Map of the Cattle Trails: The Story of Colonel Jack M. Potter (1864–1950)

Blog Post by Michael D. King

The Jack Potter map, formally titled "Map showing Cattle Trails as used from 1866 to 1895 for driving cattle on to shipping points or when trailing to northern markets," is an authoritative primary-source reconstruction of the great open-range cattle drives across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. It was compiled from the firsthand recollections of Colonel Jack M. Potter (1864–1950), a legendary trail boss, rancher, and author who drove cattle across the Southwest for operations like the New England Livestock Company. Rendered by draftsperson A.C. Loveless in Clayton, New Mexico, this particular copy carries an August 9, 1937 inscription from Potter to Harold Dow Bugbee, the prominent Western artist who later curated the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.

Digital copy provided by Michael R. Grauer of the Jack Potter map for the WCTA to post on the website, with the Credit line: H. D. Bugbee Collection, Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, Canyon, Texas.

The map meticulously traces the primary north–south arteries and regional branch routes of the late-19th-century livestock trade. It charts the central Chisholm Trail pushing northward through Fort Worth and Indian Territory toward Abilene, alongside the heavily traveled Western (Dodge City) Trail running from deep South Texas through Doan’s Crossing on the Red River into Dodge City. Westward, it documents the Goodnight-Loving Trail tracing the Pecos River corridor north through Fort Sumner into Colorado, as well as the proposed National Trail pushing cattle onward to rail depots in Ogallala and Cheyenne. Potter also incorporated specialized regional cutoffs he helped pioneer or navigate, such as the Potter and Bacon Cutoff near Clayton and the Jim Stinson Trail across New Mexico.

By detailing critical water sources, river crossings, and rail terminals through the memory of a veteran drover, Potter’s map provides a rare practitioner's view of the landscape during the twilight of the open range. It remains a foundational historical document, preserving the geography of the post–Civil War cattle boom before barbed wire, railroads, and private land ownership closed the trails for good.

The Story Colonel Jack M. Potter (1864–1950)

In the spring of 1874, when the bluebonnets pressed against the fence rails and the Guadalupe River ran high with rain, Jack Myers Potter was already a fixture on the open range. He was ten years old, his boots caked with the red clay of Caldwell County, his hands callused from the reins of half-wild longhorns. His father, the Rev. Andrew Jackson Potter, was a circuit rider whose sermons echoed from brush arbor to adobe chapel, known to the frontier as the Fighting Parson. Jack’s world was one of dust and sweat, of branding fires that burned late into the night and the lowing of cattle drifting across the prairie at dawn. By fifteen, he was driving herds north along the Western Trail, his eyes scanning the horizon for the glint of water or the shadow of a Comanche pony. It was in these years that Potter, with a battered surveyor’s compass and a gambler’s nerve, charted the Potter-Bacon Cutoff—a new trail that sliced across the Llano Estacado, bypassing the bottlenecks of the old routes and opening a corridor to the railheads of Dodge City and the grasslands of Wyoming. The trail would bear his name, but the dust of its making clung to his clothes and memory for a lifetime.

​By the time the 1880s drew to a close, the open range was already shrinking beneath the weight of barbed wire and railroad timetables. Potter, his reputation forged in the crucible of trail dust and prairie storms, found himself in the Fort Sumner country, managing herds for the New England Cattle Company. The mornings there began with the metallic rattle of coffee pots and the distant bawl of calves, the air sharp with the scent of mesquite smoke. In Union County, he built his own spread, a patchwork of windmills and wire, and settled in the raw, wind-scoured town of Clayton. Here, Potter became more than a cattleman; he was a legislator, a voice for the men who still remembered the taste of alkali water and the sound of a herd on the move. Through the 1920s and 1930s, he fought for the old ways in the halls of the New Mexico State Legislature, even as the world he knew slipped into memory. In his later years, with the range gone quiet and the trails grown over, Potter turned to the written word, gathering the stories of the cowmen before they vanished. His books, praised by J. Frank Dobie for their plainspoken humor and unerring sense of place, became a last campfire for a generation. When he died in Clayton in 1950, the wind still carried the echoes of the longhorn days he had refused to let the world forget.

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Excerpts and historical context from Jack Potter's firsthand accounts of driving cattle up the Western Trail into Dodge City.

In the brittle sunlight of the 1880s, as the cattle boom reached its fever pitch, Colonel Jack M. Potter rode north with the herds, later distilling his memories into the pages of Cattle Trails of the Old West and Lead Steer and Other Tales. These were not the polished legends of dime novels, but raw, dust-choked recollections—accounts that carried the sweat, the grit, and the restless pulse of the Western Trail as it funneled men and longhorns toward the feverish promise of Dodge City.

Texas State Historical Association
Potter was scarcely more than a boy when he first nudged a restless herd toward Dodge City in the spring of 1880. His recollections, stripped of the varnish of pulp fiction, moved between the hard arithmetic of drover life—trail rations, river crossings, the nightly ballet of men and cattle—and the sly, rough-edged humor that stitched together the cowboy brotherhood. When the lights of Dodge finally flickered into view, the city struck him not as legend, but as a living, breathing shock to the senses: a place where the myth collided with the raw, unfiltered reality of the trail.

