The Chisholm Trail - (Public Lands History) by James E Sherow

About the Book

The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy's vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post-Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade.

Book Synopsis

One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail--and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet.

The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy's vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post-Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy's way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys' vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London.

Joseph McCoy's enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation's stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.

Review Quotes

"The Chisholm Trail brings fresh eyes to the impact of the cattle era and McCoy's role in that history. It is a welcome addition."-- Southwestern Historical Quarterly


"It is Sherow's attention to the small-grained, technical details of the Chisholm Trail that elevates his scholarship above a raft of other works that have continually drawn the same yawning conclusion. And by broadening the pathways trod by cowboys and their cattle to include wider networks of capital and political patronage, Sherow's book expands the reach of the cattle drive to reveal that the significance of the Chisholm Trail travels far beyond the I-35 corridor. More than just another volume of regional literature, The Chisholm Trail will interest a wide audience of readers; not only those in Kansas and Texas, but anyone concerned with the historical and environmental roots of industrialized animal agriculture."--Nebraska History


"This is an exhaustively researched and exquisitely written book... Sherow's book, centered on the consumer demand and financial webs that facilitated the cattle trade and its subsequent environmental impact, will likely stand as the definitive work on the subject. It is highly recommended."--Panhandle-Plains Historical Review

"Jim Sherow's new study of Joseph McCoy and the Chisolm Trail deftly spans the continent, synthesizing economic and environmental histories to reveal the fascinating evolution of one of the nation's first big businesses--cattle. As Sherow reveals, beef transformed America and Americans."--Sara Dant author of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West

"This engaging book, by a leading historian of America's central plains, clearly and beautifully renders a sense of place and explains how the Texas cattle trade contributed to transforming wild prairie grasslands into today's domesticated landscape."--Jeffrey K. Stine Curator for Environmental History, Smithsonian Institution, and coeditor of Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age of Humans