Chisholm Trail

From 1990 through 1997 Robert Klemme of Enid researched the Chisholm Trail through Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas and planned four hundred concrete markers along it across Oklahoma. The four hundredth was placed on Wilshire Road near Yukon in September 1997, and he set others in Brownsville, Texas, and Abilene, Kansas. At the end of the twentieth century the trail was still visible in places, among them a spot near Bison in Garfield County, a mile and a half south of US-81 and a third of a mile west on a county road.

What the plaque says

Chisholm Trail Two miles east of this point ran the Chisholm Trail named for Jesse Chisholm, an Oklahoma part-Cherokee Indian trader. Soon after close of Civil War, Chisholm laid out a trail with his freight wagons extending from the Arkansas River valley in Kansas to the North Canadian River valley in Oklahoma. When Texas drovers headed their long-horned cattle toward the nearest railroad at Abilene, Kansas in 1867, this trace was the only well defined part of the route. As a result the entire trail from south Texas to northeast Kansas became known as the "Chisholm." In the vicinity of this marker, William Duncan constructed his store where cowboys on the trail stopped to trade and where the city of Duncan was later built. Probably the first commercial dairy in western Oklahoma was established near here by Theodore Fitzpatrick soon after the trail was opened.He secured cows from trail herds and sold milk to drovers and the military at newly established Fort Sill. Erected 1967 This monument and the contents of this vault are dedicated to the memory of Judge J. G. Clift 1882 - 1967 Historian, lawyer, community builder

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Center — 1.0 mi
  Duncan's museum of the cattle trail on US-81, with an 18-minute drive film, a western art gallery and the route through the Chickasaw Nation to Silver City and the Canadian.
• Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center — 26 mi
  The Comanche Nation's own museum in Lawton, built so that the history, art and lifeways of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ, The People, are told from a Comanche perspective.
• Fort Sill National Historic Landmark and Museum — 26 mi
  The stone post of 1869 on a working Army base, open to civilians after a background check, where the Chiricahua Apache were held as prisoners of war from 1894 to 1914.

More markers nearby

• Battle of the Wichita Village — 19 mi
• Walters, Oklahoma — 22 mi
• Waurika — 24 mi
• Sherman House — 26 mi