The cattle drives of the late 1800s left an indelible impression on American culture and established the cattle industry on the Great Plains.

The largest, longest lasting of the cattle trails stretched from south Texas north to trailheads on the plains and on to Canada.

This trail was the Western.

The stage was set for the Western Cattle Trail even before the American Civil War.

Trail drives coming to Kansas were small herds starting in the 1850s when Kansas, before it was a state, was still a territory.

And so they were coming out of Texas and Indian territory, which is now known as Oklahoma, to feed the population to the north.

And then, of course, in 1861, the Civil War started, which kind of put a hiatus on the cattle drives into Kansas.

Some of the most detailed present day maps of the Western Cattle Trail are the work of Gary and Margaret Kraisinger, who have dedicated decades to studying these routes and published two volumes on the Western Trail.

We worked on that trail for many, many years.

We lived in western Kansas.

We moved.

Oklahoma, moved to Texas, moved back to Kansas.

All the time we would drag along our suitcase full of full of files that we would gather, and we realized that that cattle trail was the biggest cattle trail in history.

The Texans went home from the war.

They had lost the war.

They had Confederate money was worth nothing.

They soon discovered that over the five years that they were gone off to war, that those herds had just multiplied.

There was millions of cattle down there, most of them unbranded.

But even when they got their ranches, there was no market in Texas for their cattle.

They had to find a market and they started driving cattle up the Shawnee Trail in eastern Kansas and soon found out when they got to southeast Kansas, Southwestern Missouri that there would they would run into resistance because a lot of these coastal cattle carried a fever.

At the time, they didn't know what caused the fever.

There was a fever that nobody knew.

They called it the Texas fever.

And what it was doing was when the Texan or southern cattle were coming through after they had passed a lot of domestic cattle from other places were dying just within a few days after the Texas cattle or the southern cattle passed.

And so they knew about this Texas fever before, so they would not let the cattle be driven through.

areas of population where the farmers were.

So they moved it on west.

The main market was to get to a railhead.

Abilene, Wichita, Newton, you know, and various other rail heads in order to ship the cattle back east because there was such a shortage of cattle after the war.

Well, the population came into the eastern third of the state fairly rapidly after the Civil War, and so the trails kept having to move farther to the west all the time.

Kansas came in and quarantined the whole east half of the state because of the Texas fever, including Wichita, Abilene and all those regular rail heads were quarantined out in 1875.

And so then the Cowboys had to completely shift a whole new system and go further west.

And they thought, we'll go 100 miles west.

And that way the quarantine laws won't disturb us.

They won't get in our way.

And so as they kept moving west and west, the last coming through was what's called the Western trail that came from Texas up until, to about Dodge City and then from Dodge City onto the north to basically Ogallala, Nebraska, but even farther north to the Dakotas and Montana and Wyoming.

The stories and remnants of the trail would spark the imaginations of many, especially those who lived were the Western once ran.

Gene Burnbeck grew up exploring the trail where it passed through his parents ground west of Utica, Kansas.

Was always interested in things to do with the Old West and of course, having the Texas cattle trail cross across our ground was a good thing.

I could always go down there and imagine or look for artifacts.

These are some little items that I found on the Texas cattle trail.

This little button here is a Grand Army of the Republic button, which I found intriguing as connected to, of course, the Civil War veteran.

Old timers that had homesteaded the world around us.

They always had good information.

There was a man that had grown up on the Smokey Hill River to our west, and his name was Warren Munsell.

He said that a man had come to him and said that he was part of the Texas cattle trail.

So Warren right away his ears perked up.

He says, Well, right through here?

And the guy said, Yeah, right, right through here where you're putting this fencepost.

And I actually found a couple of artifacts from that, a shell casing that appears to be a 45 long Colt that is made from copper, which was a forerunner to the to the brass, another shell casing that's made from copper that looks like it probably ran through a Spencer carbine.

And another item was a knife that had a large spoon riveted to the handle.

And obviously it looked like it had scraped the side of a kettle a lot.

This goes on the head stall of a bridle.

And this was also found on the Texas cattle trail.

This is where it would have attached to the head stall on the bridle.

There was an old man who lived to our west, and he was pretty much the county historian.

