Route of the Old Tascosa-Dodge City Trail

The trail kept Tascosa supplied. Each of the larger stores there freighted in 25,000 to 50,000 pounds of goods a month, and as late as 1888 the Tascosa Pioneer counted 119,000 pounds delivered in a single week. The run from Dodge City was about 240 miles; a stagecoach needed thirty-four hours one way, and an ox team a month to six weeks for the round trip. The stage line from Meade, Kansas, ran until about the turn of the century, and the road stayed in use as an interstate route after other freighting trails had been abandoned.

What the plaque says

Founded 1877, for travel from Tascosa, on the Canadian (25 mi. SW) to Dodge City, Kansas. Tascosa was supply center for hunters and settlers, Panhandle and South Plains; and for LE, LIT, LS and LX ranches, running large herds of cattle on area's free grass. Tascosa stagecoach, freighters, cattle herds going to market used this road -- also traveled by gamblers, desperadoes, U.S. marshals and noted frontiersmen. Tascosa had post office, 1878; was county seat, Oldham County, 1880. Town and trail declined after Fort Worth & Denver City Railway built into area, 1887. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 5.8 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.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 19 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.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 22 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.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 23 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.

More markers nearby

• Moore County — steps away
• Site of Historic Drift Fence — 5.6 mi
• Geological Riches of Moore County — 5.6 mi
• City of Dumas — 6.8 mi