Colorado City calls itself the Mother City of West Texas, and for a few years it earned the boast. The first Texas and Pacific train arrived on April 16, 1881, when the town had about 300 people, and by 1885 it had grown into a cattle-shipping center that rivaled Dodge City and Abilene. Railroads that bypassed it around 1900 ended that run. Its museum, in a restored historic house downtown, starts long before the town.
The headline exhibit is the mammoth skeleton found near Colorado City at Lake Champion in 2001. Beside it is a replica of the skeleton of a Bison antiquus, the larger Ice Age bison, found on Lone Wolf Creek. Farm and ranch rooms, a cowboy display with a wall of local brands, and a Missouri Pacific caboose carry the story into the ranch and railroad years. An exhibit on the Kiowa leader Lone Wolf recalls the nations whose country this was.
The war rooms hold the museum's most personal piece: the telegrams and letters sent to the family of a Colorado City soldier killed in France in World War II, including letters from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Read in order, they show how the news arrived in a small Texas town.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour