Tex Randall
Canyon, Randall County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The 47-foot, seven-ton cowboy statue, known as Tex Randall, is considered a Texas icon. Designer and builder Harry Wheeler created the cowboy in 1959 as a roadside phenomenon to welcome travelers to his Corral curio shop on U.S. Highway 60 west to New Mexico. The giant cowboy relates to the western heritage of the Texas panhandle as well as symbolizing the state of Texas. William Harry Wheeler (1914-1997) was born in Hartley, Texas in the panhandle and died in Amarillo. He was a teacher by profession, but in the 1950s, he sought a way to supplement his income and opened a curio shop along the highway. After three years, he moved the shop across the highway and began his masterpiece, the Big Cowboy. For ten months, Wheeler worked with six-inch wire mesh, rebar and concrete. A friend helped weld the pipe and rebar to the frame. The concrete cowboy was covered with burlap to protect it from the elements. Levi-Strauss made the pants and Amarillo Awning made the shirt, a surface total of 1,440 square feet. Dressing the statue was completed by hand-stitching the clothes in back with sailboat thread, and the shirt was decorated with sheet aluminum buttons covered with vinyl. In true Texas style, the cowboy was adorned with a Stetson-style hat. Wheeler soon added a six-room motel for visitors. Due to reconstruction of the highway, the tourist trade at his shop declined. Wheeler sold the property in 1963. Harry Wheeler's vision, dedication and attention to detail sealed his creation as a landmark and tourist attraction. The giant cowboy became Wheeler's lasting contribution to Texas heritage and history. (2013)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1959, along U.S. Highway 60 west toward New Mexico, teacher-turned-curio-shop-owner Harry Wheeler set out to lure travelers with something unmissable: a 47-foot, seven-ton concrete cowboy. Over ten months he shaped wire mesh, rebar and concrete into the figure, then dressed it in Levi-Strauss pants and a hand-stitched shirt topped with a Stetson-style hat. Highway reconstruction thinned his tourist trade and he sold the property in 1963, but 'Tex Randall' endured as a beloved roadside landmark of the Texas Panhandle.
Why it matters
Giant roadside figures like Tex Randall are folk monuments of the mid-century American car culture, when the open highway itself became a stage for outsized homegrown showmanship.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1959, America had fallen in love with the open road. The postwar years had put millions of families behind the wheel, and long stretches of two-lane federal highway like U.S. 60 — running west from the Texas Panhandle toward New Mexico — had become ribbons of motion dotted with motels, diners, curio shops, and gas stations all competing for the eye of a passing driver.
Canyon sat squarely in this landscape, out on the high plains near Amarillo, where the horizon is enormous and a lone traveler could drive a long way between reasons to stop. To make a living off that traffic, a roadside merchant needed something a driver could see coming — and could not resist pulling over to look at.
This was also cattle country to its bones, a place proud of its ranching heritage and its identity as the biggest, boldest corner of a big, bold state. When a local man went looking for a way to draw travelers off the highway, he reached for the most Texas image there was.
People & events
William Harry Wheeler was born in the Panhandle town of Hartley in 1914 and was a teacher by profession. In the 1950s, looking to supplement his income, he opened a curio shop along U.S. Highway 60 to catch the tourist trade. After three years he moved the shop across the highway — and began his masterpiece.
For ten months he labored over what he called the Big Cowboy: a forty-seven-foot, seven-ton figure built up from six-inch wire mesh, rebar, and concrete, with a friend welding pipe and rebar to the frame. He wrapped the finished giant in burlap to shield it from the plains weather. Then came the details that made it unforgettable. Levi-Strauss made the pants and Amarillo Awning made the shirt — some 1,440 square feet of fabric in all — and the clothes were hand-stitched up the back with sailboat thread. The shirt's buttons were sheet aluminum covered in vinyl, and the whole colossus was crowned, in true Texas style, with a Stetson-style hat.
The cowboy — known as Tex Randall — did its job, and Wheeler soon added a six-room motel for the visitors it drew. But the highway that made him also unmade him: reconstruction of the road thinned the passing trade, and in 1963 Wheeler sold the property. He died in Amarillo in 1997. His giant cowboy outlived the shop it was built to advertise and became something its maker may never have fully intended — a beloved landmark in its own right.
Its place in the American story
Tex Randall belongs to one of the most distinctly American of art forms: the giant roadside figure. Along the mid-century highways, entrepreneurs raised colossal cowboys, lumberjacks, dinosaurs, and muffler men not as fine art but as commerce — beacons meant to stop a car doing sixty. In the process they created a folk-monument tradition that mapped the country's regional identities in concrete and fiberglass.
What makes Wheeler's cowboy resonate beyond Canyon is that it was homemade. This was not a factory-produced figure ordered from a catalog but the ten-month obsession of a schoolteacher working with mesh, rebar, and sailboat thread. That handcrafted ambition — one person betting a small fortune of labor on a single unmissable object — is the essence of the roadside-attraction era's outsized, do-it-yourself showmanship.
The cowboy's own story also traces the rise and fall of the great American two-lane road. Figures like this flourished when travelers rolled slowly through the countryside and needed reasons to stop; many faded when highway rebuilding and faster routes rerouted the traffic away. That Tex Randall was born of the highway and then stranded by it makes him a monument not only to Texas heritage but to a whole vanished rhythm of travel.
If you visit
Come for the sheer scale of the thing. A forty-seven-foot cowboy is meant to be seen and photographed, and the pleasure of it is exactly the pleasure Harry Wheeler was selling in 1959 — the delight of a driver spotting something impossible on the horizon and pulling over to crane a neck. Stand at his boots and look up, and you feel the ambition of ten months' handwork.
Read the details the marker preserves and you'll look at the statue differently: the concrete under burlap, the hand-stitched clothing seamed up the back, the sheet-aluminum buttons, the Stetson-style hat. Knowing a schoolteacher built this to lure travelers off U.S. 60 turns a photo stop into a small lesson in mid-century American hustle.
Tex Randall fits perfectly into a Panhandle road trip, which is the most fitting way to meet him — approached, as he was designed to be, from the highway. Treat him as one bold exclamation point among Canyon's quieter historical stops, and let the contrast between the giant cowboy and the wide, still plains around him do its work.
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
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Themes & tags
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