Randall County

Canyon, TX

Sam Wood raised this cabin in 1887 at Hog Town, now a Panhandle ghost town. A Union Civil War veteran, buffalo hunter, and Indian scout, Wood was father of the bride in the first marriage recorded in the Panhandle, held at Fort Elliott in 1877, and his cabin once sheltered six families during an Indian scare. Moved and restored in 1954, it survives as a rare relic of frontier life on the high plains.

Canyon, TX

In the fall of 1877, cattlemen drove some 400 head to Spring Draw and raised a two-room log cabin, seeding one of the Panhandle's great open-range operations. Under the firm of Gunter, Munson & Summerfield, cowboys strung the area's first barbed wire around 240,000 acres and, in 1882, moved more than 10,600 cattle in what was called the largest drive on record. Through strikes, drought and blizzard the T Anchor endured, and when Randall County organized in 1889 six of its first officers were ranch hands, before the land was broken into smaller farms and ranches after 1902.

Canyon, TX

After the Civil War, waves of settlers pushed west onto the Great Plains and clashed with the Native nations who lived there, prompting Army campaigns against the Southern Plains tribes. In 1872 Colonel John I. Gregg led Eighth Cavalry troops from New Mexico into West Texas hunting raiders, and on August 16 they skirmished with Kiowas near this spot. That fight, with the later Red River War of 1874-75, drove the subjugation of the Plains tribes and their confinement to reservations.

Canyon, TX

Created in 1876 and named for Confederate general Horace Randal, this Panhandle county was first settled in 1877 by rancher Leigh Dyer, brother-in-law of the famed Charles Goodnight, who brought the first cattle to the region. Organized in 1889 with Canyon as its seat, it grew into the home of West Texas State University, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, and Palo Duro Canyon.