Love Bug-Mobeetie Small Pink Acrylic

Please drop this item in rural or Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or leave it behind at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents the chain and tag tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S.

This is one of a series of heart-shaped items obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs. They are named either for the places of their origin or for Texas Panhandle-South Plains towns with interesting names or histories.  

Mobeetie is a city in northwestern Wheeler County. The population was 107 at the 2000 census.  A trading post for hunters and trappers for nearby Fort Elliot, the settlement was first a buffalo hunter's camp unofficially called "Hidetown." The first formal name for the town was "Sweetwater."  On January 24, 1876, occurred the "Sweetwater Shootout." Sgt. Melvin King (aka Anthony Cook) of the then 4th Cavalry, Company H, stationed at Fort Elliot, shot and killed Mollie Brennan (a dance hall girl and former prostitute). Sgt. King then wounded Bat Masterson, who in return killed him (King may have shot Masterson first and then killed Brennan, accounts vary).  Texas cattleman and trail driver Charles Goodnight said about the town: "I think it was the hardest place I ever saw on the frontier except Cheyenne, Wyoming." 

When the town applied for a post office in 1879, the name "Sweetwater" was already in use. The town took the new name of "Mobeetie," believed to be a Native American word for "Sweetwater." Later it was discovered that the word actually means "buffalo feces".  In 1879 Mobeetie became the first county seat for Wheeler County. By 1881, Mobeetie was the judicial center of the Thirty-fifth District, made up of fifteen counties.  At its peak in 1890, the town had over 400 people, but Mobeetie's boom days ended when Fort Elliot closed that same year. Further decline came with the tornado of May 1, 1898, and then the loss of the county seat, in 1907, to Wheeler.  In 1929 the town had to move two miles when the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway built their tracks that far away.  The town steadily grew again until the start of World War II brought a peak of about five hundred.  The population has steadily declined since.  The town figures in several of the Sackett Series of western novels by Louis Lamour.