The Chisholm Trail: A Historic Route for Texas Cattle

The trail popularly known as the Chisholm Trail was one of several routes used by Texas drovers to move livestock north to markets in Kansas after the Civil War. Its historic period of use as a cattle trail was from the summer of 1867 to 1884. After the cattle market opened at Dodge City by the summer of 1876, much of the herd traffic diverted from this trail route to the Western Trail, also known as the Fort Griffin and Dodge City Trail, to head for the newer markets in Kansas and in neighboring states and territories.

In 1860 prior to the Civil War, more than 86 percent of the U.S. population was concentrated east of the Mississippi River. Railroad service was available generally east of a line from Chicago, Illinois, to Atlanta, Georgia. Railroad construction, which was mostly suspended during the war, had reached west to the Mississippi in only a few areas but resumed after the war ended in 1865. By that time, Confederate money was worthless, and Texas was facing severe economic times. There was an abundance of longhorn cattle in Texas, but no practical local market and no means of interstate rail shipment. The only choice was to walk, or drive, a herd to a market where it could be sold.

During the 1850s outbreaks of Spanish fever, also known as Texas fever or splenic fever, led to the passage of quarantine laws against Texas cattle in Missouri and later in settled parts of Kansas. As post-war railroad construction progressed west into Kansas, Joseph G. McCoy of Illinois saw a business opportunity to capitalize on the nation’s increasing demand for beef. He convinced officials of the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division—which became the Kansas Pacific Railway in 1869—to establish a railhead at Abilene, Kansas, to provide a shipping point for Texas cattle. At that time Abilene consisted of only a small number of log huts but was located far enough west to avoid violence and troubles that were prevalent along the Kansas-Missouri border. Abilene was about sixty miles inside the western boundary of the 1867 Kansas quarantine area, which made it illegal for Texas cattle, but this fact was somehow overlooked by railroad and local officials.

According to 1866 and 1867 Texas property tax records, longhorn cattle were worth up to $5 and change per head in Texas, depending on grade, condition, and location. At Abilene and other subsequent Kansas markets they could fetch up to $40 per head. There was also a growing demand for horses and mules as more settlers moved into Kansas and its neighboring states and territories. An experienced crew of twelve, including a trail boss, cook, wrangler, and drovers could typically handle a herd of about 2,500 head of cattle. Depending on experience, monthly salary for a trail boss might be $90, $50 or more for a cook, and $30 for a drover. Supplies for three months on the trail might cost up to $400. The opportunity to turn a tidy profit was there, even if a herd was sold for less than top dollar.

The trail itself was not a single unbroken route, but a network of trails that might spread over a wide area and then narrow at certain river crossings. This trail has often been compared to a tree—with the roots being feeder trails leading from where herds were gathered in South Texas; the trunk being a main route past San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Fort Worth, and on across Indian Territory; and the branches leading to the various destinations at the northern end of the trail. From South Texas to the Brazos River it was basically the same trail network that had been used since the 1840s. The old trail led through Dallas County and crossed the Red River at Preston on its way to the Shawnee Trail in Indian Territory. The new trail led past Fort Worth, Gainesville, and Fort Arbuckle. By 1871 the main trail shifted slightly west to pass the present site of Saint Jo and Red River Station in Montague County before turning north a few miles east of the ninety-eighth meridian in Indian Territory.

O. W. Wheeler is usually credited with delivering the first herd to the new market at Abilene, but Joseph McCoy stated in 1874 that a herd driven from Texas and sold in Indian Territory to Smith, McCord, and Chandler while on the trail was the first herd to arrive in Abilene during the summer of 1867. McCoy added that the Wheeler herd was the first to arrive over the trail that thousands of others would soon follow. Estimates of total herd traffic vary wildly, and no supporting documentation is usually offered. According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 5,200,000 head of cattle were driven north from Texas during the years 1866–84; more than 2,400,000 of these were driven north during this trail’s primary years of use from 1867 to 1875. It is impossible to determine the number of cattle that actually touched the Chisholm Trail since there were additional routes through Indian Territory. An 1885 Kansas quarantine law closed the state to Texas cattle unless they had been wintered north of the thirty-sixth parallel and the proper health certificates were in order. The once massive flow of Texas cattle into Kansas slowed to a mere trickle. Similar restrictive laws were subsequently enacted in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico Territory, and Wyoming Territory. 

The trail derives its name from Jesse Chisholm, a translator, negotiator, and trader of Scottish-Cherokee descent. Chisholm established a trading post at Chisholm Springs near the present site of Asher, Oklahoma, in 1847. He opened a second trading post during the 1850s at Council Grove near the North Canadian River at what is now the west side of Oklahoma City. By 1865 he opened another trading post at the site that would become Wichita, Kansas. The trail between Jesse Chisholm’s trading posts became known locally as Chisholm’s Trail and was reportedly the best way to pass through this part of Indian Territory.

