Palo Duro & the Caprock Canyons
Palo Duro Canyon and the 1874 attack on the winter camps, the JA Ranch and the Goodnight house, and Caprock Canyons with the Texas State Bison Herd.
South and east of Amarillo the High Plains end at the Caprock, where the Llano Estacado breaks off into canyons cut by the forks of the Red River. Palo Duro Canyon begins near the town of Canyon and runs southeast for almost 120 miles, up to 800 feet deep, through Randall, Armstrong and Briscoe counties. TX-217 leads to Palo Duro Canyon State Park, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and TX-207 crosses the canyons toward Caprock Canyons State Park near Quitaque, home of the Texas State Bison Herd.
The canyons sheltered the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne. At sunrise on September 28, 1874, Col. Ranald Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry rode down the canyon wall into the camps. Few people died, but the soldiers burned the lodges and the winter food and shot more than a thousand of the captured horses, and over the following months the bands drifted back to the reservations in Indian Territory. The Comanche National Museum in Lawton and the Kiowa Tribal Museum in Carnegie, Oklahoma, tell that history in the nations' own words.
In 1876 Charles Goodnight drove cattle into Palo Duro to found the JA Ranch. At Mary Ann Goodnight's urging the couple kept a few plains bison, and the state herd descends from them. Their 1887 house on US-287 is now a state historic site.
Palo Duro & the Caprock Canyons rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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