Lizzie Johnson, The Texas Cattle Queen - Great Role Model

Lizzie Johnson, though not born in Texas, was all Texan! Her Father was a teacher and he founded the Johnson Institute. Lizzie was a College educated woman who became a teacher. She lived in a two-story house and made the first floor rooms into a school. Besides being a school teacher she did bookkeeping for local cattle ranchers. She learned about ranching from them and she published many articles about cattle raising, she led a respectable life.


But she wanted to be a cowgirl.

So she saved her money from all three of her jobs, and bought herself some land. She often had to use a man's name to buy and trade cattle, as certain men wouldn't sell to a woman.


In 1871 Lizzie Johnson became one of the first women in Texas to register a cattle brand in her own name. In those days in Texas, cattle ranchers shared an open range. Each spring the cattle were sent out to wander free on the range until fall. The cattle would be rounded up and sorted according to which ranch's brand they carried. The cattle brand is how other legitimate ranchers knew whose cattle were whose.

It is also said about Lizzie Johnson that, she was an accomplished and notorious brush popper. A phrase which bears some explanation. Without a brand, cattle were considered by some cowboys and ranchers to be fair game. Brush poppers would saddle up and ride out to the range, they'd gather up all the cattle without brands they came upon. Then they start a fire heat up the branding iron and before anyone could see, those cows would be branded and claimed.


Lizzie Johnson was also the first woman to take her own cattle down the Chisholm Trail, a path through the vast open range of Texas. It led to the railroad depot in Abilene, Kansas. It was as close as the railroad came to the vast cattle ranges of Texas.

(The railroad didn't come to Texas until 1887.)

The Chisholm Trail took a month to two months and it meant living outdoors with the cattle, driving them across rivers, down canyons and up hills. It was considered men's work. By driving her own cattle on the trail, Lizzie was in charge of her cattle from start to finish. She was independent, and that's how she liked it.