Chisholm Trail Heritage Center

Herds bound for Kansas crossed the Red River into Indian Territory at Red River Station, near present Ringgold, Texas, and moved north past a string of stores and camps: Fleetwood Store, Blue Grove, Reid Store, Old Suggs Camp Ground, Monument Hill, Old Duncan Store, Cook Brothers Store and Silver City on the South Canadian. Above Silver City the trail split. The western branch, used mostly by freight and stages, ran by Concho, Fort Reno and the Kingfisher stage station; the eastern branch, used mostly by cattle, passed west of Mustang and through Yukon. The busiest years were 1871 and 1873, and an estimated six million cattle went up the trail in all.

This stretch lay in the Chickasaw Nation. William Duncan kept a store on Cow Creek beside the trail, and with his wife, Sally, a Chickasaw citizen, he claimed land in the path of the coming Rock Island railroad; legal titles waited until the Atoka Agreement of 1897 opened Chickasaw land to allotment and sale.

Citizens of Oklahoma and north Texas founded the heritage center in the early 1990s. It has an 18-minute film of a drive with wind, rain and the smell of the prairie, a chuck-wagon talk with a figure of Jesse Chisholm, and the Garis Gallery of western art with work by Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and Allan Houser. Monument Hill, a landmark on the trail, is about 25 miles south by US-81 and Monument Road.