Boot Hill Cemetery

Tascosa's first sheriff filled its first grave. Caleb B. (Cape) Willingham, chosen when Oldham County organized in 1880, shot the man who was the first buried in Boot Hill. The cemetery outlasted the town it served. Once the railroad passed two miles away in 1887, Tascosa shrank to fifteen people by the time the county seat moved to Vega in 1915, and its last resident, Frenchy McCormick, widow of the town's first saloon keeper, Mickey McCormick, left for Channing in 1939. That June, Cal Farley's ranch for boys took over the site.

What the plaque says

Boot Hill Cemetery Along with law-abiding and God-fearing men and women were buried here, often without benefit of clergy, men who "died with their boots on". The name was borrowed from a cemetery in Dodge City, Kansas, while it was a resort of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 0.4 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.
• Magnolia Station, Vega — 22 mi
  A restored 1920s Magnolia filling station on Vega's Main Street, a barbershop after the pumps stopped in 1953, saved with a National Park Service grant.
• Window on the Plains Museum — 27 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Cadillac Ranch — 28 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.

More markers nearby

• Old Tascosa — 0.3 mi
• The Historic LS — 0.3 mi
• Oldham County — 0.3 mi
• Tascosa — 0.4 mi