He pointed to the ground and said, Right here is where the Texas cattle trail was.

And I told him, I said, Well, I found some artifacts here before.

And he said, Were at?

I said, up on top of that hill.

He said, That's where they stopped because you could be up on top of that hill and look down the river to the east and to the west and keep track of your cattle.

He said.

You found that stuff in exactly the right place.

Now, Gene referred to the Western as the Texas cattle trail.

This might be a good moment to pause and discuss the question of names because historically this trail had several.

It is like many cattle trails, it has different names, but it depends upon where you are on the map.

For many years at Doan's Crossing, he called it the Fort Griffin-Dodge City Trail.

And the reason he called it that was because he set between the two of them, You get up into Kansas, then it becomes the Western Trail.

It's funny, though, you get up into Montana, Wyoming, and they call it the Texas Trail.

Or the Montana Trail.

Or the Montana Trail, they call it.

And we've been up in that area and we'll say Western Trail and say, oh, yeah, the Texas trail, you know, they call it differently.

Then in 1965, Jimmy Skaggs wrote a thesis and he called it the Great Western.

He did it only that one time.

All of his writings after that, he never used that word again.

In his book after that, in his articles after that, he did not use the word great.

I think he meant to emphasize that it was a great trail.

It was greater even than it's pretty its predecessor, but it was capitalized.

So that got picked up as part of.

The as part of the name.

If you follow the white posts, they'll all say, great Western Cattle Trail.

But the probably, to be honest with you, the most common name you would find on those old markers was Texas cattle trail.

And I think it's pretty obvious what the reason is they were Texas cattle pushed by Texans into into that area.

And so Texas was a common name on all the trails not just the Western.

I was going to say, you get over into the eastern system.

Even even east of Wichita and north of Wichita and areas up in there where we've done some research.

You run across.

Different names.

Texas, particularly though.

Universally, I mean, overall it has become the Western Cattle Trail.

It started in south Texas.

They would stage their their herds in about the San Antonio area, you know, where they'd gather their supplies and their cowboys and their cook wagon.

Road brand them.

Road brand them and so forth.

And then they would start north.

They would go originally through western Kansas, western Nebraska, and then on up into Wyoming, Montana, and even up as far as Calgary, Canada.

Then they would also had a major splinter route that splintered off and went into the Dakotas.

Now the market's changed.

They were still taking cattle north for beef and putting them on rail heads at Dodge City, Buffalo Park and Ogallala.

But now they had a whole new reason to bring cattle north, and that was to supply the northern plains.

By 1875, the indians were pretty much being placed on reservations.

They had indians agencies that were buying beef.

To quell the indians or bring them to their knees, they went to their breadbasket.

The breadbasket for the Plains Indians was the buffalo.

So they started annihilating the buffalo and taking away their breadbasket.

And that's what brought the Indians to the reservation.

Well, part of the agreements to get them on the reservation was that the government would feed them and they used Texas cattle.

So in short, the Western Cattle trail had a little bit different purpose than the Eastern systems.

Now, they were actually crossing railroads to get to their market.

The new market were ranchers and these indian reservations.

So they actually crossed railroads in order to get to their market.

So we could say that Montana and Wyoming first started their beef industries because of the Texas cattle, because the Texas cattle seeded those ranches.

But somewhere between ten and a half million to 12 million cattle were moved north during that period of time.

6 million of those went up the Western Cattle Trail.

Between trailheads were long, lonely stretches marked by small cow towns and landmarks on the prairie.

One example was Round Top.

Some reported that from this promontory on the plains, lines of cattle could be seen all the way to the next significant railhead of the time.

Buffalo Park, Kansas.

We're standing in Park, Kansas, now.

It was formerly known as a railroad station as Buffalo Station and then later Buffalo Park.

But it was a major stop.

In Part, for instance, there were numerous saloons.

There were numerous restaurants and usually a hotel.

The hotel wasn't mostly for the cowboys, but for the buyers coming in.

There were a lot of cattle buyers from the eastern United States that would stop in at Park or the other cattle towns and find a trail hard herd coming through to see if they could get a good deal on it.

