Eastern Cattle Trail

Fort Worth got credit for a trail that never quite came through it. American Heritage notes that the Chisholm Trail proper lay farther north in Indian Territory, where several Texas feeder trails merged, and that the Eastern Trail was one of those feeders, heading up Commerce Street. From about 1867 to the mid-1880s the town served as a provisioning stop. One trail veteran remembered grocers' solicitors riding out several miles to meet herds with whiskey and cigars. Yet the Chisholm name stuck in the city's memory, as the mural and the roundup show.

What the plaque says

Eastern Cattle Trail This native stone, dug from the Trinity River Valley, marks the route of the Eastern Cattle Trail, where cattle were driven north on Rusk Street, now Commerce Street, through the City of Fort Worth, Texas, to the bluff and then across the Trinity River to the broad valley below, where they rested before continuing their long drive north. From the end of the Civil War to the bringing of the railroad in 1876, great herds of cattle passed this way to Abilene, Kansas. The Eastern Trail, also called the McCoy Trail, became the Chisholm Trail when it reached the Red River. Fort Worth, the last place for provisions before Indian Country, received its name, 'Cow Town', and it first major industry, from this period. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — steps away
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 2.0 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 2.3 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 2.3 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Paddock Viaduct — steps away
• Fort Worth "Where the West Begins" — steps away
• Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church — 0.4 mi
• First Christian Church of Fort Worth — 0.4 mi