Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers

The buffalo bones the plaque says carried settlers through drought fed a national trade. For several years in the early 1880s Texas led the world as a source of bones, and prices rose from three or four dollars a ton in the early 1870s to as much as twenty-two or twenty-three before settling near eight by 1900. Old bones were ground into meal; fresh ones went to sugar refineries to decolor cane juice, choice ones to bone-china furnaces and firm ones to button factories. One estimate puts Texas shipments at half a million tons, worth $3 million.

What the plaque says

Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers Permanent citizens, forgers of local civilization. Walter Franklin (1869-1963), George Leonard (born 1875) and Dormer D. Simms (born 1884) moved to Texas in 1886 and to this county in the early 1900's. They arrived later than visiting hunters, soldiers and others who in the 1870's cleared this land of buffalo and hostile Indians, and started ranching. But unlike the early ranchers who ran cattle on state-owned range, these pioneers bought land and worked to pay for it. (To tide them over drouths, such settlers sold buffalo bones and earned bounties for wolf-scalps.) In the 1905-1906 winter, the Simms Brothers used mule-drawn plows and walked from Washburn (18 mi. SW) to Higgins (115.4 mi. NE), constructing a 4-furrow railway fireguard. John Sparks, an early local teacher and a Simms brother-in-law, worked with them and led the group in gospel singing at nightly campfires. Also in the crew were Jim Calhoun and John Sterling. Family land ownership was preserved. Years later, oil and industry brought great prosperity to this region. A fourth generation now lives on the land. Frank Simms married Minnie Pugh Williams; George married Alice Jane King; and Dormer married Gertrude Talbot. Descendants are leaders in Texas business. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  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.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 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.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Old County Bookmobile, First "Inside Service" Bookmobile in Texas — steps away
• Temple Lea Houston — steps away
• Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City — steps away
• Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana — steps away