Buffalo Trails

The Handbook of Texas ties the great slaughter to the railroad: once the Union Pacific was finished in 1869, hides could be shipped east at a profit, and the buffalo were split into a northern and a southern herd. The northern hunts ran from 1880 to 1884. Dakota Territory shipped 200,000 hides in 1882, 40,000 in 1883 and a single carload in 1884, and the Handbook estimates that for every two hides shipped, three were lost. At least 5,000 hunters and skinners worked the northern range in 1882, most of them frontiersmen from Kansas and other border states.

What the plaque says

These tracks, originally formed in soft dirt, are taken from an ancient buffalo trail which once guided herds to water at Champion Creek (6 miles south). Thousands of buffalo running single file pounded trails like this deep into the ground. When any one route became too deep, they started another, over the years making many side by side. Trails to grazing areas radiated from watering holes. Migratory trails stretched from the Rio Grande to Canada, usually following high, level ground in order to avoid winter snowdrifts and summer muck. Brothers J. Wright and John Mooar, Mitchell County businessmen and famous buffalo hunters, helped to kill thousands (including a white buffalo), 1870 to 1877. Chief product was the hide, but tongues, humps, and hams were also sold. Buffalo were so plentiful that in 1872 Mooar saw a northward migration of millions taking over 6 weeks to cross the Arkansas River. In their time, buffalo trails aided the Indians, who followed them to the animals feeding grounds. Later, explorers blazed new roads along them, and railroad engineers more than once used their exact routes. In this way, the buffalo trail was a key to the opening of transportation and settlement across the U.S. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart of West Texas Museum — steps away
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 5.9 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• Scurry County Museum — 20 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 24 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• Texas & Pacific Railway — 0.2 mi
• The Founding of Colorado City — 0.3 mi
• Mitchell County — 0.3 mi
• Col-Tex Refinery — 0.7 mi