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“I’m tired,” my son intoned as he sprawled across a chair on a neighbor’s front porch.
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Nathaniel Ellsworth Wyatt is believed to have been born in Indiana. His year of birth is in question, having been reported from 1863 until 1870. John T. Wyatt married Rachel J. Quick of Clay County, Ind., in 1860. Rachel was 16. When the Civil War broke out, John joined the 85th Indiana Infantry.
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The mention of the Santa Fe Trail brings forth images of long trains of alluring Conestoga wagons wending their way across the open prairie. That prairie was Kansas, and to a lesser extent, the Cimarron Cutoff, across the present-day Oklahoma panhandle into New Mexico.
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Joseph McCoy created the first great cattle town in 1867 when he established his “cattle depot” along the Kansas Pacific Railway tracks at Abilene. The Kansas Pacific dominated the cattle trade until 1871. In that year the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad built tracks to meet the Chisholm Trail 60 miles south of Abilene.
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Caldwell, Kan., was founded in 1871, directly on the Chisholm Trail just inside the Kansas border with Indian Territory. The location was good for business, but without a railroad, Caldwell was just another place to resupply before reaching the more successful shipping towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Newton and Wichita.
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