This stretch of the Llano Estacado — the high, flat, treeless caprock that the Spanish called the "staked plains" — was Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache country, crossed by Coronado's expedition as early as 1541 in search of the cities of Cibola. For centuries it was open range: bison herds, then the great cattle drives. The town itself begins in 1887, when the railroad arrived and surveyors laid out a settlement near Amarillo Lake. It was called Oneida at first, then renamed; two years later the rancher Henry B. Sanborn — the "Father of Amarillo" — moved the whole town to higher ground, where it stuck.
They named it yellow. When the railroad reached the high plains of the Texas Panhandle in 1887, the cattle town that sprang up took the Spanish word for yellow — amarillo — for the wildflowers, or the soil. The Yellow City grew into one of the busiest cattle-shipping points on earth, then a marquee stop on Route 66 halfway between Chicago and the coast, with the second-largest canyon in the country cut into the plains just to the south. Cattle, canyon, and the Mother Road — this is Amarillo, and this page tells its story.
Why People Visit Amarillo Texas
Amarillo draws visitors with a mix of Western heritage, natural wonder, and Mother Road Americana. Travelers find it both a marquee stop along historic Route 66 and the gateway to Palo Duro Canyon, with deep cattle-ranching and Quarter-Horse traditions and the wide, plainspoken character of the high plains. It is proud, practical, and unmistakably Texan.
