6666 Dixon Creek Ranch

Burk Burnett bought this range from the British-owned White Deer Lands in 1902: 107,520 acres in Carson and Hutchinson counties at $2.65 an acre, land earlier leased to Al Popham and J. L. Harrison. It offset the loss of his grazing leases on Kiowa-Comanche land in Indian Territory, which the government was opening to settlement. Dixon Creek became the Four Sixes' stocker division, receiving calves from Burnett's other ranches. A blizzard in 1918 killed 2,000 cattle here. The stone headquarters house stands off State Highway 207 north of Panhandle.

What the plaque says

6666 Dixon Creek Ranch Takes name from creek where noted buffalo hunter and scout Billy Dixon established first dugout home on High Plains, 1874. Ranch founded, 1882, by Francklyn Land and Cattle Co., English firm backed by Cunard Steamship Co. Fenced, 1884, with barbed wire hauled here from railroad at Dodge City; posts were of Palo Duro Canyon cedars. Purchased in 1903 by S. Burk Burnett (1849-1922), trail driver, rancher; an organizer and for 45 years on executive board, Texas Cattle Raisers Association. Host during 1905 wolf hunt to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. (1965) (Ranch not open to public.)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 9.1 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 12 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 14 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 17 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.

More markers nearby

• Gulf Burnett No. 2 (Carson County Oil Discovery Well) — 4.3 mi
• First Rotary Drilling Rig Used in Texas Panhandle — 4.3 mi
• Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail — 7.8 mi
• Beale Road — 7.9 mi