Many wonder why our (sometimes) annual football game with the University of Texas is affectionately called the Chisholm Trail Rivalry. We call it a rivalry instead of a showdown or something like that both because it is more PC and also because we love to patronize UT fans. Everyone knows a rivalry happens when both teams win once in a while, and UT has struggled mightily with the Wildcats of the Flint Hills. Since I see no earlier post about this (not like this site is user friendly/searchable anyway) on the football board, let's get started.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Chisholm Trail was a trail used in the late 19th century to drive cattle overland from ranches in Texas to Kansas railheads. The portion of the trail marked by Jesse Chisholm went from his southern trading post near the Red River, to his northern trading post near Kansas City, Kansas. Texas ranchers using the Chisholm Trail started on that route from either the Rio Grande or San Antonio, Texas, and went to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway in Abilene, Kansas, where the cattle would be sold and shipped eastward.
The trail is named for Jesse Chisholm who had built several trading posts in what is now western Oklahoma before the American Civil War. He died in 1868, too soon ever to drive cattle on the trail.http://www.thechisholmtrail.com/map2.htm To save you all some boring reads on Wikipedia and another website,
www.thechisholmtrail.com, the bottom line is this:
Texans were too stupid to build railways to ship their longhorn cattle into markets where they could get more money per head, so they instead drove them all the way up to Abilene, KS, because the people there were smart enough to build railroads and ship cattle to better paying markets. Originally they had driven cattle to Missouri, but Missourians banned cattle because they are stupid, too. Ironically, the guy who built the stockyard in Abilene to house all of these cattle before shipping them to KC and St. Louis and Chicago was named McCoy.
Also, Texans being in denial about Kansas being better than them at everything actually can be traced back as recently as 1931:
In 1931, Geo. W. Saunders, then President of the Old Trail Drivers Assoc. and an authority on Texas livestock History wrote: "The famed Chisholm Trail, about which more has been written than any other Southwestern Trail, cannot be traced in Texas for the reason that it never existed in this State." Apparently his body is at the municipal auditorium in San Antonio. This makes me very torn about going to the Cotton Bowl or Alamo Bowl. The Cotton Bowl would be great, but the Alamo would give me an excuse to saunter over to the municipal auditorium, located at 100 Auditorium Circle San Antonio,
TX 78205 210-207-8511 / 210-207-8500 / 877-504-8895 / Fax: 210-207-4263, and blame my releasing excrement on his grave and/or body on Irritable Bowel Syndrome in order to escape arrest.
To sum it all up, the "Chisholm Trail Rivalry" or CTR is more than just a cute little name, it also is a constant reminder to all Texans that they were too stupid to figure out how to ship cattle and had to take their livestock up to Kansas because Kansans actually knew how to build railroads and profit from them.
Also, if you would like to order some wonderful merchandise in preparation for Saturday's game, try this one out:
http://www.cafepress.com/chisholmtrailGodspeed,
RightMeow
