| Ed Jones and Joe Plummer had both been buffalo
hunters. Although they had known each other for some time, they did not
become partners until 1874. The preceding year the government encouraged
buffalo hunting south of the Arkansas River, totally disregarding the
Medicine Lodge Treaty which had set aside a hunting round for the red
man "as long as water runs and grass grows." The idea was to force the
Indians off this land by destroying their food supply. Bloody raids were
staged in retaliation by Chief Quanah Parker and his followers. In one
such raid two partners of Joe Plummer were brutally murdered. Jones and
Plummer fought the Indians along side other buffalo hunters and soldiers
of the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry known as the Indian Territorial
Expedition led by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. As the expedition finished
the task it set out to do, Jones and Plummer were discharged for
misconduct and left to shift for themselves some dozen miles west of the
Antelope Hills in the Texas Panhandle.
In the fall of 1874, Jones and Plummer returned to the
hunting range from Dodge City with a good stock of supplies. They built
their store on the head of Wolf Creek out of cottonwood pickets. They
had a dugout to keep their “store” in and they had a bar. They sold lots
of whiskey, kept guns and ammunition for sale, and bought dried buffalo
meat. Tongues and hides. Until the end of 1877 their store maintained a
reputation as a place of refuge for a man in need of whiskey,
ammunition, or a rest from whatever cares beset him.
By this time it was clear to the two men that buffalo
hunting was coming to an end. The partners, like other who had road
ranches or trading posts, began looking for other opportunities. Jones
and Plummer became cattle ranchers and their old store was converted
into a ranch headquarters. The partnership dissolved in 1887, leaving
only Jones to ranch for two more seasons before selling his holdings.
The following excerpt from Trails South by C.
Robert Haywood, is a description of the Jones and Plummer Trail as it
existed during the 1880s when Meade County was being settled and town
were springing up everywhere.
The Jones and Plummer Trail was not heavily used,
nor was the population along it static. There was always change as
the trail shifted to meet the needs or whims of merchants,
freighters, and stage owners. Jones was probably the architect,
choosing the river and creek crossings marking the specific route.
It started, or rather ended, at the partners' front door, connecting
the Panhandle with Dodge City's Front Street. During its lifetime,
four towns were organized close enough to it to cause it to be
altered to accommodate the new main streets. After 1885 at its
northern end the trail began to turn square corners, conforming to
the granger's section lines. Even nature changed the details as it
eroded crossings and in one dramatic instance dropped a fifty-foot
section into a salt sinkhole near the Kansas line. Road ranches
appeared and withered with the fortunes or interests of their
owners. Although it was primarily a freighting trail, thousands of
head of Texas cattle followed its ruts to the Dodge City stockyards.
People then and now confused it with the Adobe Walls Trail,
threatened to absorb it into other cattle trails, thought to extend
it down into Texas, and accused it of wandering off to Wyoming. It
remained alive and vibrant, changing and changeable, and unbearably
dry and hot ribbon in summer and a life-threatening trap in the
blizzards of winter.
At midpoint in the trail's history, say about
1879, a traveler journeying to the Jones and Plummer front door from
Dodge City would cover some one hundred sixty eight miles, would
cross six flowing streams and rivers, would observe at least four
different textures of dust settling on his boots, and would wonder
for hours whether he were the only traveler on the plains. If he had
loaded his wagon with general merchandise at Wright, Beverly & Co.
on Front Street he would start the trip by making a sharp turn down
Bridge Street, heading south out of town. He would have experienced
his first annoyance at having to pay the tollkeeper two dollars to
take his six- or even four-team hookup across the wooden bridge;
still, it was worth the price to make an easy crossing. The road out
of town was flanked by cowboy camps, and the wheels of the wagon at
first would have turned up fine sand as the sand hills rolled gently
for a few miles and then gave over to the short grass and dark soil
of the High Plains.
The first possible stop was just ten miles out at
the Mulberry crossing, where A. H. Dugan ran a flea-bitten store and
charged twenty-five cents a bucket for watering the team. The
freighters might grumble but they paid the price, for it was another
ten miles before water was again assured at a spring-fed stream that
trickled into Crooked Creek. In later years road ranches would be
available at various points along the way, but in 1879 the
traveler's eye could sweep the horizon without detected any sign of
habitation. The last tree he would have seen for many miles was the
lone cottonwood on the south bank of the Arkansas River - a landmark
dating back to early Santa Fe Trail days. In 1879, Carrie Schmoker
traveled down the Jones and Plummer Trail to a new claim in Meade
county. "In all that distance," she wrote, "from Dodge to about
three miles from the site of Meade we saw not a single house, fence,
field, or tree, nothing but the brown trail and on every side as far
as the eye could reach, just grassy prairie land that was not green
for there had been no rain for many months. On the high flats we saw
a few prairie dog towns and we met a few freighting outfits going
into town."
