Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar

J. Wright Mooar was born at Pownal, Vermont, on August 10, 1851, the Handbook of Texas says. After cutting cordwood and killing buffalo for meat at Fort Hays in 1870, he hunted for railroad crews near Dodge City, and fifty-seven hides he sent his brother in New York led a tannery to order 2,000 more, which began the American hide industry. Col. Richard I. Dodge advised him and Steel Frazier to 'hunt buffalo where the buffalo are.' Theodore Roosevelt is said to have offered $5,000 for the white hide. Mooar died on May 1, 1940.

What the plaque says

J. Wright Mooar and his brother John W. Mooar established the first buffalo hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle in 1873. Wright killed a rare albino buffalo (one of two known killed in Texas) in Scurry county on October 7, 1876. Mooar shot about 22,000 buffalo, a record probably unsurpassed. His ability to hit a vital spot from a distance of 1,000 feet or farther won the respect of Comanche Indian Chief Quanah Parker, a friend in later life. The Mooar brothers began ranching in Scurry county in 1877 and Wright became known as Scurry county's No. 1 citizen. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — steps away
  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 — 20 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.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 24 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 30 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

• The Prairie Dog (Cynomys Ludovicianus) — 1.3 mi
• Santa Fe Railway in Scurry County — 2.6 mi
• Scurry County's Canyon Reef Oil Field — 2.7 mi
• Scurry County — 2.7 mi