Podcast: Swimming Cattle: Galveston's Hidden Cowboy History

When most people picture Texas Cowboys, they imagine the vast dry plains of the panhandle or the long cattle drives to Kansas railheads, dust-covered riders under a blazing sun, and longhorns, as far as the eye can see. But what if I told you some of the boldest cattle drives happen not on dry land, but across open saltwater?

Today, we're diving into one of Texas's most surprising cowboy and cattle stories, one that takes place where the land meets the gulf. We were exploring the vital, often overlooked, role Galveston Island and the Texas Gulf Coast played in building the cattle economy of Texas. This is the story of swimming herds, saltgrass grazing steamships loaded with livestock, and a culture of cowboys who tame not just land, but also water.

Let's rewind a few centuries. Cattle and horses first arrived in Texas in the 16 and 1700s with Spanish colonists brought to support frontier missions and Presidios. Many of those animals escaped or were turned loose. Gradually forming the massive semi-wild herds that roamed across what is now Texas.

To manage these roaming herds, Spanish and Mexican Vaqueros, history's original cowboys, created a whole new style of ranching. They introduced agile horses, lassos, and sombreros that kept the blazing sun at bay. The techniques they pioneered would become the DNA of the American cowboy tradition.

Galveston Island, with its salt-tolerant grasses and coastal breezes, was an ideal winter pasture for these herds. Before it was a resort town. Galveston's West End was a working landscape, a coastal cow country. Cowboys from surrounding counties, Chambers, Brazoria, Harris, and Northern Galveston County drove thousands of head of cattle out to the island seasonally. The West End's brackish marshes grew some of the richest grass on the Texas Gulf Coast, known as salt grass.

It's a nutrient-dense plant that was naturally protected by the Gulf and West Bay on the island. The Cowboys didn't need to build fences. Nature did it for them. That meant the cattle could graze and fatten through the winter without much risk of wandering too far. In the 1800s, Families like the Mayes, Sullivans, and Boyts made these drives on a regular basis. The rich coastal grasslands on and around Galveston Island have long provided plenty of good grazing, with some ranchers establishing permanent operations in the area and others moving their herds around seasonally.

Back in the 1800s, the Boyt family moved between 5,000 and 8,000 head of cattle at a time from inland ranches to Bolivar and the west end of Galveston Island.

Before roads and bridges connected the mainland to Galveston, Cowboys got creative. They swam the herds, literally. Cattle drives crossed Western Galveston Bay, or at San Luis Pass, which is the westernmost point of Galveston Island, often making the crossing across shallow sandbars. Cowboys on horseback and sometimes swimming themselves would guide and push cattle across Galveston Bay, where only their nostrils and horns peeked above the waves. Historical accounts were called swimming cattle, paddling dogs, and the occasional cowhand having to rescue a steer from drowning. Sterling Spell was a famous 19th-century cowboy, a towering six-foot-six figure from Chambers County who famously wrestled a thousand-pound steer mid-crossing. These men weren't just tough. They were legends. Once the cattle had safely crossed, cowboys could rest the animals on the grassy, less populated west end of the island.

By the time Texas won its independence in 1836 and was known as the Republic of Texas, a strong local cattle economy was able to flourish. By 1839, the city of Galveston was officially established and already had a functioning port.

With the Port of Galveston, a naturally deep harbor and early rail access, along with its largest export of cotton, Steamships began moving beef from Galveston to New Orleans and other Gulf ports. Galveston quickly became a crucial cattle export hub.

The Butler family settled in the grassy lowlands between Houston and Galveston in 1855, and George W. Butler ran a 2300-acre ranch near League City. The Butler stock pens handled tens of thousands of cattle annually, with reports showing a Cuban shipment totaling 49,000 head of cattle. The Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad brought cattle from the interior straight to the docks at Galveston. But if the cattle weren't coming by rail, they were herded through the Galveston streets 300 to 500 at a time, and loaded onto ships bound from markets in Cuba, Central America, and Europe.