As the trail approached the Meade county line it
skirted the east bank of Crooked Creek and kept to the edge of the
sand hills until it turned west near the future site of Fowler,
crossing rich, flat prairie lands. By the mid-1880s the traveler
might have rested or eaten a meal at one of the road ranches.
Certainly after 1885 he could have found an excellent dinner at the
Wilburn House or by the next year at Fowler could have bought from
Linn Frazier's store "goods, dirt cheap, on a dirt floor" or
contested the flies at the Waco House for a skimpy supper.
After turning west, the trail user went five miles
to George W. ("Hoodoo") Brown's road ranch. Here there was not only
food and drink for the passengers and fodder for the horses but
sleeping arrangements if desired. Hoodoo had located near a spring
overlooking an artesian valley that lay to the north of the
meandering Crooked Creek. His place was a welcome refuge for all who
passed along the trail.
From Brown's ranch the trail turned almost
straight south over what was to be called Irish Flats because a
number of Irish families settled there. Approaching the crossing of
Crooked Creek, the traveler would have been impressed with the high
bluffs carved by a stream that seemed gentle, even placid, and
frequently went dry in late July. As was true of any creek crossing,
high water could create danger even here. A young freighter, the son
of W. H. Currens of Dodge City, was killed when he fell into the
creek and was run over by a wagon. At the confluence (a large word
for such a small transaction) of Skunk Arroyo and Crooked Creek, C.
("Little") Pratt built a store, but his name was never associated
with the crossing. O. D. Lemert, a rancher who lived nearby, later
secured a post office under the name of Odee. That name stuck. The
store, which came to be associated with Odee, passed into the hands
of John Marts, who converted it into a road ranch. At first glance
it might have appeared dull and mundane and certainly an unlikely
setting for romance, but Dave Mackey, a cowboy working for the
Crooked L, found that it had a special charm. The Marts had taken in
Arabelle Sewell when her parents died, and she was working the day
Dave passed through. Mrs. Tom A. Judy summarized the prairie romance
as neat and natural as the real thing. "Belle liked his
swash-buckling manner and he liked Belle. After a courtship they
were married in 1884."
The land changed out of Odee. The dust picked up
by the wagon wheels would be sandy red from the drifted sand hills,
which were covered with buck sage and yucca. In places the mounts
continued shifting, barren of vegetation. It was fifteen miles of
wild hills, dry as a buffalo bone, before the next water was reached
at the Cimarron. At least two town builders and possibly a third
tried to capitalize on the Cimarron crossing of the Jones and
Plummer Trail. J. M. Byers built a store and a blacksmith shop five
miles north of the state line. Rose Bud, the local correspondent to
the Fowler City Graphic, claimed a community of three hundred, which
brought the following report from a neighboring-community reporter
who visited the town and found two stores and three sod houses: "Gewhillikens!
what awful families they do raise in that neck 'o woods; twenty-five
to each family, and all formed in four months. Golly! what soil, and
on sod too; and yet some tenderfoot will tell the innocents that
nothing can be raised in southwestern Kansas." Byers did secure a
post office that served the area off and on for twenty years, moving
three times during its existence.
When the town of Nirwana was platted, Byers moved
store and stamps to the new site. Nirwana came closer than the
earlier efforts to being a river-crossing town on the order of
Beaver, Oklahoma. Stimulated by the land boom of 1885-86, it
prospered briefly, but the general exodus of settlers from Meade
County in 1888 reduced it to open prairie once again. Its site was
officially located well over a mile from the river, but the Meade
editor described it somewhat closer. "Nerawana," he wrote, "is
situated at the intersection of the Cimarron river and the Jones and
Plummer Trail on a gentle southerly slope which terminates at the
river bank." There was a post office, livery stable, two general
stores, a schoolhouse (which blew down in a western Kansas gale),
and a park.
