Cattle has been raised and rounded up in Texas, mainly by Mexican cowboys(vaqueros). Traditions and techniques of the cattle business were borrowed from the Mexicans, just as the cattle themselves, the Texas longhorns, came originally from Mexico. When the war ended, the Texas cattle business was easy to get into because both the cattle and the grass were free. The long cattle drives began to come to an end in the when overgrazing destroyed the grass and a winter blizzard and drought killed off 90 percent of the cattle. Another factor that closed down the cattle frontier is the arrival of homesteaders, that use barbered wire fencing to cut off access to the open range.The Homestead Act encourages farming on the Great Plains by offering 160 acres of public land free to any family that settles on the land for a period of five years. The promise of free land combined with the promotions of railroads and land speculators convinces hundreds of thousands of native-born and immigrant families to attempt to farm the Great Plains. About 500,000 families took advantage of the Homestead Act, but five times that number has to purchase their land, because the best public lands often ends up in the hands of railroad companies and speculators. "Sodbuster's" were farmer's on the great plain that had to break through so much thick soil, called sod. The first “sodbusters” on the dry and treeless plains often build their homes of sod bricks. Extremes of hot and cold weather, plagues of grasshoppers, and the lonesome life on the plains challenges even the most resourceful of the pioneer families. Water is scarce, and wood for fences is almost nonexistent. The invention of barbed wire by Joseph Gliddenin has been helping farmers to fence in their lands on the lumber-scarce plains. Using mail-order windmills to drill deep wells provided some water. Even so, many homesteaders have been discovering too late that 160 acres is not adequate for farming the Great Plains. Long spells of severe weather, together with falling prices for crops and the cost of new machinery, causes the failure of two-thirds of the homesteaders’ farms on the Great Plains. Western Kansas alone has lost half of its population between 1888 and 1892. Those who have managed to survive adopted “dry farming” and deep-plowing techniques to use the moisture available. They also learn to plant hardy strains of Russian wheat that withstand the extreme weather. Ultimately, dams and irrigation save many western farmers, as humans reshape the rivers and physical environment of the West to provide water for agriculture farming in the Great Plains.