EXCERPT FROM FIRST HERD TO ABILENE

BY PRESON LEWIS

Over the years on the frontier, I came to loathe Texans more than any creature on two legs or four. Fact is, by charting the first major cattle trail to the railheads in Kansas, I made many Texans rich, but I never got so much as a thank you from a single one of those Texas cattle kings. Even worse, I received nary a cent for all the hard work I put in and all the risks I took to chart the route to Kansas. If I’d built a toll gate along the Lomax Trail and charged a nickel a head for every steer that tromped my path to the railroads, I’d’ve lived out my life in luxury. That, however, was not to be.

Not only did wealth bypass me but also the credit for my accomplishment as the trail came to be named after Jesse Chisholm, an old coot who never traversed the route from Kansas to South Texas and back. Even Joseph G. McCoy denied me proper recognition when he wrote of the early years of the trail-driving era in his book Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, never once mentioning me. If I hadn’t spread word to the Lone Star State about his plans for Abilene, McCoy would’ve never seen a Texas longhorn, much less profited from one.

Besides making the acquaintance of Chisholm and McCoy, I also made an enemy of Wild Bill Hickok, who threatened to kill me over a misunderstanding after he rescued me from an impromptu lynching in Kansas. It didn’t matter that I had likely saved him from shooting himself when we first met and that I had even combed nits out of his lousy hair at one point. When I finally faced Hickok after years of running from both his threats and the despicable rumors he had started about me, the reprobate might have survived if he had been paying less attention to me and more to the unsavory characters around his Deadwood poker table. Some folks claim Calamity Jane saved me from Wild Bill, though I disagree, as she was little more than a distraction to us both. Calamity Jane did take a fancy to me, most likely to make Wild Bill jealous, but I never cared for her as I considered Calamity the homeliest woman I’d ever laid eyes on. If you could assay ugly, she’d work out to a hundred dollars per ounce in her early days and five times that in her later years. On top of that, her mouth was no prayer book because it was usually filled with whiskey or profanities so rank she could make Satan blush.

Much as I disliked those folks, it was the Texans that angered me most. They were brash and arrogant, proud that they could call theirs the biggest state in the Union. Nobody, though, called Texas the smartest of the states. If Texans’d been bright, they’d’ve found Abilene, Kansas, without me having to do it for them. All they had to do was ride north until they encountered two parallel lines of iron rails over a bed of crossties. That, however, was beyond their limited mental capacity.