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Tascosa
- Dodge City Trail
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
Tascosa, on the sandy flats
above the Canadian River in Texas, and Dodge City, on the
hills above the Arkansas River in Kansas, were the
liveliest cowtowns in the West during the 1880s. The
economic link that made them sister cities was the cattle
trade; the physical link was the Dodge City-Tascosa
Trail.
Tascosa was almost totally supplied by freighters from
Dodge hauling huge quantities of supplies for surrounding
Panhandle ranches. Each of the larger stores in Tascosa
freighted in 25,000 to 50,000 pounds of merchandise each
month. As late as 1888 the Tascosa Pioneer
noted that 119,000 pounds of freight had been delivered
during the previous week.
The general configuration of this freight trail was
determined by the location of Bob and James H. Cator's
ranch. Indians, Comancheros, buffalo hunters, and
soldiers had moved southward across the plains, following
old paths or their own instincts. There was no permanent
route, however, until the Cators began making trips to
Dodge City from their Palo Duro station. Their repeated
use of the same tracks and crossings produced a fixed
trail.
The trail was divided into two distinct sections: the
northern half through Kansas, which was, in fact, the
Jones and Plummer Trail; and the southern leg from
Beaver, Oklahoma, to Tascosa. The trail started at Dodge
City and ran south to Brown's Soddy, in Meade County,
Kansas, just south of the city of Meade. It then crossed
the Kansas-Oklahoma border near Hines Crossing on the
Cimarron River.
From there it turned southwest toward Beaver, Oklahoma.
It crossed the Oklahoma-Texas border near Chiquita Creek
in the northwest corner of Ochiltree County, Texas, and
ran southwest to Cator's Zulu Stockade in the southwest
corner of Hansford County. The trail continued southwest
to the Little Blue stage stand, which was located just
south of the site of modern Dumas, Texas. At this point
the trail branched.
The northern branch led to Tascosa by way of Hartley
County; the southern branch hit Tascosa after turning
south and then west through Potter County. The isolation
of Tascosa made the trail important to the town. Although
the physical difficulties of the trail were not as
formidable as those of other Panhandle trails, the great
distances between way stations and the absence of
settlements made it a long, lonesome haul.
The trip from Dodge covered approximately 240 miles. A
stagecoach took thirty-four hours one way, and an ox team
required from a month to six weeks for a round trip. The
trail remained in use as an interstate road well past the
time when other freighting trails had been abandoned. The
stage line from Meade, Kansas, continued in operation
until the turn of the century.
Although Tascosa continued to exist until World War I,
its importance as a freighting center declined as the
railroads bypassed the town. First the Fort Worth and
Denver City built its station on the south side of the
Canadian River, opposite Tascosa, in 1887; then the
Chicago, Rock Island and Mexico built elsewhere in 1901.
Area ranchers began to receive their freight from
Amarillo and Channing on the Fort Worth and Denver City
Railway, and the Tascosa-Dodge City Trail was gradually
abandoned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Cator Family Papers, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum,
Canyon, Texas. J. Evetts Haley, The
XIT Ranch of Texas and the Early Days of the Llano
Estacado (Chicago: Lakeside, 1929;
rpts., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1967).
John L. McCarty, Maverick Town: The
Story of Old Tascosa (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1946; enlarged ed. 1968).
José Ynocencio Romero and Ernest R. Archambeau,
"Spanish Sheepmen on the Canadian at Old
Tascosa," Panhandle-Plains
Historical Review 19 (1946).
C. Robert Haywood
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was last updated March 17, 2003.
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