Great Western Trail

In 1874, the cattle ranchers of the San Antonio, Texas area began blazing a trail with their large herds of longhorn cattle through western Indian Territory to the railhead at Dodge City, Kansas and to markets beyond into Canada and the northwest territories of America. It's estimated that over 11,000,000 head of longhorns passed over this trail on which you now stand, the trail's wake is marked only by a long sequence of depressions worn into the land by the millions of hooves that traveled it, and instance of one of these depressions is visible just to the back of this marker as a long "U" shaped notch running through the rounded sandy ridge the Cherokee Strip (located just over one mile north) opened to homesteading in 1893, imposing a barrier that meant the end of cattle drives