General Ranald Slidell Mackenzie

By 1924 the city held 138 acres here, where two upper tributaries of the Brazos meet, as its first city-county park; a pool had opened in 1921 and a municipal golf course in 1923. In 1933 the local American Legion post revived the idea of a state park to help the Depression economy, and in 1935 the city bought 450 acres from Mollie D. Abernathy and P. F. Brown and deeded it all to the state. A Civilian Conservation Corps camp built roads and bridges, and in 1937 K. N. Clapp started the prairie dog town.

What the plaque says

General Ranald Slidell Mackenzie Born in New York City on July 24, 1840, Mackenzie attained the rank of major general during the Civil War. On February 25, 1871, at Fort Concho, Texas, he assumed command as colonel of the 4th Cavalry, which soon became the finest regiment in the army. He commanded three expeditions into this region against the Indians. The first, in 1871 against the Comanches, was unsuccessful; but in 1872 he found two feasible routes across the vast, hitherto unexplored, Llano Estacado; and on September 29, he defeated the Comanches on the North Fork of the Red River. After a successful raid into Mexico in 1873, he commanded three of five columns of army troops in a final campaign against the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyennes; and on September 28, 1874, he surprised and destroyed three of their villages in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, also capturing 1,424 horses and mules in the engagement. Left without food, shelter, supplies, and horses, the Southern Plains tribes then submitted to life on the reservation, thereby opening western Texas to white settlement. Later promoted to brigadier general, Mackenzie died in New York, January 19, 1889, and was buried in West Point Cemetery. This park is named in his honor. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Windmill Museum — 0.6 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Buddy Holly Center — 1.0 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 3.1 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 4.2 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Yellowhouse Canyon — 0.5 mi
• Lubbock's First Cotton Gin — 0.8 mi
• Mackenzie Scout Trail — 0.9 mi
• Colonel T. S. Lubbock and Texas in the Civil War — 0.9 mi