Lost Valley

Lost Valley is a twenty-square-mile basin ringed by hills, once part of the Peters Colony grant; the Handbook of Texas suggests surveyors may have named it by overlooking it when they mapped the area. It was home to rancher James C. Loving and the Loving Land and Cattle Company, and frequent clashes with raiders from Indian Territory earned it the name 'Indian Death Trap.' The Handbook says the Rangers' July 1874 fight here was with Apaches, Kiowas and Comanches led by Lone Wolf, who hoped to win back a valley once full of buffalo. Settlers' descendants still ranch it.

What the plaque says

Marked by "Seven Blue Hills" in distance. To right is Spy Knob -- a lookout during pioneer days. Noted atrocity site: In 1857, the Cambren and Mason families, settlers, were victims of white renegades and Indians. On May 18, 1871, on western rim, teamsters of Warren Wagon Train were killed soon after General W. T. Sherman of the U.S. Army had traveled safely through this valley. On July 12, 1874, the escort part of Major John B. Jones, Commander of the Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers, was ambushed here, with two men killed. In later years, this has been peaceful farm-ranch area. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 12 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 21 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Royal Theater — 26 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Fort Belknap — 26 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.

More markers nearby

• Community of Jermyn — 4.5 mi
• Site of Loving Ranch House — 5.8 mi
• Hawkins Chapel — 10 mi
• Bryson — 11 mi