After the long trail drive, the cattle were loaded onto rail cars and shipped live to local butchers who slaughtered the livestock and prepared the beef. Ranchers hired cowboys to round up, sort out, and drive their herds to railheads in places like Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, which became famous as “cow towns,” raucous boom towns where saloons and brothels proliferated. With beef in demand in the eastern United States, shrewd businessmen capitalized on the business opportunity, buying cattle for $3 to $5 a head and selling them in eastern and northern markets for as much as $25 to $60 a head. Ranchers in Texas bred the longhorns with other cattle breeds such as Hereford and Angus to produce quality meat. Named for their long horns, which span about four feet, by the 1860s they had multiplied and great numbers of them roamed freely across the open range of the West. Longhorn cattle, a breed of cattle descended from cows and bulls left by early Spanish settlers in the American Southwest, spurred the growth of the industry. As a large-scale commercial endeavor, the beef industry had its beginnings in the decades following the American Civil War (1861–65).
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