I have long had the dream of putting a nature trail into the Cowskin Creek that passes through land that has passed down in my family for five generations. My mother used to fish in this creek and, since her passing, I have been working on this project for the last 16 years.
The land in question is on the north- west corner of 47th Street and Hoover Road south of the Oatville School as show Fig. 1 below
This land is of historical interest because it shows the trace of the Chisholm Trail. The Cowskin Creek was the last water crossing on the trail taken by the cattle drives in the early days of Wichita1. It was there that the trail boss would leave his herd to graze while he rode ahead to Wichita to arrange a meeting with cattle buyers.
A larger view of this crossing may be seen in Fig.2
The track of the cattle drive has left a lasting impression on the land as the cattle climbed from the confluence of the creeks to the higher ground where the Oatville School now sits.
Also shown on this Google Earth image is Billy Gray’s mule barn and the houses built by him on land purchased from my family. It is of interest here because Billy Gray wants to build houses for his own family on land east of the creek and is willing to swap mule barn land for land south of the school.
Billy Gray has also shown an interest in helping with the development of this nature trail, putting some of his own resources into restoring mule barn land. In fact, his son lives in one of the houses just north of the school with a back yard bordering the mule barn.
Not evident on the Google Earth image above is the progress made last year on this project. With the help of the Sunflower Land Trust, I have taken part of the field west of the creek out of production and replanted with native grasses.
To place this land in a little larger context, Fig 3 shows the Big Ditch running through Oatville. The town of Oatville was founded by my great-grandfather, J. P. Royal, who homesteaded the north-west quarter-section at Hoover and Macarthur, the next road north of Oatville School. He then married the diagonally opposite quarter. That quarter was homesteaded by my great-great grandfather, Davy Miller2. The Miller farmhouse still stands and can be seen south-east of the intersection of Hoover and Macarthur just east of the Big Ditch. The Chisholm Trail passed through the Miller homestead.
J. P. Royal prospered, and, by the time he was finished, he had acquired 16 quarters. In addition to being a good farmer, he raised mules. As a mule skinner, he had cash and animals to trade for land when other homesteaders decided to move on. We think that it was the mule business that gave Oatville its name. Oats were not a cash crop, they were a feed crop. Billy Gray’s mule barn behind the Oatville School is therefore not out of place from a historical perspective.
Just to the west of the 80 acres I call “my farm” is the half-circle irrigated field farmed by my neighbor, Billy Vanderhoff, who also farms my land. Across Hoover there is a church and, below that, there appears to be a wheat field on this image, but that field is now rapidly filling with houses, platted according to the following GIS image:
Fig 4 GIS Image
The land in the upper right corner of my farm, marked with a black line, is what I am now currently negotiating with the Haysville School District and Billy Gray.
It is the riparian woodland on both sides of the creeks that I am most interested in seeing turned into a park.
Finally, to show the relationship of my farm to the rest of south-west Wichita, the following Google Earth image is provided.
Footnotes:
1Years earlier, Jesse Chisholm chose this crossing for his wagon trains because it was the confluence of the Cowskin and the Lower Dry Creek for the same reason that he chose the crossing of the Arkansas River at what has become Wichita. The confluence of the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas Rivers made for a far easier crossing than the combined rivers downstream. Even when it comes to crossing creeks, it is far easier and safer to cross two small streams than one large one whether it is a wagon train, as in Jesse Chisholm’s day, or a cattle drive years later when Wichita became the destination. So it is not by accident that the near island on my land was a major landmark on the Chisholm Trail.
2 Davy Miller and his brother Doc were displaced as young teenage boys from their family farm in Maryland by the Battle of Antiedam, which started in their family’s cornfield. It was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, and not much was left of the Miller farm. The boys joined the circus. Doc became the dean of high wire performers and, according to family legend, was the original Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze in the folk song of old. I only know for certain that, as a little boy, my father introduced me to the trapeze performer at a circus and he told me he had learned “everything he knew” from my uncle Doc Miller. Doc retired from the circus to a farm north-west of Wichita. I interviewed him for a class when I was a student at Wichita University (now Wichita State). He was then in his 90s.