Blanco Canyon, carved by the White River into the Caprock Escarpment on the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, offered an unusually fertile, wooded refuge in an otherwise dry region. Long associated with Coronado’s 1541 expedition, it later became a focal point of West Texas history: the site of the Battle of Blanco Canyon in 1871 during Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s first campaign against the Plains Comanches, and near Mount Blanco, the location of the first permanent white settlement on the West Texas plains in 1877. Its practical importance continued in the twentieth century as the home of the Plains Baptist Assembly retreat center.