Boot Hill Cemetery
Boys Ranch, Oldham County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Along with law-abiding and God-fearing men and women were buried here, often without benefit of clergy, men who "died with their boots on". The name was borrowed from a cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas, while it was a resort of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, this burial ground took its nickname from the famous Boot Hill of Dodge City, Kansas — a place where men "died with their boots on" in the rough world of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Alongside those violent ends rest law-abiding settlers, laid here in the 1870s and 1880s when the region was a hard frontier crossroads. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of the buffalo-hunting and cattle-driving frontier, a fleeting but formative chapter in the settlement of the American West.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Tascosa
Boys Ranch, TX
Just northeast of here sprawled Old Tascosa, the self-styled cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle. An easy crossing of the Canadian River made it a trading spot long before permanent settlement, and after the buffalo vanished, sheepherders, then cattlemen like Charles Goodnight, poured in during 1876. Isolated hundreds of miles from other towns, Tascosa drew gunmen and lawmen alike and buried its dead in its own Boot Hill—until barbed wire, the giant XIT Ranch, and a bypassing railroad choked off the open range and left it a ghost town.
The Historic LS
Boys Ranch, TX
Founded in the 1870s by frontier trader W.M.D. Lee and New York financier Lucien Scott, the LS grew into one of the great cattle empires of the Texas Panhandle, running more than 100,000 head and driving herds up the trail each year. Its range brushed against legends — Billy the Kid rode through, and the surrounding country saw Tascosa gunfights fill Boot Hill. Drought in 1886 and the vast XIT land grant cut the LS down, but the brand endured through later owners, including one cowboy, E.L. Doheny, who left the $25-a-month saddle to become an oil magnate ensnared in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Oldham County
Boys Ranch, TX
Carved from Young and Bexar lands and created in 1876, Oldham County was organized in 1881 in the far Texas Panhandle. It honors Williamson Simpson Oldham, an Arkansas lawyer and jurist who served in the Confederate Senate representing Texas. Its first county seat was Tascosa, a rowdy cow-town of the open range, before the seat moved to Vega in 1915.
Tascosa
Boys Ranch, TX
For a rowdy decade beginning in 1877, Tascosa was the cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle, a wide-open town where hands from the great ranches gathered and where legends like Billy the Kid were said to pass through. Its name garbled the Spanish Atascoso, or "boggy," first attached to a nearby creek. It served as seat of Oldham County until 1915, then faded into the frontier legend celebrated in Wild West fiction.