I grew up watching the cowboys such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hop-a-long Cassidy, and the Cisco Kid on our little RCA, black and white, table model television set.
Even before that, John Wayne and Tom Mix entertained all of the neighborhood kids at the Saturday morning matinees at the old Plaza Theater on the Independence Square. The cowboys were such an important part of our American legacy back in those days that many Europeans thought all Americans were cowboys of some kind.
The legacy has lived on through the generations, but in actuality, the cowboy days lasted only a short time, possibly less than 20 years. Cowboy music and folklore grew up along the Chisholm Trail, which was possibly the most famous and romantic route that Texas cattle ranchers used in driving their herds northward to the railroads in Kansas.
The trail extended from near the Mexican Border, all the way to the nearest railroad line at Abilene, Kan. During about a three-year period, beginning in 1868, the ranchers moved about 1.5 million head of cattle in a series of “long drives” to Abilene.
The Chisholm played a big part in not only the history of Abilene, but also the history of both Kansas City and Wichita.
Following the Civil War, agriculture, and particularly the cattle industry in this country was pretty well decimated, and what cattle there were had tick fever, which left them inedible. It must have been equal to our Mad Cow Decease today, huh!
The only cattle herds of any size were the longhorns of the Southwest, a wild animal that ran in herds like the buffalo. Somehow, they had to get those cattle from Texas and New Mexico back east to where the majority of the population and the meat markets were.
Andrew Drumm of “Drumm Farm” fame pioneered the idea of driving those herds out of the southwest, up across Oklahoma and Kansas to Abilene, thus starting the long cattle drives that cowboy folklore is built around.
They were then transported by rail into Kansas City. Now, it takes no stretch of the imagination to understand how important that cattle industry became to Kansas City. It created the stockyards and lent itself to the Kansas City title of “Cow Town, USA.”
Now, let’s take Wichita! The present site of Wichita, Kan., was the original ancestral homelands of the Wichita Indians, who were part of the plains Indian culture and they hunted buffalo. In 1662, the Spaniards drove the Wichita southward to the Canadian River in Central Oklahoma. Osage war parties once again drove the Wichita further south during the mid-1700s, where they settled along the upper Red River in Northern Texas.
