Abilene's Choice: When the Farmers Won
Near Abilene, Kansas
The end of Abilene's cattle-town era was not an accident or a disaster. It was a decision. By eighteen seventy-two, the town's permanent residents, the farmers and merchants and families who wanted to build a stable community on the Smoky Hill River, had grown weary of the seasonal upheaval that arrived with the cattle drives.
Tens of thousands of trail-hardened cowboys came each summer with accumulated wages and no obligations, and the property damage, gunplay, and general disorder that accompanied them wore out the patience of people who lived there year-round. In the winter of eighteen seventy-one and eighteen seventy-two, prominent citizens of Dickinson County signed and published a formal notice that was circulated among Texas cattlemen. The language was direct and unambiguous.
The people of the county, the notice said, were no longer willing to encourage the Texas cattle trade. Drovers were asked to seek another route and another terminus. It was, by the standards of frontier commerce, an extraordinary act.
Abilene was voluntarily giving up the trade that had made it the most talked-about town in Kansas. The herds moved west in eighteen seventy-two, to Ellsworth, then to Wichita, and eventually to Dodge City, which became the new queen of the cowtowns. Abilene became what its settlers had wanted all along: a grain-shipping center, a market town for the surrounding farms, a quiet place on the river with churches and schools and no cattle in the streets.
The choice cost Abilene its wildness and gave it its future. Nearly four decades later the son of a Dickinson County family would graduate from the local high school and go on to command the armies of a world war.
