The importance of the trail drives, vast enough commercially, was no less vast psychologically. In Texas in the last half of the nineteenth century, cattle were what oil was to become in the first half of the twentieth: a seemingly infinite resource that quickly bred not merely fortunes but also imagery and identity—though in the realm of the image, oil has never been able to compete with cattle, one reason so many oilmen become cattlemen manqué. Within ten years of its inception, the cattle trade had established an appealing and enduring body of imagery and provided Texans as a people with the reputation for dash and extravagance that they cherish to this day.Before cattle began to spill out of Texas, what were we, to the…The post So Long, Little Dogies appeared first on Texas Monthly.