Old Buffalo Wallow

The buffalo that wallowed here belonged to a range that once covered about a third of the continent, from Canada's sixty-third parallel to Mexico and from Oregon's Blue Mountains to the western Carolinas. Cabeza de Vaca first reported them in Texas. Four main herds came down from northern Montana, entering Texas between the 99th and 101st meridians on trails that could be several miles wide. In 1875 the legislature weighed a bill to stop the slaughter, but Gen. Philip H. Sheridan opposed it, arguing that peace depended on destroying the Plains nations' food supply, and it failed.

What the plaque says

Old Buffalo Wallow The nearby depression survives from an epoch when great buffalo herds migrated through west Texas, many moving between present Canada and Mexico over two major trails in the Odessa area. Wallows began with individual buffalo rolling in the dirt to rid themselves of pests or shed their heavy winter coats in springtime. Repeated wallowing in the same spot by countless buffalo created an efficient depression to accomplish the cleaning ritual. Most wallows were eight to 12 feet across and two feet deep. Buffalo existed in the millions in north America, ranging throughout the western and central plains of Texas. They were pursued seasonally by the plains Indians, who subsisted on the food and clothing the buffalo provided. In the late 19th century, railroads bisected their trails, isolating the herds and providing transportation of meat and hides to distant markets. In Texas vast buffalo slaughters were encouraged in the 1870s by the army, who wanted to deprive Indians of their commissary; settlers, who had crops trampled and forage consumed by the passing herds; and hunters, who realized quick profit particularly from hides. The buffalo had all but disappeared from this area when Odessa was founded in 1886. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 3.8 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 7.9 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 13 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 16 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Emmet V. Headlee, M.D. — 1.2 mi
• Ector County's First Dry Hole — 2.2 mi
• Homer Robert Henderson — 2.3 mi
• Prairie Dog — 2.3 mi