YL Ranch History

Tecumseh Ranch History

Tecumseh Ranch is located on the site of old Camp Cooper, one of General Robert E. Lee's first command posts prior to the Civil War. The ranch is also the site of an old Comanche Indian Reservation.

It was at Camp Cooper that Cynthia Ann Parker, a 9-year-old girl, was captured by the Comanches in 1836. She would later become the mother of the famous chief, Quanah Parker. She was returned to her family in 1860, after being recaptured by Texas Rangers on the Pease River. Among those Rangers was young Lawrence Sullivan Ross, who eventually became a Texas Governor and 7th President of Texas A&M University. Cynthia is said to have "died of a broken heart," having been separated from her Comanche husband, Nacona and their two young sons she never saw again, plus the devastating death of her little daughter, Prairie Flower, in 1863. Cynthia Ann had learned to love the Comanches' nomadic way of life, and never grew comfortable with her return to civilization. She died in her sister's house in East Texas in 1870.

This ranch is also very near old Fort Griffin established July 31, 1867, and the wild town which grew in the "flat" below it during that era of soldiers, buffalo hunters, gamblers, "soiled doves," and gunfighters who passed through or resided there. Fort Griffin is where famous lawman Wyatt Earp first met and formed a loyal friendship with "Doc" Holliday, eventually leading to their sharing the same side during a well known 1881 gunfight at the "OK Corral" in Tombstone, Arizona—the same year Fort Griffin was eventually abandoned.