Route of Marcy Trail
Canadian, Hemphill County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This overland route, blazed in 1849 by energetic and efficient Army Captain R. B. Marcy, was best known as part of the California gold trail. Starting in Oklahoma, Marcy led an expedition across the Texas Panhandle and back through central West Texas. Both of the wagon roads he laid out served the emigrant traffic. In 1853, this section was planned as part of the route for the first transcontinental railroad in America, but the Civil War shifted sentiment to northern routes. Its importance declined after the railroad came through this county, 1887. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1849 the resourceful Army Captain R. B. Marcy blazed this overland route across the Texas Panhandle, best known as a branch of the great California gold trail carrying emigrants west. His wagon roads were later eyed in 1853 as the path for the nation's first transcontinental railroad, until the Civil War pushed that dream to northern routes. The trail's importance faded once the railroad finally reached the county in 1887.
Why it matters
Marcy's trail is a thread in the epic of westward migration and the fierce sectional contest over where the transcontinental railroad would run — a rivalry the Civil War ultimately decided.
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Related people
- · R. B. Marcy
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
58 Yards West to Routes of Historic Trails
Canadian, TX
During the frenzied slaughter of the southern buffalo herds in the mid-1870s, two supply trails rose across the Texas Panhandle to feed hide hunters and their markets. Around 1876 Charles Rath blazed a road from Dodge City hauling powder, lead, whiskey, and staples toward the Double Mountains, though the best hunting was gone within two years. A second route forged by Ed Jones and Joe Plummer from Kansas to Fort Elliott outlasted the hunt, becoming first a freight road and finally a cattle trail.
Canadian River Trails
Canadian, TX
The trails along the Canadian River were ancient corridors of trade, hunting, and exploration long before Coronado followed them in 1541 chasing rumored cities of gold. Josiah Gregg led a Missouri trading party this way toward Santa Fe in 1840, and Captain R. B. Marcy escorted gold-seekers along the river in 1849. Through the 1870s and '80s hunters, cattlemen, and settlers used the same routes as the Panhandle was opened to settlement — a river whose name comes from a Spanish word for 'boxed-in.'
Former Site of Hogtown
Canadian, TX
Hogtown sprang up in 1886 as a tent city for the railroad gang laying the Southern Kansas line, earning its unflattering name from its rough, hogpen appearance. It was the forerunner of the town of Canadian, but when the landowner Sam Pollard and the railroad could not agree on a price for his land, the company simply moved the line across the river—and the people followed. The tent town was left behind, one of the West's many settlements that lived and died with the rails.
Fletcher and Donley Stage Station
Canadian, TX
In the 1870s and '80s, this stop northwest of present-day Canadian offered rest and mail service to wagon trains, buffalo-hide caravans, and cattle herds crossing the Panhandle. Run by former buffalo hunter-scout Ed Fletcher and his partners — all seasoned frontiersmen — the station was a sod-roofed log cabin flanked by a brush arbor and a pump. The area's first election was held here in 1882, on ground that would soon become Hemphill County.