Chisholm Trail

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The Chisholm Trail was a route used in the late 19th century in the western United States for cattle drives, the movement of cattle overland. The trail stretched from the Red River to Abilene, Kansas and was used from 1867 to 1887 to drive cattle northward to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway, where they were shipped eastward.

The trail is named for Jesse Chisholm who had built a number of trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War. Ironically, he never drove cattle on the trail and died in 1868.

History

In 1866 in Texas, cattle were worth only $4 a head, compared to over $40 a head in the North and East, because lack of market access during the American Civil War had led to increasing number of cattle in Texas.

In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy built stockyards in Abilene, Kansas. He encouraged Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. The stockyards shipped 35,000 head that year and became the largest stockyards west of Kansas City, Kansas.

O. W. Wheeler and his partners used the Chisholm Trail to bring a herd of 2,400 steers from Texas to Abilene in 1867. This herd was the first of an estimated 5,000,000 head of Texas cattle to reach Kansas over the Chisholm Trail.

From 1867 to 1871, the trail ended in Abilene. Later, Newton, Kansas and Wichita, Kansas, would each serve as the end of the trail. From 1883 to 1887, the end of the trail was Caldwell, Kansas.

The beginning of the Chisholm Trail also changed, depending on who you asked. If a rancher wanted to get to Abilene and from there up to Wichita, they had to take the Chisholm Trail, no matter how they got to Abilene. But if you asked the young cowboys who worked for the ranchers, the Trail started at their own ranch! Today, most historians consider the Chisholm Trail to have started at the Rio Grande. Cattle drives would join the Trail as soon as they could and follow it on up to the railroad stockyards.

In Texas, there were literally hundreds of feeder trails heading North to one of the main cattle trails. In the early 1840's, most cattle was driven up the The Shawnee Trail. Winding it's way up from Austin through Waco and Dallas, crossing the Red River near Preston before continuing up along the Eastern edge of modern day Oklahoma, this path, previously used by Indian hunting and raiding parties, became the Texas Road. By 1853, cattle was being driven into parts of Missouri, where farmers began blocking herds and turning them back because the Texas Longhorns carried ticks that caused diseases in other types of cattle. Violence, vigilante groups, and cattle rustling caused further problems for the drivers. By 1859, laws were passed preventing the cattle from being driven through those areas. By the end of the Civil war, the bulk of the cattle was being moved up the western branch of the Texas Road, which joined the Chisholm trail at the Red River.

The importance of cattle drives began to diminish in 1885 with the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad in Texas. This cattle drive was one of the most important cattle drives in Oklahoma History.These people would drive their cattle to these railroads and people might try to buy the cattle at auctions.

On these long trips the cattlemen would have a lot of difficulties. The trips to the railroads were not easy. The trips took about two to three months. Also they would have to cross major rivers like the Arkansas and the Red, and innumerable smaller creeks, plus the topographic challenges of canyons, badlands and low moutain ranges. Also the weather was not always great. In addition to these natural dangers, there were rustlers and other badmen, unpacificed Native Americans (Oklahoma at that time was Indian Territory, governed from Fort Smith, Arkansas), and the natural contrariness of the half-wild Longhorn cattle themselves, who were prone to stampede on little provocation.

Chisholm Trail on film

Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks, is a fictional account of the first drive, in 1865, along the Chisholm Trail.

External links

[Chisholm Trail] Handbook of Texas Online.
[History on the trail from the "Kansas Heritage Group"]
[Oklahoma Historical Society Page on the Chisholm Trail by Steven D. Dortch]

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