Route of Tascosa-Dodge City Trail

The Handbook of Texas credits the trail's fixed line to the Cator brothers, whose repeated trips between their Palo Duro Creek station and Dodge City set the tracks and crossings others followed. North of Beaver, Oklahoma, it shared the Jones and Plummer road. The Texas leg entered near Chiquita Creek in Ochiltree County and ran southwest to the Cators' Zulu Stockade, then on to the Little Blue stage stand just south of present Dumas, where it split: one branch reached Tascosa through Hartley County, the other through Potter County.

What the plaque says

As ranchers and merchants settled in this part of Texas during the 1870s, the need for a direct supply line became evident. This trail was established in 1877 for cattle drives and freight hauls from Tascosa (38 mi. SW) to markets in Dodge City, Kansas. It also served as a stagecoach and mail route. The town of Tascosa received a post office in 1878 and was the Oldham County seat from 1880 until 1915. The coming of the railroad in 1887 led to the decline of the town and to the abandonment of the Tascosa-Dodge City Trail. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 12 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 18 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 20 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 25 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

• Moore County Courthouse — 12 mi
• City of Dumas — 12 mi
• Geological Riches of Moore County — 12 mi
• Site of Historic Drift Fence — 12 mi