Chisholm Trail

The road under these herds was older than its name. The Lenape scout Black Beaver laid out a pathway in 1861, and Jesse Chisholm's wagon road of about 1864 ran from his trading post on the South Canadian to the site of Wichita. When Joseph McCoy built his Abilene stockyards in 1867, O. W. Wheeler and partners answered with 2,400 head, the first of an estimated five million Texas cattle to reach Kansas this way. Crossing Indian Territory, trail bosses met tribal members who asked ten cents a head for the right to pass through their lands.

What the plaque says

Chisholm Trail Over this spot passed the vast herds of longhorned cattle from the ranges of Texas to the railroads in Kansas. It was in 1867 that the first herd came up this trail on the way to the nearest railroad loading yards in Abilene, Kansas. Jesse Chisholm, an Oklahoma part-Cherokee Indian trader, soon after the Civil War, laid out a trail for his freight wagons that reached approximately from the Arkansas River in Kansas to the North Canadian River in Oklahoma. In time the entire trail from southern Texas to northeastern Kansas took the name "Chisholm" after the man who had laid out the major part existing when the drives began. In the twenty years of its use millions of beeves were driven up this route, making it the greatest cattle trail of all time. Oklahoma Historical Society 1965

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum — 14 mi
  The outdoor memorial and museum on the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people were killed at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, shaped by the families and survivors.
• First Americans Museum — 16 mi
  The museum of the 39 First American nations in Oklahoma today, on the Oklahoma River, with galleries shaped by each nation, Smithsonian objects brought home and a 90-foot mound.
• Historic Fort Reno — 16 mi
  The Army post beside the Cheyenne and Arapaho agency at Darlington, from which troops chased the Northern Cheyenne north in 1878, later a remount station and a prisoner-of-war camp.
• The Chisholm — 26 mi
  Kingfisher's farming and ranching museum on the Chisholm Trail's stage branch, with a heritage village and Horizon Hill, the mansion a territorial governor built for a capital that never came.

More markers nearby

• Council Grove — 8.1 mi
• Run of '89 West Boundary — 11 mi
• Darlington — 13 mi
• Joseph Bradfield Thoburn — 13 mi