Hemphill County lies in the rolling plains on the eastern edge of the Panhandle, east of the Texas High Plains.

The county was named for John Hemphill, a staunch advocate of states’ rights who immigrated to Texas in 1838 and established a legal practice at Washington-on-the-Brazos. In early 1840 the Congress of the Republic of Texas elected him judge of the Fourth Judicial District. On December 5, 1840, the Congress elected him Chief justice of the Supreme Court, a position he held until 1858. In November 1857 Democrats, dissatisfied with Sam Houston, nominated Hemphill to succeed Houston when the latter’s senatorial term ended in March 1859. Hemphill was subsequently elected by the Texas Senate and took office on March 4, 1859. In January 1861 he delivered an address expressing his belief in the right of states to secede, and on January 6, 1861, he was one of fourteen senators who recommended the immediate withdrawal of the southern states. On February 4, 1861, the Secession Convention elected him one of seven Texas delegates to the convention of Southern states in Montgomery, Alabama, which became the Provisional Confederate Congress. He was subsequently expelled from the United States Senate by resolution on July 11, 1861.

The Hemphill County region was originally populated by Apaches, who were pushed out by the early 1800s by the Kiowas and Comanches. During the era of Indian control various European expeditions penetrated the region. That of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado possibly crossed the county in 1543 or 1544. The Long expedition, an American venture, certainly crossed the county in 1820, as did Josiah Gregg in 1839. Capt. Randolph B. Marcy surveyed several routes to California in 1849, including one that crossed Hemphill County along the divide between the Canadian and Washita rivers. During the 1870s, buffalo hunters entered the Panhandle, and by 1878 the last of the great southern herd had been killed.

Several military encounters occurred in Hemphill County, including the famous Buffalo Wallow Fight, which took place during the Red River War in the southern part of the county on September 12, 1874. The Buffalo Wallow Fight was widely publicized as a heroic engagement. Nearly all accounts of the battle claimed that six men killed as many as two dozen Indian warriors.

While the Indian wars raged and the buffalo hunters worked away, several trails were opened to link the Texas Panhandle to Dodge City, Kansas, the closest town of any size. The Jones and Plummer Trail, laid out by two buffalo hunters in 1874, ran from the site of present-day Mobeetie northward to Dodge City. In 1876 Charles Rath extended this trail southward to Fort Griffin, in Shackelford County. The Government Trail, laid out in 1874, ran from Fort Elliott, in Wheeler County, northeastward across Hemphill County toward Indian Territory as it made its way to Fort Supply.

These well-used and well-defined trails, originally used by the army and hunters, soon also brought ranchers and herds of longhorn cattle into the area. The era of open-range ranching began in Hemphill County even before the end of the buffalo.

In 1875, A. G. Springer established a temporary ranch in the eastern part of the county, and a handful of other settlers followed in 1876 and 1877. Hemphill County was formed by the Texas legislature in 1876. Investors began to purchase lands in the county for large-scale ranching during the late 1870s, when the Cresswell Ranch, headquartered in Roberts County, came to occupy much of western Hemphill County.

But the sale of school lands and state lands, begun in the mid-1880s, coupled with the terrible winter of 1886, spelled the end of the open range. By the late 1880s stock farmers and smaller ranchers began to take over the range. The early 1890s saw a county covered with smaller, privately owned and fenced ranching operations in place of the unfenced, public-domain, free-range empires. The arrival of the railroad also had much to do with this transformation.

The Southern Kansas Railway Company, a Santa Fe subsidiary, began to build a line into the Panhandle in 1886. The tracks crossed Hemphill County during 1887 and reached the town of Panhandle in 1888. The railroad allowed easier access to the outside world and encouraged settlement in the area. It also spawned three townsites, Mendota, Canadian, and Glazier.

The arrival of the railroad and the founding of Canadian led to the establishment of county government. Hemphill County was attached to Wheeler County for administrative purposes until 1887, when a petition for organization was circulated. An organizational election was held in July of that year, and Canadian was made county seat. A boundary dispute involving Hemphill County arose in the 1920s. As a result, a United States Supreme Court decision in 1930 led to the relocation of the 100th meridian, the eastern border of the Panhandle, approximately 3,700 feet to the east. This strip, 132 miles long, expanded Lipscomb, Wheeler, Hemphill, Collingsworth, and Childress counties at the expense of Harmon, Ellis, Beckham, and Roger Mills counties in Oklahoma.

(The information above is excerpted from the Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia published by the Texas State Historical Association. The Handbook can be accessed on-line at http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/ online/index.new.html. Copies of the two-volume set may be obtained by contacting the history organization at 512-232-1513.)