Hard Times Along the Chisholm Trail

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Goodnight went on to do perhaps more than any other individual to spread the cattle-raising industry into Colorado , Montana and Wyoming. Through their dealing with him, such men as Western cattle-barons-to-be John Chisum and John Iliff prospered. (Chisum later figured in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, which brought notoriety to Bill the Kid.) The route followed by Goodnight and Loving in 1866 came to be known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns moved over it for the next few years.

But the Goodnight-Loving Trail was aimed toward Western markets, and was of little use to cattlemen who set their sights on more easterly market destinations–a 11,000-pound steer that sold for $8 in San Antonio fetched $23.50 in Kansas.

Because big herds from Southern states were not welcome in populated areas, the railroads quickly extended their lines into unpopulated central Kansas. There, towns like Abilene and Wichita boomed overnight, catering to the seasonal cattle trade with barbers, baths, bars and bordellos.

The man who breathed new life into the handful of cabins called Abilene was Joseph McCoy. Realizing that increased settlement around Sedalia was the death-knell for the cattle industry there, he began building shipping pens at Abilene, beside the Kansas-Pacific Railroad. An able promoter, he pointed out that cattle could be brought in and transactions made without interruption from ‘mobs or swindling thieves.’ In 1867, he sent riders out to approaching herds from Texas and spread the word. By the end of 1871, about 700,000 cattle a year were being driven into Abilene’s waiting pens. From there, the railroad hauled the animals to meatprocessing plants in Chicago and Kansas City. As settlement shifted westward into Kansas, so did the northern end of the Chisholm Trail–from Abilene to Ellsworth, Ellsworth to Dodge City.

The most famous of cattle trails bore the name of Jesse Chisholm, a trader who set up a post on the Canadian River in Indian Territory about halfway between Texas northern border on the Red River and the Kansas state line. His father was a Scot, his mother a full-blooded Cherokee. According to his family, Jesse spoke 14 languages and negotiated many treaties between the area’s Indian tribes and white settlers. In 1865 Chisholm charted a straight, level wagon road through the wilderness from his main trading post near present-day Wichita into the middle of Indian Territory. Chisholm died in 1868, at about 63, before the trail he began became part of the legend of the Old West. His epitaph read, very simply: ‘No one left his home cold or hungry.’

In 1867 one Colonel O. O. Wheeler and his partners were driving a herd of Longhorns north to Abilene, when, in Indian Territory, they came upon Jesse Chisholm’s wagon trail. As it was level and crossed rivers at easy fords, Wheeler and other cattle drivers who followed began using the trail as they crossed the Indian Nations. Soon Chisholm’s name was applied to the whole route from central Texas at San Antonio to Abilene and Ellsworth, Kansas, along with the numerous offshoots of the main trail. Soon a long, worn depression ran almost due north from San Antonio, passing through or near Austin, Waco and Fort Worth. The trail crossed the Red River into Indian Territory at Red River Station, a rude settlement about midway between Montague and Gainesville, Texas. In Indian Territory the trail passed spots known as Stage Station and Pole Cat Creek, and then moved into Kansas at Caldwell. There the trail branched three ways toward Wichita, Abilene, and Ellsworth, the western railhead of the storied Kansas-Pacific Railroad.

A drive up the trail began with a roundup in the south-and-central-Texas brush country, where the Longhorns continued to roam freely. The roundup might last a week or 10 days, after which the cowboys would spend several days cutting out the animals previously branded by their employer and branding those young animals not yet claimed–a favorite tactic of early Texas rancher Sam Maverick, whose name fell into common usage. Typical of the open-range ranchers of the region was Sam Johnson, who, with his brother Tom, settled on the Perdenales River west of Austin in the 1850s and quickly built a sizable and very profitable ranching business. Johnson lived to an old age, in 1908 witnessing the birth of his grandson Lyndon Baines Johnson.

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