Outlet from Texas to the railroad in Abeline, Kansas. The Chisholm Trail passed through the present city of Enid and entered Kansas near Caldwell. Cattle drives following the Chisholm Trail, and numerous side trails continued to pass through the outlet for the next 20 years. The Cherokees collected, but with difficulty, 10 cents per head of cattle passing through the outlet. The Texans began to halt in the outlet to graze and winter their cattle. Ranchers in Kansas also began to use the outlet for grazing their herds. The Cherokees attempted to collect fees for grazing rights, which were confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1878, but collection of the fees was difficult. In 1880, cattlemen, mostly Kansans, formed the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association to manage a chaotic situation in the outlet. After the incorporation of the association in Kansas in 1883, the Cherokees negotiated a five-year lease of the outlet to the association for $100,000 per year. At the end of five years, the Cherokee Tribal Council put the lease up for bid, hoping to get a better price, and leased it again to the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association for $200,000 annually. The more than 100 members of the Livestock Association divided up the land, erecting fences and corrals and building ranch houses. Also during the 1880s, Bill McDonald, acting as deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Kansas and the Northern District of Texas, cleared the Cherokee Outlet of cattle thieves and train robbers, who had taken to hiding out in what they thought was a kind of "no-man's land". Boomers The lease to the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association was nullified by Congress in 1890, which then authorized purchasing the land from the Cherokees for $1.25 per acre. Having previously rejected a bid from the cattlemen to buy the land for $3.00 per acre, the Cherokee protested in vain that the government price was too low. President Benjamin Harrison forbade all grazing in the Cherokee Outlet after October 2, 1890, which eliminated all profit from leasing the land. After that, the Cherokee sold off the land at prices ranging from $1.40 to $2.50 per acre. The Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association would disband in 1893, the same year the outlet was opened to non-Indian settlement. Actual payment did not occur until 1964, when the Cherokee finally settled their claims against the U.S. government for the actual value