By BUD KENNEDY
We love telling cowboy stories in Texas.
But we shouldn’t tell made-up stories as truth — such as about the history of the Chisholm Trail.
Some modern-day storytellers from Saginaw were gathering Saturday to dedicate a monument marking their city’s place on the historic 1870s cattle drive route from Fort Worth to Kansas.
There are a couple of problems with this marker.
First, Saginaw didn’t exist until 1882. Second, the trail didn’t go that way.
Otherwise, I’m glad folks want to talk about the cattle trail.
Descriptions left by the cattle drivers describe a path through downtown Fort Worth along what is today Main, Jones and Grove streets, then north near today’s Cold Springs Road to the Trinity River and then toward Elizabeth Creek in Denton and Wise counties and the Wise County ghost town of Audubon.
Unlike in Oklahoma, we haven’t found wagon ruts to prove the exact route. But at best, that path veers near Haslet or Blue Mound, two miles east of Saginaw.
Yet the Saginaw marker brags: "This trail post shows the approximate location of the great Chisholm Trail . . . through Saginaw, on to Decatur . . ."
Rosalie Gregg is the ranking history expert in Decatur. She groaned.
"We’ve marked where the trail passed — it’s out east by the Denton County line," she said. "I haven’t really cooperated with any of these new markers. I don’t feel like they’re right."
Saginaw is one of several Texas cities stringing hokum and hype.
Cleburne historian Billy Cate and a volunteer "trail boss," Steve Myers of Fort Worth, have been contacting towns vaguely along the route, offering free markers. Cate, also a Western singer as the "Chisholm Trail Cowboy," founded an attraction southwest of Cleburne named "Chisholm Town."
"The whole idea is to contact local people and have them do the research," Myers said last week. "We’re leaving the accuracy up to them."
Saginaw Historical Society officials did not respond to e-mail messages left at the town library.
Former Fort Worth tourism official Doug Harman has always promoted the trail and lobbied for a new National Parks Service study to mark the route. The Stockyards Visitors Center posted a marker in front of the visitors’ center, even though the trail passed a mile east near Decatur Avenue.
"The objective is to get markers in places where they have some visibility," Harman said. "Who’s to say there weren’t cattle six miles off the trail?"
But Tarrant County Historical Commission archivist Susan Pritchett wrote by e-mail that she fears the new markers are driven by "tourism and commercialism."
Sometimes you can’t even believe what’s carved in stone.
Bud Kennedy’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538 Twitter @budkennedy
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