Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop. Nancy and Ted Paup Ranching Heritage Series. By Wayne Ludwig. Foreword by Tom B. Saunders IV

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/whq/whz058

1939-8603

Robert Dorman,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Wayne Ludwig’s book may be the last word on the provenance of the Chisholm Trail. Like the West itself, this most famous of all cattle trails has enjoyed a protean identity. To contemporaries, as Ludwig argues with copious maps, it was “part of a network of trails that led through Indian Territory north of the Red River”—and the story grows more complicated from there (p. 185). But over time, and well after the trail-drive era, the Chisholm Trail moniker has been “arbitrarily applied to other cattle trails” as far south as Brownsville, Texas, and as far north as Bismarck, North Dakota (p. 96). Even as recently as 2017, official Texas maps depict the Chisholm Trail extending unbroken from San Antonio to Abilene, Kansas, and several Texas museums use the name to attract tourists. The problem, according to Ludwig, is that there is little or no evidence that contemporaries applied the name to any of the various Texas trails that carried cattle northward by the millions.