The Old Buffalo Road
Electra, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Named for its traffic in buffalo hides and bones, this north Texas road gave subsistence to pioneers while aiding in mass "harvest" of the American bison. As long as buffalo survived (providing food, shelter and clothing) the Indians were lords of the plains. Recognizing this, the authorities encouraged hunting. Harvested hides were taken to market over this road. The buffalo and Indians gone, permanent settlers arrived. In adverse years (while a man tried to get a start at farming, ranching or storekeeping), bones were salvaged and sold for grocery or seed money. This old road was route of hundreds of wagons taking buffalo hides to market before 1878 and hundreds of wagons taking bones to Wichita Falls and Henrietta before 1890. The road came east from the plains, near south line of Foard and Wilbarger counties to Guide Mound; then three miles east (near this marker) and south to Wichita River bridge; then to the county line three miles west of Holliday. Next it passed the north edge of Holliday, and south of Lake Wichita, then crossed at the Old Van Dorn crossing five miles south of Jolly. Pioneers also called it "Great North" Road or "Good Creek" Road. It proved invaluable to economy and mapping of area.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This North Texas road took its name from the buffalo hides and bones that moved along it, and it tells the grim story of the American bison's near-extinction. As long as the herds survived, the Plains Indians held the land; authorities encouraged the hunting precisely to break that hold. Hundreds of wagons hauled hides to market over this road before 1878, and after the herds were gone, struggling settlers gathered and sold the leftover bones to Wichita Falls and Henrietta into the 1890s, earning grocery and seed money in hard years.
Why it matters
The Old Buffalo Road traces one of the West's most consequential and troubling transformations—the deliberate destruction of the bison that dispossessed Native nations and opened the plains to settlement.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Van Dorn Trail
Iowa Park, TX
In September 1858, Brevet Major Earl Van Dorn led 200 troopers of the elite 2nd U.S. Cavalry across this stretch of North Texas, blazing the county's first important wagon road as he pushed toward Comanche country. Ahead rode young "Sul" Ross with 100 reservation scouts guided by the loyal Tonkawa chief Placido. The campaign that followed brought sharp fighting near Rush Springs and later victories in Kansas, and the trail's deep ruts, cut by army supply wagons, later guided pioneer settlers into the region.
Jonathan Doan
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A Quaker trader known for keeping peace on a violent frontier, Jonathan Doan came from Ohio into the hides trade of Indian Territory in the mid-1870s. In 1878 he opened a trading post at the Western Cattle Trail's Red River crossing — the famous Doan's Store — soon run by his nephew C. F. Doan. Respected by Indians, cattlemen, and frontiersmen alike, the Doans became fixtures of the great trail-driving era.
Early Wilbarger County
Vernon, TX
Organized in 1858 on the rolling plains of North Texas, Wilbarger County took its name from early settlers, including surveyor Josiah Wilbarger, famous for surviving a scalping. The land here was frontier in the fullest sense: the Doan brothers' adobe house marked the Red River crossing of the Western Cattle Trail, where great herds forded on their way north. The county seat of Vernon, once called Eagle Flat, gained a railroad in 1886 as the open range gave way to towns and rails.
Cambridge
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Founded in 1860, Cambridge was abandoned in 1863 as frontier raids swept the area, then revived when settlers returned in 1870 with a grist mill. By the mid-1870s it had a school, church, hotel, newspaper, and a military telegraph line linking Fort Sill and Fort Richardson. When the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad bypassed it in 1882, the town—by then called Henrietta—shifted, and only its cemetery remains at the original site.