Jesse Chisholm died in 1868 before the trail-driving season commenced. The Chisholm Trail name first appeared in newsprint in the April 10, 1869, edition of the Georgetown (Texas) Watchman. The article stated that “hostile Indians of the Plains” had been removed “permanently from the Western route due north from Fort Arbuckle, known as the ‘Chisholm Trail,’” and that drovers “can now take that trail…with…security from molestation.” This trail name and location is corroborated by surveys that occurred within the next few years.

Contracts were issued by the U.S. General Land Office (GLO) in 1870 to survey most of Indian Territory. Jesse Chisholm’s trail appears on GLO surveys dated 1871–73 from a southernmost point a few miles northwest of the present site of Slaughterville, Oklahoma, past the present site of Oklahoma City, to a northernmost point near the confluence of Kingfisher Creek and the Cimarron River a few miles northeast of the present site of Kingfisher. While Chisholm’s original trade trail extended for a distance of about 220 miles, by this time his name was only applied to this relatively short stretch of about eighty miles of trail. This is the only place that Chisholm’s Trail or Chisholm’s Cattle Trail, also known as the Chisholm Trail, appears on surveys or maps with provenance to the post-Civil War trail driving period.

The main trail through Texas appears on an 1881 U.S. Department of the Interior map from the approximate location of the Nueces River south of the present site of Mathis past San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Fort Worth, and Red River Station. This trail is designated as the Eastern Trail, which is in agreement with an 1882 resolution by the Texas Stockmen’s Association Committee on Trails. At this time the Eastern Trail and Western Trail were the two main stock routes leading north from Texas. There is no evidence of a documented trail name designation for the trail past Red River Station prior to 1881. The Chisholm Trail name does not appear on Texas maps published during this period.

The trail north of Red River Station through Indian Territory past the present sites of Addington, Duncan, Kingfisher, and Enid appears on numerous GLO surveys and Interior Department maps dated 1871–87 designated as the Abilene Cattle Trail. In Kansas the trail appears on an 1876 Marion County survey as the Abilene Cattle Trail and on an 1871 railroad and sectional map as the Texas Cattle Trail to all existing Kansas railheads. The Chisholm Trail name does not appear in any of these locations on a survey or map published during the trail’s historic period of use.

It has been claimed that the entire trail route should be called the Chisholm Trail because of common usage by cowboys; however, this is not supported by contemporary documentation. In more than 2,100 pages about the early cattle business published during the years 1874–1905, including more than 400 biographical sketches of cattlemen, application of the Chisholm Trail name by cattlemen during its historic period of use is negligible. The Kansas Pacific Railway did not even use the term “Chisholm Trail” in advertising booklets published from 1871 to 1875 for distribution to Texas drovers, indicating that this was not a common term among their Texas customers.

There is no evidence that the entire trail route was commonly known by a formal trail name during the trail-driving days, other than perhaps informally by the destination name as was customary (Abilene Trail, Ellsworth Trail, Santa Fe Trail, San Antonio Road, etc.). The Chisholm Trail name was popularly applied to the entire trail route after 1911 due to a movement by Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas Good Roads Associations to rename the Meridian Highway as the Chisholm Trail Highway. This movement was undoubtedly influenced by the popularity of the Chisholm Trail name in songs, fiction, and folklore.

Joseph G. McCoy, William “Buffalo Bill” Mathewson, and the editor of the Abilene Weekly Reflector stated in a September 28, 1911, article that the highway proposal would “perpetuate the memory of a mythical trail called the Chisholm Trail,” and that the “proposed road should be called the Abilene Trail, the name to which it is entitled.” The article further stated that if a reader in doubt wrote to the Secretary of the Interior and requested a map of Indian Territory during the decades of 1870 and 1880 they would see the trail along the highway route as the Abilene Cattle Trail. Despite these statements by the founder of the cattle market at Abilene and a close associate of Jesse Chisholm, the controversy continued.

The Meridian Highway was designated as U.S. Highway 81 in 1926. The U.S. Good Roads Association endorsed the idea of the Chisholm Trail Highway name in 1930, but the proposal faded away during the Great Depression. Although the old trails along the Meridian Highway route through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas might be claimed as the Chisholm Trail in popular culture and modern marketing promotions, they are documented on official maps and surveys as the Eastern Trail in Texas, Abilene Cattle Trail in Oklahoma and Kansas, and Texas Cattle Trail in Kansas during their historic period of use in the nineteenth century. See also CATTLE TRAILING.