By the late 1870s buffalo hunters and the first ranchers on Wolf Creek, in what became Ochiltree County, knew of a stretch of ground where large mounds hid the walls of stone houses and broken tools lay on the surface. It came to be called the Buried City. It is a State Archeological Landmark on largely private ground, and this guide gives no location for it.
The class of 1907
In the spring of 1907 T. L. Eyerly, who taught science and history at the Baptist-run Canadian Academy, took his twelve-member science class to the site. They probed the rock-slab walls, and Eyerly wrote up the finds in two short papers in the academy's bulletin, reportedly the first report of the stone villages that archeologists later grouped with the Antelope Creek culture of the Panhandle. One of the students was fifteen-year-old Floyd Studer of Canadian. He went on to map more than 200 village sites along the Canadian River and its tributaries and drew in scholars such as Warren K. Moorehead of Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, who visited in 1919 and 1920 and described a village stretching more than 3,500 feet along the creek.
Who lived there
In the early 1980s the oilman and former Perryton mayor Harold Courson bought the land and gave the Texas Historical Commission conservation easements on about fifty acres. He paid for excavations in 1985 and 1986 led by David T. Hughes, then a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma, and the Texas Archeological Society held field schools there from 1987. Hughes argued that the Buried City people, there between about A.D. 800 and 1500, were distinct from their Antelope Creek neighbors, though they built in a similar way. Their pottery was smoother and sometimes polished, more like wares from southwestern Kansas than the cord-marked pots of the Canadian River villages, and most of their flint came from river cobbles rather than the Alibates quarries. He thought they spoke a Caddoan language and might be kin to the Wichita or Pawnee.
Houses and fields
They set big caliche boulders in a rectangle, dug the floor out about two feet and heaped the fill into thick walls. One house had about 650 square feet of floor. A wide center aisle held the hearth, four heavy posts held the roof, and the entrance was a crawlway eight to ten feet long that always faced east. They planted corn and probably beans and squash on the creek bottoms and on higher ground, where brush lines spread the runoff. Springs from the Ogallala Aquifer kept Wolf Creek flowing year round, and bison, turkeys, ducks, fish and mussels came to the water. A cluster of houses seems to have lasted about twenty years before its people moved along the creek. Around 1500, probably because of drought or newcomers, they left.
The quarries the Antelope Creek villagers worked can be seen on a guided tour at Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, beside Lake Meredith. The Museum of the Plains in Perryton keeps the county's history.