Comanche War Trail

The Comanches were traders as well as horsemen, and they controlled much of the commerce of the Southern Plains. They bartered buffalo products, horses and captives for manufactured goods and food, trading with Wichita and Caddo peoples to the east and Pueblo peoples to the west. Buffalo gave them food, clothing and shelter; a family's tepee was tanned buffalo hide stretched over sixteen to eighteen lodge poles. But the horse defined their way of life. It carried them after the herds, measured a family's wealth and served as their most valuable trade good.

What the plaque says

Comanche War Trail A Barred, Bristling flying wedge--the Comanches--Rode into 18th century Texas, driving the Wichitas and Caddoes East, the Apaches West, becoming lords of the south plains. Harassed the Spanish and Anglo-Americans along frontier from Corpus Christi on the Gulf up to the Red River. Wrote their name in blood clear down to Zacatecas, Mexico. Captured women, children and horses along their road of blood, tears and agony. Many roads converged into the great Comanche war trail, which passed about 20 miles southeast of this marker. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 4.7 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 6.5 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 14 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 14 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Ector County — steps away
• Homer Robert Henderson — steps away
• Emmet V. Headlee, M.D. — 1.5 mi
• Old Buffalo Wallow — 2.3 mi