STEEL SILHOUETTES MEMORIALIZE OLD WEST CATTLE DRIVES.

Byline: Phyllis Jacobs Griekspoor Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

A portion of Kansas' most colorful history has been frozen in steel and concrete and mounted on the side of a windswept red bluff just north of the Oklahoma border.

From U.S. Highway 81, the life-size scene of a chuck wagon pulled by horses, cowboys on horseback and a herd of longhorn steers looks startlingly real. More than 100 years ago, when cowboys rode the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene, it was real.

Titled "Ghost Riders of the Chisholm Trail," the silhouette scene erected last year was designed by Kansas State University students working with the Community Service Program and the Caldwell Community Development Corp.

The sculpture, inspired by a similar project near Council Grove, has been more than a year in the making. It stands as a tribute not only to the men who rode the trail from the 1860s to the turn of the century, but to the creativity of today's residents of the Caldwell area in southeast Kansas.

Caldwell, the first stop on the trail after miles of Indian Territory, was one of the rowdiest of Kansas cow towns. Today, the white cross of a church stands atop "Mount Lookout," where it's said the "Border Queens" once watched for the herds approaching town and the eager, thirsty cowboys who came with them.

Out in Milfred Reser's pasture, a couple of hundred yards to the east of the sculpture, you can still see the ruts cut deep into the prairie by the hundreds of wagon wheels and the millions of cattle hoofs that traveled the trail.

Reser and his wife, Lenita, are happy to point out spots in the 600-acre pasture where portions of the trail are still visible.

It's a dusty hour's journey by pickup truck, but pasture tourists can also see the original bed for the railroad that eventually ended the cattle drives through Kansas, the corrals where the longhorns were penned awaiting loading onto railcars, and the creek that provided water.

Reser donated the land along the bluff for the sculpture, and is a strong supporter of the effort to document and commemorate Caldwell's history.

"Too much has been lost already," he said, adding that he wished he had asked his grandmother more questions during her lifetime.

"She took part in the run for the Cherokee strip," he said. "There are questions now that I'd really love to have the answers to. She could have told me so much."

It was during the 1930s that his grandfather bought the pasture where the sculpture now stands.

Each steel figure is supported by oil-field pipes that have been sealed into holes in the earth with concrete.

"Someday, we hope we can get the state to put a pulloff along the highway there and maybe a marker with details about the sculpture and the trail," said Karen Sturm, a spokeswoman for the South Central Kansas Tourism Region.

She's even ambitious enough to hope that someday there'll be a path to connect that pulloff to another one a short way down the highway, where there is already a historic marker.

And, by the 130th anniversary of the Chisholm Trail in 1997, she hopes that Caldwell's efforts will inspire other Kansas towns along the trail, notably Wellington, Wichita, Newton and Abilene, to make similar commemorative efforts.

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Photo Don Schmitz, left, and Jim Lappan rest in the front-end loader of Schmitz's tractor after helping set in place silhouettes marking the trail along which cowboys once drove herds of cattle to market. Anthony Reed/Wichita Eagle Map The Chisolm Trail