Channel of Deep Creek

The Handbook of Texas traces Deep Creek from its head near Farm Road 1269, four miles north of Fluvanna, seventy miles south-southeast to the Colorado River a mile below the Mitchell County line. The bed falls about 700 feet from 2,820 feet at its head, and the creek passes through Snyder halfway along its course, becoming a flowing stream near the city's southern limits. Its first name, Culver's Creek, honored Ira Culver, an army surgeon with an 1873 expedition. Early Snyder settlers fished it, and residents later built a park on its banks.

What the plaque says

Once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River; heads and ends within Scurry County. In 1870s it supplied buffalo hunters living in hide-covered half dugouts. "Pete" Snyder's trading post, which eventually grew into the county-seat town of Snyder, was located on bank. Although state surveyors had officially named it Culvers Creek, famous buffalo hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876, and soon the name became widely used. Played central role in early town life as a scene of picnics, horse races, and baptisms. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 2.6 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.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 23 mi
  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.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 32 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

• City of Snyder — steps away
• Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar — steps away
• Scurry County's Canyon Reef Oil Field — steps away
• Santa Fe Railway in Scurry County — steps away