Tascosa Courthouse, 1884.
Boys Ranch, Oldham County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Served 12 counties in Panhandle. Site of trials for killings that had filled Boothill Cemetery. Until 1915 Oldham County seat. Many years headquarters, Julian Bivins Ranch. Birthplace of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, 1939. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1884, the Tascosa courthouse served twelve counties across the Texas Panhandle and hosted trials for the gunfights that filled the town's notorious Boothill Cemetery. It remained the seat of Oldham County until 1915 and for years served as headquarters of the Julian Bivins Ranch. In 1939 the building became the birthplace of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, a home for troubled boys that gave the old frontier town a new life.
Why it matters
The courthouse ties the lawless cattle-town era of the Panhandle to its later reinvention as a haven for children, one building spanning two very different chapters of Texas history.
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Related people
- · Julian Bivins
- · Cal Farley
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tascosa
Boys Ranch, TX
For a rowdy decade beginning in 1877, Tascosa was the cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle, a wide-open town where hands from the great ranches gathered and where legends like Billy the Kid were said to pass through. Its name garbled the Spanish Atascoso, or "boggy," first attached to a nearby creek. It served as seat of Oldham County until 1915, then faded into the frontier legend celebrated in Wild West fiction.
Boot Hill Cemetery
Boys Ranch, TX
On the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, this burial ground took its nickname from the famous Boot Hill of Dodge City, Kansas — a place where men "died with their boots on" in the rough world of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Alongside those violent ends rest law-abiding settlers, laid here in the 1870s and 1880s when the region was a hard frontier crossroads. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.
Old Tascosa
Boys Ranch, TX
Just northeast of here sprawled Old Tascosa, the self-styled cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle. An easy crossing of the Canadian River made it a trading spot long before permanent settlement, and after the buffalo vanished, sheepherders, then cattlemen like Charles Goodnight, poured in during 1876. Isolated hundreds of miles from other towns, Tascosa drew gunmen and lawmen alike and buried its dead in its own Boot Hill—until barbed wire, the giant XIT Ranch, and a bypassing railroad choked off the open range and left it a ghost town.
The Historic LS
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Founded in the 1870s by frontier trader W.M.D. Lee and New York financier Lucien Scott, the LS grew into one of the great cattle empires of the Texas Panhandle, running more than 100,000 head and driving herds up the trail each year. Its range brushed against legends — Billy the Kid rode through, and the surrounding country saw Tascosa gunfights fill Boot Hill. Drought in 1886 and the vast XIT land grant cut the LS down, but the brand endured through later owners, including one cowboy, E.L. Doheny, who left the $25-a-month saddle to become an oil magnate ensnared in the Teapot Dome scandal.