The Trail Drivers of Southwest Texas

The dates on this stone, 1867 to 1887, bracket a working life, and the men who lived it organized late. The Old Trail Drivers Association of Texas was founded on February 15, 1915, with George W. Saunders as vice president; he became president in 1917. Saunders was seventeen when he drove his first herd to Kansas in 1871, and he later drove to the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Mexico and northern markets. He is credited as the driving force behind the association's book, which his Handbook entry calls the principal source book on cattlemen and cattle drives.

What the plaque says

The Trail Drivers of Southwest Texas In Memory of The Trail Drivers of Southwest Texas who passed this way 1867-1887.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 9.3 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 16 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 16 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 22 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Yoakum — steps away
• Yoakum National Bank — 0.7 mi
• Katolika Jednota Zen Texaskych (K.J.Z.T.)_Catholic Women's Union of Texas — 1.1 mi
• Hochheim Cemetery — 8.0 mi