Tascosa, Texas: The Panhandle's Rough Cow Town

What was Tascosa?

Tascosa was a cow town in the Texas Panhandle, a small adobe village that began around 1875 or 1876 and never grew beyond about 300 permanent residents. For its first five years it had no council, no government, no sheriff and no town marshal. In 1880 it became the seat of newly organized Oldham County.

Its customers were the cowboys of the large cattle syndicates that held Panhandle range. One of those syndicate leaders was William McDole Alphabet Lee, whose group later hired Pat Garrett.

The 1883 strike and the rustlers

In the spring of 1883 cowboys employed by the big syndicates went on strike. The strike failed, and many of the men who had walked out joined Jesse Jenkins's rustling operation, nicknamed the Get Even Cattle Company, which worked from a ranch just over the New Mexico line. In spring 1884 the Lee group hired Pat Garrett to lead a band called the Home Rangers against rustling. Garrett quit after about nine months, and the unit disbanded.

The 1886 gunfight

Around 2 a.m. on 21 March 1886 a shootout broke out in Tascosa between cowboys from the LS Ranch and associates of Jenkins. Four men died: Ed King, Frank Valley, Fred Chilton and saloon owner Jesse Sheets, who was not involved. Two others were badly wounded. Oldham County indicted the surviving suspects, but changes of venue moved their cases, and oral tradition says they were acquitted, possibly by a hung jury. Court records from that period did not survive, so the outcome cannot be confirmed.

Sheriff Jim East counted 26 men killed in Tascosa from 1880 to 1886. The article used here also estimates about 30 violent deaths over six years.

Why Tascosa faded

Two events weakened the town after 1886. The Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad bypassed it, and the blizzards of 1886 and 1887, known as the Big Die-Up, bankrupted many cattle syndicates. History.com's account of the northern plains notes two drought summers followed by a severe winter that buried the prairie under about four feet of snow, with ranchers losing up to 80 percent of their steers in some places. Shootings continued, including Jim East's killing of Tom Clark in May 1890.

Today little remains of Tascosa except the old stone courthouse.

Costs and context

Tascosa shows what happened where cattle money arrived before law did. The strike, the rustling and the retaliation all took place within a few years, and the HistoryNet account ties the town's violence to the strike, the rustling that followed and the hired lawmen sent against it.

Learn more

Read the HistoryNet profile of Tascosa, the Wikipedia article on Tascosa and the History.com account of the 1886-87 winter. For more, see ranching stories on farm.FM and a farm.FM story on Panhandle cow towns.