Historical Kansas

McCoy learned the business before Abilene. Born in Sangamon County, Illinois on December 21, 1837, he bred and sold mules, and in 1861 sold a stock car of mules in Kentucky whose delivery crossed five rail lines, a lesson in rail logistics that served him six years later. In 1874 he published Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest. He died in Kansas City, Missouri on October 19, 1915, and in 1967 he was named to the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

What the plaque says

Historical Kansas Ten miles ahead is Abilene, first of the major cattle trail towns of Kansas, and famed in the story of the Cowtown West. Following the Civil War, millions of Longhorn cattle were stranded on Texas ranges. Beef- eating Northerners were hungry and the problem was to bring the supply to the markets. After the westward-building Union Pacific railroad reached Abilene in March, 1867, along came Joseph G. McCoy from Illinois. He chose the town as a cattle-shipping center, built stockyards, and sent circulars all over Texas advising cattlemen to drive their herds up the Chisholm trading trail to the site of present Wichita, then on up McCoy's extension to Abilene. During 1867-1871 more than a million cattle were trailed to Abilene where, for a time in 1871, James B. "Wild Bill" Hickok was the marshal. Hundreds of cowboys, saloonkeepers, gamblers and dancehall girls added to the din until the inhabitants who had come to stay forced the whole kit and boodle to take its market place elsewhere. Abilene was the boyhood home of President Dwight David Eisenhower from 1891 to 1911. The Eisenhower Home, Museum, Library and Chapel help make it one of Kansas' most interesting cities.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home — 9.9 mi
  The six-room house on Southeast Fourth Street where David and Ida Eisenhower raised six sons, and the library, museum and chapel that grew up around it in south Abilene.
• Rock City — 21 mi
  About two hundred sandstone spheres, many as big as a room, crowded into a strip of pasture above the Solomon River south of Minneapolis, where groundwater cemented them inside buried sand.
• Coronado Heights — 27 mi
  A Dakota sandstone bluff 300 feet above the Smoky Valley north of Lindsborg, named by boosters for a Spanish visit that never happened here, with a WPA stone castle on top.

More markers nearby

• Kansas - The Wheat State — steps away
• Historic Abilene — 9.8 mi
• Dwight David Eisenhower — 31 mi