[Music] Following the American Civil War, the cattle industry of the plains grew up as Texas drovers moved herds north to Kansas, both to graze in the fertile grasslands, and to be shipped out on the growing rail system from communities that became both famous and notorious.

Across Kansas there are several communities that still honor their cowtown origins.

To discuss this legacy our host Don Rowlison, himself a Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame historian, sat down with I've known him for a lot of years and we've had a lot of discussion and he's really done a lot of good work on preserving the history of Kansas.

He published the newspaper, The Cowboy, for many years, which is very good, very popular.

And it wasn't only you, but there's others.

You had musicians and the whole thing.

Oh, yeah.

It was a big organization.

Yeah, in tongue and cheek, we had a little organization around it called the Cowboy Society, which was the Cock-Eyed Old West Band of Yahoos.

Yeah, I was a member of that.

But we had a lot of fun.

But I don't know why, because I don't know.

It didn't apply to me at all.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

So with Cowtowns, we know that Abilene was started by Joseph McCoy, who was a guy from Illinois, or Indiana.

Illinois.

Illinois, I thought so.

Yes.

And so he did that and that started the shipping, which really developed the 19th century cattle industry in the high plains.

The whole reason that he came out here was there was a disease called Texas cattle fever.

They were driving to St. Louis and places like that before the Civil War.

But they ran into trouble with the domestic cattle because the Texas Longhorns were carrying this fever that was devastating to the domestic cattle.

So McCoy was looking for a way to get around that.

And the way to do that was to get a market out on the plains.

And there was this brand new railroad that was just building through in 1867.

So he could load the cattle and ship them on cars to the east.

But he had to make contracts with the railroad and he had to get a siding put in.

And he kind of struggled to get a lot of that going.

Build his cattle pens and hotel.

He was, you know, foresighted enough that he needed a hotel for the cowboys to come stay in.

He did all that within just a few months.

By the end of that shipping season, he'd shipped 18,000 head of cattle.

So it was a quick success.

It was was a quick success and he had trouble financing his business for this because it was new.

Well, I'd like to say too that, okay, so these folks that first came into Abilene, just on the faith that something was going to be there, there wasn't much to do in Abilene.

And so they come in and they sold their cattle and they went home with money in their pockets.

And when they went home and started telling the story, then that kicked off the boom to come to Abilene the next year.

And in 1968, he shipped like 35,000 the next year.

So there are stories about them buying presents for all the family.

When they get back home about Christmas time, they're coming home with everything.

But by 1968, one of the things was that not only did the Texans hear about what was going on in Abilene, but the merchants in Kansas City and farther east are hearing.

And they came out to Abilene and built stores and they said, Spring of 1968, you could hear the echo of the sound of the hammer all through the Smoky Hill Valley as people were building stuff up.

It was a regular little boom.

Yeah, it was.

And like I say, then those merchants could, anything you could buy in New York City, you could buy in Abilene, Kansas, and later on in all the cattle towns.

That was kind of the thing.

There was a lot of things going on.

So Abilene, though, starting out kind of naive, not really knowing what was coming, they didn't have anything but local constables.

They didn't have official marshals because they weren't actually... Yeah, they weren't incorporated.

Yeah.

And these guys, I like to call it, it was like a cowboy carnival.

And they would ride their courses at breakneck speed up and down the streets and shoot at lights, shoot at windows.

Just like in the movies now.

Yeah.

Yeah, they really did do that wild stuff.

And Abilene had, you know, people had moved in, they had young families.

And it got so bad that the story was that a bullet went through a baby carriage, missed the baby, but that's when they decided, "We've got to do something about this."

Their first attempt at doing that was, "Well, we'll hire some policemen from St. Louis.

They've seen it all.

They can take care of it."

So these policemen came in and got off the train, walked downtown to see what they had to take care of.

They said they'd turn around, got right back on the train and left.

So they had various trials, but they finally settled on a fellow by the name of Tom Smith that had a reputation.

I love to tell the story about Tom Smith because he's like this movie star.

He was.

He looks like Tom Selleck, you know, and broad shoulders and great looking guy.

And he gets off the train, he walks back to the back car and unloads his horse, which was named Silver Heels.

Wow, that's a movie star horse.

And he went then down to the city offices and he said, "I notice that everybody's wearing guns yet, having no gun law."

Well, we have a no gun law, but nobody pays attention to it.

So he started putting up signs to check your guns.

And right away, somebody challenged him on that and kind of making fun of him.

And he had his pistols on, "Nobody's going to take my friends away."

And he turned around and he didn't go for his guns.

He hit the guy and just knocked him to the ground and pulled his gun and said, "Well, I have your guns now, so you can pick them up when you leave town."

Turns out he'd been a Golden Gugs boxer in his younger days and he preferred to use his fists to use the gun.

So that's the way he handled things.

So he had several times that the cowboys challenged him and in the last time, this big fellow had come in from the cow camps and they sent a kid to tell Tom that he was in this room waiting for him.

