Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Camargo, OK

Camargo is a small town in western Dewey County, Oklahoma, sitting on State Highway 34 roughly halfway between Leedey and Vici.

Camargo's site was part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation until that land was opened to non-Indian settlement on April 19, 1892, and its post office was established on September 16, 1892, with Rosa Meek as postmaster.

Camargo's name has two competing explanations: historian George Shirk said it was named for a town in Illinois, while another tradition holds that Camargo is a Cheyenne word meaning 'little dog'.

Camargo got its railroad in 1912, when the Wichita Falls and Northwestern Railway - later part of the Katy system - built its Leedey-to-Forgan line through town, and the Camargo Comet newspaper began publishing the same year.

Camargo was a busy farm and ranch trade center by 1915, with four general stores, two hotels, two lumber yards, and two grain elevators.

Camargo's early economy rested on farming and ranching, and bentonite clay was later mined nearby and shipped out by rail until the railroad stopped operating in 1972-73.

Camargo first appeared in a federal census in 1930 with 291 residents, and its population peaked at 315 in 1950.

Camargo shrank to just 115 residents by 2000, but it has grown again since, reaching 193 people at the 2020 census.

Camargo was the birthplace of Sylvan Ambrose Hart, a buckskin-clad trapper and writer often described as one of the last of the American mountain men.