Trail driving wasn’t new; Spanish Colonial ranchers in Texas drove cattle east to Louisiana in 1779. By the 1850s, Texans were taking cattle to Missouri. But it was the post-Civil War surge in demands for beef on American tables that started the big drives of Western legend. In 1867 a frontiersman named Jesse Chisholm blazed a trail from the Red River north across Oklahoma and into Kansas. He may have driven a small herd or two of cattle along that path, but he was mainly a freight wagon operator. Soon cattle drives from South Texas and the Coastal Bend prairies were feeding into larger trails around Victoria and San Antonio, walking north to the Red River and onto “Chisholm’s trail.” Before long the whole trace from South Texas clear to Kansas was called the Chisholm Trail.
The trail’s objective was the Kansas Pacific Railroad. As iron rails snaked west, a canny promoter named Joseph McCoy drummed up business. He urged Texas cattlemen to bring their herds to Abilene, Kansas, now regarded as the first railroad “cow town.” The appeals uncorked a bottle. First a stream and then a flood of cattle streamed northward for Abilene. There, along the tracks, were acres of pens for loading cattle into wooden-slat stock cars, bound for Chicago and other meat-packing centers.
As the rails pushed on, other towns sprang up, such as Ellsworth and Dodge City; farther south were Newton and Wichita. By the 1870s, cattle trails led from Texas to New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana — even into Canada. Along with Texas cattle went ranching ways and methods that put a Lone Star stamp on stock-raising throughout much of the West. In those years an estimated five million or more longhorn cattle were driven along the trails out of Texas. Author J. Frank Dobie, in her book The Longhorns, called the trail-drive era “…the greatest, the most extraordinary… migration of animals controlled by man that the world has ever seen….”
How many cattle were in a trail herd? Numbers varied, but in Chisholm Trail days anywhere from 500 to 1,500 animals was about average. Bigger ranches might send 3,000 to 5,000 head on a drive, but claims of bigger drives often were just bragging. Dobie tells this anecdote in The Longhorns: “An old cowman once listened to a tenderfoot spouting about what a monstrous herd he had helped drive. The listener said nothing until asked what was the biggest herd he was ever with. ‘I don’t remember exactly,’ he replied, ‘but it was so big it took us three days and nights every morning to get it off the bed grounds.’”
Trail drives began in early summer, after the spring roundups. Cattlemen wanted to move their stock to Kansas by summer’s end and sell them to beef company buyers. Then the hands would be paid off; along with their “trail boss,” they’d start for home, riding along the cattle trail with their horse remudas and chuck wagon. It all made for a long stint in the saddle, up to three months (or more) walking a herd, then a somewhat quicker return trip. If you rode from deep South Texas to Abilene, Kansas and back, you were looking at about 2,000 miles.
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