Will Rogers

Rogers told the rest of his first Texas year himself. Recalling 1898 in a weekly article of March 7, 1926, he said the outfit took a trail herd to Kansas, that he saved enough to buy an old horse and rode into Amarillo that summer broke and looking for work, and that he hired on with another herd bound for western Kansas, crossing the Canadian at the LX Ranch. The Plains, he wrote, were the prettiest country he ever saw. In December 1902 he joined Texas Jack's show in South Africa as the Cherokee Kid.

What the plaque says

One of America's best loved humorists, whose stage act, gently mocking man's foibles, was highlighted by rope tricks learned here in his youth. Born in Oklahoma. In 1898, threatened with discipline for pranks, he left school and came to Texas. He became a cowboy on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins and made a lifelong friend of young Frank Ewing, son of his employer. In 1902 he joined a wild west show; was famous by 1918. Rogers died in a crash during a globe-circling pioneer flight with aviator Wiley Post, 1935. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Marvin — 18 mi
  A small 1930s conservation lake on Boggy Creek east of Canadian, named for the Panhandle congressman whose name is on the 1937 law that turned the plains' ruined farms back to grass.
• Gene Howe Wildlife Management Area — 20 mi
  Five thousand acres of sand sage and cottonwood bottomland along the Canadian River east of Canadian, bought by the state in 1950 for wildlife research and open to walkers with a permit.
• Canadian River Wagon Bridge — 23 mi
  The longest pin-connected bridge in Texas, 3,255 feet of Parker trusses across the Canadian River at Canadian, built for wagons in 1916 and reopened as a footpath in 2000.
• River Valley Pioneer Museum — 24 mi
  The Hemphill County museum in Canadian, a Santa Fe division town of 1887 on the river breaks that held one of the first commercial rodeos in Texas and voted itself dry in 1903.

More markers nearby

• Higgins — steps away
• Lipscomb County — 1.7 mi
• Lipscomb Union Church — 16 mi
• Lipscomb School — 16 mi