The town below Fort Griffin sat on bottomland between the post and the Clear Fork of the Brazos, and people called it the Flat. It served as a supply point for buffalo hunters, busiest from 1874 to 1876-77, when hides and salted meat sold briskly. At its height it held about 1,000 permanent residents and nearly twice that many passing through.
Hides and the herd
The Union Pacific's completion in 1869 made hides pay, and the southern herd, the larger of the two, went first: in earnest from 1874, and practically gone by 1878. A good hunter could take 1,000 to 2,000 animals in a season, and a bull hide brought about $2.00. In August 1876 a Fort Worth paper expected a thousand hunters on the range within weeks, and in November it reported 10,000 hides on the way to the railroad with thousands more waiting.
The record is plain about what the killing was for. In 1875 the Texas legislature considered a bill to protect the animals, and Gen. Philip Sheridan protested that peace with the Indians could be kept only if their food supply was eliminated. The bill failed. The Army had declined to enforce the Medicine Lodge Treaty's ban on white entry, and Dodge City hunters had emptied the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation by 1874. Comanche leaders such as Isa-Rose and Tabananica named the hide merchants as the real threat. The war that followed ended with the southern herd virtually extinct and the Comanche, Kiowa and southern Cheyenne confined to Indian Territory.
The Tonkawa camp
A Tonkawa village stood at the edge of the Flat. In October 1862, in Indian Territory, other Native groups attacked the Tonkawa over their loyalty to the Confederacy, and historians put the dead at about half of some 300 people. Survivors straggled back to Texas, and most settled near Fort Griffin, where they scouted for the Army through the Red River War. In 1877 John Larn and John Selman won the contract to supply beef to the fort and the Tonkawa. In 1884, three years after the fort closed, the 92 surviving Tonkawa were moved to Indian Territory, where the Tonkawa Tribe in Oklahoma remains.
The mob
From April 1876 a secret vigilante society went after horse and cattle thieves. The historian Robert Cashion counts as many as two dozen hangings. Houston Faught was hanged with a placard reading "Horse thief No. 5," and eleven suspected horse thieves were hanged in October 1876.
Larn, who had joined a vigilance committee in 1874, was sheriff in 1876-77, with Selman as his deputy. A Ranger reported that the two had threatened to drive farmers out. Masked men shot Larn dead in the Albany jail on June 24, 1878; Cashion says they feared he would turn state's evidence. Selman left for New Mexico, and in 1895 he killed John Wesley Hardin in El Paso.
By then the herds were gone. The fort closed on May 31, 1881, and the Texas Central Railway went through Albany, where the merchant Frank Conrad moved his stock. The Flat emptied.
The post's ruins stand on the bluff above the townsite at Fort Griffin State Historic Site, which keeps the official Texas longhorn herd. The Flat itself lies outside the park.