The Fort Worth Herd Cattle Drive

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132 – May/June, 2025

By Carol Middlekauff

In the early dawn at the Fort Worth Stockyards, sounds of raking, mumbled greetings, shuffling feet, nickering, and creaking leather stir the quiet as six modern-day cattle drovers prepare themselves and their horses for a twice-daily longhorn cattle drive.

In a few hours, the drovers and their horses will drive 17 longhorns past crowds of spectators lining the historic brick pavement of Exchange Avenue.

The drovers, professional horsemen and women who continue to update their horsemanship training, wear period-correct pants, chaps, shirts, vests, dusters, wild rags (cowboy scarves), and boots, portraying the parts of the cattle drovers who would have pushed huge herds of longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas 150 years ago.

Back then many of the drovers were teenagers. Making $1 a day, those kids were the family breadwinners. They all stopped at the Fort Worth Stockyards, about halfway to their destination, Abilene, Kansas, to gather provisions, rest up, and get ready to head north.

While our twenty-first-century Fort Worth cattle drovers may not experience that sort of adventure, and they’re not kids, they still put in long hard days.

Click here to read the complete article
132 – May/June, 2025