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Keep a Rollin, rollin, rollin, though the streams are swollen.
Keep them doggies rollin’ Rawhide!
Keep a movin, movin, movin. though they’re disapproving
Keep them doggies movin Rawhide!
Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rope, throw, and brand 'em.
Soon we’ll be living high and wide”
Dimitri Tiomkin &
Ned Washington
Virginia, beef capital of the United States! Yes, indeed! Just look around at all those Black Angus grazing on our bucolic hills. Count the rolls of hay spread across the fields from this year’s first cutting. The Old Dominion is clearly steakin’ its claim to fame on the heads, backs, ribs, etc. of its bovine population. But wait you say, this can’t be right. Cattle capital? That distinction belongs to the Lone Star State or perhaps to Florida, but not to Rappahannock or to Old Virginia. We grow grapes, tourists, and land values here, not the entire freezer inventory for The Outback in Warrenton!
You are right of course, but so are we, so long as we peg the date at 1845. At that time Virginia was indeed the largest cattle producer among the states, although about to be surpassed by Tfexas. And those raging bulls of the 1800s were not just down here in the relative lowlands of Rappahannock and the various other counties bordering the Blue Ridge. The mountains were full of big and little ‘doggies’, providing occasional tasty snacks for the wolves that still roamed the Ridge, and wrangled by folks known, strangely enough as cowboys, as far back as the 1700s. There were even Clint Eastwood style cattle drives up, down, and across the ridge top where modem adventurers encounter the dangers of Skyline Drive from the air-conditioned comfort of their SUVs.
Before the beeves reached maturity, movin’ the doggies was a seasonal activity: down in the valley so low during the cool months; back to the open spaces on the ridge in the springtime. After the cows were fattened up however, in a curious precursor of today’s geographically diverse economy, they were apparently driven some distance away to market. Cowhides to be processed in local leather tanneries were ‘imported’ from afar back to our area. The finished leather was then shipped ..., etc., etc.
Tbday, only one great pasture remains in what is now Shenandoah National Park at the spot we know as Big Meadows. But for at least 100 years before the coming of the Park, some 50 square miles of the Blue Ridge was open meadow where “lonesome cattle could feed on the lowly gypsum weed’. Weeds there may have been, but it was said that Blue Ridge bluegrass was a better ‘graze’ than its lowland equivar
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