Attractions | Visit Liberal | Liberal, Kansas

📜 On this day in history — September 5, 1867 — Abilene, Kansas, became the first great cowtown of the West -- and later the cowtown that raised a President! 🏆 A whistle echoed across the prairie as the first shipment of Texas longhorns rumbled east on the Kansas Pacific Railway. Joseph McCoy’s gamble had paid off: his newly built stockyards transformed Abilene from a quiet frontier village into the trail’s end of the legendary Chisholm Trail. More than 1.5 million cattle would follow, along wi