Joseph McCoy and the Invention of the Cowtown
Near Abilene, Kansas
The man who made Abilene famous was not a cowboy but a businessman, and his ambition reshaped the cattle industry of the American nation. Joseph G. McCoy was an Illinois livestock trader who in eighteen sixty-seven saw an opportunity where others saw only distance and difficulty.
The ranches of Texas held enormous numbers of longhorn cattle that had multiplied during the Civil War while their owners were away fighting. The cities of the East needed beef. The problem was moving the animals from one place to the other across hundreds of miles of open country.
McCoy's solution was to establish a shipping facility in Kansas at a point where the Kansas Pacific Railway could carry animals east, then spread the word to Texas that a market existed. He arrived in Abilene in the summer of eighteen sixty-seven, bought roughly two hundred fifty acres of land north and east of town, and within weeks had built a hotel called the Drover's Cottage, stockyards capable of holding about two thousand head of cattle, a stable, and a scale. He sent word south: bring the cattle here.
In September of that year, the first cattle cars rolled east from Abilene loaded with Texas longhorns, the beginning of a trade that would define the American West for the next generation. McCoy made Abilene the terminus of the Chisholm Trail, the route originally blazed by a mixed-heritage Cherokee trader named Jesse Chisholm through the Indian Territory. Over the four years that Abilene served as the main trail terminus, hundreds of thousands of head of cattle were shipped east from McCoy's yards.
He had essentially invented the American cowtown, a model that Ellsworth, Wichita, and eventually Dodge City would copy after Abilene moved on.