He walked in and he looked for the biggest guy in the place standing at the bar, figured that was him.

And he just made a quick walk towards him and the guy turns around too late and he hit him twice, didn't he?

Took two.

He hit him twice, put him down and pulled his guns and they said the whole place just went silent.

And all the other Cowboys started dropping their pistols to the floor and he came to have with him.

And from then on, it was whatever he said went.

The reason why most people don't know about Tom Smith was because he didn't last long because after the shipping season had gone, he was helping the county sheriff and there was a warrant for a fellow's arrest out in the country.

And he helped his deputy go out to serve the warrant.

There are varying accounts of the incident.

An Abilene paper from the time recounted that Tom took a bullet, returned fire, but was attacked from behind by a second assailant who nearly beheaded Smith with an axe.

That was the end of Tom Smith.

So in the next year, they're thinking, well, now what are we going to do?

Somebody knew of Wild Bill Hickok.

A lot of people think Hickok's story begins in Abilene and it doesn't.

He's got a whole story prior to that.

In Ellsworth And Hays.

So all Hickok had to do, his reputation, he was Harper's weekly hero.

So he was known nationally and all he had to do was maintain that presence.

They even say that people would come to Abilene just to see Wild Bill.

And even Cowboys, they heard Wild Bill was in Abilene.

They're going to maybe get in a card game with him if you could.

But movie star status.

Wild Bill's hand or I saw him on the street or playing cards or anything.

And he really did hold the line in Abilene until the end of the shipping season.

They were very busy for a while, so I'm going to ask you to explain the shipping season.

Well, you know, the whole thing starts in South Texas, actually, say the previous January and February, gathering up the herds that they were going to prepare to bring north.

They would start out maybe in March, April, but with first grass.

And so they're coming north just hitting first grass all the way north.

It's greening up for them all the way north.

So by the time they'd get here on the Kansas prairies, they'd be coming in in June, July.

They'd set up what they called cow camps with a chuck wagon next to good water and maybe a little shade if you could find it.

But sometimes they'd actually dig dugouts in the side of a hill where they could get in out of the sun.

They didn't just drive into Abilene and load those cattle out on a train and ship them out.

Let's go to the saloon and have a drink.

They'd settle in and then graze those cattle, put a little more weight on, get them some condition.

And buyers are in town, ride out in their buggies and look through the herds and buy what they wanted.

So there were cow camps all over the prairie south of Abilene.

The real true shipping season.

To bring them into the stockyards and load them onto those rail cars was September through the first part of November.

So where did they go after Abilene?

Well, okay.

So a lot of people think that they went west with the railroad.

Well, actually the railroad had already been there.

Ellsworth had been trying to get the market since it first went there.

But by the time Abilene shut down, they had built good stockyards.

The Kansas Pacific Railroad was supporting the Ellsworth market and they came in and upgraded.

But they were doing that because they had suddenly gotten this competition in 1871 from the Santa Fe building a brand new railroad to the southwest.

And they stopped at the, where they crossed the Chisholm Trail and established a new town of Newton.

Yeah, because Newton was closer than Ellsworth and stuff and a different railroad and I think the freight rates were about the same.

Newton had the same problem in that it was not an official town.

And so then they became the wild town.

In Newton's short history as a cow town, it had one of the bloodiest shootouts of the wild west.

When eight were injured, five of whom were killed at Tuttle's dance hall in the Hide Park district.

Especially in the earlier years of the cattle drives, you had a conflict a lot of times between the policemen and the drovers because of the war had just gotten over.

And so you had Yankees and Confederates refighting the war sometimes on the streets of these.

These cattle towns and Ellsworth had, see Ellsworth had had the experience of being a frontier town with Fort Harker next door.

So Ellsworth had had the previous experience so that when the drovers started coming in to Ellsworth, they fortified their police force.

But in the early days, before the Cowboys really started coming in to Ellsworth, they had almost daily shootings.

And they used to say Ellsworth had a man for breakfast every morning in those times.

It was more scouts and bull whackers.

There's actually a recording of a face-to-face gunfight on the street in the plaza and it was between a saloon keeper and a bull whacker and a cowboys.

But all these towns were bringing in people from all over as far as the gamblers and store keepers and stuff like that.

So you had a lot of mixture in all the cow towns.

Well, in Ellsworth, things were going 24 hours a day.

And they said when it came to an end, one of the store keepers couldn't find his keys to lock up because he'd never closed.

A fellow by the name of Mayor Golsal ran the old reliable house and it was a department store.

I think it was in 1873, he recorded $150,000 in sales and that's selling items at $0.25 a piece and $3 a piece.

But you could get anything you wanted from a diamond stick bin to a whole camp set up if you wanted it.

Well, in Ellsworth, the business was on what side of the railroad track?

Was it east or west?

Actually, it was on both sides in Ellsworth.

The tracks split the town between a street that was north Main Street and a street that was south Main Street.

And south Main Street was full of saloons, but there were saloons on north Main Street too.

