How the Panhandle Got Its Towns (and Why They Sit Where They Do)

Drive US 60 from Amarillo to Canadian and you pass through a town about every fifteen miles. Panhandle, White Deer, Skellytown, Borger. That spacing is not an accident, and it is not geography either. It is a railroad timetable from the 1880s that nobody ever redrew.

Here is the short version of how this country filled in, because it explains a lot about why service out here looks the way it does.

Before 1874 this was not open country

It gets described as empty land waiting on settlers. It was not empty. The Comanche and Kiowa held the Llano Estacado, and they held it well enough that Anglo settlement did not get a foothold for decades.

That ended with the Red River War. It opened in June 1874 when several hundred Cheyenne and Comanche warriors attacked a camp of buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls, up in what is now Hutchinson County. In September, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie found a large encampment down in Palo Duro Canyon and destroyed it, along with the horse herd. Losing the horses is what actually finished it. By 1875 the southern Plains tribes had been forced onto reservations in Indian Territory, and the Panhandle was open.

The buffalo went at the same time and for the same commercial reasons. Within a few years the grass that had fed millions of bison was sitting there unused, and cattlemen noticed.

The ranches came first, and they were enormous

Charles Goodnight moved 1,600 longhorns down from Pueblo, Colorado in 1876 and set up in Palo Duro Canyon. His cowboys spent that first season pushing buffalo fifteen miles down canyon to clear room for cattle. With his partner John Adair he built the JA Ranch, the first big cattle operation in the Panhandle.

In 1878, when hungry families came off the reservations looking for buffalo that were mostly gone, Goodnight made his arrangement with Quanah Parker: two beeves every other day, so long as the JA herd was left alone. It held.

Then came the XIT. In 1882 the state of Texas handed a syndicate three million acres of Panhandle land in exchange for building the state capitol in Austin. That is the deal. The building in Austin was paid for in Panhandle grass. The XIT ran across ten counties and it is the reason so much of this country was fenced range under a single owner before it was ever a town.

The railroads made the towns, almost all at once

Ranches do not need towns. Railroads do.

The Fort Worth and Denver City Railway pushed northwest through the Panhandle in 1887, and towns appeared behind it like a wake. Amarillo started in 1887 as a camp for the crews laying track. On March 14, 1888, the line met the Denver, Texas and Fort Worth near Folsom, New Mexico, and the through route to Denver was finished.

The pattern repeated on every line that came after:

• Panhandle, 1888. Built as the end of the line for the Southern Kansas (Panhandle and Santa Fe) Railway, and made the Carson County seat the same year.
• White Deer, 1888. The Francklyn Land and Cattle Company had been running cattle here since 1882. The railroad put a depot at this spot because of the water well.
• Channing. Became the main shipping point for the XIT, which moved its twenty-two room headquarters there.
• Groom, 1902. Platted on the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf, named for B. B. Groom, who managed the Francklyn Ranch.
• Fritch, 1933. A Rock Island vice president named H. C. Fritch bought the right-of-way back in 1924. The townsite waited nine years, and a 1926 gas boom is what finally filled it in.

Between 1850 and 1900 the population of West Texas went from about 4,100 to over 755,000. Nearly all of that came after the rails did.

The spacing tells you what these towns were for. Steam locomotives needed water. Farmers needed a grain elevator they could reach and get home from in a day with a loaded wagon. So you put a stop every ten or fifteen miles, and a town grows up around the stop. Once the county seats were settled, usually by an election and occasionally by an argument, the map was fixed. It has barely moved since.

Why a hundred-year-old railroad map is still your internet problem

Here is where it stops being a history lesson.

Cable and phone companies built the same way railroads did, and for the same reason: they follow density, because the math only works when enough houses share the cost of the line. Up here the density was set in 1888 by where a steam engine needed water. Towns of eight hundred people, twelve miles apart, with working farms and ranches in between.

That is a fine way to run a wheat operation. It is a terrible way to attract a national cable company. So they skipped it, the same way they skipped most of rural America, and a lot of people out here spent twenty years on whatever they could get.

Fixed wireless got built out here first because it does not care about the twelve empty miles. A licensed radio link reaches a house that no cable company would ever trench to. Fiber is going in now too, town by town, and every year the list gets longer.

The geography that made this country hard to serve has not changed. What changed is that somebody local decided to serve it anyway.

Sources

The history here comes from the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas, which is the standard reference for this, along with the Oklahoma Historical Society for the Red River War. Specific entries worth your time:

• The XIT Ranch
• The JA Ranch
• Charles Goodnight
• The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon
• The Fort Worth and Denver Railway

If you want to know how your own town got started, most of them have their own Handbook entry, and we link to it from that town’s coverage page.