Chisholm Trail
The Chisholm Trail was a historic trail used in the late 19th century in the western United States for cattle drives. The trail ran for 800 miles from South Texas 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 was named after Jesse Chisholm who had built a number of trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War.
History
In 1866 in Texas, cattle was worth only $4 a head because of the build-up of cattle during the American Civil War compared to over $40 a head in the North and East. In 1867, Joseph McCoy built stockyards in Abilene, Kansas and encouraged Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. The stockyards shipped 35,000 head that year and became the largest west of Kansas City, Kansas.
O. W. Wheeler and his partners brought a herd of cattle up the trail in 1867. This herd of 2,400 steers was the first of an estimated 5,000,000 head of Texas cattle to reach Kansas over the Chisholm Trail. The cattle trail ended in Abilene from 1867 to 1871. Later on, Newton, Kansas and Wichita, Kansas would become the end of the trail. From 1883 to 1887, the trail ended in Caldwell, Kansas: the final end point of the trail.
The importance of cattle drives began to diminish in 1885 with the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad in Texas.
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.