Red River Expedition of 1852

The North Fork that Marcy's party traced rises in western Gray County and runs east about seventy miles across Gray and Wheeler counties, gathering McClellan Creek, its chief tributary, before it crosses into Oklahoma and joins the Prairie Dog Town Fork northeast of Vernon. On September 29, 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie's troops struck the Kotsoteka Comanche village of Mow-way near the river east of present Lefors while he was away at a council, taking 124 prisoners, mostly women and children. Col. John W. Davidson campaigned along the stream in 1874.

What the plaque says

Red River Expedition of 1852 Randolph B. Marcy, U.S. Fifth Infantry Captain, and George B. McClellan led a company into the Texas panhandle in 1852 to determine the locations of the headwaters of the Red River. That summer the team discovered two main branches of the Upper Red River that intersect the 100th Meridan. The North Branch is southeast of Pampa. Earlier treaties used the Red River as a boundary, but it was unclear which fork was meant when first defined. In 1896, the South Branch was determined to be the main stream and the boundary between Texas and Oklahoma. (1984, 1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 6.8 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.
• White Deer Land Museum — 6.9 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.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 24 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.
• Phillips 66 Station, McLean — 25 mi
  A 1929 cottage-style Phillips 66 station on First Street in McLean, the town I-40 went around last and whose Route 66 business district stayed much as it was.

More markers nearby

• Woody Guthrie — 6.8 mi
• Pampa — 6.9 mi
• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — 6.9 mi
• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — 6.9 mi