The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop by Wayne Ludwig, and: The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble by James E. Sherow

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop by Wayne Ludwig, and: The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble by James E. Sherow Andrew Offenburger The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop. By Wayne Ludwig. Nancy and Ted Paup Ranching and Heritage Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 307. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-671-5.) The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble. By James E. Sherow. Public Lands History. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 338. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6053-5.) For most of the nineteenth century, a network of cattle trails connected southern Texas with major transportation nodes in New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Abilene, Kansas. Men drove their herds to market over these paths despite complicated geographical and political lines; they forded the Trinity River near Fort Worth, Texas, as much as they attempted to cross from South to North during the nation’s midcentury political crisis. Though hindered by the Civil War, vast drives resumed when national markets reopened, unimpeded by separatism. Cattlemen like Jesse and Thornton Chisholm and stockyard investors like Joseph McCoy recognized the potential for profit that soon gave rise to the famous Chisholm Trail, over which millions of Texas cattle tramped their way to midwestern railheads and, eventually, to urban markets in the Northeast. The heyday of these cattle drives occurred between 1867 and 1872, a blip in time compared with the Chisholm Trail’s cultural significance, which has been enshrined in popular depictions of the West ever since. Two recent books explain this history in distinct ways. Wayne Ludwig’s The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop, researched with passion and attention to detail, immerses the reader in the region’s history of cattle trails. He explains how one small segment came to be known as the authentic Chisholm Trail, and how it was transformed “from a simple path to a legend” (p. xv). Ludwig sets his goal “to avoid preconceived conclusions, seek the facts, follow the trail of evidence wherever it led . . . and just let the chips fall where they may” (p. xiv). This investigative approach often produces rewarding and straightforward explanations, with clarity fit for lectures to undergraduates. Such passages include a description of how cowboys broke horses to accept saddles, a functional overview of a standard herd and drive on the trail, an analysis of stampedes, and a description of how the trails came to an end with the entrenchment of settler society in Kansas and with barbed-wire fencing, agriculture, and ranching. At other times, Ludwig’s clinical approach to history can test a reader’s patience. The author examines and analyzes evidence, guiding readers through a series of possibilities before discarding some and coming to an informed conclusion. This strategy appears in the text when the author separates documented facts from trail lore. For example, in chapter 6, “Two Chisholms and a Chisum,” readers are introduced to a series of hypotheses on the origin of the trail’s name. The result leaves readers full of facts and minutiae but hungry for meaning. James E. Sherow, in The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble, dishes out context by the ladleful, crafting a broader narrative informed by economic, cultural, and environmental history. The great cattle drives could not [End Page 931] have existed, the author persuasively argues, without increased demand for beef in the urbanizing United States. Yet cities like New York City could no longer tolerate the trade’s foul-smelling consequences. After setting the industry in this post–Civil War context, Sherow is able to explain the results of urban demand. He focuses on the drives from the hinterlands of Austin, Texas, to markets in Abilene, Kansas, and on all of the human and ecological entanglements they created, understanding them as an environmental historian does—as transfers of energy. What others have called good business sense, Sherow explains through the environment: how “prairie grass, the stored solar energy fueling the trade,” allowed cattle to make trips from Texas pastures to Kansas stockyards, to fatten, and then to board stockcars headed...