OklahomaHorses Magazine May 2022

22 OklahomaHorses • May/June 2022 PART THREE OF A THREE-PART SERIES Oklahoma’s Cattle Trails Leave Legacy Long Drives Give Way to Ranch and Range by Jason Harris, Ph.D. Executive Director, Chisholm Trail Museum, Kingfisher, Oklahoma Photographs courtesy of Oklahoma Historical Society I n this final segment, we will explore the transition from the era of large cattle drives in the 1870s and 1880s to the de- velopment of Oklahoma’s ranch and range industry. Cattle production in what is now Oklahoma extends back to the 1830s and the removal of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations from the East. Once tribal members were in Indian Territory, they quickly expanded larger livestock herds, allowing them to graze on communal pastures. When the territory was plunged into the American Civil War in the 1860s, countless raids and the hostilities of war cost ranchers hundreds of thousands of cattle. After the war, millions of cattle made their way north along the Shawnee, Chisholm, and Western cattle trails while Native American herds in the eastern part of Indian Territory slowly began to recover. The postwar period was an era of rapid economic development for the territory as railroads connected the growing mining, lumbering, and ranch- ing industries to the rest of the nation. In Indian Territory, tribes sought to generate revenue through head taxes for cattle driven through the territory and by leases of pas- tureland to ranchers. Large-Scale Ranching Begins Large-scale ranching came to Oklahoma in the 1880s when Texas ranchers and Kansas stockmen negotiated leases with Native American tribes. Each year, thousands of cattle making their way north along the Chisholm Trail passed through a sixty-mile- wide swath of Indian Territory known as the Cherokee Outlet, or Cherokee Strip, before crossing into Kansas. Originally granted to the Cherokee Nation as an out- let for hunting bison on the Great Plains, the roughly six million acres provided ideal grazing for large herds of cattle. The Cherokee Nation began to negotiate with ranchers to graze cattle in the outlet over the winter before completing the re- mainder of the journey north to cow towns in early spring. In March 1883, ranchers gathered in Caldwell, Kansas, to organize roundups, record brands, and solve the The chuck wagon continued to serve cowboys during roundups in Oklahoma after the end of the cattle-drive era.