With the coming of the railroads to the Great Plains in the 1860s, Texas ranchers were finally able to link their native longhorns with the markets of the East. They did so by moving their herds on thousand-mile “long drives” to railheads in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, where booming “cow towns” grew at the junction of trail and rail. In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy laid out the Chisholm Trail form San Antonio to the Kansas Pacific railhead at Abeline, Kansas, buying 250 acres there for grazing land and stockyards. The cattle trade flourished in Abeline until 1872 when opposition from area farmers finally closed it down. But the long drives continued — to other railhead towns like Ellsworth, Dodge City, Ogallala and Cheyenne, as well as to burgeoning ranches on the northern Plains. Many difficulties beset the drovers on the trail. There were danger from floods, thunderstorms, stampedes, rustlers and Indians. Cattle sometimes lost so much weight on the trek they became unsaleable. Eventually, Kansas and a number of other states, in an effort to keep out dreaded cattle diseases like Texas and splenic fever, passed restrictive quarantine laws. These restrictions, together with the use of barbed wire on the open range, brought trail-driving to an end by the 1890s.