West Texas | |
|---|---|
 West of Notrees | |
 West Texas counties in red; counties sometimes included in West Texas in pink | |
| Country | United States |
| State | Texas |
| Largest city | El Paso |
West Texas is a loosely defined region in the U.S. state of Texas, generally encompassing the arid and semiarid lands west of a line drawn between the cities of Wichita Falls, Abilene, and Del Rio.
No consensus exists on the boundary between East Texas and West Texas.[1] While most Texans understand these terms, no boundaries are officially recognized and any two people are likely to describe the boundaries of these regions differently. The historian and geographer Walter Prescott Webb has suggested that the 98th meridian separates East and West Texas;[2] writer A.C. Greene proposed that West Texas extends west of the Brazos River.[3] Use of a single line, though, seems to preclude the use of other separators, such as an area—Central Texas. Texas is part of the American South and the American Southwest at the same time, while the semiarid and desert climates of West Texas are clearly characteristic of the American Southwest.
West Texas is often subdivided according to distinct physiographic features. The portion of West Texas that lies west of the Pecos River is often called "Far West Texas" or the "Trans-Pecos", a term introduced in 1887 by geologist Robert T. Hill.[4] The Trans-Pecos lies within the Chihuahuan Desert and is the aridest part of the state. Another part of West Texas is the Llano Estacado, a vast region of high, level plains extending into Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. East of the Llano Estacado lies the “redbed country” of the Rolling Plains, and south of the Llano Estacado lies the Edwards Plateau. The Rolling Plains and Edwards Plateau subregions act as transitional zones between eastern and western Texas.
- ^ Cochran, M., Lumpkin, J. and Heflin, R. 1999. West Texas: a portrait of its people and their raw and wondrous land. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 176 pp.
- ^ Webb, W.P. 1935. The Texas Rangers: a century of frontier defense. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 583 pp.
- ^ Greene, A.C. 1998. Sketches from the five states of Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 176 pp.
- ^ Hill, R.T. 1887. The topography and geology of the Cross Timbers and surrounding regions in Northern Texas. The American Journal of Science, 3rd Series, 33:291–303.