End of the Texas Cattle Trail
Near Abilene, Kansas
This marker stands near where the great cattle drives ended. In eighteen sixty-seven, an Illinois stockman named Joseph McCoy looked at the little railroad town of Abilene and saw a fortune. He built stout shipping pens stout enough to hold three thousand restless longhorns and made a deal to ship them east on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.
The math was irresistible. A longhorn worth about four dollars in Texas could be driven north, fattened on free prairie grass, and sold at the railhead for forty or fifty dollars a head. Texas cowboys pointed their herds toward Abilene, and over the next four years more than one and a half million head of cattle came up what mapmakers of the day called the Texas Cattle Trail, the route we now remember as the Chisholm Trail.
Abilene became the first of the wild Kansas cow towns, and the American cowboy passed into legend right here.