And then since it was along the railroad track, they could ship those cattle anywhere else that they wanted.

We always had the stereotypes of the cowboys on the trail would go into a saloon, and there were saloon girls and a lot of whiskey and stuff, but they wanted to do something different.

And so roller skating in the mid 1880s became very popular.

And it wouldn't be like a skating rink today where you have shoes to put on.

They were clip on skates that you had to adjust with a key.

And you can visualize a bunch of drunk cowboys on roller skates on their boots going out and roller skating on these wooden skating rinks.

And it would be noisy.

It would sound like a thundering herd once they got on there with the steel wheels on the roller skates and on a hardwood floor.

And so there was this entertainment around.

It wasn't all all saloons and dances and and picnics and all.

With the sign, we can see how many cattle passed by here in a season.

You know, 11,600 head of cattle went through by Buffalo Park Station and then 30,000 came through in one week.

And by the end of the season, which was in August, there was over 165,000 head went through this way.

This was only one portion of it.

These are just the ones that went by here where the newspaper publisher happened to keep track of.

Traveling north on the map from Park, one sees a stop at Port Byron, but this cow town is long since lost to time.

Behind me is probably one of the locations where Port Byron really was.

Basically a mile east of Hoxie.

Kenneth, which was the first county seat of Sheridan County, which we're in now, was about three miles north.

And so Port Byron was kind of the cowboy town, and Kenneth was for the good citizens.

It wasn't too much of a town.

It had a had a post office.

It had a livery stable, a general store, and at least one saloon, or maybe even more.

Some say as much as three and also a brothel.

There's been a lot of research.

I've been looking for it for probably 60 years.

So Port Byron is really a mystery.

It was a very short lived cow town that was only active during the trail drive period and basically in the summer.

The functional value of driving the cattle was not all about availability of rail heads and cow towns.

The Great Plains themselves prepared the cattle for market.

The longhorn cattle were skinny and the grass, especially in the western half of Kansas, and really more in the western third is very rich.

The native grass here is what we call short grass country, and it's very nutritious.

It's very palatable to the cattle while it's green, and it has a high protein.

On the trail.

There's a lot of grass up in that country, at least then, so these cattle, as they moved up the trail, they gained weight.

Most of those cattle arrived in northern Montana heavier than when they left Texas.

And then western Kansas, especially the western third where the Western Cattle Trail came through, it's a area, coined early on, it was a ladder of rivers.

Most of these streams were basically 15 to 20 miles apart.

The streams, the creeks, the rivers went to the east.

Driving the cattle, they had to be watered hopefully once a day.

And the distance of a trail ride per day was about 15 miles.

The cattle could come up this ladder of rivers, eat a long way, get a drink.

Because these cattle did get fat as they went forward.

And that's where the trail drives came through also, because there's estimates it would cost the person to drive cattle from here to Ogallala, Nebraska for $1 to $2 per animal.

And that is including the hiring of the Cowboys, which were maybe making a dollar a day and getting fed.

They were charging $5 a head to put them on a train.

It was under $2 that they could walk a cow to northern Montana.

And so it was it just made more economic sense to continue to drive the cattle north.

They were bringing up 2500 to 3000 per herd.

A common number per season would be 300 to 350000 animals were brought up.

They finally perfected the art of moving cattle out of Texas.

In the beginning, owners took their own cattle north.

But there were also contract drovers.

Their business was to drive cattle.

A contractor was an experienced trail driver who would usually go up year after year, and he knew about the trail, he knew the location, he knew the market, he knew about animals, and he was hired by the rancher to take the cattle up and he would get a percentage.

That's a contractor.

He hired his own crews, got his... and then the chuck wagon was a big development, and it didn't sound like it, but their bed rolls went in there, their extra food went in there, all of the chuck.

And then, of course, the utensils.

The cook went with him and it freed the cowboy to do the job he was hired to do.

which was to control the cattle going north.

They tried to get 10 to 12 miles a day.

And one of the rules was by some of the early cattle handlers, the commission men was don't let the cattle know that you're driving them.

You hear reports of some oxen that could maybe make 40 miles a day, you know, with an ox to pull the freight, but they really had to push them.

But you didn't want to do that with the cattle because they would lose weight.

