Here the Llano Estacado ends in a broken wall up to 1,000 feet high, and streams heading for the Little Red River have cut down through red beds of shale and sandstone to the Permian Quartermaster Formation. People have hunted in these canyons since Folsom times, more than 10,000 years ago. The Comanche arrived in the early 1700s, and New Mexican buffalo hunters and Comanchero traders met them on Las Lenguas Creek a few miles south of the park. It was part of Goodnight's 1882 purchase for the JA, and Theo Geisler, for whom Lake Theo is named, owned it from 1936 until his death in 1969. The state bought it in 1975 and opened the park in 1982.
In 1878, as hide hunters finished the southern herd, Mary Ann Goodnight urged her husband to rescue orphaned calves. The Goodnight herd grew past 200 head and became one of five foundation herds behind nearly all bison alive today. By the 1990s about fifty remained on the JA. Tests showed a rare genetic marker suggesting they were the last southern plains bison, the ranch gave them to the state, and in 1997 they came here, back on old JA ground. They now roam more than 10,000 acres and share the roads with cars.
The park has nearly 90 miles of trails and the 120-acre Lake Theo. Its 64-mile Trailway follows a 1920s rail line, with Clarity Tunnel and its summer colony of up to half a million Mexican free-tailed bats just over the Floyd County line.
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