Cattle Drives from South Texas

The Chisholm Trail the plaque names was never the whole road. Jesse Chisholm, a trader of Scottish and Cherokee descent, gave his name to about eighty miles of track in Indian Territory, and the name first appeared in print in 1869. In Texas an 1881 Interior Department map calls the main route the Eastern Trail and shows it running from the Nueces River south of Mathis. The label spread over the whole route after 1911, when good-roads boosters wanted a Chisholm Trail Highway. Joseph McCoy, who opened the Abilene market, joined a statement calling the trail mythical.

What the plaque says

Cattle Drives from South Texas By 1840, tens of thousands of wild cattle roamed this vast south Texas region between the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico. The longhorns were almost worthless to Texans, so in 1842, extended cattle drives began with small herds driven to New Orleans and Missouri. Edward Piper, in 1846, drove 1,000 head to Ohio. By 1850 drives began to California and in 1856, a herd was driven to Chicago. During the same period, bovines were shipped by boat to New Orleans and Havana, Cuba, but with little or no profit. The number of cattle driven out of south Texas did not diminish the growing cattle population, as over 3.5 million head were present in 1860. Several thousand cattle were delivered to the Confederacy during the early years of the Civil War, but not until the conflict ended did cattle drives become profitable. Industrialization and urbanization of the northern U.S. created a huge market, and the westward expansion of railroads provided the means of transportation. In this vicinity, several "feeder" trails led north to connect with the Chisholm and Dodge City trails to the Kansas railheads. By 1880, four million head had been driven to market, and Texas cattle had spread throughout the west. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• King Ranch Visitor Center — 13 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 18 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Duval County Courthouse — 25 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.
• Mirador de la Flor — 28 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• Site of Santa Petronila Ranch — 5.5 mi
• Battle of Agua Dulce — 7.3 mi
• Banquete, C.S.A. — 7.7 mi
• Bishop — 8.0 mi