Wilbarger County

This was buffalo country of the Wanderers band of the Comanches (Numunuu) until the hunts and army campaigns of the 1870s. Though inside the Peters Colony boundary, the county drew no settlers until 1878, when it was attached to Clay County for courts. W. B. Worsham set up the R2 Ranch at Big Spring in 1879. Settlers without livestock poisoned coyotes for hides or hauled buffalo bones to Gainesville at twenty to twenty-two dollars a ton. Deer, antelope, wild turkeys and prairie chickens were plentiful, and in 1880 the county had 126 people.

What the plaque says

Formed from Bexar County. Created February 1, 1858. Organized October 10, 1881. Named for Josiah and Mathias Wilbarger, brothers who came to Texas in 1829. Josiah, scalped by Indians August, 1833, survived 11 years. Vernon, the county seat. Millions of cattle and horses were driven north through this county.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red River Valley Museum — steps away
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.
• Doan's Crossing — 13 mi
  A store, an adobe house and a granite marker of ranch brands at the Red River ford where the Western Trail herds left Texas, kept alive by a May picnic held since 1884.
• Copper Breaks State Park — 25 mi
  Red badlands on the Pease River between Quanah and Crowell, streaked with the green copper that lured a Civil War general here to mine, with longhorns and a dark-sky designation.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 26 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.

More markers nearby

• Early Wilbarger County — 2.1 mi
• Thaddeus Edgar Johnson — 2.3 mi
• Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation No. 12, Home of Hybrid Sorghums — 12 mi
• Medicine Mound Community — 16 mi