After all that work, I'd be willing to bet that those cowboys would mosey on down to the beach to rinse off after a long day's drive or head straight for some of Galveston's other traditional forms of entertainment. Gambling, drinking, and spending some real quality time in the Islands' Red Light District. This really paints the picture that Galveston was a real wild west town. Sometimes cowboys would even sail with the animals, caring for them in transit, even milking cows mid-voyage.

Before the Civil War, driving cattle across the country was completely possible. This became the legendary era of those large-scale long-distance cattle drives to reach markets in the central and northern US. Coastal ranchers certainly moved some cattle up these dusty trails, but many of these ranchers could rely on local markets and the Galveston shipping industry to sustain their operations. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Texas' booming cattle industry helped bolster the state's economy. These coastal ranchers were also among the first to divvy up rangeland and herds with shiny, sharp, new technology, barbed wire.

By the 1870s, the invention of barbed wire changed the game. It marked the end of an era of open-range grazing. Barbed wire quickly stretched across the state, and then the country, making the free movement of cattle more and more difficult. The great cattle drives northward began to decline. Railroad tracks sprang up alongside cattle trails, and by 1900, those long cattle drives just weren't efficient anymore.

However, until the turn of the twentieth century, Texas continued supporting large ranching operations with huge numbers of cattle and cowboys. As the network of railroad tracks grew and connected distant towns during this period, rail cars picked up product closer to home pastures and carried it to shipping hubs like Galveston. And if these rail cars weren't carrying livestock well, other cattle products would be shipped to markets across the world, too. Salted hides, tallow, and meat.

The beef economy was booming, but ranching on a coastal island isn't without risk. Hurricanes, alligators, venomous snakes, and high tides kept cowboys on their toes. Worse still, disease. Texas Fever, carried by ticks, could wipe out herds. Coastal ranching played a key role in developing vaccines and dipping vats, which are long troughs designed to eliminate disease-spreading ticks.

This process and these tools became standard in the cattle industry. An innovation developed in this area that took off across the country. In the late 1800s, as Galveston's cattle economy matured, the East End urbanized and expanded due to the port, banking, and industry, and a quiet agricultural shift began taking hold on the island's West End. The West End was still pretty rural while seasonal herds, gray saltgrass marshes, and cowboys swam cattle across the bay. Enterprising families saw another opportunity. In 1889, the Schaper family, German immigrants who settled on Stewart Road near Campeche Cove, founded Schaper's Dairy Farm, turning coastal pasture into a reliable source of fresh milk and cream for Galveston residents. For nearly 90 years, multiple generations of Schapers milk cows daily, made milk runs, and weathered historic storms like the 1900 hurricane. The Schaper family Dairy is but one example. Before residential development was popular on the west end, ranching and agriculture were the staples.

Though times have changed, coastal ranchers have been able to continue supporting the health of the global cattle industry. Demand shifted towards breeds that naturally carry more fat and meat on their bones. Over time, ranchers also crossbred various species to produce healthier cattle well suited for coastal life. Galveston's cattle legacy even continues today in 2011 in order to help support and rebuild struggling Russian herds with genetic diversity, over 5,500 pregnant heifers were shipped from Galveston to Russia, part of the largest live cattle export in US history.

That journey involved 243 cattle trailers in 10 days of inspection and coordination. Since then, Texas Ranchers have shipped breeding stock and even entire herds like sleek, black Angus, bright red Herefords, or humpback Brahman to countries across Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond.

Today, the west end of Galveston may appear to be a vacation destination or a good spot to buy a second home, but its legacy runs much deeper. The salt grass continues to thrive, and the sea breeze still carries the echoes of hoofbeats.

If you look closely between the beach and the bay. You might still catch a glimpse of a few resilient cows grazing the next time you drive over San Luis Pass, Imagine a cowboy from a century ago shouting across the bay as his herd swims through the salt water.