By the 1890s, barbed-wire fencing had become standard on the northern plains, railroads had expanded to cover most of the U.S., and meatpacking plants were being built closer to major ranching areas, making long cattle-drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas unnecessary. In the north, overgrazing stressed the open range, leading to insufficient winter forage for cattle and their subsequent starvation, particularly during the harsh winter of 1886–1887, when severely overgrazed rangelands combined with unusually cold temperatures killed hundreds of thousands of cattle across the northern plains, leading to the sudden collapse of the cattle industry. By 1890 illegal fencing had been mostly removed. federal legislation outlawed the enclosure of public land.
Various state statutes, as well as vigilantism during the so-called Fence Cutting Wars, tried to enforce or combat fence-building, with varying success. Indiscriminate fencing of federal lands was commonplace in the 1880s, often without any regard to land ownership or other public needs, such as mail delivery and movement of other kinds of livestock. This initially brought considerable drama to the Western rangelands. In Texas and surrounding areas, rapid population-growth required ranchers to fence off their individual lands. The invention of barbed wire in the 1870s made it easier to confine cattle to designated areas, which helped to prevent overgrazing of the range, and made fencing huge expanses cheaper than hiring cowboys for handling cattle. Unbranded cattle, known as "mavericks", could become the property of anyone able to capture and brand them. As the United States government acquired Western territories by purchase, conquest, and treaty, land not yet placed into private ownership was publicly owned and freely available for grazing cattle, though conflicting land-claims and periodic warfare with Native Americans placed some practical limits on grazing areas at various times.įree-roaming range cattle were calved, moved between grazing lands, and driven to market by cowboys. Until the invention of barbed wire in the 1870s, it was more practical to fence the livestock out of developed land, rather than to fence it in. The land was also generally much more arid, with scarce, widely-separated sources of water. Unlike the Eastern United States, the Western prairies of the 19th century were vast, undeveloped, and uncultivated. American ranchers borrowed many other cattle-raising techniques from Mexico. The practice was also widespread in Mexico, and some argue that the Mexican tradition may have been the predecessor to open-range practices in the American West, much of which was part of Mexico prior to the 1840s.
Open-range management has also been practiced in other areas, including the Caribbean and some Eastern US states, such as South Carolina during the colonial period.
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