Open Range , in US history, the public domain areas north of Texas where between 1866 and 1890 more than 5,000. 000 people lived cattle were being driven to the mast and shipped to slaughter. The open areas to the west of Kansas , Nebraska , the Dakotas, Montana , Wyoming and other western states and territories served as vast grazing areas for the herds of Texas ranchers.
Britannica Quiz United States of America:Fact or Fiction? You may be familiar with New York and Nebraska, but there are 11 US states with names beginning with the letter "N " start? See if your knowledge of names is quick or deaf with this state and city quiz. The cattle trails ran north from West Texas through Indian territory into the vast expanses of public space in the central and northern lowland . During the relatively short period of grazing, these areas - the "cow country" - with their barbed wire fences and grass-eating sheep were largely devoid of farmers. Where water was scarce, wells were drilled and dams built.
In the mid-1880s enormous amounts of British capital went into the United States, to invest in free range farming. Foreign enthusiasm infecting American financiers and businessmen who formed cattle companies to the big gains of raising beef for the House to harvest Consumption or overseas shipping. The government cooperated by banning the fencing of property on either public land or Indian reservations and awarding beef contracts to cattle companies. Government-bought beef was distributed among the West Indians who ran out of food when the buffalo herds were destroyed.
The disastrously cold winter of 1886-87 brought the free-range cattle industry into a crisis from which it never recovered. Investors were ruined when hundreds of thousands of cattle perished in thick snow and ice. As cattle ranching dwindled, the homesteaders took over and fenced off the land. By the 1890s there was little evidence of what had once been a booming business in the open fields.