Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum

Blanco Canyon runs thirty miles down the White River from Floyd County to the Caprock's edge a few miles east of Crosbyton, and it was a campground long before the counties existed. In October 1871 it was the ground of Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie's first campaign against the Quahadi and Kotsoteka Comanche bands that had refused the reservation. On the night of October 9, Quanah Parker and his warriors ran through the cavalry camp and drove off sixty-six horses. The next morning a detachment chasing a few riders down the canyon rode into a much larger party; Lt. Robert G. Carter and five men held them off until the Tonkawa scouts and the main column arrived. Mackenzie followed the Comanche up onto the Llano until a blue norther with snow and sleet stopped him, the Comanche got away, and he was wounded on the way back down the canyon. The road his column cut became the Mackenzie Trail that the first settlers followed in.

One of them was Henry Clay Smith, born Heinrich Schmitt in Bavaria, who moved his family into the Rock House in the canyon in November 1878, the first permanent settlers in the county. The museum opened in 1958 in a replica of that house. It holds some 45,000 objects, from a Brush automobile of the early 1900s to a diorama of the canyon, and the adjoining Wayne J. Parker Center for the Study of Native American Cultures shows tools and art gathered by Choice Smith and Wayne Parker.