Skeleton Trail Ranch

You are near the site of the old Skeleton Trail Ranch, one of the working cattle stops that made the great drives of the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties possible.

Skeleton Creek below you gave this place its grim name, though the creek itself was named, by one account, in eighteen sixty-seven by pioneers who found the bones of Wichita people who had died there in a cholera outbreak. Trail ranches like this one were staging grounds where drovers could rest exhausted cattle, water them at the creek, and restock basic supplies before pushing north toward the Kansas railheads at Abilene or Dodge City. Without stops like Skeleton Ranch, the long drives of a thousand miles or more would have been nearly impossible. The ranch is gone now, but the creek and the name carry the memory of the cattle-drive era forward.