Prairie Dog

Prairie dog towns had neighborhoods. A town often covered 247 acres or more and could be split into wards by ridges and gullies, and each ward into coteries, family groups averaging about eight animals that nuzzle, groom and bark to claim territory. A burrow drops from a small volcano-shaped mound, which its owner tends to keep floods out, into passages three to five meters deep. J. Frank Dobie gathered accounts of a single town on the Llano Estacado in 1852 holding some fifty million animals on a million acres, and another of 1853 on Brady Creek with thirty million.

What the plaque says

Prairie Dog Actually a squirrel. Gets name from its bark. It was food for settlers, especially in drouths. Lives in cluster of burrows called a "Town". Burrows, hazardous to running horses, often have caused broken bones among horses and riders. Also prairie dogs ate grass roots, destroying cattle feed. One old-time town was 100 miles wide and extended, almost unbroken, 250 miles southward from prairie dog town fork of Red River. Extermination has wiped out most colonies. This colony was established in 1959 by Odessa rotary club. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 3.3 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 — 10 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 — 11 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 — 18 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

• El Paso Natural Gas Company's First Compressor Transmission Engine — 0.8 mi
• The Cable Tool Rig — 0.8 mi
• Permian Basin — 0.8 mi
• Site of Odessa College — 1.6 mi