Miami calls itself the last real cowtown in the Panhandle. It sits in the Red Deer Creek valley under a mesa called Mount Moriah, on a stage route that ran from Fort Elliott and Mobeetie to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and it grew up around the railroad camp of 1887. It shipped cattle for the big outfits nearby, the Laurel Leaf, the Turkey Track and the Bar CC, and it was not county seat until 1898, after the first election was ruled fraudulent and the seat sat at Parnell for nine years. The 1913 courthouse has been restored.
The museum fills the old depot, moved to its present lot and restored in 1979, with rooms that set out early Miami's businesses and homes, a large arrowhead collection and a room on the area's Native peoples. Its most important holdings go back much further. In 1934 J. A. Mead, a Miami resident and amateur fossil collector, brought scientists from the University of Texas to a site that Charles Puckett had found on the C. R. Cowan ranch. They uncovered a bone bed with the remains of five mammoths and projectile points of the Clovis people, who hunted on the Plains near the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. Part of the Mead Collection is kept here.
Each June Miami holds the National Cow Calling Competition, as it has every year since 1949, a contest born of its ranching past.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour