Chisholm Trail

Kansas State University is celebrating the legendary cattle trail’s sesquicentennial with a notable exhibit featuring historic books, music, photographs, maps, cowboy attire and artifacts. “Chisholm Trail: History & Legacy” is a collaboration between the Libraries’ Morse Department of Special Collections, the K-State College of Human Ecology’s Historic Costume & Textile Museum, and the Kansas City Museum.

The exhibit focuses on Kansas cattle towns, trailblazers, ranchers, farmers, drovers, lawmen and outlaws. It includes historic railroad and Indian Bureau maps, wood engravings, stereocards, advertisements and first-hand accounts of the trail that brought Texas cattle to Kansas markets.

The free exhibit runs through October 13, 2017 in Hale Library's Fifth Floor Gallery.

Kansas State University Libraries is home to William J. Keeler's incredibly scarce 1876 National Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (detail above). Printed under the authority of then-Secretary of the Interior Orville Hickman Browning (1806-1881), the map documents the locations of tribal and ceded territories, leases and trusts. It reveals the westward expansion of the nation's Public Land Survey System, its overland mail route and its railways.

Map, detailed above:

William J. Keeler. National Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean Made by the authority of the Hon. O.H. Browning Secretary of the Interior. In the Office of the Indian Bureau Chiefly for Government Purposes under the direction of the Hon. N.G. Taylor Commise. of Indian affairs & Hon. Chas. E. Mix Chief Clerk of the Indian Bureau. 1876. Detail. Richard L. D. & Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.