Cowboy joke pokes fun at Kansas cow town

It’s an April Fools’ joke with historic ramifications.

On Saturday morning, some Ellsworth cowboys snuck into Caldwell and hung a banner from the town’s arch, which welcomes visitors to the Kansas border town as the gateway to the Chisholm Trail.

Jim Gray and Dennis Katzenmeier, with the National Drovers Hall of Fame in Ellsworth, hung a banner on the Caldwell arch that read, “Gateway to Ellsworth.”

“Caldwell does a magnificent job of promoting their town and the Chisholm Trail history,” Gray said. “When they put that arch up in 2011, I started teasing Karen Sturm (Caldwell historian and town booster) that it was the Gateway to Ellsworth.”

Some folks across Kansas have been in on the joke for a couple of weeks.

“I love … to see the joshing and good-natured teasing between towns,” said Marci Penner, executive director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, which helps promote rural Kansas.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of when Texas cowboys started driving longhorn cattle up the Chisholm Trail to the cow towns of Kansas, including Wichita.

On Saturday, towns all along the Chisholm Trail celebrated their heritage. Caldwell is known as the Border Queen of the trail. And Ellsworth, 170 miles to the northwest, is home of the National Drovers Hall of Fame.

“We were the founded because of the trail,” Caldwell’s Sturm said. “That is the reason we exist.

“The other towns already existed, but we were started because of the trail and because of some Wichita entrepreneurs who saw the advantage of catching the cow trade after it crossed Indian Territory.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2017 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Cowboy joke pokes fun at Kansas cow town."