Key Accounts and Firsthand Observations:

The Trail Approach and Crossing the Arkansas: Potter lingered over the choreography that unfolded in the final miles before Dodge. Herds drifting up from Red River Station or Doan’s Crossing would ease their pace along the public grazing strip south of the Arkansas, the air thick with the scent of trampled grass and river mud. Here, cattle and men alike paused—resting, watering, waiting for the signal that would send them across the river and into the chaos of buyers and railcars. It was a time for discipline, for the quiet rituals of night herding and the tense anticipation of the crossing that separated the trail from the city.

"A man who hasn't stood night guard on a bunch of wild Texas cattle when the clouds were rolling low and the lightning playing along their horn tips hasn't seen the elephant yet. But when we hit the south bank of the Arkansas and looked across at the lights and false fronts of Dodge, every boy in the outfit forgot the two months of sand and alkali."

The Spectacle of Arrival: Ab Blocker's Outfit

Among Potter’s most enduring memories was the moment when the trail crews, wild with exhaustion and anticipation, finally spilled onto Front Street. In Cattle Trails of the Old West, he conjured the spectacle of Ab Blocker’s outfit cresting the Arkansas River bridge, the dust swirling around them as they paraded into the heart of Dodge—a scene that crackled with the pent-up energy of weeks on the trail. 

Ford County Historical Society

"Old Ab Blocker's outfit came rolling in, and his colored chuckwagon cook, Gordon Davis, marched right up into Dodge City mounted on the back of his left wheel-oxen, with fiddle in hand, playing 'Buffalo Girls, Can't You Come Out Tonight!' That was Dodge all over—noise, music, dust, and longhorns."

The Transformation of the Drover on Front Street

Potter often recounted the ritual trail-weary hands underwent once the trail boss paid them off. After months living in trail dust and sweat, a cowboy’s first hours in Dodge followed an unwritten rite of passage:

• The "Clean Up": Dropping months-old trail clothes for a hot bath, shave, and haircut at a local barbershop.
• The Outfitting: Heading straight to outfitting establishments like Wright, Beverly & Co. on Front Street to purchase brand-new wool shirts, high-heeled boots, and wide-brimmed white Stetsons.
• The Revelry: Hitting the dance halls, billiard parlors, and saloons like the Long Branch, where cowhands mingled with seasoned gamblers, buffalo hunters turned hide merchants, and local town marshals.

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 "Nine Powder Marks on a Duckin' Vest"

The article "Nine Powder Marks on a Duckin' Vest" (subtitled —unpublished story from the files of Colonel Jack Potter) was written by former trail driver and range manager Colonel Jack Potter and edited by J. M. Burroughs. Potter penned this firsthand account about events dating back to around 1887, and the manuscript was published posthumously in the October 1977 issue of the Western history magazine True West.
The storyline centers on a deadly 1887 range dispute in east-central New Mexico involving the White brothers (Jim and C.W. White) and George Peacock, the foreman of William Cox’s Bar-V ranch. The White brothers had taken in, raised, and bottle-fed an orphaned dogie calf and became fiercely protective of it on the open range. Tensions boiled over during a roundup when Bar-V cowboys captured the calf and prepared to brand it with their own iron. Despite Jim White's stern warning to leave the animal alone, Peacock persisted with the branding. In response, Jim White drew his revolver and shot Peacock repeatedly at point-blank range, leaving nine distinct powder-burn marks scorched into Peacock's heavy ducking (canvas) vest. Potter, then managing the nearby New England Cattle Company, recounted the immediate chaos, the fatal aftermath, and the scramble of the cowboys following the violent outburst.
Overall, the piece illustrates the raw, perilous volatility of frontier life, where an everyday ranching chore could erupt into deadly violence over a single unbranded calf. Potter’s account provides an authentic, granular window into territorial New Mexico's range conflicts, highlighting both the suddenness of frontier gunplay and the personal grievances that frequently superseded legal authority on the open range.

Historical Context & Historiographical Significance

• Nomenclature and Trail Tracing: In his writings, Potter was meticulous about trail naming. He consistently identified the primary cattle trunk through Fort Griffin and Doan’s Crossing straight to Dodge City as the Western Trail (or the Dodge City Trail). In his 1930s correspondence and retrospective maps compiled with compiler Laura R. Krehbiel, he argued that early cowmen distinguished this dedicated thoroughfare clearly from the eastern Chisholm route, estimating that roughly nine million cattle crossed the Western Trail corridor during its operational years.
  
• Dodge City as the Pivot Point: Potter viewed Dodge City not just as a terminal market or shipping depot, but as the great staging gate for northern expansion. In his narratives, Dodge was where southern herds were split: prime beef steers were loaded onto Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe cattle cars bound for Chicago packing houses, while stockers and young cows were sold to northern range-cattle outfits and pushed further north into Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
• The End of an Era: Potter’s accounts captured the closing years of the Dodge City trail drives. By the mid-1880s, the combination of barbed wire, Kansas quarantine statutes against "Texas Fever," and the westward march of the railroads permanently shut down the open corridors into Dodge City, prompting Potter and other cow bosses to pioneer deeper westward bypasses, including his own Potter-Bacon Cutoff across eastern New Mexico.