texas cattle trails north
Honoring the Trails' Rich Heritage
Two Cattle Trail Systems
The cattle-trailing industry from Texas north constantly evolved; drovers reevaluated their craft each season and adapted to circumstances, military situations, cattle laws, and homesteaders’ westward movement. From statehood in 1845 to 1861, pre Civil War, the main focus for drovers was to supply mature longhorns to the staging areas in Kansas Territory and Missouri to be used as work oxen to pull the immigrant wagons on the overland trails or to haul freight wagons on the Santa Fe Trail. Small herds were also sold to accompany the overlanders as a beef supply.
After the Civil War, the atmosphere completely changed. The demand was now for beef in the eastern cities. The Chicago Union Stock Yards opened on Christmas day in 1865, and packers east of the Missouri River wanted beef stock. When the Union Pacific Eastern Division Railway reached Junction City and Abilene, Kansas in 1867, the cattle-trail network expanded almost annually in order to reach new Kansas railheads. This ballooning network become known as the Shawnee Cattle Trail System.
When the Kansas Legislature quarantined the Shawnee System out of existence in 1875 because of the pressure of incoming homesteaders, another system was developed farther west—The Western Cattle Trail System. For the next twenty-two years, this network from Texas expanded, delivering beef and stock cattle into the northern territories and into Canada.
Our Purpose
When Old West enthusiasts visits the cattle towns or read about “cowboys” and their adventures, the Texas cattle trails that brought these young cowpunchers north are most often not mentioned. The narratives, novels, and enactments are about personalities: the cowboys and the lawmen in the famous cow towns of the West.
Our purpose has always been to seek out the actual routes of the Texas cattle trails north—where they were located; what creeks and rivers were crossed; what was each pathway’s destination. We were interested in how early cartographers presented each route and why that particular pathway was used in its timeframe. We wanted to show
the migration westward of these routes, explain the reason why drovers chose to abandon a route and establish another one.
To present this, we had to study the military’s action toward the Plains Indians, the Kansas cattle quarantine laws, the incoming railroads and their affect on the cattle trails, the westward movement of homesteaders, and the diaries of the drovers.
We have written about and geographically presented three cattle-driving systems: the Shawnee, the Western, and the Goodnight. Each one had a trunk line in Texas and as seasons passed, various branches or off-shoots were created in order to adjust to the ever-changing circumstances and rail terminals.
Texas Cattle Trail Scholars
Gary & Margaret Kraisinger
Award-winning authors, Gary & Margaret, have published three books and various articles on Texas cattle trails. The couple researches, lectures, and writes about the Texas cattle trail industry that lasted only about 50 years from 1846 to 1897. They have studied and mapped all the cattle trails from Texas north.
Their historical research has been recognized by the Oklahoma Historical Society, the National Parks Service, True West Magazine, the Wild West History Association (Sixth Shooter Award 2016), the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame (2015 inductees), and the National Cowboy & Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City (Wrangler Award 2016).
