Western Horizon: Train & Cowboys

The railroad made the long cattle drives worth making, and then it ended them. Every time the tracks pushed farther south and west, the walk to the nearest railhead got shorter, until the cattle could be loaded close to the ranch they were raised on.

The rails changed the work too. Stock trains needed men to ride along to market, and with long poles they prodded cattle back onto their feet when they went down in the crowded cars, so a steer would not be trampled. That job gave the cowboy one of his nicknames: cowpuncher.

The telegraph went up beside the track in the same years, and the price of a steer in Chicago could reach a cow town before the herd did.

The painting sets three riders on a grassy rise at the left, sitting their horses and watching a black locomotive haul a long string of boxcars across the plain. Smoke rolls back from the stack in a thick brown plume, and a line of telegraph poles runs beside the track.