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Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
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LIFE OF TOM CANDY PONTING
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
HERBERT O. BRAYER
ILLUSTRATIONS
Tom Candy Ponting 1856
Frontier Town
In the Indian Nations
Pontings Texas Trail 18531854
Abilene, Kansas 1871
Margaret Ponting 1857
Cattle, Hogs and a Buffalo 1868
Ponting and Prize Hereford
The Homestead, Moweaqua, Illinois
Tom Candy Ponting 1903
Margaret Ponting 1903
INTRODUCTION
ALMOST unheralded a new era began on July 3, 1854 at the old Hundred Street Cattle Market in New York City. When the auctioneers cane fell that day on the last of a herd of 130 head of Texas Longhorn cattle, a new and important part of The Cattlemans Frontier had finally made its importance felt from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Thousands of bawling Longhorns from the Lone Star State had made the long trek to California following the Gold Rush of 49, but it was not until that warm summer afternoon in 1854 that a trail herd from Texas made its appearance at the Atlantic coast market. It not only marked the first of thousands of such western cattle which were to move to Atlantic markets from the prairie states, but it established the pattern by which this movement was to attain its significance, {1} Over the rutted, chocolate hued trails stretching for a thousand miles through Texas, Missouri or Kansas, across the southern Great Plains the rough Longhorns were driven to the feeding farms of Illinois and Indiana. Fattened for a season or two on the corn grown in these prairie states the ungainly Texans matured into desirable beef animals with a distinctive market value in the rapidly growing industrial and commercial centers of the East. {2} An eight to twelve dollar steer became an eighty to a hundred dollar animaland for more than half the distance furnished his own transportation from the place of his birth to his ultimate destination!
Illinois and Indiana were already integral parts of the broad cattlemans frontier when Tom Candy Ponting arrived on the prairies in 1847. Large ranch-like operations had begun in both states during the thirties, and drove after drove of prairie-bred cattleusually accompanied by hogscovered the trails and drove roads from late spring to late autumn. {3}
To young Ponting America must have seemed a fantastic place where everything was on the move and change the order of the day. The eastern part of the nation was not the only portion of the United States swelling with the tides of immigration and migration. Wagon trains stretched across the prairies and plains pointed for Oregon. Others lumbered along between the bustling Missouri settlements and the placid adobe city of Santa F in the newly seized territory of New Mexico. California was now American, but several years still remained before the narrow dangerous trails to the Pacific territory were to become crowded arteries to the gold fields and the Golden Gate. Wisconsin was still a frontier territory but Milwaukee was already in the throes of its first land boom. Chicagos population numbered less than seventeen thousand and Nauvoo which only two years earlier had been the second largest city in Illinois had become almost a ghost town. The persecuted Mormons had made their hegira to the Great Basin where they had already begun to carve a fruitful empire from the desert. Texas was still a vast wilderness with almost five times as many cattle as human beings within her borders.
Throughout the West the Army was engaged in a one-sided battle with a score of tribes spread over a million square miles of prairie, plain and mountain and anxious to hold on to every one of them. Twenty-one million people in twenty-nine United States were engaged in an unplanned, uncoordinated, irrepressible and still indecisive movement to create a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Tom Candy Pontinghis name was really Tom and not Thomaswas born on his fathers stock farm in Somersetshire, England, in 1824. What little education he acquired was in a local private school in which there was an old lady for a teacher and the tuition was tuppence a week. At fifteen he began his career as a drover. Accompanied by an older mangenerally the older person called in a scrivener and made his will before departing on such a long journeyPonting drove an unstated number of cattle from Somerset to London, a distance of 110 miles. {4}
Life on the English stock farm was arduous and fraught with more difficulties than just shortages of feed and dull markets. In June 1845 hoof and mouth disease broke out among the herd of fine dairy Herefords. When, some years later, the same disease broke out among American herds, Ponting recalled his old country experience with the affliction. Segregation of the affected cattle, he reported, was the initial step in the successful battle....We got some oatmeal and drenched each animal affected with two or three quarts of oatmeal gruel. This gruel was made as thick as possible, permitting the animal to swallow it.... At the end of twelve days the cattle had recovered sufficiently to eat but were too weak to graze. We washed their mouths out once a day with alum water with a swab which caused their tongues to heal. This unique treatment was completed by putting tar around the hoofs of the affected beasts. No other medication was prescribed. {5}
Cheap American wheatcorn to the Britishpoured into hungry Britain with the repeal of the Corn Laws and under this impact British agriculture became an ailing industry. Farm labor suffered as the land owner was forced to curtail or alter his traditional mode of operation. As part of a family of nine children on a farm affected by a depressed local economy, the beckoning opportunities of that fabulous America, attracted Tom and his older brother John Ponting.
