Site of Store of William Henry (Pete) Snyder
Snyder, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Adventurer, Civil War veteran, whose career included mining Colorado gold, building railroads in Kansas, hauling freight and buffalo hides in Texas; opened Snyder's first trading post, 1878. Built of lumber hauled from Ft. Worth in ox-wagons by Webb Brothers, Jim, Jeff and Ben. Store furnished supplies to buffalo hunters who infiltrated area, lived in dugouts on Deep Creek. After 3 years, Snyder quit the trading business, laid out part of original townsite and sold lots from his property. Moved to Colorado City, where he died in 1916 at age of 79. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
William Henry "Pete" Snyder — a Civil War veteran who had mined Colorado gold, built Kansas railroads, and hauled freight and buffalo hides — opened Snyder's first trading post here in 1878, its lumber freighted by ox-wagon from Fort Worth. The store supplied buffalo hunters living in dugouts along Deep Creek. After three years Snyder left the trade, laid out part of the original townsite, and sold lots before moving to Colorado City, where he died in 1916.
Why it matters
Pete Snyder's trading post seeded a West Texas town and marks the buffalo-hunting frontier economy at the very edge of Anglo settlement on the plains.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1870s, the rolling country along Deep Creek was near the very edge of Anglo settlement on the Texas plains — a frontier still defined by the buffalo, the hunters who pursued them, and the long, difficult supply lines back to established towns.
This was a raw economy built on hides. Commercial buffalo hunting swept across the southern plains in these years, and where the hunters went, someone had to supply them with powder, provisions, and the goods of ordinary life. A trading post on the frontier was a lifeline, often the only fixed point of commerce for miles.
Into this world came men who had already lived several lives elsewhere on the American frontier. The story of one such man, and the trading post he opened, is the seed from which the town of Snyder grew.
People & events
William Henry Snyder — known as Pete — had the kind of restless, wide-ranging career the nineteenth-century West specialized in. A Civil War veteran and self-described adventurer, he had mined for gold in Colorado, built railroads in Kansas, and hauled freight and buffalo hides in Texas before he ever set up shop here.
In 1878 he opened Snyder's first trading post. The lumber for it was hauled all the way from Fort Worth by ox-wagon, freighted in by the Webb Brothers — Jim, Jeff, and Ben — a detail that tells you just how far this outpost sat from the nearest source of milled boards. His store furnished supplies to the buffalo hunters who had moved into the area and lived in dugouts along Deep Creek.
Snyder stayed in the trading business only about three years. When he left it, he did something that outlasted the trade itself: he laid out part of the original townsite and sold lots from his own property, turning a supply point into the framework of a town. He later moved to Colorado City, where he died in 1916 at the age of 79.
Its place in the American story
Pete Snyder's trading post is a clear window onto the buffalo-hide frontier — a brief, intense chapter when the southern plains economy ran on the hunt, and when a store selling supplies to hide hunters could be the first permanent business in a whole region.
His career reads like a map of the western frontier itself: gold in Colorado, railroads in Kansas, freight and hides in Texas. Men like Snyder followed opportunity from one edge of settlement to the next, and their movement is a large part of how the American West was knit together.
There is a deeper pattern here, too. Again and again, American towns began not with a grand plan but with a single practical enterprise — a store, a ferry, a mill — around which lots were sold and a community took shape. That a Texas county seat traces its origin and even its name to one man's frontier trading post is a vivid instance of that very American way of founding a town.
If you visit
You are standing at a beginning — the spot where a town's first store once sold flour and powder to men who slept in dugouts along a nearby creek. There is no post to see now, but the site itself is the artifact: the point from which streets and lots and a whole community were eventually measured out.
Let the frontier distances sink in. The lumber for that first building came the long, slow way by ox-wagon from Fort Worth, and the buffalo hunters it supplied lived rough on the open land around you. It is a scene worth pausing over before the modern town crowds it out of mind.
For anyone tracing the frontier history of West Texas, this marker rewards a moment of imagination more than a camera. Read the sweep of Pete Snyder's life on the plaque, look around at the town that grew from his three years in trade, and let it remind you how much of the map began with one enterprising newcomer and a wagonload of lumber.
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 people
- · William Henry "Pete" Snyder
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First State Bank Building
Snyder, TX
Built in 1907-08 beside Deep Creek, where the trail of Gen. Ranald Mackenzie's U.S. Cavalry had once run, this Snyder landmark housed the First State Bank & Trust Co., an early bank serving West Texas cattlemen and ranchers. It closed during the depression year of 1931 and afterward sheltered many tenants, including the local newspaper. Its Ionic-columned Greek Revival exterior survives unchanged from the day it was built.
City of Snyder
Snyder, TX
Snyder began in 1878 as "Hide Town," a rough camp of tents and dugouts where buffalo hunters traded on Deep Creek, taking its lasting name from trader W.H. "Pete" Snyder. The railroad's arrival in 1908 knit it into the wider economy, but it was the 1948 discovery of the vast Canyon Reef oil field that transformed the quiet county seat into an overnight boom town, tripling its population in a single year.
Ira
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The Scurry County community of Ira took its name from Ira Green, who kept a crossroads store near this spot, and its first homes and school were half-dugouts—cellars with windows set just above the ground. A post office opened in 1896, and when Block 97 was opened to settlers in 1899 the area became a busy farm and ranch community. Oil production, beginning in 1923, added a new chapter to its economy.
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