Cattle were first driven north along the route associated with Jesse Chisholm in 1866, demonstrating the viability of long-distance drives from Texas toward rail-connected markets in Kansas.
Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving partnered to drive Texas Longhorns west to new markets, beginning a route later known as the Goodnight–Loving Trail; their first drive started in June 1866 and reached Fort Sumner, New Mexico, continuing on to Colorado markets.
Joseph G. McCoy developed stockyards at Abilene, Kansas, and helped redirect Texas herds to a railhead positioned west of settled farm country—helping establish the classic cowtown/rail shipment model for the cattle trade.
The first rail carloads of Texas cattle shipped out from McCoy’s Abilene stockyards on September 5, 1867, linking the trail system to eastern markets by rail and accelerating large-scale drives.
After earlier Goodnight–Loving drives, Charles Goodnight began driving “slaughter herds” to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in February 1868, where animals could be butchered for local consumption and shipped onward by rail.
By the early 1870s, newer rail connections helped shift the cattle trade away from Abilene toward other Kansas railheads (including Newton and Wichita), illustrating the cattle economy’s dependence on where railroads ended.
As railhead competition shifted west, Ellsworth, Kansas, became the principal Texas-cattle shipping point on the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1872, reflecting how rail expansion moved the profitable end points of drives.
Dodge City was founded in 1872; that same year the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached the town, helping make Dodge a leading destination for Texas herds seeking rail shipment to eastern markets.
Joseph F. Glidden’s key barbed-wire patent (No. 157,124) was issued on November 24, 1874. Cheap fencing rapidly reshaped the cattle frontier by enabling widespread enclosure of land and restricting open-range movement.
Escalating conflict over barbed-wire enclosures led Texas Governor John Ireland to call a special legislative session beginning January 8, 1884; the legislature made fence cutting a felony and addressed illegal fencing practices, helping curb the violence and signaling the open range’s legal and political fragility.
During the severe winter of 1886–1887 (part of the broader “Big Die-Up” period), extreme cold and blizzards killed vast numbers of cattle on the Great Plains, bankrupting ranching operations and accelerating the shift from open-range practices toward fenced pastures and winter feed strategies.
Across the broader cattle-drive period that began after the Civil War, an estimated ~5 million cattle were herded from Texas to northern markets (roughly 1865 into the mid-1890s), capturing the scale of the open-range and cowboy economy during its peak decades.
Cattle Drives, the Open Range, and the Cowboy Economy (1866–1890)
