Yellow Town: The Founding of Amarillo

In the spring of eighteen eighty-seven a man named John T. Berry rode out of Abilene, Texas, looking for a place to build a town. He found it in the Texas Panhandle, along the right-of-way of the newly arriving Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, a site with good water and open prairie where the railroad tracks would soon run. Berry platted a townsite, and by that summer a collection of tents and rough buildings had gathered around the tracks.

The settlement already had a name, borrowed from a nearby creek and lake that Mexican traders and sheepherders had used for generations. They called the water amarillo, meaning yellow in Spanish, most likely for the yellow soil along the creek and lake banks, or perhaps for the yellow wildflowers that bloom across the Panhandle in spring and summer. The traders who gave the creek its name pronounced it the Spanish way, Ah-mah-REE-yoh.

The railroad crews pronounced it differently. In eighteen eighty-eight a newspaper editor named Charles Rudolph, writing in the Tascosa Pioneer, complained bitterly about how the Fort Worth and Denver's workers were mangling the name. He prophesied, with what turned out to be complete accuracy, that the Spanish pronunciation was already lost. Never again, he wrote, would it be Ah-mah-ree-yoh. And so it has remained: AM-uh-RILL-oh, as flat and direct as the plains it sits on.

The town was elected county seat of Potter County in August of eighteen eighty-seven. Freight service from the Fort Worth and Denver began that October. Within a decade Amarillo had become one of the busiest cattle-shipping points in the world. The name that the New Mexican pastores gave their creek outlasted everything that tried to rename or reshape this place. The yellow wildflowers still come back every spring.