Randall County
Canyon, Randall County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Created 1876; named for Confederate general Horace Randall. Settled 1877 by rancher Leigh Dyer, brother-in-law of Charles Goodnight, man who brought first cattle to Panhandle. Organized in 1889. County seat: Canyon. Home of West Texas State University, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Palo Duro State Park, Buffalo Lake. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Created in 1876 and named for Confederate general Horace Randall, this Panhandle county was settled in 1877 by rancher Leigh Dyer, brother-in-law of the famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, who brought the first cattle to the region. Organized in 1889 with Canyon as its seat, it later became home to West Texas State University and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. Its founding weaves together open-range ranching and the memory of the Civil War.
Why it matters
The county embodies the great age of Panhandle ranching, when cattlemen like Goodnight opened one of the last American frontiers to settlement.
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Related people
- · Horace Randall
- · Leigh Dyer
- · Charles Goodnight
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Randall County
Canyon, TX
Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Randall County was created in 1876 and organized in 1889, with Canyon as its seat. It honors Horace Randall (1821–1864), a Confederate officer who was killed leading his brigade in battle. The naming reflects how Texas, in the decades after the Civil War, memorialized its Confederate dead across the map of the settling Panhandle.
Homesite of W. F. Heller, Pioneer Farmer
Canyon, TX
A native Texan and Civil War veteran, W. F. Heller settled on this land in 1887 and became the first to farm the area successfully—no small feat on the challenging Texas plains. When the county organized in 1889 he was elected its first clerk, and he helped found both the area's first Sunday school and West Texas State Normal College. He married Susan Roberts in 1897.
T Anchor Ranch
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.
Col. John I. Gregg 1872 Battle Site
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.