Chisholm Trail in Sumner County

The deadly tick behind the 1885 quarantine had not yet been explained. The disease, Texas fever or redwater, is caused by a parasite that lives in red blood cells, and in 1888 the Romanian bacteriologist Victor Babeș identified such organisms as the cause of a fever in cattle marked by bloody urine. Theobald Smith and the veterinarian Frederick Kilborne then showed that ticks carried the parasite, Babesia bigemina, in work published in 1893. It was the first demonstration that an arthropod could transmit an infectious agent to a vertebrate, and it pointed toward the later discoveries about mosquitoes.

What the plaque says

Chisholm Trail in Sumner County The Chisholm Trail probably began as a buffalo migration route, linking summer pastures in the Central Plains to winter pastures in Texas. American Indians followed the buffalo and shared the route with U.S. explorers, who mapped it in the 1850s. In 1865 Jesse Chisholm, for whom the trail was eventually named, drove 250 cattle over the trail to what is today Wichita. An estimated 5 million head followed the route into Kansas over the next 20 years. Traffic became thick after 1867 when Joseph McCoy built a large stockyard on the Kansas Pacific Railroad at Abilene (140 miles north of here) - the nearest shipping point to Texas. It took about three months to drive a herd from Texas to Abilene and cost roughly 75 cents a head. The same animals sold for 10 to 20 times that amount in Kansas City. In 1885 Kansas imposed quarantine on Texas cattle, which carried a deadly tick, and the cattle trails closed. By then Kansas had become a leader in the nation's livestock industry. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Keeper of the Plains — 22 mi
  Blackbear Bosin's 44-foot steel figure on the point where the Little Arkansas meets the Arkansas, the ground where Wichita refugees built grass houses in 1864.
• Old Cowtown Museum — 23 mi
  Wichita's open-air museum of its 1865 to 1880 years, begun in 1950 to save a first church found inside a rooming house, in a city that was never sure it wanted to be called a cowtown.
• Etzanoa — 26 mi
  The ancestral Wichita town on the Walnut River that Spanish soldiers called the Great Settlement in 1601, located again by archaeologists at Arkansas City and opened to visitors in 2026.

More markers nearby

• Cherokee Outlet — 28 mi
• Caldwell and the Chisholm Trail — 29 mi