By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

After the Civil War, Texas — including Waco — was poor in greenbacks but rich in beef.

Trouble was, cattle didn’t fetch much per head around these parts, only $3 or so. But if you could get them to markets in the North and East, your cattle could fetch upward of $50 a head.

In 1867, cattle baron Joseph G. McCoy (1837-1915) built stockyards in Abilene, Kan., along the Union Pacific railroad.

McCoy advertised extensively to encourage Texas cattlemen to drive their herds to his stockyards. More than 35,000 head used the Chisholm Trail that first season — a trickle in the tidal wave of bovine wealth that flowed northward.

The Chisholm Trail began as a trade route mapped by Jesse Chisholm (1806-1868), a Tennessee native born to a Scottish-American father and Cherokee mother. In the late 1820s, he migrated to the Indian Territory (modern-day eastern Oklahoma) from Arkansas, where he had lived as a youth.

A sought-after guide and adviser about Indian affairs, Chisholm aided Republic of Texas President Sam Houston in making contact with tribes in West Texas. Chisholm was instrumental in setting up and interpreting at several meetings to discuss peace and cooperation between American Indians and Texas settlers.

Following the Civil War, Chisholm hauled a wagon loaded with buffalo hides from his trading post near Wichita, Kan., to a site near present-day Oklahoma City. His wagon carved deep ruts in the prairie in spring 1866, creating a route that eventually came to be called the Chisholm Trail.

For almost 20 years, traders and cowboys driving longhorn cattle from Texas to the Kansas railroad stops followed this path. Though the trail fell into disuse with the expansion of the railroads and the introduction of barbed wire fences, the Chisholm Trail was immortalized in cowboy ballads, frontier lore and eventually movies and television shows.

Modern historians consider the route of the Chisholm Trail to have started at the Rio Grande itself, or San Antonio. Hundreds of smaller feeder trails in Texas headed north to join one of the main cattle trails.

The Chisholm Trail was previously used by Indian hunting and raiding parties ambling north from Austin through Waco — where drovers and their herds crossed the Brazos River via the Suspension Bridge of 1870 — and through Fort Worth.

From 1867 to 1871, the trail ended in Abilene. Later, the Kansas cities of Newton, Wichita, Caldwell and Ellsworth were named as the end of the line.

An estimated 3 million head of Texas cattle used the Chisholm Trail and similar routes to get to Abilene, Kan., from 1867 to 1872, when the cow town of Wichita took prominence.

The importance of cattle drives began to wane in 1887, with the arrival in Texas of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the Katy.

The city of Lacy-Lakeview celebrates its place in the trail’s storied past. When cattlemen stopped along the Brazos River, some camped to rest and feed their cattle at the plantation of Sarah Walker (1811-1899), an Alamo widow given tracts of land by the Republic of Texas in acknowledgement of her sacrifice.

History notes that some of the cowboys who died on the trail are buried in the Walker-Stanfield Cemetery in unmarked graves. The cemetery is located on U.S. Highway 77, between Stanfield Drive and Avenue C.

Sources: Kansas Heritage Group; Handbook of Texas Online; LacyLakeview.org; TheChisholmTrail.com; Painting Texas History to 1900, by Sam DeShong Ratcliffe, 1992.