Tee Pee City
Matador, Motley County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Camp of early buffalo hunters. Only settlement west of Henrietta, north of Fort Griffin and south of Fort Elliott (now Mobeetie) 1875-1880. Headquarters of Texas Rangers under Captain G.W. Arrington at intervals, 1879-1881. Abandoned about 1886. First white child born in Motley county was Nora Cooper born here in 1882. S.N. Armstrong, pioneer merchant, buried near this site. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the late 1870s, when the southern buffalo herds were being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, Tee Pee City rose as a hunters' camp on the empty plains — for a few years the only settlement between Henrietta, Fort Griffin, and old Fort Elliott. Captain G.W. Arrington's Texas Rangers used it as a base while policing the raw frontier, and the birth of Nora Cooper here in 1882 marked the first for Motley County. By 1886 the buffalo were gone and the town with them, leaving only graves and memory.
Why it matters
Tee Pee City captures the brief, violent hinge of West Texas history when the buffalo economy collapsed and open range gave way to ranching and settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the mid-1870s, the rolling country below the Caprock in what would become Motley County lay at the edge of the known Texas world. The Red River War of 1874–75 had just ended with the Southern Plains tribes, the Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne, forced onto reservations in Indian Territory. With that resistance broken, the vast grasslands they had defended opened almost overnight to a new and very different kind of traffic.
That traffic was the buffalo hunters. Eastern tanneries had worked out how to turn bison hides into commercial leather, and railroads could now carry the hides to market. Hunters spread across the Southern Plains. In a few short years they reduced the southern herd from a vast, moving presence to scattered remnants. By around 1880 the great herds were essentially gone.
Frontier Texas was a land of enormous distances. Settlements and forts were islands in a sea of grass, often a hundred miles or more apart. Tee Pee City grew up in one of the emptiest stretches of all, with Henrietta to the east, Fort Griffin to the south and Fort Elliott far to the north in the Panhandle. For a few years nothing else stood in between.
The settlement's life matches almost exactly the hinge between two eras. One was the open plains of the bison and the tribes who followed them. The other was the fenced ranches and organized counties that came after. When it was abandoned in the mid-1880s, the big cattle ranches were already taking over the region.
People & events
Tee Pee City began as a hunters' camp. Picture a cluster of rough shelters, hide stacks and supply wagons set where there was water and grass. Men who made their living skinning bison needed somewhere to sell hides, buy powder and lead, and find a little company. In a country with no towns, a camp like this did all of that at once. For roughly five years it was the only settlement anywhere in its huge corner of the plains.
Where hunters, traders and drifters gathered, the law eventually followed. At intervals between 1879 and 1881, Captain G.W. Arrington of the Texas Rangers made Tee Pee City his headquarters. The Rangers at that time were the state's mounted frontier police. They patrolled ground where the nearest courthouse might be days away, and a base at the only settlement around made practical sense.
The town also saw the quieter milestones of settled life. In 1882 a baby named Nora Cooper was born here, the first white child born in Motley County. Her birth is a small sign that by the early 1880s some people were coming to stay, not just passing through after the herds.
One of those who stayed for good was S.N. Armstrong, a pioneer merchant buried near the site. Storekeepers like him were the backbone of frontier settlements. They extended credit, handled goods and kept a place running after the hunting crowd had moved on. By about 1886 the settlement was abandoned, and what remains is the ground, a few graves and the 1936 marker.
Its place in the American story
The slaughter of the southern bison herd is one of the most consequential and sobering episodes in American history. It happened with startling speed, and it was bound up with the forced removal of the Plains tribes, whose way of life depended on the buffalo. Camps like Tee Pee City were the working end of that process, the places where the hides were gathered and the hunters were supplied.
Tee Pee City also shows what came next. Rangers made the town a base because the state was extending law and order across territory it had only recently controlled in practice. Within a few years cattle ranching moved onto the cleared grasslands, and counties were organized. Families arrived, and a child born in a hunters' camp became a county 'first.'
Across the West, places like this appeared fast and vanished almost as fast. They existed to serve one resource or one moment, and when it passed they were left behind. Tee Pee City's whole life lasted barely a decade. It is a compact case study in how the frontier actually worked: quickly and roughly, and for a short time.
Remembering it means remembering all of it, including the hunters' hard work, the Rangers' patrols and the first families. It also means remembering the ecological and human loss on which that brief boom was built.
If you visit
Don't expect ruins or buildings. Tee Pee City is a ghost town in the truest sense, and the marker is mostly what announces it. The interest here is the landscape: open, rolling ranch country under a huge sky. That is the same kind of land that once held the bison and the hunters who followed them.
Stand by the marker and try to see the distances the inscription describes. The nearest settlements were days away by horse or wagon in every direction. Few places in Texas make that frontier isolation feel as real.
The site fits naturally into a drive across the Rolling Plains and the country below the Caprock, where small ranching towns sit far apart. Pair it with other frontier and ranching markers in the area for a full picture of how this region moved from buffalo range to cattle country.
This is remote ranch land, so plan ahead for fuel, water and food. Respect private property and any posted fences, and treat the area as a burial ground, since the inscription notes that a pioneer merchant lies nearby.
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
- · Capt. G.W. Arrington
- · Nora Cooper
- · S.N. Armstrong
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tee Pee City
Matador, TX
In the 1870s, when the southern buffalo herd still darkened the plains of West Texas, traders threw up a rough camp of picket houses and tents where the Middle Pease River meets Tee Pee Creek, naming it for the abandoned tipi poles scattered along the water. Charles Rath and his partners hauled in wagons, cattle, and dance-hall gear to profit from the hide trade before moving on. As the hunters emptied the range, Tee Pee City settled into a hard-drinking outpost of saloons, gambling, and gunplay wild enough to draw the Texas Rangers, until the Matador Land and Cattle Company bought the land and shut the saloon in 1904.
Motley County Jail
Matador, TX
This two-story stone jail went up in 1891, the very year Motley County was organized on the rolling plains of the Texas Panhandle, built by local contractors under the county's first judge and commissioners. Cells filled the upper floor while the jailer and his family lived below. The county's first courthouse, raised the same year, later burned, leaving the jail as one of the oldest surviving symbols of the county's frontier beginnings.
Traweek House
Matador, TX
Dr. Albert Carroll Traweek and his wife Allie came to the West Texas town of Matador soon after their 1897 marriage, and he built a practice riding on horseback and by buggy to reach patients scattered across the county. Renowned as the 'Pneumonia Doctor,' he founded a hospital and served as the county's first public health officer. After fire destroyed an earlier dwelling, this two-story stuccoed home was completed in 1916 for $14,000, its blend of Italian Renaissance, Prairie, and Classical Revival styles designed by builder Charles Stephens Oates. Visitors over the years included Baldwin Parker, son of Comanche chief Quanah Parker.
Motley County
Matador, TX
Carved from earlier Young and Bexar territories, Motley County was created in 1876 and organized in 1891, with Matador as its seat. It honors Dr. Junius William Motley, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence who served as an aide to General Rusk and was mortally wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. The county's name misspells his—Motley for Mott—an error preserved in law.