The longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi when it was completed in 1870, Waco’s Suspension Bridge over the Brazos River has been vital to travelers and traders as well as an icon of progress for 140 years.

But was it one weigh station on the famed Chisholm Trail? The answer depends, of course, on who you ask.

A variety of sources — such as the ones online including TheChisholmTrail.com and ChisholmTrailMuseum.com — and the Texas Historical Commission place Waco in the heart of the action when it came to Western cattle drives.

A map based on research conducted by TheChisolmTrail.com and other resources, such as the Texas Historical Commission, shows the Chisholm Trail coming right through Waco. But some historians are just as adamant that Waco was not a part of the famed cattle path of the 1870s-80s. What is not in dispute is the pivotal role that Waco’s Suspension Bridge played in the local economy, charging a nickel per head of cattle.

But Scott White, a researcher and curator at the National Ranching Heritage Center at Texas Tech University, said author C.H. Rust cited a different route in “The Trail Drivers of Texas.”

Waco was part of the Eastern Trail or the McCoy Trail, but not the Chisholm, Rust wrote, which ran to the “right of Salado, to the right of Belton, to old Fort Graham, crossing the Brazos River to the left of Cleburne.”

Just as adamant for the Chisholm distinction is Doug Harman, a researcher who consulted for the Texas Historical Commission on its brochure and accompanying maps of the famed pioneer path.

“I find it amazing that there could be any doubt about the trail going through Waco,” he said. “Anyone with such doubt should consult the many hundreds of references to the cattle trails in Texas.”

Different names

Harman said there are a few contentions about the name. Some called the route through here the Abilene Trail, for example, because of its ending point.

“But those persons concerned with the name do not dispute that hundreds of thousands of longhorns went up this route, and it was the money from this new cattle industry which brought Texas out of bankruptcy after the Civil War,” he said.

The trail through Waco also was known in the 1850s and 1860s to drovers as The Texas Road, The Kansas Trail or The Shawnee Trail.

After the Civil War, it was known more by the name Chisholm, as in Jesse Chisholm (1806-1868), the half-Cherokee trading post operator who popularized his route north through Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) and into Kansas.

Many modern historians said the route later acknowledged as the Chisholm Trail originated in the Rio Grande valley. 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 and onto Fort Worth.

An estimated 3 million head of Texas longhorn used the Chisholm Trail and similar routes to get to Kansas from 1867-72, when the cow town of Wichita took prominence.

The importance of these cattle drives began to wane in the late 1880s, with the arrival in Texas of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the Katy.

What’s not disputed is that for a few decades, Waco’s place in the Western lore of cattle drives was assured by its practical, popular bridge, which for almost 20 years charged a nickel a head to keep one’s feet dry — whether there were two feet or four.

Wayne Gard’s 1984 study, “The Chisholm Trail,” names Waco as a stop. He noted the custom of the time (before the bridge) of bedding down the beef on the edge of town the night before their often desperate swim across at first light. The frequently muddy, reddish river presented a challenge to man and beast.

On the eve of the Civil War, Waco played a tragic role in the life of the Day family of Hays County, Gard noted.

Rancher Jesse Day started from home with a large herd in April 1860, and while swimming the cattle across the river at Waco, he drown. His two sons, William and Monroe “Doc” Day, buried him in Belton and went on with the herd, eventually selling out in St. Louis.

Hidebound businessmen

Waco has its share of hide-bound businessmen on the trail.

Shapley Prince Ross (1811-89), the future Brazos River ferryman who came to young Waco in 1849, was able to double his money in an 1854 cattle drive. He sold the cattle he had purchased from his McLennan County neighbors at $13 a head for more than $27 each in Missouri.

His son, Peter F. Ross (1836-1909) and two partners the following year drove a herd all the way to Chicago to sell for $50 per head (or $1,135 each, in 2009 dollars), according to local historian Bob Poage, author of “McLennan County Before 1980.”

W.A. Poage

Poage (a second-generation rancher himself ) served in the U.S. Congress for 40 years before his retirement in 1978.

The younger Ross more often sold his cattle south in New Orleans after the unpleasantness between the states.

A Texas Ranger in his youth, and a Confederate colonel during the war, Peter F. Ross was also sheriff of McLennan County for two terms before his retirement to his ranch 10 miles south of Waco in 1880.

Meanwhile, Poage’s father, William Allen Poage (1855–1920), came to Texas from his native Virginia with his parents in 1866 and grew up on the family farm on the South Bosque River.

At age 17, W.A. Poage joined a cattle drive to Kansas, the first of several he would work as either the pointer (lead driver) or eventually as trail boss.

Well known for his cow-punching and roping abilities as a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail, he would later document his trail adventures in an 1890 account published more than two decades after his death.

He spun yarns of snow storms, sand storms, swollen river crossings, Indian raids and weary cowpokes just trying to make a living with a lariat.

At 20, the young entrepreneur began buying cattle and driving them to Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, making his last such journey in 1885.

By the mid-1880s, as ranchers began fencing their land and the railroads started moving cattle more efficiently to market, the era of the big cattle drives ended.

Additional sources: Kansas Heritage Group; and Handbook of Texas Online