And so you wanted to drift them and you didn't want them to feel confined where they'd get nervous.

So they were kind of driven in a loose style.

Many of those cattle they found were in the same spot every day.

The leaders were out front.

And just like they were numbered and they were in line.

But they they pretty well took up the same station in that drive every day, and they could be strung out for miles.

It would depend on the size of the herd, But herd 2500 might be spread out for a mile and a half, two miles.

They kept doing this until they figured out a number that was profitable,.

That number as Margaret mentioned earlier was about 2500.

I mentioned earlier about a road brand.

The other thing they learned was because they had stampedes and they mixed up with other cattle, they figured out they needed another brand.

For instance, they had the ranch brand and a lot of times those ranchers would go together and pool all their cattle, get a herd together.

Well, then they need some commonality.

They got mixed up in a stampede or with other cattle.

They had to have a brand they can look for.

So they had a road brand.

As routes developed, you got short grass out there, you got buffalo grass, you can see the ruts, you can see where the one was in front of you.

The first one of the season, he hadn't been up the trail before maybe, but you got to remember they kept hiring these contractors and they went up the trail every year for years and carried his herds.

And they knew where that trail was.

They knew where it was.

They knew where these these points of interest were or markers to get going.

And if you actually go out and physically find a remnant of a cattle trail, it's in the ground.

It's a swell in the ground.

I mean, we went we have gone down and and they're actually almost knee deep.

Some of those trail marks and and and this is 150 years later, I can imagine the the the scar in the earth that those cattle left on those trails.

What brought the cattle trailing industry to an end?

Most people will say, oh, barbed wire or they'll say trains.

Both of those are true.

I would like to say, however, I think the main reason that it all ended was because of the end of the open range.

The last trail drive is 1885 through here.

This country in the 1880s was being settled very quickly.

The ground that these cowboys used to go across was had become private ground.

And so they couldn't go from Texas to Montana without stepping on somebody's toes, without getting into private property, without getting into fenced property, without getting into a mire of homesteaders, you know, who didn't want them there, and so on and so forth.

So it was the end of open range.

The other factor, too, is that by mid 1880s, the people that were eating the cattle, eating the beef, wanted a better quality of meat.

The consumer still had control of the beef.

So they wanted more tender meat, a little bit fatter meat because the Longhorns weren't something that would get fat.

So there was the settlement, the demand for beef.

And also in the winter of 1885 and 86 there was severe blizzards that hit the western third of the state and wiped out approximately 80% of the cattle because they weren't putting up hay or fodder, as they would call it, for the winter.

And so after 1885, beginning 1886, people started fencing off areas to control their cattle, not only for the selective breeding of, but they also had the fencing so they would have areas that the cattle wouldn't eat in the winter, which they created hay meadows for that so they could have had the hay.

So 1885 was a key year in stopping the trail drives, fencing in part the demand of beef and also the settlement.

But it was an industry and the reason I bring up the fact it was an industry that's what developed the cattle industry in Texas, it's still a big thing in Texas.

Yeah.

If you look at... if you were to go to Google and say, what are the states in our union that are cattle states?

It would be Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma.

Nebraska.

I mean, because still today we are the top beef producing states and it was because of the cattle drives.

You know, they they supplied the beef for these states.

We wanted to show through Gary's maps and through our writing where those cattle trails were.

In other words, from point A to point B.

Be interested in what's going on around you where your area is at.

Most places, just like in my little part of the world, I had the Texas cattle trail, I had the Butterfield Trail.

It was just hours of entertainment of of looking for things if you knew where to look.

My kid growing up around me, was interested in those stories too.

And then I got a couple of grandsons.

Who, grandpa tell us a story again about... Won't be long, they'll be able to repeat it back to or point to the same piece of ground and say, Right here is where that old white haired man told me when I was a kid that this is where the Texas cattle trail was.

You know, I want to make sure that all that gets passed on.

The romance to me is where was it that, you know, where was this trail at?

And it's a way of... and if someone doesn't write about them and doesn't collect up even the early maps that were drawn and try to piece them all together and show where the trails were, it's going to be lost to time.

It'll be a part of our history that is lost.

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