The Red River rolled by at full flood, its muddy waters looking more like the Mississippi than the stream the Texas cowboys had hoped to find. Like most of the region’s rivers, the Red might rise suddenly and dangerously–as much as 25 feet in a day. Despite the currents of the swollen river, one trail boss was determined to get his herd of Longhorn cattle across. ‘Old Man’ Todd knew the dangers of herds as big as his getting backed up at a ford, waiting for the river to go down. With as many as 25,000 cattle from a dozen herds bunched up in a few square miles of rolling terrain, a full-blown stampede could be disastrous, and in any case the ground would soon be overgrazed.

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Todd called one of his hands, Jim Foster, a cowboy young enough to be ‘generous with his life as with everything else,’ as Western chronicler J. Frank Dobie later said. The lead steers were driven into the river, but about halfway across began swimming in a circle. The jam of milling cattle had to be broken before the animals at the center were pushed under and drowned. Foster stripped to his union suit and drove his horse into the river. He climbed off the horse and onto the backs of the Longhorns, walking across the herd as if it were a logjam. Straddling one of the biggest steers in the herd, he forced it to swim to the far bank. The rest of the herd followed, and Foster spend the remainder of the day–from 9 a.m. to dusk–keeping the herd together on the northern bank, soaked to the skin in his underwear, until the other cowboys got across the river to relieve him. For this notable piece of work, Foster received the princely sum of one dollar, a standard day’s wage on the Chisholm Trail in 1871.

The Chisholm Trial ranks in the mythology of the American West with places like the Little Bighorn, the Long Branch Saloon and Tombstone’s Boot Hill. All of these real places have become so romanticized and fictionalized over the last century that it is often difficult to separate fact from fancy. The real-life experiences of those who rode the trail, though, need little embellishment to convey its lively story.

The Chisholm and other cattle trails–such as the Western, Goodnight-Loving and Shawnee–were born of economic necessity, for there was a tremendous demand elsewhere in the country for Texas cattle. During the decade before the Civil War, sporadic efforts already had been made to move cattle from Texas ranges to these lucrative markets, which ranged from the gold fields of Colorado and California to the tables of New York City and even Europe. In the 1850s, cattle were ferried across the Mississippi River to Illinois, where they were fattened on the lush prairie grass, then driven east and down the very streets of New York City. Drives toward Western gold fields ran afoul of dry deserts and marauding Indians. For a time, New Orleans served as a major market, then the railhead at Sedalia, Mo. Some drives were made over the Shawnee Trail to Kansas City or the railhead at Sedalia, passing through Baxter Springs, in southeastern Kansas. There, cattlemen ran into a stone wall. Many of their cattle carried Texas fever, a tick-borne ailment that could quickly spread to other stock in an area. Counties in the two states enacted their own quarantine laws, effectively creating a bottleneck for cattle drives. At the same time, outlaws and confidence men preyed upon the incoming Texans. Gunplay was common, and tension between cattlemen and local residents was at fever-pitch when war intervened.

After the Civil War, there were many young men at loose ends in Texas and an enormous number of unclaimed wild cattle–5 million of them, by one estimate. All that needed to be done was to round up the cattle, which were longhorned descendants of livestock brought in long ago by Spanish Conquistadors, and then brand them and deliver them to market.

In 1866, Charles Goodnight, 30, and 54-year-old Oliver Loving did just that. They pushed a herd of cantankerous Longhorns from Texas toward the Colorado mining camps. Loving had successfully made the trip before by driving north through Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), then west along the Arkansas River. But in 1866, the Kiowas and the Comanches were on the warpath. Instead, the two cattlemen, with the help of 18 cowhands, moved southwest along the Pecos River, then into New Mexico Territory. At Bosque Redondo, however, they found an unexpected market; an Indian agent bought all of their steers, but not the cows and calves, for $12,000. Goodnight returned to Texas, leaving Loving and more than a dozen hands to complete the drive into Colorado with the remaining stock. The following year, in another drive out of Texas, Loving was fatally wounded by Comanches.

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