Grazing Industry

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a governmental agency devoted to creating jobs for public works projects.

Associate Director of the Federal Writers' Project, Luther Harris Evans, proposed to Harry Hopkins, the director of the WPA, that a project be implemented for a nation-wide survey of historical materials. This resulted in the founding of the Historical Records Survey, a subdivision of the Federal Writers' Program. The Survey focused on unpublished documents while collecting information on and preparing inventories of historical collections in repositories throughout the country, especially those pertaining to government records.

The Grazing Service of the Department of the Interior requested that the Survey undertake a project to create a compilation of the history of grazing in seventeen states, including Texas. The project incorporated historical records from the western range and livestock industry, including journals, diaries and interviews with ranchers.