Neither of these towns had much influence on the
development of the area although they both served the trail and the
settlers for a few months. The mysterious town of Ferguson probably
lived only in the pages of the Fowler City Graphic, where it had a
correspondent and its own column of news. The name first appeared in
the July 16, 2024 issue announcing: "We are going to have a town on
the banks of the classic Cimarron just where the Jones & Plummer
Trail crosses the river. The soil is rich and water is easily
gotten, but we don't want the county seat." The last statement makes
it unique among western Kansas towns and undoubtedly accounts for
its ghostly character. It did continue to send announcements to the
Fowler paper but never gained any other recognition.
If none of these towns flourished, at least the
Cimarron crossing could boast of a spectacular prairie dog town on
the flats north of the river and two road ranches: Miles City on the
south bank and Charles Heinz's (or Hines's) place on the north bank.
Captain and Mrs. Henry A. Busing had a store and post office
(borrowed from Byers City for a brief time) and some sheds and
corrals, all made of sod or adobe, and the station was named Miles
City. Part of the adobe walls of the store still stand. The
old-timers used any of the three names - Miles, Heinz, and Busing -
spelled whichever way they liked, to identify the crossing. All knew
it as the Cimarron, the toughest passage the traveler had to make on
his journey thus far. The river lay between hills, especially
impressive to the north, marking the extent of a flat, even valley,
lush with grass up to the very edge of the water. Under normal
conditions it was a sandy, slightly briny stream; at other times it
was a red, turbid flood. After such a flood it invariably became
boggy in places, which tended to shift with each heavy rain, making
a crossing somewhat of a gamble. Said Billy Dixon: "The Cimarron is
commonly regarded as one of the most dangerous streams in the
southwest. Its width often is three of four hundred yards. . . . It
is filled to the brim with sand [that] . . . grips like a vise, and
the river sucks down and buries all that it touches." [Pgs. 78-83]
From Miles City to Beaver was forty miles and then
another crossing at the Beaver River. The trail then led through the
Oklahoma Panhandle and into the big-ranch country of Texas ending at the
Jones and Plummer Ranch on Wolf Creek just east of present-day US 83
highway.
For the freighter, the popularity of the Jones and
Plummer trail was attributed to its well-marked route. The water places
were spaced closer than those on many of the other trails; the terrain
was smoother, or at least flatter, and as much sand as possible was
avoided.
At the peak of its freighting days, 1880 to 1886, it
was not unusual for 100,000 to 150,000 pounds of freight to pass over
the trail in a given week. Besides the merchants, the trail was used by
the big ranchers who bright in their own supplies. Traffic on the trail
picked up considerable when homesteaders started to stream into Meade
County creating a whole new market for goods.
In Cimarron Chronicles Carrie Schmoker Anshutz
wrote of leaving Dodge City after arriving there by train and reaching
their homestead in Meade County by way of the trail:
Two freighters with lead and trail wagons had been
hired, their wagons and our own piled high above the sideboards with
our goods. Each wagon bearing its quota of human freight disposed of
to safest advantage, topping it all, we started south and west on
the wide Jones Plumber Trail. Crossing the Arkansas River on the
wooden toll bridge that had a wooden bar across it at the south end,
where the toll house stood, each wagon was charged a toll of 50
cents for a single team, a six horse team was one dollar, horsemen
were charged 25 cents. [The trail was very much a part of Carrie
Anshutz’s life as she grew up in Meade County, and she describes it
often in the book.]
The rapid increase in population brought more than
four thousand new residents to Meade County between 1882 and 1888,
increasing the traffic on the trail. Its popularity came to an end
however, when the Rock Island Railroad came through the county with
Meade and Fowler both on the line. Although local traffic continued for
some time, the days of the wagon-road economy as a major economic impact
ceased to exist.
Again, quoting from Trails South:
The trail was identified with that era on the
Great Plains that spanned major transitions: from buffalo hunting to
ranching to farming. As long as transportation was dependent upon
beasts of burden, the Jones and Plummer Trail stimulated growth and
progress. In the end, progress relegated the wagon trail to near
oblivion. Its death knell was the sound of the train bell as a Santa
Fe locomotive pulled into Panhandle City on New Year's Day 1888.
Having served its purpose, the trail gradually slipped into the dust
of history, and its mark upon the land was covered by the sod like a
forgotten grave.
There are still traces of the Jones and Plummer Trail
across Meade County. The ruts are only visible now in pastures and on
hard, high ground where they are less apt to be washed away. There are
some ruins of the Old Miles Post Office on the south bank of the
Cimarron River, but all the other way stations and boom towns are long
gone. Plowed under by the settler’s plow and blown away by the winds of
time, the Jones and Plummer Trail became just another chapter in our
history. |
