Welcome to the “My Place” page
 My name is Scott
I run the Rope and Wire website.
My original idea for this page was to give those living in the country the opportunity to tell others about the things that made their farm or ranch so special.
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that either no one likes to brag or no one lives on a farm or a ranch. Whatever the case, no one submitted an article so I felt it was high time to try something different.
So for now this will be literally “My Place.” I’ll use this page to post a western blog or short articles. They will either be mine, or possibly one from a contributing R&W community member.
The theme will remain Western but the content will change weekly, or there about.
If you click on any of the links to past blog's, you can return to this page by clicking on the My Place button across from my picture.
I hope you enjoy it but if not, might I suggest you “stroll the grounds.” Read a story or watch a movie.
Thanks for visiting.
Scott
Jesse Chisholm
March 4th marks an anniversary for Jesse Chisholm, the man who blazed one of the West's most famous trails, the Chisholm Trail.
The trail named for him was one of the major cattle-drive routes between Texas and Kansas, but as ironically as it may sound, Jesse Chisholm was never a cattleman, he was a frontier trader, born in Tennessee.
His father, a Scotsman and his mother, a full-blooded Cherokee, were among some of the earliest settlers to move west into what is now the state of Arkansas. The family settled with the Cherokees in northwestern Arkansas where Jesse immersed himself into the culture and the language, learning to speak a reported fourteen different Indian dialects.
His familiarity with both Anglo and Native American culture and language helped him build a thriving trade with the Osage, Wichita, Kiowa, and Comanche. He was a trusted and respected friend of many tribal leaders. This fact, along with his language skills, made him an extremely useful and successful government liaison between tribal leaders and federal officials as they negotiated treaties with several of the regions tribes.
In 1865, at the age of 60, Jesse Chisholm was still hauling wagons loaded with buffalo hides from his trading post near present-day Wichita, Kansas, to a site near what is now Oklahoma City. The trail was one he had blazed himself and was one of the first trading routes south down from Wichita to the Red River in central Texas. It eventually extended all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Designed for the heavy freight wagons used for commerce, the trading route was a straight wagon road with easy river crossings and few steep grades. It soon became known as the Chisholm Trail.
An unfortunate bout of food poisoning ended Jesse Chisholm’s life in 1868, but for the next 20 years, traders and cowboy’s herded Texas longhorn cattle along Chisholm’s straight and gentle trail to railheads as far north as Kansas.
Eventually, more than a million head of cattle would travel along the Chisholm trail, creating a path that was in some places cut down below the level of the plains it crossed, permanently carving Chisholm's Trail into the face of the earth. Traces of the trail can still be seen to this day.
Oh yes, March 4th, It’s the anniversary of Jesse Chisholm's untimely bout with food poisoning.
His gravesite can be found near Geary, Oklahoma.
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