American History of the Old West
Chisholm Trail

The Chisholm Trail was a route used in the late 19th century in the Western United States for cattle drives, the movement of cattle overland. The trail stretched from southern Texas across the Red River to Abilene, Kansas, and was used from 1867 to 1884 to drive cattle northward to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway, where they were shipped eastward.

The trail is named for Jesse Chisholm who had built several trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War. He never drove cattle on the trail and died in 1868.

In 1866 in Texas, cattle were worth only $4 per head, compared to over $40 per head in the North and Eastern United States, because lack of market access during the American Civil War had led to increasing number of cattle in Texas.

In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy built stockyards in Abilene, Kansas. He encouraged Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. The stockyards shipped 35,000 head that year and became the largest stockyards west of Kansas City, Kansas.

O. W. Wheeler and his partners used the Chisholm Trail to bring a herd of 2,400 steers from Texas to Abilene in 1867. This herd was the first of an estimated 5,000,000 head of Texas cattle to reach Kansas over the Chisholm Trail.

Today, most historians consider the Chisholm Trail to have started at the Rio Grande or at San Antonio, Texas. From 1867 to 1871, the trail ended in Abilene. Later, Newton, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas, each served as the end of the trail. From 1883 to 1887, the end of the trail was Caldwell, Kansas.

In Texas, there were hundreds of feeder trails heading north to one of the main cattle trails. In the early 1840s, most cattle was driven up the Shawnee Trail. The trail was previously used by Indian hunting and raiding parties; it went north from Austin through Waco and Dallas, then it crossed the Red River near Preston before continuing along the eastern edge of modern day Oklahoma. The path later became known as the Texas Road.

By 1853, cattle was being driven into parts of Missouri, where farmers began blocking herds and turning them back because the Texas longhorns carried ticks that caused diseases in other types of cattle. Violence, vigilante groups, and cattle rustling caused further problems for the drivers. By 1859, laws were passed preventing the cattle from being driven through those areas. By the end of the Civil War, the bulk of the cattle was being moved up the western branch of the Texas Road, which joined the Chisholm Trail at Red River Station in Montague County, Texas.

The importance of cattle drives began to diminish in 1887 with the arrival of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad in Texas.

On the long trips the cattlemen would have a lot of difficulties. The trips took about two to three months. They had to cross major rivers like the Arkansas and the Red, and innumerable smaller creeks, plus the topographic challenges of canyons, badlands, and low mountain ranges. The weather was not always good. In addition to these natural dangers, there were rustlers, un-pacificed Native Americans (Oklahoma at that time was Indian Territory, governed from Fort Smith, Arkansas), and the natural contrariness of the half-wild Longhorn cattle themselves, which were prone to stampede with little provocation.

Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks, is a fictional account of the first drive, in 1865, along the Chisholm Trail.