Cottonwood Mott Line Camp

The sale that closed the camp's first chapter was a Scottish one. In 1882 A. M. Britton took the Matador range to Dundee, where merchants formed a company that paid $1,250,000 for about 100,000 acres, range rights over another 1,500,000, 40,000 cattle and 265 horses. Hank Campbell stayed on as superintendent and began fencing, building windmills and tanks, and buying land to consolidate the range. Riders at a camp like this one, mending fence and watching stock, worked under that new order. The site is private land.

What the plaque says

Cottonwood Mott Line Camp (Private Property) The Cottonwood Mott, named for the stand, or mott, of trees which surrounded a natural spring here, was the site of a line camp as early as 1878. Cowboys used the camp as a base from which to work, herding cattle and mending fences on the ranch. A log cabin was built here by employees of the Jingle Bob Ranch, and was the site of at least two gunfights. The ranchland was sold in 1882 to the Matador Land & Cattle Company, LDT., a Scotland-based syndicate. The company sold out in 1951, and the land was divided into smaller ranches. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Motley County Historical Museum — 10 mi
  Matador's museum in the 1928 Traweek Hospital, in the county seat a Scottish-owned ranch created by having its cowboys open one-day businesses to pass a state rule.
• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 28 mi
  Crosbyton's museum of Blanco Canyon, built in 1958 as a copy of Hank Smith's Rock House, and the place to learn the canyon's 1871 fight between Mackenzie's cavalry and Quanah's Quahadi Comanche.

More markers nearby

• Whiteflat — 9.5 mi
• Bob's Oil Well — 10 mi
• Motley County — 10 mi
• The Motley County Railroad — 11 mi