Tascosa: The Ghost Town and Billy the Kid

Forty miles northwest of Amarillo along the Canadian River, there is almost nothing left of Tascosa. A stone courthouse still stands. A few foundations. A cemetery with weathered markers. For a few years in the eighteen eighties this was one of the roughest and most consequential towns on the southern plains, a rival to Dodge City, a market for the great Panhandle ranches, and a place where the law was, at best, approximate.

Tascosa began as Plaza Atascosa, a settlement of New Mexican pastores, or sheepherders, established on the Canadian River in eighteen seventy-six by a man named Casimero Romero. The name came from the Spanish atascosa, meaning boggy, for the creek. Anglo settlers arrived within months, among them a blacksmith named Henry Kimball, and within a few years the town had saloons, a dance hall, a general store, and enough traffic from the great ranches, the XIT, the LIT, the LX, to sustain a rough commercial economy.

In the fall of eighteen seventy-eight, Henry McCarty, known already as Billy the Kid, arrived in the Panhandle trailing horses he and his companions had stolen in New Mexico. Billy made friends in Tascosa. He played cards, drank, and was by all accounts liked. He was nineteen or twenty years old. He left without being arrested, returned to New Mexico, and his career continued on its famous trajectory.

When the Fort Worth and Denver Railway bypassed Tascosa in eighteen eighty-seven, the town's commerce began moving to Amarillo. Floods damaged what remained. The county seat moved to Vega in nineteen fifteen. In March of nineteen thirty-nine, a man named Cal Farley established a home for underprivileged boys on the old townsite. Boys Ranch is still there. Frenchy McCormick lived on in the old town until her death in nineteen forty-one, its last civilian inhabitant.