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del.icio.usKansas was right route for cattle drive
The Wichita Eagle
This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."
BY BECCY TANNER
At the end of the Civil War, Kansas was an open horizon, with a colorful mix of cultures and technology taking shape.
The Kansas Pacific Railway had just completed construction of a long-distance line across the state, extending the national railroad network.
And a genre known as the American cowboy was emerging from small, dusty towns across the prairie.
Both railroad men and cowboys had the same goal: to get cattle to eastern markets faster.
That proved a daunting task. Steamships could carry only a small number of cattle, and railroads had yet to reach Texas where more than 5 million longhorns roamed, free to whoever claimed them. How to get the $3 to $4 steers in Texas to the $30- to $40-a-head market on the East Coast was a problem. And Joseph G. McCoy, an Illinois livestock trader, had the insight in 1867 to solve it.
McCoy came to Kansas looking for leaders who would be willing to have their town used as a shipping point for the railroads. After searching, he came across Abilene, where he built shipping yards and started running full-page ads in many of the northern newspapers, urging buyers to come west to Abilene to buy stock. All told, he spent nearly $5,000 in newspaper advertising.
The next year, the herds began moving along the Chisholm Trail, named for early Wichita trader Jesse Chisholm.
The cattle drives weren't under the best conditions. Cattle were stressed and often lost weight or died en route to the beef-packing plants. Livestock producers believed if they could get the cattle closer to the railroad, better profits could be made, so more cowtowns developed, including Wichita.
Most herds moved at about a mile per hour, covering between seven and 10 miles a day.
Along the trail, the cowboys ate "Pecos strawberries" (beans), potatoes, onions, steak and "boggtop," a stewed fruit with biscuits on top.
If it was raining and the ground muddy, cowboys trying for "a little shut-eye" would lay in a triangle, so each man's head was on another man's ankles.
In its heyday from the late 1860s through the 1880s, the Chisholm Trail served as a cattle pipeline from Texas ranches to the stockyards and railroad accesses in Abilene, Newton, Wichita and Caldwell.
It also served as an economic lifeline for Kansas, helping promote the railroad and make ranching profitable. In Wichita alone, more than 230,000 head of cattle were shipped out from 1872 to 1876.
Most historians see the Chisholm Trail as one of three great byways that crossed the country. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails were east-west migrant and commercial trails. But the Chisholm was a north-south cattle trail.
Well-known songs generated from the Chisholm Trail that are still sung today include "Old Chisholm Trail," "I Ride An Old Paint" and "The Streets of Laredo."
Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.
