Historical Marker
The Canadian River
Amarillo, Potter County · Texas
Erected 1967
The quarries near this copy of the plaque have a short modern history. Charles N. Gould, surveying the Canadian's water resources from 1903 to 1905, first named and recorded the Alibates dolomite ledges, and the name itself contracts that of Allie Bates, who ran an LX line camp here for his father. Floyd V. Studer is credited with discovering the quarries in modern times, and in 1930 Gould and Jesse L. Nusbaum identified Alibates flint as the source of Folsom points. The quarry pits number in the hundreds here, yet none has ever been scientifically excavated and reported.
What the plaque says
The Canadian River A travel route and dwelling site for over 12,000 years, the Canadian River supported stone and adobe Indian villages from the 12th to the 14th centuries. This waterway was also one of the first interior rivers of the U.S. known to early explorers. Coronado, coming from Mexico, crossed the Canadian in 1541 in his search for the famed city of Quivira. Juan de Onate, also seeking Quivira, saw the river in 1601. The Canadian traders Pierre and Paul Mallet followed it in 1741. Josiah Gregg, famous Missouri trader, took $25,000 worth of goods to Santa Fe along the river trails in 1839. Gold seekers bound for California were escorted along the trails in 1849 by Army Captain R.B. Marcy. During its history, the river has borne many names. The origin of the word "Canadian" is disputed. A possible source is the Caddo word "Kanohatino", which means "Red River". Some think it was named by the French-Canadians who traveled it in the 1700s, while others believe the river is called "Canadian" because it rises in a "canyon" (from the Spanish word meaning "boxed-in"). Beginning near the Colorado-New Mexico line in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Canadian flows 900 miles. Its course runs southeast, then east until it finally joins the Arkansas 36 miles from Fort Smith. (1967)
Where it stands
35.55916, -101.69271 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 1.5 miHand-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.
- Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 8.3 miA 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.
- Hutchinson County Museum — 19 miBorger'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.
- Carson County Square House Museum — 23 miThe 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.