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.
The railroad made Amarillo a cattle town, and by 1890 it was one of the busiest cattle-shipping points in the world — longhorns and Panhandle herds moving out by the trainload. That ranching heritage still runs deep: Amarillo is the home of the American Quarter Horse Association and its Hall of Fame, the registry of the quintessential Western working horse. Then, in 1926, came the road that made the city famous a second time. Route 66 — the Mother Road — ran straight through Amarillo, roughly halfway between Chicago and Santa Monica, and the Historic Sixth Street District filled with the diners, motels, and neon that still say "road trip" to the whole country.
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.
