Delayed by Cattle Drive
If you plan on visiting western parks this summer, remember it’s high tourist season meaning go with the expectation of traffic and congestion and on rare occasions if your lucky, you might even end up bumper to bumper not behind busses but bovines providing kids with a lesson in western history. I’m Susan Allen stay tuned for the story. Many of our western ranches still move cattle by horses and if you travel the rural west you will run into delays as livestock, cattle and sheep are also going on vacation... to summer pastures. For example last Summer cowboys from the Pinto Ranch moved around 250 head of cattle through Grand Teton National Park. Park rangers provided traffic control while tourists had up to a forty minute wait all due to the fact that area ranchers still have grazing rights through much of Teton National Park. Oh non doubt a few touchy urbanites complained to park rangers about cattle foot prints and emissions but I hope savvy parents used the cattle drive to explain to their children that up until about 1885, the end of the era of great cattle drives and well before the Big Mack that was how hamburgers ended up on city supper plates back east. Today cattle trucks move the majority of US herds once the role of the cattle drive and trains and while the grazing leases for the Tetons go back just 60 years, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho cattle supplied thousands of head of cattle to feed a growing and prosperous nation. Without a stimulus act of federal bailout the Nelson Story herd, for example from Montana grew from several thousand in 1866 to fifteen thousands 1885.
