Old Dewey Lake
Crosbyton, Crosby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Once an important landmark for early surveys of this area, Dewey Lake got its name after surveyors returned from here to headquarters and found, to their embarrassment, they had not yet named this site. Gallantly, they decided to call it after land office employee Miss Dewey. Lake Shore was site of Texas Ranger Camp "Roberts" (1879-1882) and the "Stag House," barracks for the cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. Surveyors often camped here, too. The lake disappeared in the 1880s after two creeks eroded its shores, forming a new channel which drained the lake basin. 1968
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Old Dewey Lake served as a key landmark for early surveyors of the South Plains, reportedly named for a land-office employee, Miss Dewey, after crews realized they had forgotten to name the site. Its shores hosted Texas Ranger Camp Roberts from 1879 to 1882 and the "Stag House" bunkhouse for cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. The lake itself vanished in the 1880s when eroding creeks cut a new channel and drained the basin.
Why it matters
The lost lake captures the frontier world of surveyors, Rangers, and open-range ranching that briefly ordered the West Texas plains before settlement transformed them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the late 1870s, the high, wind-swept South Plains of West Texas were on the edge of enormous change. For generations this country had been Comanche and Kiowa homeland and buffalo range. After the Red River War of the mid-1870s and the near-destruction of the great buffalo herds, the U.S. Army and Texas authorities pushed the region open to Anglo-American ranching and settlement.
What followed happened fast. Surveyors came to measure the land into sections the state could sell or grant. Texas Rangers set up camps to keep order in a sparsely populated region. Big cattle outfits moved their herds onto the open grass. In open country with few landmarks, any reliable water source was valuable, so a lake on the plains became a natural gathering point.
This was the short open-range era, before barbed wire, railroads, and farm towns changed the plains again. Old Dewey Lake belongs to that brief window, and fittingly, the lake itself didn't outlast it.
People & events
The lake's name comes from a small comedy at the land office. Surveyors working this country made it back to headquarters and realized, with some embarrassment, that they'd never named the lake that had been one of their main reference points. They chose to honor a land office employee, Miss Dewey, and the name stuck. It's a reminder that the lines and names on early Texas maps were often made by tired people working quickly and sometimes improvising.
The lake was more than a surveyor's landmark. From 1879 to 1882, Texas Rangers kept a camp on its shore, Camp "Roberts," which gave the law a foothold in a region where the nearest settled communities were very far off. The Two Buckle Ranch's cowboys also bunked here in a building nicknamed the "Stag House," a name that says something about life in an all-male cow camp on the plains.
Surveyors kept camping by the water too, so for a few years the shoreline was a crossroads of the frontier's main working groups: men who measured land, men who policed it, and men who worked cattle on it. Then, during the 1880s, two creeks cut into the lake's banks and carved a new channel, and the water drained out of the basin. The lake that had organized so much frontier activity simply disappeared.
Its place in the American story
Old Dewey Lake is a small piece of one of the biggest transformations in American history: the closing of the Great Plains frontier. The sequence of events here, with surveyors first, Rangers right behind them, and then large cattle ranches, repeated itself across the West in the decades after the Civil War.
The survey work especially had national weight. Turning open grassland into measured, saleable sections was the legal groundwork for everything that followed, including ranches, farms, towns, and railroads. In Texas, which kept control of its public lands when it joined the Union, the state land office played the part federal surveys played elsewhere, and the people who worked there, Miss Dewey among them, quietly shaped the map.
The lake's disappearance also carries a lesson. The plains could look permanent and unchanging, but water there was fragile. Settlers across the West learned that landscapes they relied on could shift under them, and the history of the Great Plains has been shaped again and again by questions of water.
If you visit
Don't come expecting a lake. What you'll find is the memory of one. The interest here is in reading the land: look for the low basin and the creek channels that ended the lake, and imagine a sheet of water shining on the open plains with a Ranger camp and a cowboy bunkhouse on its shore.
The Crosbyton area sits in big-sky country near the edge of the Caprock, where the high plains break into canyons and rough land. Even a short stop here gives you a sense of the scale and the openness early surveyors and riders faced.
Old Dewey Lake is a nice addition to a West Texas road trip about ranching and frontier history. Pair it with other markers and museums in the region that tell the story of the open-range era, and you'll come away understanding how quickly this country changed, from buffalo range to ranch land to farm towns, within a single lifetime.
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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Themes & tags
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