Yellow Texas

The region commonly known as Yellow Texas is an area in the north west of the old state of Texas and in Eastern New Mexico that is a tableland known as the Llano Estacado. This is a flat high plains area that is the southern end of the American Great Plains. To the south and East the Llano Estacado is separated from the Texas plains by the 300 to 1,000 feet steep Caprock Escarpment and to the West by the Mescalero Ridge that overlooks the lower lying Pecos River valley region.

Yellow Texas is a high plain mesa region over 3,000 feet above sea level in the south rising to in excess of 5,000 feet in the North West. It has a low rainfall semi-arid climate with long hot summers and cold winters. Low rainfall makes it a relatively poor farming area and cattle ranching is the main livelihood. The area has a low population density with a few large settlements of Amarillo, Clovis and Brownfield. Lubbock on the eastern edge of the plateau is Texican controlled trading city and the Republic’s only area of control in the central and northern plateau.

Despite the independent minded temperament of the Yellow Texans, the area would have easily been absorbed in to the Texican Republic but for one major reasons; Bomb City. In the north of the Llano Estacado lies the old city of Amarillo known as the Yellow City and also Bomb City. Before the apocalypse Amarillo was the site of a nuclear weapons production facility and that is how it earned its Bomb City nickname. The ruler of Amarillo, ‘Big’ Frank Cannon, claimed that he still had working nuclear devices and that if the Texican Republic did not halt its northward expansion he would ‘Roswell’, i.e. nuke, Galveston. A standoff resulted with the Republic holding Lubbock as a trading town and all other absorption of the region halted.