Caprock Chronicles: Rath opens trail for bison hunters, way to move hides north

EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s Caprock Chronicles essay is written by Paul Carlson of Lubbock. It looks at the Rath Trail of 1876 and afterward that brought bison hides and robes to market in Dodge City, Kansas.

Charles Rath, a merchant, entrepreneur and bison hunter, opened the Rath Trail in 1876. In Texas, it stretched from Mobeetie and old Fort Elliott in Wheeler County south to Rath City (now gone) in Stonewall County or about eight miles north of modern Hamlin.

Essentially, it followed present-day U.S. 83, the so called “Main Street of the Great Plains.” It ran through Wheeler, Collingsworth, Childress, Cottle, King and Stonewall counties.

Rath laid out the road as a way to get bison hunters and their followers south of the large bison herds still roaming West Texas. And he opened the road to ease the problem of moving hunter supplies and equipment south to his trade center and hides north to market in Dodge City, Kansas.

Dodge City until late 1877 was the main hide market. There, Rath and his partners operated a large trading store and mercantile, and they handled hundreds of thousands of bison hides.

To further the trade, Rath and his partners were among the first merchants to build a store near Adobe Walls, a former and in 1874 a current trading site in the Panhandle, a place Comanches, Kiowas and Cheyennes in 1874 attacked in an effort to drive the merchants and bison hunters away.

The Indian warriors enjoyed mixed success. They did not over run Adobe Walls, but the merchants, teamsters, hunters and skinners (perhaps 28 in all, including one woman) who survived the attack left temporarily and returned to Dodge City.

A year later they were back. This time they stayed, in part because the Federal army had pursued Indian warriors and their families in the Panhandle and got them back to their reservations. And, because the army in February 1875 had built Fort Elliott in what became Wheeler County, the Panhandle seemed safe.

To supply the increasing number of bison hunters, a well warn wagon road ran south from Dodge City through Camp Supply to Mobeetie, a little community for supplying hunters, sheepherders and traders in the area as well as soldiers at nearby Fort Elliott.

Some writers, including Ida Ellen Rath, argue the route from Dodge City is properly called “The Rath Trail.”

Perhaps she is correct, for it was in Dodge City that Charles Rath talked his partner Robert Wright into risking a large part of the firm’s capital in the venture. There also Rath convinced W. D. Lee of the large Lee & Reynolds trading firm — the “Big Contractors” they were called — to go in with Wright and him.

Rath was in charge of the operation. He and John Russell, wagon master of the Rath freight train, acquired wagons and oxen to pull them, building equipment for the new town and supplies for hunters, including merchandise, whisky, tobacco, food stuffs, guns and ammunition among them.

As Russell began loading operations, bison hunters got their outfits together. According to Ms. Rath, there “were perhaps fifty wagons in all in the train.” They made it to Fort Elliott without difficulty.

At Fort Elliott, Lee & Reynolds assembled their supplies and added a large number of wagons to the train. The traders got laundryman Charlie Sing with his equipment, some scouts, and perhaps others to join the caravan.

J. Wright Mooar, one of the bison hunters, said “there were two or three hundred wagons in the outfit.” The number seems too large, but Ms. Rath argues that with freight wagons from the two firms, wagons belonging to the hunters who had left Dodge City, and others “who joined along the way, the number does not seem out of line.”

Thus, in the fall of 1876, loaded and organized, the huge procession started. Forty-year-old Rath, sitting on horseback with a compass in his hand, led the way from Fort Elliott heading due south.

Behind Rath in the first wagon rode Russell and 12 road builders. Using picks, shovels, axes and other road-building equipment, they chopped trees and shrubs, removed large rocks and graded passable roadways down creek and river banks and through draws and arroyos along the route. They moved south in as straight a line as possible.

Following the first wagon, company teamsters and bullwhackers moved tons of equipment and supplies. Bison hunters, skinners, saloon operators, traders, storekeepers and others moved their wagons into the long line. One wagon, or so the story goes, carried several women who planned to operate a dance hall.

In December 1876, after several weeks on the trail, Rath led the procession onto a stretch of level ground above the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River in Stonewall County. There, not far from the Double Mountains, he laid out the short-lived town of Rath City.

During the next two years, Rath’s teamsters carried supplies to his namesake town and hauled away tens of thousands of hides, following the compass-straight road he had charted on horseback.