Storm and Stampede on the Chisholm

In 1883 young Hubert Collins traveled the Chisholm Trail to a ranch in Indian Territory. For the next fifteen months he lived at the Red Fork Ranch on the banks of the Cimarron River at present-day Dover, Oklahoma. It was the boy’s “great land of romance,” a dusty empire of cattle and rattlesnakes owned by his older brother, Ralph. With plenty to learn from rangy cowboys in residence and frontier characters passing through, Hubert enjoyed more adventure than he would ever know again. He befriended Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians who stopped by the ranch, and he visited them at the Darlington Agency. In Storm and Stampede on the Chisholm, first published in 1928, he recorded his excitement at being exposed to an elemental way of life soon to be gone.