History
The Chisholm Trail was a trail where cattle herds were driven from South Texas to Abilene, Kansas from 1867-1887 where the cattle was shipped east via the Kansas-Pacific Railroad . The trail stretched for 800 miles at its peak.
The trail was named after Jesse Chisholm who had built a number of trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War.
In 1866 in Texas, cattle was worth only $4 a head because of the build-up of cattle during the American Civil War compared to over $40 a head in the North and East. In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy built stockyards in Abilene, Kansas and encouraged Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. The stockyards became the largest west of Kansas City, Kansas.
O. W. Wheeler and his partners brought a herd of cattle up the trail in 1867. This herd of 2,400 steers was the first of an estimated 5,000,000 head of Texas cattle to reach Kansas over the Chisholm Trail. The cattle trail ended in Abilene from 1867 to 1871. Later on, Newton, Kansas and Wichita, Kansas would become the end of the trail. From 1883 to 1887, the trail ended in Caldwell, Kansas: the final end point of the trail.
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