The Jones and Plummer Trail was established in the fall of 1874 when two former buffalo hunters turned merchants and freighters, Charles Edward “Dirty Face” Jones and Joe Plummer, established a store at the head of Wolf Creek.[1] The need for a convenient place for buffalo hunters to sell hides and obtain supplies was clearly evident after Quanah Parker’s raid convinced the Dodge City merchants to abandon Adobe Walls. Jones marked the trail and the partners’ trips to and from Dodge City to deliver hides and buffalo meat and purchase goods, cut ruts deep enough into the sod for others to follow.[2]
Leaving Dodge City their route angled southwest paralleling Crooked Creek, to cross it and the Cimarron River near the Oklahoma-Kansas line, and continued on to Beaver, Oklahoma. At Beaver the Dodge City-Tascosa Trail branched off to the southwest. The Jones and Plummer Trail continued due south for thirty miles to where Booker now stands. Passing Brubaker Lake, it headed southwest toward Gillalow Lake to the Jones and Plummer store on Wolf Creek just east of present- day U.S. 83. The route to this point covered approximately 160 miles. The rapid growth of Mobeetie made the trail attractive to other freighters who extended it on south. Mose Hayes, an early plainsman, left a clear description of the lower half of the trail: “… more freighting came down the Jones and Plummer Trail about Clear Creek and turned off to the east before it got to the end of the [original] Jones and Plummer Trail on Wolf and continued south across Wolf Creek, and crossed the Canadian, and then up Red Deer, out on the plains, and on to Mobeetie.”[3]
At the peak of the freighting days, amazing amounts of freight passed over the Jones and Plummer Trail, including the material to build Fort Elliott and supplies for troops in the field, hunters, ranchers, homesteaders, and towns. A single merchant, Charles Rath, shipped 150,000 pounds of freight a week to Mobeetie.[4] Eventually, five towns were established along the route that served as their primary artery of commerce and travel. After 1879, it was used by mail contractors and in 1886, P.G. Reynolds made it a major stage-coach route from Dodge City to Mobeetie. Although primarily a freighting trail, it also was used by cattlemen in driving herds north.
The trail’s usefulness was ended when rail lines moved into the region, making the wagon road trade uneconomical. The death knell was the sound of a train’s bell as an Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe locomotive pulled into Panhandle City on New Year’s Day 1888, and the same sound heard as tracks of the Rock Island crossed southwestern Kansas the same month. From 1874 until the last decade of the century, the Jones and Plummer Trail was a major factor in the growth of a region comprising parts of three states and served as guide and thoroughfare linking a community of common business, economic, and social interests.
- Interview of Mose Hayes by J. Evetts Haley, June 10, 1930, Earl
Vandale Collection, Barker Library, University of Texas at Austin. - C. Robert Haywood, Trails South: The Wagon-Road Economy in the
Dodge City-Panhandle Region (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986).
Chapter 4 deals specifically with the trail, 64-100. - Hayes Interview by Haley, June 10, 1930.
- Dodge City Times , October 6, 1881.