San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Markers celebrate romance of a famed trail
There’s a long, long trail a-winding … but most of it has no factual connection with the legendary merchant route it’s named for.
San Antonio’s association with the Chisholm Trail (covered here April 18) stretches a point — there were Texas cattle trails here that led to the original Chisholm Trail trade route between Oklahoma and Kansas in the late 1800s — but the 20thcentury effort to mark a tourist-promoting “Chisholm Trail” in Texas has pursued us into the 21st century.
Reader Charles Sarratt read the column that detailed the various trails — original, Eastern and Western trails through Texas and a memorial highway linking Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas — and remembered a family photo that shows his then-9-year-old grandson Nicholas Neumann in
2017, pointing to a Chisholm Trail marker in the courtyard of the Menger Hotel.
According to Wayne Ludwig, a historian of the trail and its afterlife, the white concrete post at the Menger “is one of many such markers erected in Texas since about 2000.” Ludwig is the author of “The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist
Stop,” published in 2018 by Texas A&M University Press.
An interstate series of Chisholm Trail posts were installed by enthusiasts starting in Oklahoma during the 1990s, Ludwig said, citing a story in the Daily Oklahoman, Nov.
29, 1990, that reported that markers were to be placed along merchant Jesse Chisholm’s original trade road “between the Cimarron River and the Kansas state line.”
At some point, the project expanded to mark towns along what’s now U.S. 81 — actually the Abilene Trail, as identified on a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race, suggesting bias in stop decisions.”
Many researchers, therefore, have concluded that the best way to test racial bias is to examine what occurs after a stop, when police have no doubt about a driver’s race.
Baumgartner said the most reliable test is a comparison of how often motorists are searched, a decision often left to officer discretion. Last year in Paris, northeast of Dallas, Black motorists were searched at double the rate of whites. In Houston and in Travis County, outside of Austin, sheriff ’s deputies searched Black drivers at about 2½ times the rate of white motorists.
The disparities mirror a 2005 study that found that two-thirds of Texas police departments searched African American and Hispanic drivers at higher rates than white drivers.
Police and their supporters have argued that late 19th-century maps of the Texas General Land Office and U.S. Interior Department maps — and the last of 400 markers in Oklahoma were installed in 1997.
Another project “proposed to make the Chisholm Trail into an official Texas Travel Trail.” The Fort Worth Star Telegram, Nov. 5, 1999, outlined the plans and noted the need for signs to attract tourists (“a hard sell without markers”).
Graduate students at the University of Texas at Arlington researched the trail, according to the spring 2000 edition of “Fronteras,” the newsletter for the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography, stating that no useful conclusion can be drawn without knowing what the searches uncover. Even if Black drivers are searched at a higher rate than whites, if police discover contraband at the same rate on all the searches, it demonstrates solid police work, not bias.
As a result, analyzing search “hit rates” by race — comparing what the searches turn up — has become “the meat and potatoes of the evaluation,” said Alex del Carmen, a criminal justice professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville who trains police in how to comply with Texas law.
After the Bland Act
The Sandra Bland Act was intended to provide the missing information. Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman, was stopped in 2015 by a Texas state trooper for failing to signal a lane change. The stop, captured on the trooper’s dash camera and
“The Chisholm Trail (project) is somewhat controversial in that there is no evidence that it was called by that name in Texas during its heyday (18661882).”
Bland’s cellphone, escalated into a verbal and then a physical confrontation. Bland committed suicide at the Waller County jail.
The new law was intended to compel departments to report what their officers found when they stopped and searched motorists, broken down by race. Criminal justice reform advocates celebrated.
But by the time the Sandra Bland Act went into effect, TCOLE determined that it would not ask police departments to break out the search and contraband information by race.
“I wish I knew what happened,” said Dwight Steward, an Austin economist and researcher who has studied racial profiling in Texas police departments.
Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, a sponsor of the Sandra Bland Act, said he, too, was baffled. “I don’t know why they didn’t do it the way we wanted it done,” he said.
Nevertheless, promoters of this latest attempt for Texas to stake its claim on the historic trail planted the first 21st-century Chisholm Trail marker post outside the Visitor
“We were pretty clear.”
Gretchen Grigsby, director of TCOLE’s Office of Government Relations, said the commission did its best to interpret the intent of the law, “based on the information we had at the time.”
After a June 25 report by Hearst Newspapers revealed the commission’s failure to collect data with racial breakdowns, Coleman said he spoke with TCOLE officials and that they agreed to correct the problem.
Coleman said he also asked the agency to work with academic experts to ensure the information it requests from law enforcement agencies can be used to conduct racial bias analyses.
Del Carmen said he had created a survey that would produce the necessary information.
Experts say that even when solid data demonstrate that a police department treats minority drivers
Center at the Fort Worth Stockyards in June 2000 and placed another one on Commerce Street in downtown Fort Worth. More have been erected, said Ludwig, from the Rio Grande to the Red River, and the project expanded into Kansas in 2001.
Chisholm Trail marker posts, in a distinctive style similar to old-time highway signposts, now can be found from Brownsville at the southernmost tip of Texas to Abilene, Kan.
“Some markers might be located on or near the old trail route,” Ludwig said, “but many are located in higher-visibility areas such as highway rest stops, roadside parks, hotel courtyards or county courthouses. Much of the trail is now on private property and this makes sense, otherwise the markers would have limited visibility.”
The Chisholm Trail name is supported by “actual evidence from the cattle-trailing era” only along the road between Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kan., Ludwig said. It’s a reaffirmation of early 20th-century grafting of the Chisholm Trail name onto other areas involved in cattle trailing, most extensively when the U.S. Good Roads Association — not a historical organization but a promoter of automobile tourism — “endorsed the Chisholm Trail name for the entire length of the Meridian Highway from Texas to Canada in 1930.”
The marker at the Menger commemorates the role of the historic hotel, founded in 1858, as a favorite stopping place for Texas cattlemen in the days of the great Texas cattle drives and beyond. San Antonio is one of several Texas cities and towns linked to the cattle business in the “Chisholm Trail Travel Guide” published in 2001 by the Texas Historical Commission.
“Drovers herding South Texas cattle north on the Chisholm Trail and later toward Dodge City on the Western Trail gathered their herds near San Antonio before beginning their long journeys,” the brochure says. “While drovers refreshed their supplies, cattlemen came to buy and sell stock.” The Menger Hotel is singled out as “a meeting place and home away from home for many cattle barons.”
“Add the word ‘to’ to the Texas markers,” Ludwig suggests, “so they read ‘to the Chisholm Trail,’ and they will make more sense.” differently, proving institutional bias is a challenge. The numbers may be skewed by the behavior of a few officers.
“It is not difficult to measure whether there is disparity between racial/ethnic groups in stops made by police,” said Don Arp, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement, which collects and analyzes statewide data. “The difficulty comes in identifying the causes for the disparity and whether or not it is based on race.”
Over the past decade, no Nebraska racial profiling allegation has been upheld.
Still, Matt Simpson of the ACLU of Texas said comprehensive numbers at least offer a starting point for deeper examination of policing. “People think this is going to be used for litigation,” he said. “But we’re really talking about adjusting policies and training.”