The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop by Wayne Ludwig (review)

The cover art of Wayne Ludwig’s The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop typifies the old-time cattle-driving life: a horse-mounted cowboy-driver looks back at a longhorn herd, distant hills, and white thunder-heads in brooding gray skies, evoking bygone cow-path days before major railhead destinations provided easterners’ beef and the drovers and trail bosses’ gold and later became major tourism markets. The legend of the cowboy fed tourists’ imaginations and opened a new revenue stream for Texas and other trail states.

By the twenty-first century, the history of cattle trails needed facts more than legends. At a Chisholm Trail marker rededication in 2000, Ludwig, a native of Fort Worth, asked this serendipitous question, “Why is there a Chisholm Trail marker post in Fort Worth?” (xiii). The deep research he conducted to answer that question takes the reader to those facts; his purpose is to “avoid preconceived conclusions, seek the facts, follow the trail of evidence wherever it led, determine what can and cannot be corroborated by data . . . and let the chips fall where they may” (xiv).

Ludwig’s book, the first in the Nancy and Ted Paup Ranching Heritage Series, shows his passion and skill for sifting through voluminous collections of lore, legend, fiction, and opinions presented as fact as he searches for documented evidence. The lyrics, “I’ll tell you my troubles on the Old Chisholm Trail,” become the theme for the book’s seventeen chapters and nine-page timeline, which stretches from 1493 to 1938.

Ludwig’s major focus is the Chisholm Trail’s route and its many debated names, but he also includes other major cattle trails, which vastly increased his need for deep research. For example, he details Oklahoma oilman P. P. Ackley’s efforts to mark the Chisholm Trail in Texas and his controversial efforts to rename its sister trail to the west, Longhorn Chisholm, by placing monuments at Doan’s Crossing on the Red River. Later, Ackley linked the Meridian Highway project to the Chisholm Trail, a move supported by the U.S. Good Roads Association. Ludwig’s verification of trail names included “maps with provenance to a particular historical period” (172). He explains issues of fact using newspapers and books such as J. Marvin Hunter’s The Trail Drivers of Texas (Cokesbury Press, 1925). Readers also learn that the names “Chisholm Trail” and “Great Western Trail” are pending as names for National Historic Trails.

Even with the author’s exacting research, one especially significant fact remained elusive: the use of “Great” in the name of the Great Western Trail (the sister trail to the Chisholm Trail). Ludwig says, “Great Western Trail is currently popular but does not appear to be grounded in fact, as no reference that includes ‘Great’ as part of the name during the trail’s period of use is found” (115). He also says, “Accounts of the Chisholm Trail name in Texas cannot be verified against other data from 1867 to 1887 because such data do not seem to exist” (188). However, Ludwig overlooked two important sources. First, “Great Western Cattle Trail” is used during the trail period by John R. Cook in his memoir from 1877 to 1881, The Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest Plains (Crane, 1907). The second is the definitive study, “Great Western Cattle Trail to Dodge City, Kansas,” a 1965 master’s thesis by Texas Tech history instructor and archivist Jimmy M. Skaggs. Ludwig’s otherwise impressive research results in nearly two hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, forty pages of maps, photos, and trail documents, and a thirty-page bibliography. His book now stands as a companion to the first comprehensive Chisholm Trail study, Wayne Gard’s The Chisholm Trail (University of Oklahoma Press, 1954).