This road is part of the historic Great Western Cattle Trail, a path for cattle and horses established in the 1800s that went through Texas and Oklahoma to railheads in Kansas and Nebraska. The trail saw less traffic from 1885 with the introduction of barbed wire, and legislation called for cattle quarantine due to “Texas Fever.” In 1893, the last large cattle drive up the trail crossed the Red River to Deadwood, South Dakota. Over the years, an estimated six to seven million cattle and one million horses had traversed the trail.