Mobeetie Music Festival in Mobeetie in July. Are you planning a Texas Trip? Do you need Maps with good directions? You will find all the Texas Information you need by visiting one of the 12 Texas Travel Information Centers located at convenient locations throughout Texas.
Named after Abilene, Kansas, Abilene, Texas eventually became a big cattle producer. And in , during Abilene's centennial celebration, oil was discovered. Amarillo Amarillo, along with Fort Worth, are 2 Texas towns that give you the feeling that you are really in Texas, the wild west, cowboy, cowtown type of Texas. Amarillo definitely has a western ambience.
Palo Duro State Park is nearby. Andrews Andrews, located in the heart of the Texas Panhandle Plains, gives visitors a wide range of things to do outdoors, including golfing, camping, swimming and fishing. It is also the location where two of his novels were turned into movies, Last Picture Show in and Texasville in Big Spring Located on the northern edge of the Edwards' Plateau, Big Spring makes good use of its unique natural setting with numerous parks, Moss Lake and a large outdoor amphitheater.
Or, arguably, before; George Washington first visited as a teen. The more charming of the state's two panhandles see below , this eastern arm boasts several destinations worth visiting. Harpers Ferry , site of radical abolitionist John Brown's doomed effort to lead a slave uprising a wax museum bearing his name depicts the famous incident , is where West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia meet.
It's also where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers converge not a coincidence. The Appalachian Trail runs right through the center of town, which adds a folksy vibe to the place. Berkeley Springs —formerly, and aptly, known as Bath—is one of the oldest spa destinations in the nation, if not the first. This is nothing new. The Oklahoma panhandle may just be the unluckiest rectangle of plains in world history.
It was the hardest stretch to cross on the old Santa Fe Trail and the region hit hardest by the s Dust Bowl. Well, there are a handful of quaint community museums to visit Goodwell, Oklahoma, has one that features two-headed calves , and Optima Lake , a failed project with roots in FDR's New Deal era that looks like a post-apocalyptic film set. And, near the New Mexico border, the mile-long Black Mesa , the highest point in the state, juts up from twisting canyons home to dinosaur footprints.
But if you find yourself in this panhandle, your time would perhaps be best spent exploring side roads and popping into eerie abandoned homesteads left behind from Okie families heading west during the Dust Bowl. There are New Deal-era cabins to bunk in at the park, and an al fresco production of a musical called Texas , which is sort of a half-hearted rebuttal to Oklahoma!
As is the case in Western Maryland, residents from this region tend to have more in common with Pittsburghers than they do with folks from the rest of their state. The star of West Virginia's northern panhandle is Wheeling , the state's first capital city after its split from Virginia during the American Civil War. Head downtown for the shops, food at the central Centre Market , which dates to , or to the Wheeling Waterfront for views of the Ohio River.
Just outside Wheeling city limits you'll find one of the largest conical burial mounds in the United States. Built by members of the Adena culture well before Jesus was born, the Grave Creek Mound is 62 feet tall and feet around that's about million pounds of dirt.
A free museum nearby showcases relics found on the site. New Canaan and Greenwich , for instance, represent two of the most affluent towns in the nation, while Stamford is home to one of its largest concentrations of corporations, including a heaping handful on the Fortune list.
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Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Long explored the Canadian River valley, thus initiating the Anglo-American exploratory phase of Panhandle history. Between and the the Pacific railroad survey of the thirty-fifth parallel, led by Lt. Only the interior of the Llano Estacado lay beyond the ken of the Americans.
Meanwhile, in Josiah Gregg found the south side of the Canadian an advantageous trade route, and in Capt. Randolph B. Marcy , closely following Gregg's tracks, specifically marked the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail so that ties of commerce and travel, along with exploration, pulled the Panhandle toward the American orbit. Until after the southern Plains Indians remained essentially undisturbed, mainly because of the sectional controversy and the Civil War , but in the early s professional buffalo-hide hunters entered the Panhandle from western Kansas.
Normal Indian resentment toward this incursion was heightened by their understanding that the Medicine Lodge Treaties of guaranteed them exclusive hunting grounds south of the Arkansas River. In retaliation, resentful warriors led by Quanah Parker and the charismatic medicine man Isa-tai plotted an attack upon the buffalo hunters' trading post at Adobe Walls in what is now Hutchinson County.
Most importantly, Second Adobe Walls goaded the government into the climactic campaign against the southern Plains Indians, the Red River War of — Earlier efforts to deal militarily with the southern Plains tribes won some battles, but resolved very little. On November 25, , a man force under Christopher Kit Carson had engaged several villages in the vicinity of the Bent brothers' old adobe trading post on the Canadian.
