For more than a dozen tempestuous years, beginning in 1867, the Chisholm Trail was the Texas cowhand's road to high adventure. It offered the excitement of sudden stampedes, hazardous river crossings, and brushes with Indian marauders. It promised, at the end of the drive, hilarious celebrations in the saloons, gambling parlors, and dance halls of frontier Kansas towns.

The account that appears on these pages reveals the courage, daring, and enterprise of the cattle owners and their cowboys, establishing them firmly as heroes in the westward expansion.

"The best story of adventure that has come this way in a fair interval....It's better reading than several dozen of the latest, largest, lustiest historical novels....A magnificent piece of work." New York Times

"An excellent piece of Western Americana, displaying exceptional artistic and historical merits." American Historical Review

"Wayne Gard has focused the lens of scholarship on the subject as no previous student has. He has done more to enable us to see what [the Chisholm Trail] was, where it began, and where it ended, and what went on along and around it than any other." Walter Prescott Webb, Saturday Review