Palo Duro Canyon State Park

Palo Duro means hard wood, for the Rocky Mountain junipers on its slopes. The canyon runs about 120 miles from near the town of Canyon toward Silverton and reaches 800 feet deep, cut over the last million years by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. People have camped here for some 12,000 years, and by the eighteenth century it was a home ground of the Comanche and Kiowa, sheltered from the wind.

In late September 1874, at the height of the Red River War, Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne families were wintering on the canyon floor. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry, guided by Tonkawa scouts, came down the wall at dawn on September 28. Few people died, but the families fled up the canyon with nothing. The soldiers burned the lodges and the winter food and took more than 1,400 horses, most of which were shot. Without them the families had no way through the winter except to go in to the reservations in Indian Territory. Two years later Charles Goodnight drove cattle in to start the JA Ranch, and a restored dugout in the park is thought to be his first quarters.

The state bought the upper canyon from Fred S. Emory in 1933. Civilian Conservation Corps crews spent five years building the road to the floor, the rim cabins and El Coronado Lodge, now the visitor center, and the park opened in 1934 before they finished. It covers about 28,000 acres and keeps a few longhorns of the state herd near headquarters.