drover

Colophon

A drover moves livestock on foot, over distances too long for a day's walk, to the market or the railhead that will buy them. The word is old: drove comes from the Old English draf, a herd or the act of driving one, and drover has meant "one who drives cattle or sheep to market" since the early fifteenth century.1

In England the trade was regulated early. An Elizabethan statute of 1563, "An Act touching Badgers of Corn and Drovers of Cattle, to be licensed," required a drover to hold a license from the justices at quarter sessions. The clerk of the peace wrote out each license, for twelve pence, and entered its terms in a register produced at the sessions. The act stood until 1772.2

Welsh drovers walked black cattle to the London markets, a journey that could take three weeks, and walked home with the proceeds. People at home trusted them with bills to settle in London, and the drovers paid those out of what the cattle fetched, which made them an early kind of country banker.3 In 1799 one of them, David Jones, opened a bank at Llandovery whose notes were printed with a black ox. It stayed private until Lloyds bought it in 1909.4 In Scotland the Highland herds met the buyers at the trysts, and by 1770 the one at Falkirk was the largest cattle market in the country.5

In the United States the great drives ran north from Texas after the Civil War. The first Texas cattle shipped east from the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, on September 5, 1867.6 At Doan's store on the Red River, the storekeeper recorded each herd that crossed and the name of its trail boss.7 Within about twenty years the trails had closed: Kansas pushed its quarantine line against Texas fever south and then shut it, barbed wire fenced the open range, the winters of 1885 to 1887 ruined the ranges, and the railroads reached Texas itself.8

In Western Australia, Alfred Canning surveyed a stock route across the desert in 1906 and finished its 48 wells in 1910, the year commercial droving on it began. Only eight mobs used it in the next twenty years. After its wells were repaired in 1930 and 1931 about twenty more went down it, and the last drove walked it in 1959, when cattle had stopped going to market on foot.9

drover, the software, borrows the name and nothing else. It moves work items, not cattle.

This site

The text is set in Merriweather, a slab serif Eben Sorkin designed for Google in 2010 to read well on screens.10 The headings are set in Montserrat, which Julieta Ulanovsky released in 2011, drawn from the posters, signs and painted shop windows of the Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires.11 Both are free under the SIL Open Font License, and this site serves its own copies: Merriweather license, Montserrat license. The pairing comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site.

The emblem on the front page is the project's own pixel-art drover, kept in the repository at docs/assets.

Sources

  1. Online Etymology Dictionary, "drove".
  2. Wikipedia, "Engrossing (law)", on 5 Eliz. 1 c. 12; "Badgers licenses were granted at the Quarter Sessions".
  3. Herefordshire Through Time, "Droving"; Henley Archaeological & Historical Group, "Drover roads in Oxfordshire and beyond".
  4. Wikipedia, "Llandovery Bank".
  5. Falkirk Local History Society, "Falkirk Trysts", quoting A. R. B. Haldane, The Drove Roads of Scotland.
  6. Constituting America, "September 5, 1867: The First Texas Cattle Shipped From Abilene".
  7. Oklahoma Historical Society, "Doan's"; Texas Historical Commission, "Doan's Crossing".
  8. Texas Christian University, "The Cattle Kingdom"; Nebraska State Historical Society, "The Blue River Cattle Trail".
  9. Wikipedia, "Canning Stock Route"; National Museum of Australia, "Yiwarra Kuju: reopening".
  10. Wikipedia, "Merriweather (typeface)".
  11. Wikipedia, "Montserrat (typeface)".