High Plains Pioneer Henry Clay Smith

Smith came to America from Bavaria in 1851 and lived briefly with a sister in Peru, Ohio. He passed up schooling, sailed for a time on Lake Erie, went down the Santa Fe Trail with a wagon train in 1854 and joined a surveying party on the Missouri River in 1855-56. Somewhere along the way he added Clay to his name, believing every American had a middle name. In 1857 he drove a bull team to Fort Laramie and went on to San Bernardino, working as prospector, cowboy, interpreter and Indian fighter.

What the plaque says

High Plains Pioneer Henry Clay Smith (1836 - 1912) First to set up a post office and to farm in Crosby County; first to break land and drill a water well on High Plains. At start of Civil War, he was miner at Pinos Altos, New Mexico and joined in moves to take gold and silver mines for South. But Indian raids closed mines. When the Confederate Army withdrew from Arizona and Mexico in 1861, Smith along with others joined the South's cause. Served four years in Texas and spent rest of his life here. Replica of old rock house he built near here in 1877 is now shown in museum at Crosbyton. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — steps away
  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.
• Spur-Dickens County Museum — 25 mi
  Dickens County's museum on the main block of Spur, a town born on November 1, 1909, when the first train reached the land a New York syndicate was selling off from the Spur Ranch.
• Slaton Harvey House — 27 mi
  A 1912 Santa Fe Harvey House in the railroad town of Slaton, restored as a museum, event hall and five-room inn overlooking a working BNSF yard.
• Motley County Historical Museum — 34 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.

More markers nearby

• Crosby County — steps away
• Crosbyton — steps away
• Crosby County — steps away
• Citizens National Bank — steps away