Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum

Cuero takes its name from Cuero Creek, the Arroyo del Cuero, the creek of the rawhide, for hides taken from wild cattle caught in its mud. The museum tells the cattle story from the Guadalupe Valley's side, beginning with an early drive north: in 1866 Thornton Chisholm and Crockett Cardwell drove a herd from Cuero to St. Joseph, Missouri. Saddles, lassoes and a chuck wagon follow the drive era, and the Tinker Collection sets the Mexican vaquero beside the gaucho and the American cowboy.

The other DeWitt County story is the Sutton-Taylor feud, which the Handbook of Texas calls the longest and bloodiest in the state. It grew out of the years after the Civil War, with the Taylor clan on one side and, on the other, William Sutton and the State Police under Jack Helm, who terrorized much of Southeast Texas while chasing cattle and horse thieves. Two of Pitkin Taylor's sons-in-law, Henry and William Kelly, were arrested on a trivial charge in August 1870 and shot down while Henry's wife watched from hiding. The Taylors shot and wounded Sutton through a Cuero saloon door in April 1873 and later besieged his faction in the town; on March 11, 1874, Jim and Bill Taylor rode up to the Indianola dock and killed Sutton as he boarded a steamer. The Suttons answered that June: Scrap Taylor, Kute Tuggle and Jim White, Taylor men held in the Clinton jail, were taken out and lynched. Cuero's citizens formed a Home Protection Club that drilled as a militia. The town itself was a railroad creation of 1872-73, platted by Gustav Schleicher.