The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941 Page: 251
546 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Letters and Documents
these mounds to another. He also sent men to Texas
to interview the cattle owners who theretofore had
pursued a more easterly route and met with many
hardships and difficulties owing to the opposition of
settlers in Missouri whose stock, after the passing of
the Texas drives, became infected with Texas fever.
It is a most interesting letter. He relates how he con-
tracted with the management of the Kansas Pacific
Railroad for a commission on all carloads of cattle
shipped from Abilene on their road to eastern mar-
kets, particularly Chicago. McCoy built strong cattle
pens right out on the prairie at the present Abilene
long before the coming of the railroad. He also built
a hundred-thousand-dollar hotel and stables for the
trailers' horses, finally being beaten out of his commis-
sions and becoming a financial bankrupt.
This trail laid out by McCoy in 1867 came to be
known all the way to the Red River and beyond as
the Chisholm Trail, though the major mileage of it
was no part of the original Chisholm Trail. When the
Cherokee Outlet was surveyed by the Government in
the early seventies, the surveyors marked this trail
its entire route through the "Strip" as it was called.
These surveyors marked it throughout as the "Abilene
Cattle Trail." I have a copy of their map.
As the railroads were extended westward and other
towns sprang up, other loading places were erected,
and to shorten the drives from points farther west in
Texas other trails were made to these points, viz.,
Newton and Dodge City, the latter in 1872. The trail
leading into this latter-named place from the south
was known as the Dodge City Trail.
A few enterprising secretaries of chambers of com-
merce in the western part of Oklahoma have sought
to spread the notion that the Chisholm Trail passed
through their respective towns. I refer particularly
to Clinton, Elk City, Woodward, and a few others.
They have even caused to be erected as markers along
a certain highway pictures representing heads of
Texas steers and called it the Chisholm Trail. They
are all "wet." That cattle trail was not made until
necessity called for it and that was four years after
Jesse Chisholm died in the present Blaine county,
Oklahoma, in March, 1868. Their case falls quite flat.
There was a John Chisum of Texas who was a cattle
rancher and who sent many cattle northward, but there
is no evidence that he ever, personally, made the trip
over the trail which those enterprising secretaries
now seek to have called the Chisholm Trail in Western251
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941, periodical, 1941; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146052/m1/274/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.