Channel of Deep Creek
Snyder, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River; heads and ends within Scurry County. In 1870s it supplied buffalo hunters living in hide-covered half dugouts. "Pete" Snyder's trading post, which eventually grew into the county-seat town of Snyder, was located on bank. Although state surveyors had officially named it Culvers Creek, famous buffalo hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876, and soon the name became widely used. Played central role in early town life as a scene of picnics, horse races, and baptisms. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Deep Creek was once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River that both began and ended within Scurry County. In the 1870s it watered buffalo hunters camped in hide-covered dugouts, and W. H. "Pete" Snyder's trading post on its bank grew into the town of Snyder. Though official surveyors named it Culvers Creek, the famed hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876 and that name stuck, as the stream became the stage for the young town's picnics, horse races, and baptisms.
Why it matters
The creek marks the brief, transformative buffalo-hunting era that opened the West Texas plains to settlement and gave rise to a county-seat town.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1870s the southern Great Plains of West Texas were on the edge of dramatic change. For thousands of years vast herds of buffalo had grazed these grasslands. They sustained the Plains Indian peoples who hunted them and built their way of life around them. Few Anglo settlers had yet made permanent homes in this country.
That changed quickly in the 1870s. A strong market for buffalo hides, used for leather back East, drew professional hunters onto the Texas plains in large numbers. They killed buffalo on an enormous scale, and within a few years the great southern herds were nearly wiped out. The slaughter devastated the Plains tribes, whose independence depended on the buffalo. At the same time the U.S. Army was pressing Native peoples onto reservations.
With the buffalo gone and the tribes removed, the plains opened to ranchers and settlers. Creeks and springs like this one, reliable sources of water in dry country, became the places where camps, trading posts and eventually towns took root.
People & events
Deep Creek was once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River, one that both begins and ends within Scurry County. In the 1870s its water supported buffalo hunters who lived in half dugouts roofed with hides. These were rough shelters dug partly into the ground, practical in a treeless land where building materials were scarce. Life in these camps was dirty, hard and focused entirely on the hunt.
One of the people drawn to the creek was W. H. 'Pete' Snyder, who set up a trading post on its bank. Hunters needed supplies, and traders like Snyder provided them. His post became a gathering point, and over time it grew into the town that bears his name. Snyder eventually became the county seat of Scurry County.
The creek's name has a story too. State surveyors had officially recorded it as Culvers Creek. But the well-known buffalo hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876, and their name caught on and became the one everyone used. J. Wright Mooar in particular became one of the best-remembered hunters of the era. As the town grew, the creek stayed at the center of community life. It was the scene of picnics, horse races and baptisms, where early residents gathered to celebrate, compete and worship.
Its place in the American story
Deep Creek tells, in miniature, one of the most important and painful transformations in American history: the end of the great buffalo herds and the opening of the Plains to settlement. The hunters who camped along this creek were part of a slaughter that nearly wiped out an entire species. It also broke the way of life of the Plains Indian nations who had depended on the buffalo for generations.
The creek also shows how quickly the frontier turned into a settled landscape. In just a few years a hunters' trading post became a town, and the town became a county seat. That pattern, from camp to trading post to town, repeated itself across the West. Here you can trace it to one creek bank.
Finally, the creek reflects the everyday life of the communities that followed. Picnics, horse races and baptisms were the building blocks of frontier society. They show how settlers turned a remote place into a home, even as they built that home on land whose earlier way of life had just been swept away.
If you visit
As you stand by this marker in Snyder, think about how different the landscape looked in the 1870s. Picture open grassland, buffalo herds and hunters' camps dug into the banks along a spring-fed creek. The town around you grew directly out of that moment, from the trading post Pete Snyder set up on the creek's bank.
Look for traces of that buffalo-hunting heritage around town. Snyder has long embraced this part of its past, and the story of the buffalo hunters, the Mooar brothers among them, is part of local lore. Take time to consider both sides of that history: the grit of the hunters and settlers, and the loss the buffalo slaughter meant for the Plains peoples.
Snyder makes a good stop on a West Texas road trip across the Rolling Plains, where small towns, wide horizons and ranch country tell the story of how this region was settled. Imagine the creek as it was in the town's early days, a place for picnics, races and baptisms. It was where a young community came together at the water.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · W. H. "Pete" Snyder
- · John Mooar
- · J. Wright Mooar
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
City of Snyder
Snyder, TX
Snyder began in 1878 as "Hide Town," a rough camp of tents and dugouts where buffalo hunters traded on Deep Creek, taking its lasting name from trader W.H. "Pete" Snyder. The railroad's arrival in 1908 knit it into the wider economy, but it was the 1948 discovery of the vast Canyon Reef oil field that transformed the quiet county seat into an overnight boom town, tripling its population in a single year.
First State Bank Building
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Built in 1907-08 beside Deep Creek, where the trail of Gen. Ranald Mackenzie's U.S. Cavalry had once run, this Snyder landmark housed the First State Bank & Trust Co., an early bank serving West Texas cattlemen and ranchers. It closed during the depression year of 1931 and afterward sheltered many tenants, including the local newspaper. Its Ionic-columned Greek Revival exterior survives unchanged from the day it was built.
Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar
Snyder, TX
Vermont-born J. Wright Mooar came west at nineteen and, with his brother, established the first buffalo-hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle in 1873. Over his career he shot an estimated 22,000 bison — including a rare albino whose hide his descendants still preserve — and later supplied game to railroad crews and turned to ranching. His marksmanship earned the respect of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, who became his friend.
Witness Tree
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The hackberry stump across the street once served as a "witness tree" in the land surveys that carved up the West Texas frontier. Under Texas custom rooted in Spanish law, boundaries were fixed by natural and man-made witnesses and measured in varas and leagues, with grantees formally taking possession by shouting, throwing stones, and firing guns. When this land was first surveyed in 1873 for a railroad, it was still hostile country; surveyors worked with rifles on their shoulders, and only after buffalo hunters and Gen. Ranald Mackenzie's cavalry had cleared the plains did settlement follow.