Site of Significant Archaeological Find, American Mammoths
Amarillo, Potter County, Texas
Marker Inscription
When this Santa Fe Railway general office building was erected in 1928, the remains of a mammoth were excavated from the basement and were placed in the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas. The extinct American mammoths were closely related to the modern elephants of Africa and Asia. They migrated from Asia into America early in the Pleistocene Epoch, or Ice Ages, more than 1,000,000 years ago. They thrived on this continent until the end of that epoch, when they disappeared, along with many other ice age animals such as the giant bison ground sloth, horse, camel, and other lesser animals. The causes of this extinction are still being investigated. There were several species of mammoths, some of them much larger than modern elephants. Remains of mammoths are so abundant in Pleistocene deposits of the Texas Panhandle that they serve as "Index Fossils" for beds of that age. Early inhabitants of North America, such as men of the Clovis Culture (circa 12,000 to 15,000 years ago), pursued the mammoth as a means of subsistence. Preservation of history is a policy of the Santa Fe Railway System. See exhibit, foyer of this building. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Santa Fe Railway raised this office building in 1928, workers digging the basement unearthed the bones of a mammoth, later displayed at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon. These Ice Age giants, cousins of today's elephants, roamed the Texas Panhandle in such numbers that their remains serve geologists as "index fossils" for Pleistocene deposits. Thousands of years ago, the hunters of the Clovis Culture stalked these very animals for survival.
Why it matters
It links the deep prehistory of North America — from Ice Age megafauna to the continent's earliest human hunters — to a single spot on the Amarillo plains.
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Related events
- · Clovis Culture mammoth hunting
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Potter County, Establishing of
Amarillo, TX
The land that became Potter County lay in country ranged by Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples and crossed by old Spanish and trail routes, including the Great Spanish Road of 1786 and the Fort Smith–Santa Fe Trail followed by 1849 gold seekers. Created by the legislature in 1876 while still empty, it saw Indigenous peoples forced out and buffalo replaced by longhorns, the great LX and barbed-wire Frying Pan ranches established, and finally organized by cowboy voters in 1887. Named for Republic of Texas official Robert Potter, it later gave up the vast Panhandle-Hugoton gas field and holds the Alibates flint quarries worked by prehistoric peoples as early as 10,000 B.C.
Self Sacrifice of Padre Fray Juan de Padilla - 1544
Amarillo, TX
This 1936 monument honors the Franciscan missionary Fray Juan de Padilla, who accompanied Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition into the Texas Panhandle and Palo Duro Canyon in the 1540s in search of the fabled Quivira. Returning to labor among the Wichita and other Native nations, Padilla was killed in 1544—remembered here as the first Christian martyr in what is now the United States.
Wild Horse Lake
Amarillo, TX
This shallow playa lake on the high plains long drew buffalo, wild horses, and nomadic Native peoples, and later explorers, traders, and cattle drivers who needed reliable water in a dry country. In 1887 the lakeside became the original townsite of Amarillo, but repeated flooding pushed the town a mile east to higher ground by 1890, where it grew into the great cattle- and grain-shipping hub of the Texas Panhandle. Modern drainage has since shrunk the lake that started it all.
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.