Fort Griffin

Fort Griffin was the fort above the wildest town in Texas — the 1867 post on the Clear Fork of the Brazos where the Army never finished building, and the town below it, 'The Flat,' never stopped running wild. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp passed through; John Wesley Hardin and Pat Garrett knew its streets; Lottie Deno dealt cards in its saloons; the buffalo hunters spent their wages in the bordellos while the soldiers policed what they couldn't close.

The fort ran the Red River War — Mackenzie's campaigns against the Comanche and Kiowa staged out of Griffin, the Buffalo Soldiers and Tonkawa scouts pushing the southern plains tribes toward Fort Sill while the town below sold the buffalo hides by the ton. When the herd was gone the town was too — the fort closed in 1881, the railroad went through Albany instead, and The Flat went from the wildest town in the West to a rural crossroads in a decade.

What's left is the state's — the ruins on the plateau, the 45-foot hand-dug well, and the Official State of Texas Longhorn Herd grazing the grounds where the buffalo hunters' town stood. The file keeps the double ghost town: the fort that outlasted the buffalo and the town that died with them — the wildest address in Texas, now a state park where the longhorns keep the grass down.

Fort Griffin is the archive's wildest file — the unfinished fort above The Flat, the buffalo-hide boomtown where Earp and Holliday and Hardin all walked, dead since the herd ran out and the railroad went elsewhere.