Rattlesnake Butte
McCamey, Upton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Rattlesnake Butte was named for wildlife seen here in 1919 by students and professors of the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, who were working to map county resources. A meandering formation, approximately 2,600 feet in elevation, the butte and other nearby formations are part of the Central Basin Platform, which is represented by remnants of thick layers of Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rock that formerly extended across the entire county. The sections of limestone that have resisted erosion form the tops of Upton County's buttes, hills, and mesas. The geologic formations represent the area's ideal formations for the production of oil and gas. (1967, 2010)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Rattlesnake Butte earned its name from the wildlife spotted here in 1919 by students and professors of the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, who were mapping the county's resources. Rising about 2,600 feet, the butte belongs to the Central Basin Platform, its cap of erosion-resistant Lower Cretaceous limestone protecting the hills and mesas around it. Those same geologic formations proved ideal for the oil and gas production that would transform the region's economy.
Why it matters
It marks the scientific survey work that read the West Texas rock and helped unlock the Permian Basin oil boom that reshaped the state.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1919, West Texas was rugged, thinly settled country where the land itself was still being catalogued. The Progressive Era's faith in science and expert study had reached even these remote reaches, and Texas had begun sending trained observers to inventory what the state actually possessed beneath its dry surface.
Upton County sits in a landscape of buttes, mesas, and low hills — the eroded remnants of an ancient world. What survives here are the harder layers of sedimentary rock laid down when shallow seas covered this part of the continent long ago. Softer material washed away over the ages, leaving stubborn caps of limestone standing above the plain.
Into that setting came a survey party doing patient, unglamorous work: reading the rock, mapping the formations, and trying to understand what resources a young state might one day draw from the ground.
People & events
The story attached to this butte is a small, human one. Students and professors from the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology were working the county in 1919, mapping its resources formation by formation. Somewhere in that fieldwork they encountered the local wildlife that gave the rise its name — the kind of vivid, on-the-spot detail that sticks to a place long after the science is forgotten.
Their real task was more consequential than naming a landform. They were measuring elevations — this formation stands at roughly 2,600 feet — and identifying the layers of Lower Cretaceous rock that once stretched across the whole county before erosion cut it back to isolated hills.
That mapping mattered. Understanding how the layers stacked and where the resistant limestone lay was the groundwork for understanding what economic value the region might hold. A survey crew with notebooks and instruments was, in its quiet way, taking the first measure of a landscape that would soon draw very different visitors.
Its place in the American story
Across the early twentieth century, the United States was learning to turn scientific surveying into economic power. Geologists mapping remote country were not just satisfying curiosity — they were building the knowledge that industries would later exploit, from mining to petroleum.
West Texas became one of the great proving grounds for that idea. The same broad geologic setting that produced these erosion-resistant buttes is bound up with the region's reputation as an energy powerhouse, where the arrangement of ancient sedimentary layers created ideal conditions for oil and gas far below the surface.
The butte itself is a reminder that the West Texas oil story did not begin with a gusher. It began with survey parties reading the rock — the unglamorous scientific labor that let a whole region be understood before it could be developed.
If you visit
Come for the long view and the geology written plainly across the horizon. The buttes, hills, and mesas around you are not random; each is capped by the tougher limestone that outlasted the softer rock once surrounding it. Once you see that, the whole landscape reads like a diagram of deep time.
This is wide, open country, and the reward is scale and quiet. Stand a moment and picture the 1919 survey crew moving across it with instruments and field notes, naming what they saw as they went.
It fits well into a road trip through West Texas as a stop that slows you down — a place to appreciate that the dramatic energy history of this region rests, quite literally, on layers of very old stone.
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 events
- · University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology survey
Themes & tags
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