Tascosa

Before it was a cowboy capital, Tascosa was a sheep town. In 1876 Hispanic pastores under Casimero Romero settled the Atascosa Creek valley as Plaza Atascosa, grazing flocks and building adobe houses and irrigation ditches; most of them drifted back to New Mexico with their sheep in the late 1880s and 1890s, and those who stayed switched to cattle. Henry Kimball, the first Anglo settler, opened a blacksmith shop in 1876. Before Tascosa had a post office, "Dad" Barnes carried its mail to Dodge City, and Charles Francis Rudolph began the weekly Tascosa Pioneer in 1886.

What the plaque says

Tascosa Cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle, 1877-1888. "Billy the Kid" and cowboys from many ranches added to its liveliness. Made famous by wild west fiction. Its name is a corruption of Atascoso (boggy) first given to nearby creek. County seat of Oldham County, 1881-1915. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — steps away
  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.
• Magnolia Station, Vega — 22 mi
  A restored 1920s Magnolia filling station on Vega's Main Street, a barbershop after the pumps stopped in 1953, saved with a National Park Service grant.
• Window on the Plains Museum — 27 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.
• Cadillac Ranch — 28 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.

More markers nearby

• Boot Hill Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• Old Tascosa — 0.6 mi
• The Historic LS — 0.6 mi
• Oldham County — 0.6 mi