John Chisum

John Simpson Chisum (August 15, 1824 – December 22, 1884) was a wealthy cattle baron on the frontier in the American West in the mid-to-late 19th century. He was born in Hardeman County, Tennessee, and moved with his family southwest across the Mississippi River to the newly independent Republic of Texas the year after the Texas Revolution (and brief war for independence from Mexico) in 1837, later finding work as a building contractor. He also served as a county clerk in Lamar County, Texas. He was of Scottish, English, and Welsh descent.^[2]

Seventeen years later in 1854, Chisum became engaged in the cattle and ranching business and became one of the first to send his herds further west from Texas to the newly established New Mexico Territory which occurred in 1850, two years after the Mexican War's end (acquired along with future state of California, and adjacent territories, then states of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona after the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 in the peace treaty's Mexican Cession which later became the Southwestern United States). He obtained land along the Pecos River by right of occupancy and eventually became the owner of a large ranch in the Bosque Grande region and Lincoln County, New Mexico, with a county seat and largest town of Lincoln, about forty miles south of the military post at Fort Sumner, with over 100,000 head of cattle. In the years immediately after the American Civil War in 1866-1867, Chisum formed a partnership with cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving to assemble and drive herds of cattle for sale to the United States Army cavalry in Fort Sumner and further north at the former longtime Royal Spanish colonial city, later then the Mexican provincial capital, becoming the new American territorial capital of Santa Fe. Chisum and his other ranching cattlemen partners also providing cattle to feed miners further to the north in the Colorado Territory as well as provide cattle to the Bell Ranch in nearby Tucumcari, New Mexico.