Rath City: A Million Hides and Then Nothing

Fourteen miles northwest of present-day Hamlin in Stonewall County, Texas, a boomtown appeared in eighteen seventy-six, lived fast, and vanished by eighteen eighty. Rath City, named for frontier trader Charles Rath, sprang up on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River as a trading post for buffalo hide hunters working the southern plains. At its brief peak, the settlement held a store, two saloons, a dance hall, and a scattering of tents and dugouts.

In eighteen seventy-seven, hides reportedly lay stacked at the trading post in enormous piles. In February of that year the town became a rallying point for three hundred frontiersmen after a hunter was killed nearby. When the great southern buffalo herd collapsed under the weight of commercial slaughter, the reason for Rath City vanished with it.

Today little remains beyond a historical marker and a roadside rest area.