Trailblazer: Jesse Chisholm, 1805-1868

Mixed race Natives provided a valuable link between indigenous and European cultures trying to co-exist on the American frontier and in the west.  One of these was Jesse Chisholm, a mixed-race Cherokee born in what is now Tennessee.  His mother was Martha Rogers, the daughter of a Cherokee leader, John Rogers.  Jesse's father, Ignatius Chisholm was a trader of Scottish descent.  The Rogers family moved voluntarily to Oklahoma in the decades before the Trail of Tears and forced removals.  In 1826, Jesse joined a prospecting party, and helped blaze a trail from what is now Wichita, Kansas, to Fort Gibson and Fort Towson, in Oklahoma.  In 1834, he was a guide with the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition, one of the earliest contacts between the Army and Plains tribes.

Like his father before him, Jesse entered into the trading business.  He married a woman named Eliza Edwards.  Her father owned a trading post near the junction of the Canadian and Little Rivers.  In addition to being a skilled guide, Chisholm learned several Native languages and was an interpreter for the Republic of Texas to various tribes.  He served in this capacity from 1838-1858, meanwhile building up his trading business and cattle ranching.  During the Civil War, pro-Union Natives feared that they would be killed.  Chisholm led a group of refugees to Kansas and later settled in the Wichita area.  After the war, he resumed his trading business, turning an old Native path and Army road into a road wide enough for wagons and cattle to pass.  It became the basis of the Chisholm Trail.  The part of the trail blazed by Chisholm led from his trading post on the Red River to what is now Kansas City, Kansas.  In 1868, he died of food poisoning near Left Handed Spring and was buried there.  Not too many years after his death, the heyday of the Texas cattle boom made his trail famous in American history and folklore.

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