The Long Drive: Cattle, Cowboys, and the Kansas Cow Towns

In the spring of eighteen sixty-seven, a Chicago livestock dealer named Joseph McCoy rode the Kansas Pacific Railway line into the middle of Kansas and got off at a small siding called Abilene. Abilene had a handful of buildings, a post office, and a lot of empty grassland. McCoy looked at it and saw a cattle shipping terminal.

He was thinking about Texas. The war had left the Texas range full of longhorn cattle that no one had been able to move to eastern markets. Millions of animals, worth almost nothing in Texas, were worth forty dollars a head in Chicago if you could get them there. The problem was distance. The solution, McCoy decided, was a railhead at the edge of the Kansas plains, north of the quarantine lines that Missouri and Kansas settled counties had drawn against Texas cattle and the ticks they carried.

McCoy built livestock pens at Abilene large enough to hold three thousand cattle and wrote letters to every trail drover in Texas he could locate. In the summer of eighteen sixty-seven, the first herd arrived up the Chisholm Trail, thirty-five thousand animals in a single season. The following year, seventy-five thousand. By eighteen seventy-one, the peak year for Abilene, more than seven hundred thousand cattle were shipped east from that single Kansas railhead.

The Chisholm Trail was not the only one. The Western Trail ran to Dodge City after the railroads pushed further west. The Great Western Cattle Trail brought animals up through the Oklahoma Panhandle. For roughly twenty years, from the late eighteen sixties through the late eighteen eighties, the cattle drives defined the Kansas economy and produced the mythology of the American West: the cowboy, the trail boss, the cattle town with its saloons and gambling halls and marshals.

The reality was less romantic. The work was brutal. Cowboys rode sixteen-hour days in heat and dust and rain, across river crossings that could drown animals and men. The cow towns were violent in ways that civic boosters later preferred to forget: Abilene, Dodge City, and Caldwell all saw shootings, and the famous marshals, Wyatt Earp in Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene, were hired not to tame the frontier but to protect commerce. Disarming cowboys who had just arrived after months on the trail was a business decision, not a moral one.

The drives ended because of the railroads, not the violence. When the rail lines extended into Texas in the mid-eighteen eighties, there was no longer any reason to drive cattle six hundred miles north to a Kansas railhead. The cow towns shrank. Some disappeared. The mythology remained.