09/30/2026
Around 1875, buffalo hunters set up a camp of hide shacks beside Fort Elliott in the Texas Panhandle. They called it Hidetown, and it later became Mobeetie, often called the oldest town in the Panhandle. In January 1876, a young Bat Masterson was shot in a gunfight at the Lady Gay dance hall there, the start of a legend that would follow him to Dodge City and Tombstone. Mobeetie became the Wheeler County seat, but a tornado in 1898, a railroad that went elsewhere and the move of the county seat in 1907 left the old town nearly empty. The old jail still stands as a museum.
