by William Nadeau Esq

Created on: December 20, 2009   Last Updated: April 18, 2011

Way up in the north east corner of New Mexico is the small town of Clayton. It is just ten miles north of the Texas Panhandle and ten miles west of the Oklahoma no-man's land. This town had originated in the eighteen hundreds when the ranchers used to drive cattle herds up to Dodge City and auction them off. It is right on the Santa Fe trail. That is still marked and one can follow it back into Oklahoma or west into Santa Fe. Some of my friends have told me about how Clayton was back in the eighteen hundreds. They have stated that there were a bunch of wild cowboys around. Those guys used to hit town after herding cattle for several days. It can easily be seen how it must have been a nice place to see after camping in the Texas Pan handle for as long as it took to herd all the way up to Dodge City. A lot of those wild cowboys liked to hit just about any bar to get drunk, While there there they would do some thing like play poker against the saloon gambler and loose a lot of money. They could then blow up and draw what ever pistol they carried.

There is a set of rail road tracks running right through town. Those tracks run up from Amarillo Texas all the way over to Raton, New Mexico. A little conversation around town let me learn that there had been a narrow gage rail road tracks on the east side of town that ran east to Boise City Oklahoma.  One good thing about small towns is that it allows one to speak to your neighbors and learn several things that real old folk still know about. That let me find out that the old buildings on the west side of the rail road tracks right across from city hall used to be a rail road passenger station. Through it one could get on the train and travel easily from town. One guy even told me that the large tanks standing along side the tracks at the south end of town were used to load grain into rail road cars. I should have snapped at that right away because the look like the tanks that are still standing beside the rail road tracks about halfway between Clayton and Dal heart exas. They even look like some of the old ones standing beside Interstate twenty five west of Amarillo. The ones down there that used to have rail road tracks running beside them. The passenger train station was probably closed down back in the seventies like so many others around America were.  Clayton has a couple of cattle feed lots along side it. One ought to guess the rail road tracks had been originally set up to haul cattle

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>