Town of Buffalo Gap
Buffalo Gap, Taylor County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Probably named for the pass in Callahan Divide (mountains) crossed by thousands of buffalo that once inhabited this area. Besides providing the native Apache and Comanche Indians with food, buffaloes drew the first white hunters here, about 1874. First homes in present town were dugouts of buffalo hunters. The community began to grow in 1878 when it was named county seat and was located on the western cattle trail. In 1883, however, the new railroad town of Abilene became county seat and Buffalo Gap, like so many small Texas towns, lost prestige.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Buffalo Gap takes its name from the pass in the Callahan Divide that funneled the great herds — buffalo that fed the Apache and Comanche and later drew white hunters around 1874, whose dugouts became the town's first homes. Named county seat in 1878 and sitting on the Western Cattle Trail, it briefly flourished, only to be eclipsed in 1883 when the railroad crowned nearby Abilene as county seat. Its rise and decline mirror dozens of small Texas towns that lived and died by the trail and the rail.
Why it matters
Buffalo Gap compresses the whole arc of the West Texas frontier — Indigenous homeland, buffalo range, cattle-trail boomtown, and railroad-bypassed also-ran — into a single place.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Vicinity of Indian Fight
Buffalo Gap, TX
On August 29, 1863, Lt. T.C. Wright and eleven Texas state troopers overtook a party of raiders, probably Comanches, driving stolen horses north from Mason County. Forced to charge uphill against a larger, determined foe, the outnumbered soldiers, two badly wounded by arrows, finally broke off, and the raiders escaped with the herd. A lone rider slipped away in the dark to summon an ambulance from Camp Colorado, forty-five miles distant.
In Vicinity of Coronado's Camp
Abilene, TX
In 1541 the Spanish explorer Coronado is thought to have crossed this region while searching for the fabled riches of Quivira, though his exact route over the Texas plains is now lost. Realizing his guide, dubbed "The Turk," had led him too far south, Coronado halted at a small canyon, conferred with his captains, and turned his compass due north. When he finally reached Quivira, likely in present-day Kansas, he found no gold — only the grass huts of a Wichita village.
Vicinity of Indian Fight
Merkel, TX
On New Year's Day 1871, a party of 18 Texas Rangers and cowboys overtook Indian raiders here who had driven off horses stolen in Coleman County. The raiders took cover in the heights west of Mountain Pass, and the running fight lasted all day before they abandoned the horses and slipped away at nightfall. One of the pursuers, J.M. Elkins, later recorded the clash in his memoir of frontier fighting.
Near Site of Indian Battle
Merkel, TX
On February 15, 1870, Corporal Hilliard Morrow and five soldiers of Company E, 24th U.S. Infantry, rode from Fort Griffin to relieve the guard at the Mountain Pass mail station. Soon after they arrived, a Comanche raiding party estimated at seventy-five warriors besieged them, but the vastly outnumbered soldiers held their ground and drove off the attack, losing no men though the raiders made off with army mules and a horse from the mail company.