James Mead

James Mead, 1836 - 1910

Taken from

"Hunting and trading on the Great Plains"

By James R. Mead

James Richard Mead was born on May 3, 1836, in Weybridge, Vermont, the son of Enoch Mead and Mary Emmes James, and the grandson of Ebenezer Mead and Elizabeth Holmes. When he was still a little boy, the family - parents, James and his little sister Lizzie - went west and settled in Rockingham, Iowa. James grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River. From early life he learned to use a rifle, and the woods were full of game. There were turkeys and prairie pigeons, quail, raccoons and deer, and as he grew to manhood, he learned to hunt.

In the spring of 1859, when James had just turned 23, he organized an expedition of his friends, with wagons and a couple of teams of oxen, and set out for the plains. During May they made their way across Missouri, crossing the Missouri River on the ferry to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, James' two companions decided they had had enough of adventure and hightailed it back to Iowa. James joined a wagon train and continued west. He went as far as Burlingame, Kansas, where he staked out a claim and attempted to break up eighty acres of prairie. "But the sun and wind dried the ground till it was hard as a grindstone. I became disgusted with honest endeavor and quit" in order to sit on the front porch of Colonel I.B. Titus' house watching the wagon trains going past on the Santa Fe Trail. It was at Colonel Titus' house that James met his future wife, Miss Agnes Barcome from Montreal.

In the fall of that year, in September 1859, James organized a hunting party. They headed west on the Santa Fe Trail as far as the Smoky Hill River west of Salina, Kansas. There they found an abundance of turkey, antelope and buffalo. They camped there for awhile, living off the fat of the land. Their meals consisted of buffalo meat, flapjacks fried in buffalo fat, and coffee with plenty of sugar. After a few weeks James headed north towards the Saline River. In a bend of the river James and some friends he had just met made camp, building cabins for themselves and corrals for their horses and cattle. The place became known as Mead's Ranch. They spent the fall and winter exploring the Saline River and hunting elk and buffalo. During the winter James established a trading post at Mead's Ranch, going to Leavenworth to buy coffee, sugar, flour and tobacco to trade with the Kaw tribe for buffalo furs.

From 1859 until the spring of 1863, James was engaged in hunting and the fur trade on the Saline, Solomon and Smoky Hill Rivers. In the spring of 1863 he took a trip to Leavenworth and sold all his furs, earning about $1000. He then moved about 70 miles southwest, to Towanda on the Whitewater River. Towanda was at the extreme limit of settlement and at the eastern edge of the buffalo range. By a large spring that produced good clear water, James Mead built a log cabin and trading post, which included a post office, an Indian agency, and an inn. He organized hunting parties along the Osage Trail to the Arkansas River, near the site of present-day Wichita, taking loads of buffalo furs and tallow to sell in Leavenworth, about 200 miles to the northeast. In Burlingame, on his way back from Leavenworth, James picked up his wife, Agnes, and their son, James, who had been born in January 1863, and took them along to his ranch in Towanda. There he traded with the Osage, Comanche and Wichita tribes, selling coffee, sugar, tobacco and cloth in exchange for buffalo furs. In 1864, James built a trading post about 20 miles west of Towanda, between the Great and Little Arkansas Rivers, about two miles above their junction. Among his partners were Jesse Chisholm, Buffalo Bill Mathewson, and Dutch Bill Greiffenstein. In January 1866 Jesse Chisholm bought goods from James Mead and took them to his ranch at Council Grove on the North Fork of the Canadian River in the Indian Territory, nowadays Oklahoma. The route from Wichita to Council Grove became known as the Chisholm Trail. During the winter of 1866, James Mead established a trading post at Round Pond Creek on the Chisholm Trail, about half-way from Wichita to Council Grove.

In 1868, James staked a claim for a quarter section, 160 acres of prairie, on the site of Wichita. The other founders of the town were Dutch Bill, Buffalo Bill Mathewson, Darius Munger and Nathaniel English. At the beginning, there was nothing to distinguish Wichita from a thousand other small towns that remained nothing more than a general store and a few farmhouses surrounded by prairie. Two things turned Wichita into a city: the Chisholm Trail that brought cattle north from Texas, and the railroad that took them on to the stockyards of Chicago, and from there to dinner tables back east in New York and Philadelphia.

In the spring of 1871, the Kansas Pacific Railroad, hoping to control the cattle market, built stockyards at Ellsworth, about forty miles west of Wichita. They marked out a trail that intersected the Chisholm Trail and sent riders to meet the cattle herds coming up from Texas. They explained that the old trail was closed, so the cattle had to go up the new trail to the stockyards at Ellsworth and from there to the railroad depot at Park City, Kansas. When news reached Wichita that their rival town had outmaneuvered them, four men - James Mead, Nathaniel English, Mike Meagher and James Steele - saddled up and rode down the Chisholm Trail to see if they could redirect the herds and ensure the future of their town. They traveled twenty miles in darkness, reaching the crossroads only to hear that the first cattle, four large herds, were already heading north on the new trail. The next morning they rode hard for two hours until they caught up with the herds. After long discussion they convinced the cowboys that the Chisholm Trail to Wichita was the fastest and safest route for their cattle. So all that summer, and for many summers to come, the cattle came in a steady stream into Wichita.

Also in the spring of 1871, the Santa Fe Railroad made a decision not to extend its line south from Newton, Kansas, to Wichita. The town leaders of Wichita held a hurried conference and James Mead telegraphed T.J. Peter, the superintendent of the railroad, asking on what terms they would build the railroad to Wichita. The answer was that they must establish a local company and vote $200,000 of county bonds. A few days later the Wichita and South Western Railroad was incorporated, with James Mead as president and Henry Sluss as secretary. On May 16, 1872, the first train pulled into Wichita.

James Mead continued to live in Wichita for almost forty years, dying in 1910. His son, James Lucas Mead, moved to Chicago, where his eldest son, James Enoch Mead, my grandfather, was born in 1895. By a coincidence, James Mead and I share a birthday - May third. When I was a bit younger and had a mustache, I looked a lot like him - so people said.