Been browsing through a book called "On the Border, an Environmental History", here an author quotes from the 1850 US Census....
While Kendall and others were forced to adapt to a series of ecological forces [besides Indians killing the shepherds, he means] that complicated their early attempts to establish grazing on the Edwards Plateau [AKA Texas Hill Country], contemporaries were establishing much larger flocks on the more southerly Rio Grande Plain.
Of the 100,000 sheep in Texas denoted in the US 1850 census, half of these were located to the south and west of San Antonio. Within twenty years the Callaghan Ranch alone near Encinal [on I35 30 miles north of Laredo] ran 100,000 head.
By 1886 the Rio Grande Plain contained nearly 4 million sheep and goats (five times the number of cattle). The land could not sustain such spectacular numbers "The practice of herding one sheep per acre proved too taxing for the buffalo grass and gramma grass.... turning the once-lush South Texas grassland into the veritable scrub brush and barren waste that it remains today.... In 1900 there were but a quarter-million sheep remaining.
A sheep economy dominating all of South Texas, once the home of the original cowboys, all this underway by the year 1850, BEFORE Ranger Captain RIP Ford and his stalwart companions were chasing Comanches and Mexican Bandits around that very same region.
Who'd a thunk it?
Birdwatcher
