Heartland of Old XIT Ranch

🏛️The era

In the early 1880s, Texas had a problem and a solution. The state wanted a grand new capitol in Austin, but it was short on cash and long on land, especially in the remote Panhandle, which had only recently been cleared of the Comanche and the buffalo herds. So Texas did what it had done before: it paid in land.

Under an 1882 contract, out-of-state investors agreed to build the capitol in exchange for three million acres in the Panhandle. The result was a massive granite statehouse in Austin, the largest state capitol in North America, and, far to the northwest, a single ranch of almost unimaginable size.

This was the era of the great cattle boom. Investors from the East and from Britain poured money into Western ranching, convinced that grass and cattle were a sure path to fortune. Barbed wire, invented only a few years earlier, made it possible to fence the open range, and railroads were reaching toward the High Plains. The XIT stood right where all of those forces met.

👥People & events

The contractors were led by two wealthy Chicago merchants, John V. Farwell and his brother, Senator C. B. Farwell. In return for building the capitol, their group received a grant some 200 miles long, running from near present-day Lubbock to the Oklahoma line. It covered land in ten counties: Bailey, Castro, Cochran, Dallam, Deaf Smith, Hartley, Hockley, Lamb, Oldham, and Parmer. In time the ranch was enclosed by roughly 6,000 miles of barbed wire.

To turn that grass into a working ranch, the investors needed cattle and men who could drive them. In 1885, trail boss Abner Blocker delivered the first herd to Buffalo Springs, which became the ranch's headquarters. According to the story the marker preserves, Blocker scratched the letters XIT into the corral dust with his boot heel. It was a brand hard to alter with a running iron, and it became one of the most famous in the West.

People have long tried to explain the letters. A popular tale holds that XIT means Ten in Texas, a nod to the ten counties, but historians treat that as folklore rather than established fact. What is certain is that the brand became shorthand for the biggest, boldest ranching venture of its day.

The XIT could not last forever at that size. The land was eventually divided and sold, and farms, towns, and smaller ranches took its place. The cowboys were not forgotten. In 1940, Dalhart dedicated this empty saddle monument, designed by Western artist Bobby Dycke, as a permanent tribute to the XIT's range riders, and the town still holds an annual XIT reunion with a rodeo and a parade featuring a riderless horse.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The XIT shows the American West being built from capital and contracts as much as from courage. Its story ties together a state government trading land for a public building, Chicago merchants and outside investors financing a cattle empire, barbed wire fencing the open range, and cowboys doing the daily work. Those threads run through the whole history of Western expansion.

It also marks a turning point. The great ranches of the 1880s were part of the brief, dramatic age of the open range, which gave way to fenced pastures, railroads, and farming within a generation. The XIT's eventual breakup and sale into smaller holdings followed that larger pattern, as the Panhandle filled with farms and towns.

And the XIT lives on in American memory. Images of the cowboy, the trail boss, and the great ranch became central to how the nation sees itself, through novels, films, and rodeos. The empty saddle monument in Dalhart honors the real working cowboys behind that myth, who were often young and poorly paid, and whose labor made the legend possible.

🧭If you visit

Dalhart sits on the High Plains of the far northwest Texas Panhandle, where the land is wide, the wind is steady, and the horizon seems endless. Standing at the empty saddle monument, you are about 32 miles south of the old Buffalo Springs headquarters and inside the vast territory the XIT once covered. Let the scale sink in: one ranch stretched about 200 miles from here toward Lubbock.

The monument itself is the point of the visit. A saddle with no rider is a deliberate symbol of absence and remembrance, honoring the cowboys who are gone. If you are in town during the annual XIT reunion, you can join the rodeo and parade, where a horse with an empty saddle carries the same tribute down the street.

This stop is a natural anchor for a Panhandle road trip built around ranching history. Pair it with a visit to the Texas Capitol in Austin, the building the XIT paid for, for a trip that connects a granite statehouse to the grasslands that bought it. Families with kids can make a game of spotting brands and cattle along the way.