146. Tulia, Swisher County

Another tiny town with a fairly impressive courthouse. And guess what I found?

Welcome to a new stop the Ozark Trail! Well, OK, a surviving stop on the Trail. While Wellington still has its marker, several of the towns we have just been through don’t have theirs any more. It’s odd to think of Tulia as a “city with a future” when it’s still smaller than 5,000 people and when it has corruption and a history of racial policing issues. But that’s one of the problems I’m sure they to tackle with out here in the middle of the Panhandle. I’m here for something different…

HEEEEEEEYYY! Quanah! I ran into this one on the way into town. And of course there was a cache. Nothing particularly special, just a preform along the fenceline. But at the same site was this:

Sometimes it’s a little odd what we have chosen in the past to memorialize. Just as I chafe to see trumpeted remembrance of the Confederacy, I can only imagine native Americans have seen their fill of memorials to battles against their ancestors and massacres and indignities visited upon their pasts. To think that slaughtering horses would have been noteworthy in the 1930s seems ridiculous, but then again the past is a foreign country. If any native cachers want to talk about it in greater detail, I’d happily read Caching While Native, too.

Of course, despite being the best known slogan in the country, Don’t Mess With Texas doesn’t always stop this from happening. CITOs exist for a reason. Oh well, I proceeded to my encounter with the courthouse and then got back on the the road, rolling on until I reached…