Bents Creek

The post on Bent's Creek had a short, uneasy life. The Handbook of Texas says the Bents' traders worked first from tepees and log buildings, and that sometime after September 1845 William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain brought Mexican adobe makers to raise Fort Adobe, eighty feet square with nine-foot walls and one gate. By 1848 hostility had closed it. One later party traded with Comanche visitors through a window cut in the wall, and in 1849 Bent blew up the fort's interior with gunpowder and left the trade to the Comancheros.

What the plaque says

(About 1.5 miles east) Named for Charles (1799-1847) and William Bent (1809-1869), famed for frontier trading with mountain men and "wild" Indians. As early as 1835 they came from their headquarters near present La Junta, Colo., to trade with the Kiowas and Comanches along the Canadian River, in this vicinity. They built at least three posts along the river and tributary creeks; most permanent post was Fort Adobe, built 1843-1844. In the ruins of this fort (NE of here) Kit Carson fought his last big Indian battle (1864), and buffalo hunters and Indians fought the Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 5.2 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.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 20 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.
• White Deer Land Museum — 29 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.

More markers nearby

• Fifteen miles to the Site of the Battle of Adobe Walls — steps away
• Plemons Cemetery — steps away
• Gulf Dial #1 Oil Well — 3.4 mi
• Twentieth Century Club — 5.2 mi