The end of the drive for most cowboys on the trail was the Kansas railhead towns. The ribald stories of the pleasures to be found in these towns told by veteran drivers raised the expectations of many new hands, and they were often disappointed by the reality they found. One Texan rode into a rough settlement and asked a local how far it was to Abilene. When told he was in the center of the town, he remarked, ‘I never seen such a little town have such a big name.’ Another cowboy, arriving in Wichita behind several well-fed heres, observed that the town was ‘a mile long, one hundred yards wide, and an inch thick.’

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The stories of the bawdy houses were not much exaggerated, though. From a dozen families and a single general store in 1867, Abilene grew in four years of the cattle trade to contain ten saloons, five stores, two hotels and at least two ‘hotels’ of the other sort.

Most of the residents were temporary, arriving in the late spring before the first drive plodded into town, and leaving after the last drive in the fall. In time the permanent residents succeeded in moving the racier activities out of town into the so-called ‘Devil’s Addition.’

A host of figures, some still remembered, others long forgotten, roved in and out of the railheads at the end of the Chisholm Trail. They included lawmen and sometime-lawmen Tom Smith, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday an Happy Jack Morco, and such avowed badpersons as Clay Allison, Belle Starr and the Clanton brothers.

In the end, it was the area’s permanent residents who made the Chisholm Trail obsolete. While the railroads moving west had made the trail a profitable route in the first place, they also brought farmers. Cultivated land meant fences and farm stock, which in turn brought more quarantines on Texas cattle. The cowmen had to keep moving west ahead of civilization. By the mid-1870s the drivers were switching to the Western Trail, a route that roughly paralleled the Chisholm Trail and ended at the railhead in Dodge City. Later they moved still farther west to the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which ran from west Texas to the new ranch lands in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.

Like most of the West’s fabled institutions, the Chisholm Trail was remarkably short-lived. In eight seasons, more than 2 million head of Longhorn cattle went up the Chisholm Trail on their way to feedlots in St. Louis and Chicago and the open-range ranches of the northern Plains. In driving those cattle, the few thousand men who rode the trail established the place of the cowboy as the greatest of American folk heroes. The truth about them really needs no embellishment.

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