Route 66, Cadillac Ranch, and the Grand Canyon of Texas at Palo Duro
The Texas Panhandle's largest city sits at the crossroads of Route 66 and the Llano Estacado high tableland. Cadillac Ranch — ten Cadillacs buried nose-first in a wheat field west of town by the art group Ant Farm in 1974 — is among the most photographed roadside installations in America. Palo Duro Canyon, the 'Grand Canyon of Texas', opens just 30 km south: 240 metres of red, orange, and white canyon walls carved by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, with a summer musical performed in the canyon since 1965.
Amarillo was founded in 1887 as a railroad camp on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway and grew rapidly as the centre of the Texas Panhandle cattle industry — the stockyards processed 750,000 head a year at peak. Palo Duro Canyon was the site of the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, when US Army Colonel Ranald Mackenzie destroyed the winter camp of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne peoples — effectively ending the Red River War and forcing the surviving communities onto reservations. The Panhandle's geology yields helium, and Amarillo once accounted for 90% of the world's helium supply.