Dwaine Fosler’s love of the cowboy life led him to study the early trail drives, and he heard about the Blue River Cattle Trail that came through the area and read everything he could find about it.
Cattle drives from Texas north spanned about 20 years, from the 1860s to the 1880s, he said.
Most herds were branded by their owners for identification, but they added trail brands, too, Fosler said.
Fosler’s first resource was Harold Griepentrog of Schuyler. Griepentrog had drawn a map showing the trail along the Blue River, coming from Abilene, Kansas, north to Columbus and Schuyler.
Crossing rivers was the most dangerous part of the trail drive, Fosler said. Storms, rustlers and disease also decimated herds as they traveled north.
As areas around the rivers grew more settled, however, the cattle couldn’t use those trails. The Big Blue River was settled on its east shore, Fosler said, and the cattle trail used the west side that had been a game trail, then an Indian trail.
The drives before the Civil War came up the Missouri River, but cattle fever, a disease brought north by the Texas herds, decimated some herds in Missouri and led to a quarantine. Kansas set a quarantine zone from the state line west.
So the cattle drives moved west. Kansas City, St. Joseph and Nebraska City because the new delivery sites.
In 1866, another outbreak of Texas Fever in Nebraska led to another quarantine law. Kansas also extended its quarantine boundary, pushing the drives even further west.
Joseph McCoy of McCoy Brothers in Illinois got to Kansas in June of 1867, looking for places the trail drives could use and chose Abilene. The town was on the far west boundary of Kansas’s quarantine zone, so the governor allowed McCoy to use the town as a staging area for the cattle drives.
As Abilene established itself as a cowtown, the trail extended north into Nebraska.
It took about three months for the cowboys to drive the longhorns the 835 miles from San Antonio, Texas, to Schuyler.
Cowboys took their cattle along the Big Blue River north through Beatrice, Crete, Milford and Seward. The trail boomed in 1869 when the Texas cattlemen realized the Big Blue River trail didn’t have the same limits as the trails further east.
The 1869 season was the busiest yet along the Big Blue. Approximately 350,000 head of cattle came north during that year.
Meanwhile the Union Pacific Railroad was looking to capitalize on the cattle drives and built a trailhead in Schuyler. Cattle from Texas were loaded onto trains at Schuyler and shipped to the stockyards in Chicago.
Continued settlements in Seward and Saline counties and others along the Big Blue River forced the cattle drives even further west. By 1870, they were crossing into Nebraska in Thayer and Jefferson counties.
Fosler has collected everything he could find about the Blue River Trail and other cattle drives, from eyewitness accounts to newspaper clippings. Three-ring binders hold photocopies of books, maps, photos and diary entries. One account describes a stampede near DeWitt.
