Five Million Longhorns: The Western Cattle Trail
Near Dodge City, Kansas
When the buffalo herds were gone by the early eighteen eighties, Dodge City might have collapsed into another failed plains town. Instead it pivoted, and the new industry was Texas cattle. Kansas quarantine laws had pushed the old Chisholm Trail's eastern terminus progressively westward, and by the mid-eighteen seventies Dodge City had become the new endpoint.
A route called the Western Cattle Trail, sometimes called the Great Western Trail, ran north from the Texas rangelands through the Indian Territory and across Kansas directly to Dodge. The cattle moved north in the spring and summer, driven by cowboys on horseback over routes that could take months. The animals crossed swollen rivers, walked through drought and heat, and arrived in Kansas thin but alive.
At Dodge City the herds went into the stockyards and the cowboys went into the saloons. The Santa Fe Railroad loaded the animals into cattle cars and shipped them to the packinghouses of Kansas City and Chicago. The numbers staggered the era's observers.
At the peak of the cattle boom, in eighteen eighty-three and eighteen eighty-four, the herds moving through Dodge City totaled millions of head per season. Over the roughly ten years of the Western Trail era, historians estimate that more than five million longhorn cattle were driven up to Dodge City from Texas. The cattle era ended in the late eighteen eighties.
A devastating blizzard in January of eighteen eighty-six killed hundreds of thousands of cattle across the open range. Kansas quarantine laws extended westward, finally reaching Dodge City's county, blocking Texas cattle from legally entering. By eighteen eighty-seven the drives had effectively stopped.
