They took place between 1866 and 1886. The height of the cattle drives years was in 1871. Hope this helped! You can also go to Wikipedia and get more information there.
1860-1900
three to four months
Cattle Drives were important because the East wanted beef and the cowboys want money the cattle drived could take weeks to get to the Railroad station.
Geography both helped and hindered cattle drives. Natural obstacles like rivers and mountains could slow down the journey, but vast open plains provided abundant grazing land for cattle. Additionally, the geography determined the best routes for cattle drives to take to reach their destinations efficiently.
yes, it did cause in the 1800s cattle drives were so long it would take days to get them where they need to be.
They used their knowledge of herding cattle and their horses to round them up from the home-base on the ranch, then moved them from the ranch to the place that they are going to sell them. Cattle drives always take more than one cowboy to complete. For instance, over a 500 head of cattle usually took about 10 horsemen to drive from point A to point B which often was 50 or 100 miles away.
It took about 16 weeks
Cowboys take cattle to the rail road station (actually the proper term is "stockyards") to be shipped to the facilities that slaughter them for our food. That's what happened in the past, over 100 years ago. In today's world, trains are not used to ship cattle to slaughter plants. Ninety-nine percent of all cattle are shipped by cattle liners or trailers from a handling facility on a ranch all the way to the slaughter plant. Cattle can still be gathered off of the range, pasture or from the corrals to be loaded on to the trucks just like with loading cattle on the stock cars, but these trucks come to the ranch or farm to pick them up. Cowboys and ranchers don't drive them to another distant facility off their land, not especially with all the highways and suburban areas and other farms they have to travel through.
Actually that's when it all really began to take off, not when it ended. Cattle drives soon ended in the late 1800's to the early 1900's because of fierce winter storms, barbed wire, drought, overgrazing, and the near extinction of the population of Longhorns originating from Spain and developed in the wilds of southwestern America.
A cow will never become a bull because cows are female cattle and bulls are male cattle.
Cattle drives were for taking cattle to the stock pens for shipping by rail. Trucks replaced the rail stock yards and now they just go from large ranches to sale. Yet, there are small cattle drives that still do take place in some areas.
Cattle drive came to an end because of the invention of the barbed wire and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Thousands of cattle also perished due to an outbreak of Texas Fever and the Great Winter of 1887-88, which also contributed to the end of the famous cattle drives of the Old West.