Old Tascosa, the cowboy capital of the plains, lay one-half mile northeast and in its brief span became the center of the open-range world, a stomping ground for some of the West's most notorious bad men and a focal point for cattle thieves and ranchmen. Because of the easy crossing of the Canadian River there, it early became a meeting place where Indians and Mexican traders, called Comancheros, exchanged contraband goods, including women and children. With the passing of the buffalo came the first permanent settlement, made by Mexican sheepherders in 1876, and that same year Charles Goodnight and Thomas S. Bugbee brought the first cattle to the free-grass empire. Smaller ranchmen and nesters followed, and hundreds of miles from the general line of settlement, Tascosa drew both the lawless and the lawmen, including Billy the Kids and Pat Garretts. To accommodate those who died with their boots on in growing gunfights, a cemetery was set aside in 1879 and named for the famed Boot Hill in Dodge City, Kansas, to which Tascosa was tied by cattle and freight trail. The heaviest toll in a single shootout came on March 21, 1886, when three cowboys and a restaurant owner died in a five-minute duel, and all were buried in Boot Hill. Tascosa's cattle trails, its lifeblood, began to be pinched off with the coming of barbed wire, first put to commercial use nearby on the Frying Pan Ranch in 1882, and the pressure tightened when the vast XIT spread fenced its 3 million acres. By 1887 Tascosa was completely closed in, and when the railroad bypassed it that same year, its fate was sealed. By the time the Oldham County seat was moved to Vega in 1915, only 15 residents remained, and the old town's sole remnants were Boot Hill and the stone courthouse, though the site came to be occupied by Cal Farley's Boys Ranch.