Trail Broke

- Bob Welch

Most cowboys rode the Chisholm Trail for adventure and money, but C.S. Robinson rode it for love.

In the years following the Civil War, pioneers, freed slaves, and Long-horns flooded Texas. Entrepreneurial cattlemen responded to the demand for beef back East and put herds of free-ranging wild cattle together in South Texas for drives up the trail to railhead markets in Kansas. The youngsters who went up the trail fancied themselves as cowboys of fortune—and much like young soldiers, they left home fresh-faced and brave only to return after one season hardened and wise. Or in cowboy parlance, with “gravel in their gizzard.”

Charles Samuel Robinson, my great, great-grandfather on my father’s side, was not prone to wanderlust. He was a modest farmer on the country’s frontier—east Texas—but hard times, drought, a sense of duty as a father and his love for his wife led him far away from home. In 1886 and 1887, Robinson forked a horse and trailed herds of cattle from Texas to Kansas. He needed the money to feed his family and faced peril and adventure on the trail after all else had failed. The lovelorn letters he and his wife sent each other during the summer and fall of 1886 and 1887 survive and are treasured heirlooms within my family. We cherish these windows into the everyday realities of a bygone time.