Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (US) to rush around, to bustle about.

1872		R.B. Johnson Very Far West 195: I’ve rustled upwards from a picayune printin’ office down to New Orleens [DA].
1887		M. Roberts Western Avernus (1924) 149: I’m not [staying] if I can rustle through.
1898		F.P. Dunne Mr Dooley in Peace and War 246: Why should I take Mary Ann [...] an’ Robert Immitt Snakes, an’ all me little Snakeses, an’ rustle out west iv the tracks.
1900		Ade More Fables in Sl. (1960) 178: He had to go out and Rustle for a Job.
1907		Sun River Sun (MT) 20 Dec. 10/1: Establishments which go to make up a red-hot, lively, enterprising, get-up-and-rustle town.
1907		S.E. White Arizona Nights 123: It was a sign. It read: THE DUTCH HAS RUSTLED.
1916		T. Burke Limehouse Nights 135: She spoke Cantonese and a little Swahili and some Hindustani, and could rustle it with the best of them.
1925		K. Mullen ‘Westernisms’ in AS I:3 150: ‘Rustle for your bacon’ is much more than a quaint Westernism; it is the expression of a people still close to their grim struggle with an unrelenting wilderness.
1937		‘Boxcar Bertha’ Sister of the Road (1975) 261: I was rustling around Chicago trying to make a living the best I could.

2. to make available, to round up.

1953

E. Hunter ‘Vicious Circle’ in Jungle Kids (1967) 31: He was getting slop details, rustling chicks for the big boys [...] stuff like that.