One of the stories my dad repeated many times was how Grandmother Reeves crossed the plains in a covered wagon “the year Custer was killed” as her family resettled from Arkansas to Arizona Territory.
Her name was Margaret, but everyone knew her as Reci. And the one thing Reci remembered about crossing the Texas Panhandle in 1876 was the emptiness, save for the occasional burial scaffolds left behind by native tribes that had only recently been starved out of their homeland and relocated to Oklahoma reservations. But it was the lonely nothingness of the grassy void that left the deepest impression on that 8-year-old Arkansas girl peering at the stark landscape through the canvas flaps.
Not only were the native people absent, but the great herds of bison, hunted almost to extinction, were gone, too. Aside from a few buffalo hunters’ camps and the newly established Fort Elliott in Wheeler County, the Panhandle was anything but crowded in 1876.
But trickles of new life were starting to spread across the high lonesome, gradually pooling into makeshift settlements faintly flickering in the darkened vacancy at the close of day. That spring, the brief solitude of the Texas Panhandle was noisily interrupted when Charles Goodnight drove 1,600 head of Longhorn cattle south from Colorado toward the Llano Estacado to stake his claim on the well-watered shelter of Palo Duro Canyon. Unlike Reci’s wagon train, Goodnight and his cowboys stayed. They claimed an empty land as their own.
Goodnight was somewhat familiar with the Panhandle, having served as a scout and Texas Ranger during frontier skirmishes with Comanches. But he steered clear of the Panhandle when he and his business partner, Oliver Loving, blazed their cattle trail in the 1860s. Flush with trailblazing success, Goodnight established a ranch in 1869 near Pueblo, Colorado, strategically close to Denver, where wealthy men such as the British aristocrat and financier John G. Adair were looking to cash in on the “beef bonanza” of Western ranching.
A financial panic in 1873 presented a rare setback for Goodnight, but also a golden opportunity. The greener grass of the Texas Panhandle beckoned. In March 1876, Goodnight’s signature on a loan—from Adair’s brokerage firm—to fund the Palo Duro venture effectively started the clock on our modern timeline.
With money in the bank, Goodnight set off for the Panhandle’s majestic canyon shortly thereafter, but he needed some help finding it. As recounted by J. Evetts Haley in his biography Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, a Mexican guide was brought along to help navigate the way in, but with so many side canyons splitting open the caprock, the guide had trouble locating the canyon proper. After days of searching, the advance party rode to the brink of the grand Palo Duro and the guide shouted “al fin! al fin!” (at last! at last!).
A year into the Palo Duro business venture, Adair was impressed enough with Goodnight to bring him on as a partner in the JA Ranch, building on Goodnight’s Palo Duro claim and eventually growing the holdings to more than a million acres filled with 100,000 head of cattle. Dozens of cattlemen followed Goodnight’s lead, and within a decade, the formerly empty Panhandle was virtually one large cattle ranch. But the conquest of the Plains by cattlemen was not a foregone conclusion at first.
Sheepmen from New Mexico known as pastores were also laying plans to relocate to the empty Panhandle in 1876, but only one is widely remembered. Casimero Romero, a sheepman from Mora County, New Mexico, likely had some knowledge of the empty land to the east where comancheros had been trading with native tribes for years. He was also aware of a particular Canadian River crossing at Atascosa Creek that would make a strategic base of operations.
In November 1876, a few months after Goodnight’s southward trek, Romero rolled into the Panhandle from the west with 12 ox-drawn wagons and close to 4,500 sheep—along with all of his family, all his possessions and a small army of hired help. The Romero party made camp on the banks of the Canadian River just east of Atascosa Creek, naming this first settlement Plaza Atascosa.
As cattle ranches began to proliferate in the western Panhandle, the town of Tascosa sprang up near Romero’s plaza. Romero and his family became part of the new community’s life, but his vocation increasingly became a problem for area cattlemen unwilling to compete with sheep for the available grass. By then, close to a dozen pastores had set up plazas built from native stone and adobe in the Canadian River valley. They were being pressured to either turn to cattle ranching or take their sheep with them back to New Mexico, which is what many did by the 1880s.
It’s interesting to think how things would look in 2026 had sheep won the day 150 years back. More of our towns might have Spanish names and would look more like New Mexican settlements with plazas and adobe homes. But the money in the 1870s and 1880s was on beef, and most of the Panhandle-Plains region, with its wide-open spaces, seemed made for large herbivores. And if anyone knew large herbivores, it was Goodnight. After he survived a winter in Palo Duro Canyon and formed the JA with Adair, he brought his beloved wife Mary Ann to their new forever home, ushering in the cowboy way that is still foundational to our Panhandle culture today.
Reci eventually made her way back, too. She arrived in Hall County by train as a young married woman in the 1890s after life got too hard in Arizona. I’ve always tried to imagine what she felt when she stepped off the train, surveying a landscape that was definitely less empty than before, but still delightfully uncrowded. She, too, found her forever home in the Texas Panhandle, but only because a few dreamers and opportunists in 1876 saw more than just an empty land.
