Old Tascosa, Texas

01From Plaza Atascosa to Cowboy Capital

The settlement began as Plaza Atascosa in 1876, when Romero's shepherds drove their flocks up from New Mexico and built adobe huts and irrigation ditches along Atascosa Creek. Henry Kimball, the first Anglo settler, opened a blacksmith shop the same year. A post office followed in 1878, replacing an informal mail route carried by a man known only as "Dad" Barnes, who rode his saddlebags of letters up the trail to Dodge City. When Oldham County organized in 1880, Tascosa became its seat.

The town sat at a natural crossroads. The LX, LS, LIT, and Frying Pan ranches sprawled across the surrounding plains, and their cowboys rode into Tascosa on payday for the saloons, brothels, and card tables clustered along its single dirt street. A census in 1879 counted roughly 150 residents, only eight of whom were English-speaking women not employed in the local trade. The imbalance set the tone.

02Why Was Tascosa Called the Cowboy Capital of the Plains?

Tascosa earned the nickname because it was, for nearly a decade, the only real town in a 100-mile radius, and because the cattle industry passed directly through it. The Texas Panhandle ran on open range, and the big outfits needed a supply point, a courthouse, and somewhere for their hands to blow a month's wages. Tascosa was all three.

It also drew a striking roster of gunmen. Billy the Kid rustled cattle across the New Mexico line, thirty-five miles west, and drove them into Tascosa to sell; his old campground beside a nearby creek is still marked. Dave Rudabaugh, Pat Garrett, and Charles Siringo all walked the town's streets, sometimes as lawmen, sometimes not. Sheriff Cape Willingham, the county's first, shot the man who occupied the first grave in Boot Hill cemetery. At least twenty-six burials followed between 1879 and 1886, most of them violent.

The 1883 Cowboy Strike, one of the earliest labor actions in the American West, was organized out of Tascosa when LS, LIT, and LX cowhands walked off the job demanding higher wages. The strike collapsed within weeks, but it gave the town a second, quieter kind of notoriety.

03The Railroad That Bypassed Tascosa

Tascosa's decline began not with a gunfight but with a survey line. In 1887 the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway laid sixteen miles of track across the northeastern corner of Oldham County, two miles from the old townsite and across the Canadian River. Businesses followed the rails. Within a few years most of Tascosa's merchants had picked up and moved to the new railroad town.

The 1893 flood finished what the railroad started. The Canadian rose, washed out the bridge, and damaged homes and stores still standing on the old site. By the turn of the century Tascosa was nearly empty. An election in 1915 moved the county seat to Vega, and only fifteen people remained.

Among the last holdouts were Mickey McCormick, a former gambler who had run the town's first saloon, and his wife Frenchy, reportedly a former dance hall girl and card dealer. Mickey died in 1912. Frenchy stayed on alone in their small adobe house for nearly three more decades, refusing to leave the grave of her husband. She finally moved to Channing in 1939 and died there in 1941. The couple are buried next to each other on a rise outside the old townsite.

04Can You Visit Old Tascosa Today?

Yes. The site is now the home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, established in June 1939 after Julian Bivins, son of cattleman Lee Bivins, donated the townsite, the renovated courthouse, and 120 surrounding acres to Cal Farley for his Maverick Boys' Ranch. The ranch still operates as a residential home and school for at-risk youth.

Visitors are welcome during daylight hours. The old 1884 courthouse now houses the Julian Bivins Museum, with exhibits on the cattle era, the cowboy strike, and the McCormicks. Boot Hill cemetery sits on a low rise a short walk away, its sandstone markers still legible in the Panhandle light. The 1889 schoolhouse is also preserved on the grounds.

05What Remains of Old Tascosa Today

Two original buildings survive: the 1884 courthouse, now the Julian Bivins Museum, and the 1889 schoolhouse. Boot Hill cemetery is intact, with roughly twenty-six identified graves from the town's violent decade. Mickey and Frenchy McCormick lie buried together on a bluff a short distance from the main site. Everything else, the adobe saloons, the livery, the dance halls, has returned to the Panhandle grass. The Canadian River still runs past the townsite, narrower now than it was in 1893, but still shaping the land the Cowboy Capital briefly ruled.