In Amarillo’s Memorial Park, the terrazzo floor of the Rose Garden Gazebo features a flag, and on that flag is a map of the Western Hemisphere. A red star marks Amarillo, and inscribed beneath is the Latin phrase “In Charta,” which can be translated as “on the map.”
For centuries, our region was marked on maps as a wilderness. The out-of-bounds where nothing was in play. But the story of how we came to be the Panhandle of Texas, how the lines were drawn around us, shows that empire builders throughout American history were curious about us and sometimes itching to fight over us. But it took until August 1876 for map makers to draw us in as a habitable zone when the Texas Legislature carved out 26 counties in the state’s uppermost region and opened us up to a world of possibilities.
Our journey to recognition started in 1541 when the Spanish explorer, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, trekked across the Panhandle looking for gold. Coronado, who could’ve used a good map, became disoriented by the perceived nothingness of the beautiful Llano Estacado, a land with “no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.” That description in his letter to the King didn’t exactly lead to a land rush, but for centuries afterward the Spanish viewed the whole of the Southern Plains as part of their realm without making any real attempts at settlement.
In 1682, the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, landed at the mouth of the Mississippi River near present-day New Orleans and claimed all the land drained by it. Because the faraway Panhandle rivers flow to the Mississippi, unlike most rivers of Texas, our home region was suddenly French, based on La Salle’s claim.
Almost a century later, France ceded its Louisiana territory to the Spanish but wound up taking it back through a back-room deal in 1800. Within three years, France needed some quick cash to shore up accounts in its Caribbean possessions and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson was happy to help, offering $15 million to purchase Louisiana. Ostensibly, the Panhandle became an American territory at that point, but no one bothered to draw a line on the map just yet. After American forces occupied Spanish Florida in 1819, President James Monroe agreed to recognize Spanish control of Texas. The Adams-Onís treaty established an international border that included the 100th meridian, the eastern boundary of the future Panhandle of Texas. So the Panhandle was Spanish once more.
After 1821, Texas and the Panhandle passed from Spanish possession to Mexican control. Texans revolted against the Mexican government in 1836 and took charge of their own affairs, The new Republic of Texas brashly claimed all the land east of the Rio Grande, taking in large chunks of New Mexico and Colorado. Included in that claim was everything south of the Arkansas River east to the 100th meridian. Texas mapmakers then drew a thin appendage between the headwaters of the Rio Grande and Arkansas and extended it north to the 42nd parallel in Wyoming just to see how far they could push it. That skinny part up north was more of a classic Panhandle than our own, but it didn’t take.
When Texas joined the union in 1845 as a slave state, the northern claims ran afoul of the limits imposed by the 1820 Missouri Compromise that banned slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel in states formed from the Louisiana Purchase. In an 1850 compromise with the federal government, this northern Texas aspiration was ceded back to the U.S. and everything west of the 103rd meridian was handed to the newly formed Territory of New Mexico. But we didn’t lose it all. Later surveys erroneously placed the Texas-New Mexico boundary 1.5 miles west of where it should be and we’ve never offered to redraw the line.
But the Panhandle still didn’t look quite like the Panhandle we recognize on maps today. In 1860, Texas carved out Greer County just east of the 100th meridian adjacent to the present-day counties of Wheeler, Collingsworth and Childress. The 1819 treaty with Spain had defined the Red River east of the 100th meridian as part of the new international border. Early on, the North Fork of the Red River was considered the headwater stream of the Red, so Texas claimed the land south and west of the North Fork. Settlers began trickling into Greer County by 1884 around the time the federal government questioned the Texas view of how the Red River flows. When the Oklahoma Territory was established in 1890, the courts said Texas was basing its claim on outdated information and established the South Fork—or Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River—as the headwaters of the Red, placing Greer County in Oklahoma.
Greer wasn’t the only “lost” county in our story. Three years before the current Panhandle counties were mapped and named, a forgotten county called Wegefarth showed up in the southeastern Panhandle across the 100th Meridian from Greer County. Wegefarth covered all of what became Collingsworth and Donley counties along with portions of the future Wheeler, Gray, Childress, Hall and Briscoe counties. There were never any settlements in Wegefarth, and its boundaries were questionable because the 100th meridian surveys were way off the mark. Wegefarth was written out of the script in 1876 when our current Panhandle counties came to be.
What Wegefarth may have contributed to our saga, however, is the idea that everything north of the Prairie Dog Town Fork is the true Panhandle since Wegefarth’s southern boundary was partially made up of that particular stream. Just draw a straight line west from the 100th meridian’s intersection with the Red and you’ve got (roughly) the southern “boundary” of the Panhandle as most people see it.
Lines on the map may have defined our home geopolitically for 150 years, but it’s something more indefinable that makes us Panhandlers. We just know we’re a bit different from everyone around us, and we tend to notice it once we hit Tulia while “making speed up ol’ 87” on Terry Allen’s hard Amarillo highway. And short of New Mexico trying to confiscate that mile-and-a-half strip off to the west, our lines should stand the test of time. Here’s to 150 more years of being us.
