| In 1865 Jesse Chisholm, a trader who had
a Cherokee parent, headed his wagons southward from his trading post on
the Arkansas River near present-day Wichita, Kansas. He crossed the Cimarron
and North Canadian rivers into what is now now Oklahoma and reached Fort
Cobb, where he traded with locals. During his numerous trips through sparsely
populated parts of North America, Chisholm had often found American captives
in local villages and was able to arrange ransom payments for their release.
The locals, who believed that Chisholm spoke "with a straight tongue,"
not only came to his trading post to do business but also sought his advice
on personal and political matters. When Chisholm died in 1868, his grave
marker declared that "No man ever left his home cold or hungry."
Chisholm was also honored by men who never
met him or visited his home, but who followed faithfully the ruts of his
trade wagons between Fort Cobb and Wichita, driving their Texas longhorns
to Abilene on the Kansas-Pacific Railroad line in north-central Kansas.
In time, Jesse Chisholm's name was given to this trail, which began along
the Neuces River in south Texas, almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km.) from Abilene.
Over this greatest of all the cattle trails, an estimated five million
cattle were driven to railheads in Kansas during the period from 1867 to
1885. Although the Chisholm Trail provided a direct route to Kansas, it
was not without its perils. The trail crossed several treacherous streams
that cost the lives of many cowboys. Moreover, the locals objected to the
trail herds because they ate the grass needed by their own animals. Usually,
the Texans were able to pay for a safe passage by giving the locals several
animals, but sometimes the angry locals stampeded the cattle being driven
along the trail.
During the first year of the Chisholm Trail's
existence, only 25,000 cattle reached the pens that had been built in Abilene.
But from 1867 to 1872 more tha.n a million and a half longhorns were shipped
out of Abilene, bound for Kansas City and the north on the Hannibal and
St. Joseph Railroad to the stockyards of Chicago, Illinois. After 1872
shipments from Abilene declined sharply as the railroads were extended
south and west and new railheads were opened at Newtown, Ellsworth, and
Dodge City, Kansas. Later, when the Southern Pacific and Atchison, Topeka
& Santa Fe Railroads were completed through Texas, the need for trail
drives to Kansas ended, and by 1885 the Chisholm Trail was rarely used.
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