And then the red light district was on, there was, prostitution was outlawed.

So they were outside of the city limits just to the southeast Main Street that was on the south side, that paralleled the tracks, also became pretty notorious because there was a lot more action on that side.

But Ellsworth runs into the same thing, settlers coming in and quarantine lines to keep the drovers out.

And by 1875, it's just an end of their market.

But there were the drovers who had been in this country recognized the feeding value of these river bottoms.

And they began to set up ranches after that where they'd bring cattle back in and feed them.

So there was continued cattle industry that carries through to today.

Yeah, it didn't die, it was just there.

Okay, so we've been to Ellsworth, we talked about Newton.

Newton only held on for about a year and a half as a shipping point because they turned to Santa Fe down to Wichita and opened up a market in Wichita in 1872.

They saw all these cattle going north to Abilene and Newton and they were thirsting for that cattle business.

And they pushed hard and were disappointed for a while before they got the Santa Fe tracks to Wichita.

To build a ship, yeah.

And Wichita did quite well.

We could be telling stories that would keep you here all night long about the events that are going on in all the places.

And they wanted to hold on to it as long as they could.

They were hitting the same problem as Ellsworth and they actually made arrangements with the settlers to the west of Wichita because you couldn't go into Wichita anymore.

You had to drive past them to the west.

They arranged for a corridor where the cattle could come in to Wichita and if you lost cattle, we'll pay you damages, that sort of thing.

And at the same time, then the Santa Fe built south to Caldwell which was right on the right within two miles of the Indian territory border.

Caldwell first and Honeywell were trail towns because the railroad wasn't there.

Sure enough, yeah.

So they were on a trail and they had saloons and stores and post offices so the trail people could use that but they weren't shipping cattle at first.

Their stockyards were just inside, they were outside of town but just inside the border.

And so Caldwell became known as the Border Queen and but now Dodge City's opening up and by 1976, they're shipping cattle out of Dodge City and why mess with Wichita?

There was this new route, Dodge City became the famous cowboy capital and while most lasted only a few years, Dodge City went from about 1876 to 1886.

Yeah.

And the drovers coming into town and they're kind of, I was going to give you a generality that they're kind of wild and wooly but a lot of them were young boys that had never been off the farm before, hired on to come north with a trail and they'd get caught in uncomfortable situations, maybe taken advantage of by a gambler or something like that.

So there are lots of reasons for the violence that took place.

There were stories of fellas being killed in the red light district.

They just disappeared.

You never knew what happened.

The saloons were gentlemen's entertainment.

Women were not allowed so like it was only men in the saloons and there would be a lot of gambling taking place in those saloons.

But if you were looking to dance with a woman, you had to go to the red light district and the dance halls were then involved in prostitution and the saloons would actually hire their own security a lot of times just to make sure no women tried to enter the place or just to keep the peace in general.

In Abilene there was a certain time in the afternoon when the ladies would put on their finest from the houses over in the dance halls and parade down the streets in front of those saloon doorways but they didn't dare enter.

They were shopping.

They were advertising at the same time.

And you could always too, like if you're a young cowboy that's got enough money to spend, you could marry a woman for a week.

And then they're paraded up and down the streets with their woman on their arms.

But Dodge City had a problem with seeing a lot of these cattle swing around Dodge and go on north to Ellis and go on to Ogallala, Nebraska.

But guys like Richard King of the King Ranch, Ellis was his place.

He loved to ship to there.

Well, just like politics today, Dodge City sent some folks to Topeka.

And they got the quarantine line, moved west of Ellis and killed the Ellis Martin.

So then there was still opportunity, but they weren't cattle towns to ship to a Buffalo station, which today is Park, Kansas.

And there were yards, well, there were shipping pens all up and down the tracks by then.

But you didn't have really a town to work with.

Well, even in our day we knew that every little town had stock yards.

Yeah.

The cowboy image sort of took a back seat to the agricultural production that was going on in Kansas.

And Texas was only too ready to take that cowboy image.

And you know, what is it, Montana?

It's called the Cowboys Day.

There's a lot of everybody wants to attach themselves to the.

They do.

It's that cultural.

And I tell you what, cowboys have an aura about them that no other culture seems to have.

And little kids always know a cowboy and just love seeing the cowboy.

And of course, we grew up in a time where about half of the TV shows were not found in cowboy shows.

Yeah.

Well, I have to tell you, like I was always felt kind of like I'd been left out because I wasn't living close to the cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and that sort of thing.

When I started doing all this research, I found that there was there were two herds that were brought in on the creek west of where I live that would have totaled 3000 head of cattle.

They were there.

The cowboys were there and they set up a cow camp.

I also grew up around the local Sherman Ranch was now defunct.

But a lot of those little Sherman Ranch Cowboys are still around.

I learned a lot of stuff from those guys.

But but it wasn't just you know, it wasn't that Roy Rogers image that that I've seen on TV.

It was a working man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, they were there.

[music]