Shoeing Mules in Bailey County

My grandmother talked about traveling to Muleshoe, Texas on a wagon

Muleshoe City Limit

when she was a child. She may have visited it, again, when she was at West Texas Normal College in Canyon, Texas. In any case, I was enamored with the name of this town and wondered what mule lost its shoe there. As we headed to New Mexico, I was surprised when that tiny town popped up on our GPS. Of course we had to make a stop.








In 1860 Henry Black registered his brand and seventeen years later he purchased 40,000 acres with three houses on it, calling it Muleshoe Ranch supposedly because he found a mule shoe in the soil. Going back a year, Bailey County was created and named after a Kentucky lawyer killed at the Alamo, Peter James Bailey. The economy got a boost in

Bailey County Courthouse

1906 when the Gulf, Santa Fe, and Northwestern Railway Company, and the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway Company merged. Their purpose was to build a railway between Lubbock and Farwell on the New Mexico border. Communities along this future route gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to construction; and in 1913 the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway laid rails across northern Bailey County, allowing Muleshoe, with its name borrowed from the Muleshoe Ranch, to come into being. Because this was thinly settled cattle country it took until 1918 to get the county organized. Of course Muleshoe, then a small settlement, became the county seat and the first commissioner’s court meeting was held in the Blackwater Valley State Bank in early 1919. In July of that year a wooden frame courthouse was built. The little town boomed and very shortly outgrew its tiny county courthouse. In 1925 a new courthouse was built, designed by M. C. Butler in the Classical Revival style. With its good water resources, Muleshoe has developed an outstanding agricultural economy. It is also home to the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, the oldest such refuge in Texas; it was founded in 1935. And of course, the Muleshoe Heritage Center has the world’s largest mule shoe.

Grazing cattle

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