Doubtlessly the Indians were hurt considerably, but Carson achieved little of strategic consequence. Rather more successful was the Winter War of , in which a strategy contrived by Maj. Philip H. Sheridan directed four converging columns upon the Indians' haunts to catch them unsuspecting in their winter camps. No column came from the south, however, and many camps simply dropped southward out of the encirclement. Ranald S. Mackenzie to complete the encirclement.
The Red River War saw some dramatic pitched battles, most famously Mackenzie's victory in the battle of Palo Duro Canyon on September 28, but mainly it was a campaign of harassment that gave the Indians no rest until, near starvation, they accepted their inevitable move to reservations. By early the military phase of Panhandle history was over. The hide men quickly felled most of the remaining buffalo with relatively minor interference from Indians, and the region lay essentially empty awaiting its next phase.
Fort Elliott, placed in Wheeler County as a hedge against Indian outbreaks, supported White settlement with numerous essential services. In the Texas legislature marked off the twenty-six Panhandle counties from the Bexar Land District, thereby essentially completing the transformation of the region from a southwestern Hispanic cultural domain to an Anglo-American one. The empty grassland was attractive to the pastores , led by Casimero Romero , who initiated the grazing phase of Panhandle history by bringing their sheep to the western Canadian basin, where Charles Goodnight found them when he moved his cattle from Colorado in the spring of Other pioneers soon followed, and the towns of Tascosa, Mobeetie, and Clarendon developed as the centers from which settlement, commerce, and political organization emanated.
Their counties, Wheeler, Oldham, and Donley, were organized in , , and , respectively. The federal census of counted 1, persons in the Panhandle, including 1, Anglos concentrated in Wheeler, Hemphill, and Donley counties; Hispanics concentrated in Hartley, Oldham, and Deaf Smith counties; and fifty-one African Americans , thirty-six of whom lived near Fort Elliott. Of adults over age fifteen, were born in former Confederate states, while were born in Union states or territories.
The region's foreign-born represented eleven nations. Although sheep ranching initiated the grazing phase, its dominance quickly gave way to cattle, which first came in herds of as few as head, owned by cattlemen who took the best grass and water.
Few followed Goodnight's lead when he purchased 12, acres of JA range. Individual enterprise soon gave way to corporate enterprise because the attraction of low-cost stocker cattle, low labor costs, the subsidy of free grass, and high market prices infused large amounts of capital from both the east and Europe. Corporate financial resources brought barbed wire fencing, deep-drilled wells, and windmills , thus enabling more effective use of pasturage away from surface water and the upgrading of herds through selective breeding.
Conversely, barbed wire enclosed much state-owned land and the state's insistence on grazing fees bred bitter controversy, which was eventually resolved peacefully. Early corporate ranching contained the seeds of disaster, however, because its very success attracted excessive investment, overstocking, bad management, and depressed prices, thereby making the industry vulnerable to any dislocation.
The first rather feeble attempts at farming, which came in the early eighties, were equally vulnerable. Both were devastated by unusually severe winters and summer droughts in the mid-eighties. Farming had to wait another generation for a new start. Though many ranches failed, well-managed ones survived, and a far better-organized industry emerged.
It became the foundation for a ranching industry that remains integral to the economy and culture of the Panhandle. Every phase of regional development profited by completion of the Fort Worth and Denver Railway in Because the escarpments of the Staked Plains partly dictated routes, the rails crossed in the central Panhandle at the point where Amarillo was fortuitously located and made the town the center of regional cultural, social, and commercial life.
Railroads determined the location of townsites, ranchers got far easier access to supplies and markets, and promoters of various sorts, especially railroad men, ardently boosted the Panhandle as the new garden for farmers. Not until well into the twentieth century, however, did improved dry-land farming techniques and the first stirrings of modern irrigation , both backed by emerging technology, assure permanence of an agricultural foundation for the region.
By beef, wheat, and cotton emerged as the basics of commercial production. Unusually favorable weather, markets impelled by World War I , and technological improvements blessed the efforts of producers who expanded acreage and increased production.
The artificial demand and prices raised by the war, however, encouraged excessive production and cultivation of marginal lands better left to grazing, a fact that portended disaster in the s. Fortunately for the Panhandle, a new and unanticipated industry burst upon the economic scene and permeated the whole fabric of regional life.
Drawing upon the research of geologist Charles N. Gould , a group of entrepreneurs led by grocer Millard C. Nobles organized the Amarillo Oil Company, leased 70, acres of ranchland, and began drilling. Their first wells produced only natural gas, but on May 2, , Gulf-Burnet No. Oil spawned numerous collateral industries and towns, of which Borger was surely the most chaotic. The place eventually became so lawless that only martial law brought it stability.
Other communities such as Lefors, Pampa, and Dumas profited from oil but avoided such tumult. Amarillo became the corporate center of major oil companies.
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