After the American Civil War, thousands of cattle walked across what would become Okla-homa on their way north from Texas.

Those cattle help-ed Texas recover from the war and ushered in a historic era in American history — the era of the cowboy.

Bob Klemme, of Enid, through a love of history and the help of his friends, has helped to preserve one of those historic cattle trails by marking them from Texas to Caldwell, Kan.

“In a lot of places there are still trail ruts. I wanted to mark it for future generations,” Klemme said.

Klemme has been named one of four finalists for the seventh annual Pillar of the Plains Award, created by the Enid News & Eagle and community partners to honor local residents who are active in the community and take on tasks to improve the quality of life here. The other finalists are Dr. Jerry Blankenship, Jack Douma and Ann Price. The winner will be announced at a reception Jan. 14 at Enid Symphony Center.

The marking of the Chisholm Trail was a seven-year project that started small and grew. Klemme set 400 concrete markers, weighing 200 pounds each, along the Chisholm Trail through Oklahoma. The markers follow the trail from the Red River to Caldwell, Kan. Originally, he planned to place the markers only in the Cherokee Outlet, but the project grew. Enid sprang up overnight following the land run in 1893 that settled the Cherokee Outlet.

“I didn’t do it for praise, I did it because I love history,” he said.

Klemme said he was influenced by a strict Oklahoma history teacher in the ninth grade and became interested in the Chisholm Trail. Working as an insurance adjuster in northern Oklahoma for 20 years, Klemme often would talk to farmers who knew where the trail crossed their land and could show him the wagon ruts. In the mid-1980s, Klemme found a book of original townships dating to 1873 in the Garfield County Court House. The book showed where the trail went through the county.

Klemme raised the money and enlisted the help of his friends and put up 79 posts for the Cherokee Outlet. He also had another 104 posts made and placed them from the Kingfisher County line south. The project took several years and a lot of his time, but Klemme was dedicated to the preservation of the trail. He also was part of the planning process for the Chisholm Trail Museum in Duncan.

Klemme also placed silhouettes in Government Springs Park to commemorate the early day cattle drives through the area. He raised the money to do the project and persuaded artist H. Holden to draw some sketches for him, from which the silhouettes were made. There are 24 longhorn cattle, six cowboys, one chuckwagon and one Indian in the park.

He also placed a larger Indian silhouette, named “Nanon,” on the cliff south of Watonga looking toward Jesse Chisholm’s grave. Nanon is the Cheyenne word for scout.

“I got my friends involved, Glen Payne and his sons Bill and Larry,” Klemme said.

He also has been involved in Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center and has been a member of the Oklahoma Historical Society board of directors since 1992.

Klemme was the inspiration behind moving a 1910 watering trough on the corner of Maine and Grand on the downtown Square.

The trough was given to the city by the National Humane Alliance in 1910, and was the city’s responsibility to make sure it was filled with water, he said. By the 1930s, Enid had many cars, but few horses and it was not used. The trough, which is made of granite, was run into by a drunk driver and knocked over.

It then was moved to Government Springs Park, where it was placed in the children’s pool, he said. When the pool water became contaminated, the pool was filled with dirt around the trough. Klemme feared the trough would be removed and destroyed, so he led a movement to place it on the Square near the Cherokee Strip Conference Center.

In 1988 he began working on a commemorative stamp for the 1893 land run, and it was finally approved after Enid’s Bert Mackie became a member of U.S. Postal Service board of governors. The stamp used a sketch by Holden and became the Centennial stamp, he said.

“If not for my friends none of this would have been done,” Klemme said.

He singled out the Paynes, David Martens, Jim and Matt Parrish, Mackie and the late John Lovell.