Amarillo: Cattle, Helium, and the Cadillacs

Amarillo did not exist before the railroad. When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway began building across the Texas Panhandle in eighteen eighty-seven, a group of merchants chose a flat spot on the plains, platted a townsite, and elected it Potter County seat all in the same summer. The name, Spanish for yellow, may have referred to the yellow wildflowers that covered the surrounding plains, or to the yellow clay soil of the nearby creek, depending on which origin story you prefer.

Within three years, Amarillo had become one of the busiest cattle-shipping centers in the world. The open range of the Panhandle, the High Plains, and eastern New Mexico fed enormous herds into the pens at Amarillo, where they were loaded onto stock cars and sent east. The XIT Ranch, the largest fenced ranch in the world at its peak, ran a hundred and fifty thousand head of cattle across three million acres in ten Panhandle counties; its cattle moved through Amarillo. By nineteen hundred, the city had reshaped itself into the commercial capital of the Texas Panhandle.

Then came something unexpected: helium. In nineteen eighteen, prospectors discovered the world's largest known helium field beneath the Panhandle's natural gas deposits. Helium was then a critical strategic material. The United States government held a global monopoly on commercial helium production, and Amarillo became the center of that monopoly. The federal helium plant established here supplied the gas that kept the Navy's airships aloft and, later, the programs that put American astronauts into orbit. Amarillo's Helium Monument, a six-story stainless steel column erected in nineteen sixty-eight to mark the gas's centennial, still stands near downtown.

But the landmark most travelers remember comes later. In nineteen seventy-four, the art group Ant Farm buried ten Cadillacs nose-first in a field west of town, each tilted at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Cadillac Ranch is now a public canvas where anyone can spray-paint the cars, which are repainted constantly. The installation has become, improbably, one of the most visited sites in Texas.