Site of Fort Elliott

Fort Elliott never fought a major battle. Its troops patrolled the Panhandle and western Indian Territory, at first turning back small hunting parties leaving the reservation and pursuing bands that tried to escape it. By the mid-1880s the work had shifted to the range cattle business: keeping Panhandle stock off the reservation and supervising Texas herds driven north across Indian land. Civilians found jobs building the post and then as teamsters and skilled laborers, and supplies were bought locally when possible. After a typhoid outbreak hurried the abandonment, the Interior Department sold off the buildings and land.

What the plaque says

Site of Fort Elliott Established June 5, 1875. One of the last forts established in Texas for purpose of clearing the region of Indians. Around it Mobeetie, rendezvous of buffalo hunters and traders, grew up. The post was abandoned in 1889. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 1.3 mi
  The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.
• Roberts County Museum — 16 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Devil's Rope and Old Route 66 Museum — 21 mi
  Barbed wire and the Texas road in McLean's old brassiere factory: the fence that closed the open range, from the salesmen who sold it to the Panhandle ranches it divided.
• Phillips 66 Station, McLean — 21 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

• Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Elliott — steps away
• Mobeetie — 0.9 mi
• Emanuel Dubbs — 1.0 mi
• Captain G. W. Arrington — 1.0 mi