County of trails: Hemphill County
Location of marker: US-60/83, W. side of Hwy., 6.5 miles S. of Canadian
Marker erected by: State Historical Survey Committee
Date marker erected: 1969
Marker text:
50 Yards West to Routes of
HISTORIC TRAILS
During the mass slaughter of buffaloes in the Panhandle, two trails arose to meet the needs of the hunters and their ever-hungry markets. Started about 1876, both moved vast convoys of wagons across the plains.
Charles Rath-- transporting gun powder, lead, tobacco, whiskey, and food staples-- blazed a road from Dodge City to the Double Mountains. In two years, however, the best hunting was over and the route fell into disuse. Ed Jones and Joe Plummer forged a trail from Kansas to Fort Elliott. Their route became a freight road and finally a cattle Trail.
RATH TRAIL. The Rath Trail, an important trace across the buffalo turf, was not laid out by builders of homes, seekers of gold, nor drivers of herds; but among the trails of the world it was unique, for it was built on the business of buffalo hides. In the early 1870s the spasmodic slaughter of the buffalo boomed into big business with the discovery of a commercial market for the hides. On the frontiers of Kansas, where the animals in millions grew fat on the grass, hunters moved out and fell upon them and mowed them down. They staked the hides to dry on the ground and hauled them to market at the newly founded village called Dodge City. The hunting grounds were never static but shifted with the herd, and the herd periodically moved with that strange wild impulse that causes migration-north with the growth of grass in the spring and south before the slanting snows of fall. Thousands of men pushed into the buffalo range between the frontiers of Kansas and Fort Concho in Texas. Not a railroad crossed its grass or tapped its trade. But out of Dodge City came Charles Rath. His train of freight wagons was loaded with kegs of powder and whiskey, bars of lead, boxes of tobacco, and other simple necessities of life that the hunters demanded. He pushed south in the fall of 1876 to Fort Elliott, which had just been built in the Panhandle. There he was joined by fifty to sixty hunters, with an immense train of wagons, each drawn with the usual six yokes of steers. They pointed south for the new and most profitable part of the hunting range. Rath led the way with his compass on the horn of his saddle. Day after day they kept south of the foot of the plains, across the Salt Fork, across the Red River, over to the Brazos, and up the Double Mountain Fork near to the Double Mountains. There he established a hunters' trading post, built principally of poles and covered with hides. It boomed until the buffalo were gone as Rath City or Camp Reynolds. Along the rough ruts of the Rath Trail that almost pointed to the magnetic course from there to Mobeetie, the settlement at Fort Elliott, moved hundreds of thousands of high-stacked, flinty hides toward market at Dodge City. Back down the trail sweating and swearing bullwhackers, each with "an eye skinned for Indians," brought the heavy loads of supplies the hunters had to have. In two years the best of the trade was done; and those noted South Plains hunters, John W. and Josiah W. Mooar, took their forty yokes of cattle and at one trip moved Rath City back up the Rath Trail to Camp Supply, in the Indian Territory. Except in memory, the Rath Trail was gone." ~ TSHA online
"JONES AND PLUMMER TRAIL. The Jones and Plummer Trail was established in the fall of 1874, when two former buffalo hunters turned merchants and freighters, Charles Edward (Dirty Face) Jones and Joseph H. Plummer, established a store at the head of Wolf Creek. They had seen the need for a convenient place for buffalo hunters to sell hides and obtain supplies after Quanah Parker's raid had convinced the Dodge City merchants to abandon the Adobe Walls trading post. Jones marked the trail, and the partners' trips to and from Dodge City to deliver hides and buffalo meat and to purchase goods cut ruts into the sod deep enough for others to follow. From Dodge City the trail angled southwest, paralleling Crooked Creek, to cross it and the Cimarron River near the Oklahoma-Kansas line. From there it continued on to Beaver, Oklahoma. At Beaver the Dodge City Trail (see WESTERN TRAIL) branched off to the southwest. The Jones and Plummer Trail continued due south for thirty miles to the site where Booker now stands. Passing Brubaker Lake, it headed southwest toward Gillalow Lake and on to the Jones and Plummer store on Wolf Creek just east of what is now U.S. Highway 83. The route to this point covered about 160 miles. The trail was extended farther south to Mobeetie but kept its original name. Mobeetie grew rapidly, making the trail attractive to additional freighters. Mose Hayes, an early plainsman, described the lower half of the trail thus: "more freighting came down the Jones and Plummer Trail about Clear Creek and turned off to the east before it got to the end of the [original] Jones and Plummer Trail on Wolf and continued south across Wolf Creek...and crossed the Canadian, and then up Red Deer, out on the plains, and on to Mobeetie." Freighters were not the only users of the trail. During the late 1870s Jones and Plummer's store gained a reputation as a safe place for outlaws to hide and replenish their supplies. In the winter of 1878 Bartholomew (Bat) Masterson and a posse from Dodge City pursued a gang of train robbers along the trail, only to lose them at the store.
"During the peak freight years of 1880 to 1886 the Jones and Plummer trail provided a crucial conduit for the materials needed to sustain such important projects as the building of Fort Elliott. Troops in the field, hunters, ranchers, homesteaders, and towns also depended on the goods that passed along the Jones and Plummer Trail. At times, the sheer volume of freight was remarkable. For example, a single merchant, Charles Rath, shipped 150,000 pounds of freight a week to Mobeetie in 1878. Eventually five towns were established along the trail, which served as their primary artery for commerce and travel. After 1879 the trail was used by mail contractors, and in 1886 P. G. Reynolds made it a major stagecoach route from Dodge City to Mobeetie. Though primarily a freighting trail, the Jones and Plummer Trail was also used by cattlemen driving herds north. The trail's usefulness ended when rail lines were built into the region, making the wagon trade uneconomical. Pulling into Panhandle City on January 1, 1888, an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe locomotive rang its bell, signaling the end of yet another frontier trail. The Rock Island line extended service to southwestern Kansas in the same month. Thus, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Jones and Plummer trail had ceased to be a major factor in the growth of a region embracing parts of three states" ~ TSHA online