Trails South: The Wagon-Road Economy in the Dodge City-Panhandle Region

About this book

The Wagon-Road Economy in the Dodge City-Panhandle Region As the expanding American frontier stabilized in western Kansas after 1870 Dodge City witnessed a lively trade to the south and west across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. As the U.S. Army wound down its long war against the Plains Indians it blazed a rough trail to serve the garrison to Camp Supply in what is now northwest Oklahoma. There were other needs for trails as well: to serve towns settlements trading posts farms ranches and other military installations. C. Robert Haywood has put the story of trail development in the Dodge CityPanhandle region into historical perspective with his account of the people who made this vast transportation network possible: the troops and early entrepreneurs who laid out rough paths the freighters who refined and developed those paths into established routes and the people who serviced and were served by the routes. As in any historical canvas the big picture is made up of many small ones and it is these that Haywood paints carefully in Trails South. For example western American history is replete with references to the Santa Fe Trail but how often does one hear of the ones and Plummer Trail? Dodge City was a big name in the West but how about the towns it served via the trails that led from it: Ashland Beaver Mobeetie Tascosa? Doc Holliday and the Overland Stage are household words for history buffs but how many know about P. G. Reynolds? Haywood supplies a wealth of details about such places and people in his narrative of the Kansas-Oklahoma-Texas trails their rise and their fall. Make no mistake about it without a transportation system like that described by Haywood the West would have developed much more slowly. Likewise without works like Trails South the history of the West would be woefully incomplete. 312 pp. Illus. with b/w 23 photos and drawings and 3 maps. Inscribed by the author.