Hi, Future Ticia 2025 here, and I’m updating this older history lesson. It’s a great US history lesson that partially relies on a local field trip (and I’m going to give you some ways to do this without that aspect, so stick around). But our Cattle Drive lesson was a great way to drive home how hard making it during this time period. I now return you to Past Ticia 2013.
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Have you ever looked at the different types of communities that have grown up in different parts of our country?
On the eastern coast, it started off as mostly agricultural, and then the Northeastern coast started becoming more industrial, while the Southeastern areas became more agricultural. Then our middle states, in particular the Iowa and Ohio region are full of farms. Why is that?
Quick time-out before I answer that question.
Let’s get some:
Cattle Drive Resources
Future Ticia 2025 is butting in. See, here’s the problem Past Ticia could just write and tell you a story. Now Future Ticia has to do things like give you resources, and alternate ideas, and things that make Search Engines happy.
I kind of miss the days back when I could just tell you a story.
But, this does give me an excuse to look up more books.
- Skillet bread, sourdough, and vinegar pie: cooking in pioneer days– this looks fabulous
- Cowboy Ned and Andy– this is a fiction book, but sometimes it is fun to include a fun fiction book
- How to Get Rich on a Texas Cattle Drive– A fun nonfiction book
- The Chisholm Trail– This is the “local” trail, which goes through here all the way up to Kansas
- B is for Buckaroo– this is a great way to learn a little bit about a lot of different concepts related to cattle drives
Some quick videos I found about cattle drives
This one is a bit more for middle school, because the humor is a little odd, but is a fairly decent overview.
I’m listening to this one right now, as I finish updating this post, so I may delete it.
I’m planning to watch this later, I enjoy watching his channel, and know that you can trust what he says. I just don’t have time to watch the entire 15 minutes right this moment.
Okay, with that, I now return back you back to the question of, why did Texas become primarily cattle ranchers rather than farmers?
It’s the weather, and the soil and many other factors. Well, people came to Texas thinking great big flat expanses, perfect for farming.
And then they discovered the snow up North helps make the soil better for farming, and the lack of rain really makes it hard to grow crops.
But, it’s great for cows. You can turn them loose on large expanses and just let them wander. Then you ride them up North to the railroads in Kansas and sell them for a profit in Chicago.
But how does that work? We wanted to find out about the old Cattle drives, so we took a field trip.
First we learned about the early settlers, there’s a memorial to them a couple of miles from our house, and we followed the statues and learned.
Early pioneers weren’t limited to men. Hattie Cluck was one of the first settlers, and she went on cattle drives. We learned that on the frontier both genders had jobs to get done, and for many of the jobs it didn’t matter if you were man or woman.
Then we headed carefully across the street and looked at the famous “Round Rock,” This rock helped people to know this is a low water crossing and their cattle can safely cross here.
The famous, or at least in cattle country, Chisholm Trail runs right through Round Rock, and you can see proof of its importance all throughout our town, schools are named after it, roads are named after it. I’m sure somewhere in Texas, there is a town named for it.
We continued on down and learned that not all of the Texas immigrants came from the United States, as a matter of fact we had many immigrants from all throughout Europe, significant portions coming from Germany and the Czech areas. So our towns have an odd conglomeration of names from English tradition (Shining Star) to American (Austin) to Mexican (San Antonio) to German (New Braunsfel).
As a side note, the Quick Pharmacy mentioned in that plaque is still in existence, and we’ve filled several prescriptions there.
Then we headed over to look at the statues of the cattle. We talked about how the long horns of these cows are useful for protection, and how these cows are different from Superman’s favorite cows, the milk cows.
Then we learned about the bell steer, which is the one that leads the herd in darkness or bad weather, where you can’t see well. Of course, we had to look over the statues to find the bell steer that was leading the herd.
They were very intrigued by the cowbell and how helpful it was on cattle drives.
More great history lessons for early elementary
- US Election lapbook
- Nathan Hale, patriot spy
- Grant Wood artist study
- Transcontintental railroad
- Gun fights, learn your local legends
Cattle Drive notebooking pages
Hi, Future Ticia 2025 back, just jumping in to note, at the time we used the Mystery of History notebooking pages or maybe All American History junior. I don’t know if either of those are available. I also used 3-D interactive US history maps. I highly recommend picking that up.
Right after the picture, I’ll continue the story of what we originally did, BUT after that I’ll be back with some tips for how you can do this without the materials I had. Now back to Past Ticia 2013.
When we got home we worked on making some hands on maps for the kids to play with and let them have a better memory of what we had just learned on our field trip!
Future Ticia 2025 is back! Let’s talk about how to notebook this Cattle Drive history lesson.
Things to put in a notebook lesson:
- Where did they go on the cattle drive? (great opportunity to include a map)
- What did they need to bring?
- How long did the cattle drives go on?
- How many people went on the cattle drives, and how much were they paid?
- What is the purpose of the cattle drive?
Super quick and easy things to put in your cattle drive notebooking page and history lesson.
Oh, and thanks for the many well wishes yesterday, I’m feeling much better, but I have a doctor’s appointment to get a migraine prescription. It’s rather ridiculous to spend 5 days with a headache, and it left me feeling very very miserable, leading to my total exhaustion on Saturday………
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