Site of Old Headquarters of the Hashknife Ranch

In 1875 J. R. Couts and John N. Simpson drove longhorns from Weatherford to Elm Creek and lived in a dugout near this hill. The brand resembled a kitchen hash knife. In 1880 the outfit took range along the Pecos, a hundred miles from the New Mexico line to Grand Falls, branding 10,000 calves a year. In 1885 that herd was sold to the Aztec Land and Cattle Company and trailed to Arizona, where the Hashknife Outfit later turned up in Zane Grey's novels. The headquarters ground is now Abilene Christian University's.

What the plaque says

(on hill east of Cedar Creek) In December 1880, H.C. Whithers of the Texas & Pacific Railroad met local men here to decide on a site for a cattle shipping center. Bypassing the county seat of Buffalo Gap, the railroad platted a new town named Abilene for the famous cattle town in Kansas. Cattlemen meeting with Whithers were Dallas banker and Hashknife Ranch co-owner John N. Simpson, and Confederate Colonels Claiborne W. (Clabe) and J.D. Merchant, twin brothers and ranchers who moved to Callahan County six years earlier. Brisk bidding ensued at a sale of city lots in March 1881. Abilene grew quickly and became a significant regional city of west Texas. (1968, 2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 1.8 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 12 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 14 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Abilene State Park — 19 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• Abilene Christian University — 0.7 mi
• Hendrick Medical Center — 0.7 mi
• Hardin-Simmons University — 0.8 mi
• Morgan Jones — 1.0 mi