Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana

The 1892 drive on this plaque had a sequel. In 1893 the N Bar N sent 40,000 more cattle north, and the two seasons were the last big drives out of Texas, each taking five months to reach the Wolf Creek range in Montana. The herds crossed the Canadian River at Adobe Walls and afterward learned of a Kansas quarantine that forced them to skirt the state. On August 6, 1966, descendants of William Niedringhaus, ranch manager J. L. Harrison and drover Tom Coffee met at White Deer for the town's sixtieth anniversary, seventy-three years after the last drive.

What the plaque says

Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana Each Spring and Summer after 1880, many Texas herds went up the trail to Northern states for fattening. For the cowboys, trail drives meant hard work. They had to turn stampedes, ford rivers and quicksand streams, and fight Indians and cattle thieves. They endured hunger, thirst, and other physical hardships. The Last Great Texas Panhandle Drive was organized here at N Bar N (N-N) Headquarters. Ranch manager was J.L. Harrison; trail boss T.L. (Tom) Coffee. 100 cowboys drove 10 herds, each with 2500 cattle, or a total of 25,000 beeves, to Montana from April to September 1892. The cattle belonged to Niedringhaus Brothers, German tinsmiths of St. Louis, who put into ranching a fortune made in enamel granite household wares. From 1882 to1886, N Bar N leased range in Carson and neighboring counties from the Francklyn Land & Cattle Company, a British syndicate backed by Cunard Steamship Line. Afterward this range belonged to White Deer Land Company. The N Bar N outfit left here because White Deer Land Company wanted the range cleared of large herds. By 1907 the 650,000 acres of its land was offered for sale to small ranchers and farmers. It was fenced and the steam plow introduced to turn the rich, grassy sod. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — 12 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 12 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 15 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 21 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• White Deer — 1.4 mi
• Jackson General Store — 1.4 mi
• Polish Settlers of White Deer — 1.5 mi
• White Deer United Methodist Church — 1.5 mi