Site of Western Cattle Trail

The trail had a single blazer. In 1874 the drover John T. Lytle and his partner Tom M. McDaniel took 3,500 longhorns from Medina County to the Red Cloud Agency at Fort Robinson in Nebraska under a government beef contract, laying out a route through Fort Griffin and Camp Supply. When Kansas closed the eastern trails over Texas fever, drovers followed Lytle's line to Dodge City from 1876. Chuck wagons restocked at Fort Griffin and Doan's Crossing for the 150 miles to Camp Supply. The Handbook of Texas estimates about four million cattle went up it in twenty-one years.

What the plaque says

The main route -1876 to 1887- for several hundred thousand longhorns driven north to stock ranches and Indian reservations and to supply beef market. Was also called Dodge City Trail, for its main terminus; or Fort Griffin Trail, for the site where feeder trails joined. This major branch began in South Texas, passed the western outskirts of Abilene, and from here moved northeast to Fort Griffin. An alternate route ran to the Red River, then to Kansas. Use of the trail ceased after fenced ranges blocked route, and Texas & Pacific Railway arrived. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 2.6 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 12 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Abilene State Park — 16 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• Company I, 7th Texas Infantry — 1.1 mi
• Childers Classical Institute — 1.5 mi
• James Harrison Parramore — 2.0 mi
• McMurry College — 2.0 mi