Briscoe County Texas map
34.53° N · 101.21° W · County seat: Silverton · 902 sq mi
Briscoe County is where the Llano Estacado ends. The Caprock Escarpment runs across it from north to south, and the red canyons below the rim hold Caprock Canyons State Park and Trailway at Quitaque — the home of the official Texas State Bison Herd. Fewer than 1,500 people live in the county's 902 square miles.
Silverton sits at the SH-86 and SH-207 junction on the flat western half. The broken country in the northeast is the Caprock breaks around Quitaque.
Where Briscoe County is
Briscoe sits on the southeastern edge of the Panhandle counties, on the line where the High Plains break down toward the Rolling Plains. Armstrong County is north and Donley touches the northeast corner. Hall is east, Motley southeast, Floyd south and Swisher west.
Lubbock is the nearest large city at roughly 75 miles southwest; Amarillo is about 60 miles northwest. Neither is reached by a four-lane road from Silverton — every route out of the county is a two-lane state highway.
The Caprock Escarpment is the county's defining line. West of it, around Silverton, the land is level irrigated farmland at High Plains elevation. East of it the Little Red River and the tributaries of the Prairie Dog Town Fork have cut through the Ogallala caprock into older red beds, dropping several hundred feet in a few miles.
Silverton and Quitaque
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Silverton | City, county seat | 629 |
| Quitaque | City | 342 |
Those two towns hold roughly two-thirds of the county's population between them. Quitaque, at the foot of the Caprock in the northeast, is the gateway town for the state park and the trailway; the name is a Comanche word and locals say it as KITTY-kway. Silverton, on the plains 15 miles west, has the courthouse, the schools and the grain elevators.
Roads
- SH-86 – the east–west route, entering from Tulia in Swisher County, running through Silverton and Quitaque, then dropping off the Caprock and continuing east toward Turkey and the Hall County line.
- SH-207 – the north–south route. From Silverton it climbs north through the canyon crossing into Armstrong County and Claude; southward it runs to Floydada in Floyd County. The stretch north of Silverton is one of the most scenic paved miles in the Panhandle, crossing the Prairie Dog Town Fork on the way through.
No US highway and no interstate touches Briscoe County. The closest US route is US-287, about 25 miles northeast through Hall and Donley counties.
Caprock Canyons State Park and the bison herd
The state park lies just north of Quitaque, in the canyons cut into the escarpment. Its central feature is Lake Theo, a small reservoir on Holmes Creek, with campgrounds and trails running out into the red rock above it. The park is the Texas Parks and Wildlife property that most directly explains the geology of the Caprock: the exposed walls show the Ogallala cap sitting on the older red Permian beds below.
The park is also the home of the Texas State Bison Herd. These animals descend from the calves Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight gathered in the 1880s at the JA Ranch in Armstrong County, when the southern plains herd had been shot almost to nothing. The herd was moved here and given official state status, and the animals range across the park rather than being penned in a display pasture — drivers on the park road share it with them.
Attached to the park is the Caprock Canyons Trailway, a rail-trail of about 64 miles built on the abandoned Fort Worth and Denver South Plains grade between South Plains in Floyd County and Estelline in Hall County. Its best-known feature is the Clarity Tunnel, a former railroad tunnel near the Briscoe–Hall line that is now used by a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats.
The county is named for Andrew Briscoe, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and fought at San Jacinto. Like every county in this part of the state it was marked out of the old Bexar District in 1876 and left unorganized for years; Briscoe County did not organize its government until 1892.