Site of Homestead of William C. Sublett

The Handbook's Sublett was born about 1834 in Tennessee and grew up in Alabama, where his father was a county sheriff and the boy found he could dowse for water. He served as a Texas Ranger in 1860 and was cited for gallantry at Fayetteville in 1863 with the First Arkansas Cavalry. About 1880 he became an advance water scout for the Texas and Pacific, and in early 1881, working from the railhead at Colorado City, he found gold somewhere in the Pecos River country. In 1883 he was one of three men who settled Monahans.

What the plaque says

Site of Homestead of William C. Sublett Born 1835 in Alabama. Moved to north Texas before the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate. After his wife died in 1874, he went to the Texas frontier to hunt Buffalo, taking his three young children with him. In 1881-1882 he supplied game to Texas & Pacific Railroad construction crews. (Such hunting was important to development of west Texas and to transcontinental railroad construction.) Settling later in Odessa, Sublett built near this site a dugout-and-tent home, and homesteaded a 160 acre claim. To support his family, he hauled wood and "water-witched" to locate wells for settlers. In the 1880's he attracted notice by using gold nuggets to trade for supplies. In explanation, he said an Apache Indian had directed him to a mine in the Guadalupe Mountains, about 150 miles west of here. Periodically he disappeared and returned with gold, but efforts to follow him to the mine always failed. He once took his young son there, but the boy could not find the way later. in 1889, Sublett sold his Ector County property. He died Jan. 6, 1892, in Barstow, without disclosing the location of his mine. However, stories of his treasure still lure explorers into the Guadalupe Mountains. 1967

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 1.6 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 9.6 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 11 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 17 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Ector County's First Dry Hole — 0.4 mi
• Site of Blackshear High School — 1.1 mi
• St. Joseph Catholic Church — 1.3 mi
• Ector County Newspapers — 1.5 mi