It also presents a pioneer town, Indian art, fine art and firearms.
To find “Texas’ largest history museum,” don’t go to Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, Galveston or San Antonio but to Canyon (pop. 12,875). The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, which claims that title, lies in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, 20 miles south of Amarillo. Opened as a one-room gallery in 1933, the PPHM now occupies 200,000 square feet on the campus of West Texas A&M University. Permanent exhibitions run the gamut from paleontology and geology to people of the Plains, from pioneer town to petroleum, from fine art to firearms. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, founded in 1921 to preserve the history of frontier life and natural history in the west Texas region, owns the entire collection. The museum strives to “demonstrate our relevance to every generation everyday,” and it succeeds admirably, mixing high tech and history in its onsite and cell phone tours, videocasts and podcasts.
Frontier history buffs will have a field day at Canyon’s celebrated museum. The Old West in this neck of the southern Plains meant cattle, of course, and the PPHM entrance opens on a display of 100 top west Texas cattle brands. The museum’s Western Heritage Collection celebrates 19th-century cattle industry trailblazers, as well as the ranching and homesteading that made people proud to be Texans. Panhandle pioneer Charles Goodnight (1836–1929) naturally stands tall here, as he did back in the frontier days. A scout and Indian fighter, Goodnight was barely in whiskers when he joined the Texas Rangers to protect settlements from raiding Indians and Mexican bandits. After the Civil War, he built up a sizable cattle herd but needed a better market, so in 1866 he and Oliver Loving drove their Longhorns to New Mexico Territory on what became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, extended by Goodnight in 1875 to Granada, Colorado Territory. The next year, Goodnight began his cattle operations in the Texas Panhandle’s Palo Duro Canyon. While trailing herds long distances, the cattleman conceived of an efficient way to feed cowboys—the chuck wagon, a mobile kitchen that provided enough decent chuck (slang for food) to boost trail hands’ morale. The collection showcases one of Goodnight’s chuck wagons along with such cowboy essentials as saddles, bits, spurs, tack, branding irons and barbed wire.
The museum’s Agricultural Collection holds tractors, planters, plows, harvesters, cultivators and other tools and equipment used in farming from the late 1800s through the 1920s. The two-story Derrick Room exhibit, with floor-to-ceiling windows and an overhead balcony, centers on a 1929 cable-tool drilling rig used during the early years of the Texas oil boom. Another exhibit shows a 1930s filling station, working pump jacks and two vintage Model T Fords.
The Red River War of the mid-1870s was the Army’s attempt to stop depredations by Comanches, Kiowas and other Indians against white settlers fanning out on the southern Plains. On June 27, 1874, the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, marked by Billy Dixon’s legendary long rifle shot (a reported eight-tenths of a mile) that knocked a warrior from his horse, kicked off the war. Plenty of skirmishing followed in the Llano Estacado (“Staked Plains”) as soldiers doggedly pursued the hostile warriors. On September 28, 1874, 4th U.S. Cavalry Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie successfully attacked an Indian village in Palo Duro Canyon, prompting the scattered Indians to stop fighting and return to the reservation by early the next year.
In the History Collection, the museum’s largest exhibit, visitors can gawk at Dixon’s rifle and Comanche Chief Quanah Parker’s 1873 Winchester rifle and eagle feather headdress. The collection includes many period Indian items, from clothing to everyday tools. Other exhibits re-create the lives of native people of the Plains from as far back as 14,000 years, tracing their ties to the American bison. The collection also touches on the daily lives of homesteaders, with an array of early pens, inkwells, kerosene lamps, medical instruments, musical instruments and personal items (razors, combs, etc.). The museum offers 22 galleries in all, including one devoted to American Indian art and the only permanent gallery in Texas devoted to Lone Star State artists.
The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum is at 2503 Fourth Avenue in Canyon. For more information about exhibits and hours, call 806-651-2244 or visit www.panhandleplains.org, Facebook or Twitter PPHM1933.
Originally published in the August 2010 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
