The cowboy is without question the undisputed heroic symbol of the American West. Movies, novels and songs have carried his fame around the world, and yet, the era in which he prevailed lasted only a few decades. Oh, but what decades they were!

Drovers began trailing cattle out of Texas as early as 1842, following a migratory route called the Texas Road. Somewhere along the line, the northwardbound cattle trail along the same route became known as the Shawnee Trail.

The term drover comes from the British Isles and refers to the occupation of handling virtually any farm animal such as sheep, hogs, cattle or geese. Drove is an English expression for a herd or flock.

The person engaged in moving a drove of animals from one place to another is a drover. Herders were identified in Colonial times as drovers and by the time cattle were coming up the Shawnee Trail, those involved in the cattle drives were known as herders or drovers.

The Shawnee Trail passed through Baxter Springs, Kan., destined for St. Louis, Kansas City or Sedalia, Mo. Eastern branches of the trail led to Fort Scott, Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley. Northern destinations were popular, but some daring drovers pointed their herds west, braving mountains, desert and dangerous bands of warring tribes in their quest to reap huge profits from the California Gold Rush.

The Civil War brought a halt to all overland cattle drives from Texas, except to southern markets at New Orleans, Memphis and locations in Mexico. The close of the war brought a new surge of drives north along the Shawnee Trail.

Trail driving naturally thrived on the frontier, and Missouri was becoming heavily settled. Texas cattle belonged on the frontier because they often carried Spanish fever, a dreadful disease the longhorns were immune to, but was disastrously contagious to domestic northern cattle. Cattlemen were obliged to find other routes to market their big rangy longhorns.

However, other options were opening up to Texas drovers. A new trail opened along the old California route. After crossing into southeastern New Mexico, the trail turned north toward the Colorado gold fields. Known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, the route was fraught with death and destruction.

In central Kansas, Joseph McCoy, an Illinois cattleman, built a cattle depot at a little village called Abilene. Drovers followed a freighting trail all the way to the confluence of the Little Arkansas and Arkansas Rivers. The trail had been heavily used by the famous plainsman Jesse Chisholm and other traders.

A year later, Wichita was established along the route the drovers called Chisholm’s Trail. Drovers told harrowing tales of stampedes, hail and lightning. They fought Comanches, were attacked by Osage warriors and traded with Cherokees. Card games turned to gunfights and cattle thieves were either shot or hung. In a few short years, the Chisholm Trail carved out the man we know as “cowboy.”

By-and-by, every town that boasted a railroad and a set of loading pens took its turn as a wild and woolly cattle town.

Some, like Abilene, acquired infamous reputations. Newton, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell and Dodge City all saw the best and worst of cowboy life. Many an unsung cattle town witnessed the magic, if only for a few months.

Settlement pushed the cowboy west, and in 1874, a new trail, the Western Trail, was blazed across west Texas to Dodge City, Ogallala, Nebraska and points north.

Texas Longhorn cattle forged the new trail through short grass and sage brush, spreading the beef industry all the way north to Canada. The state of Kansas called those herds “through cattle,” and in 1885, the legislature outlawed “through cattle” within Kansas borders.

The cattle trail moved west beyond Kansas borders, and for a brief moment, cattlemen lobbied Congress to create a National Cattle Trail from Texas to Montana. The trail was never sanctioned by the federal government, and by 1890 was all but dead.

Ironically, two of those old cow paths were nominated by the National Park Service to the National Historic Trail designation. If anything ever deserved national recognition, the Chisholm and Western cattle trails should have been a cinch for the distinction.

However, a small group of trouble makers have succeeded in derailing those efforts with scare tactics and sorry misinformation. One more sign of our times when nothing gets done because certain parties don’t want government to work, and that is too bad.

They may stop the historic designation, but they will never dispatch the story of the trails that shaped the American cowboy. Those trails were just cow paths from the ranch to a ready market for beef, but in the blood, the dust and the rawhide, legend was made on The Way West.