Biohazard Cleanup Near South Pyote Pyote, TX

Pyote is a small incorporated town in central Ward County, Texas, along Interstate 20 and U.S. Highway 80, about 20 miles west of Monahans.

The town began as Pyote Tank, where the Texas and Pacific Railway opened a telegraph office in 1881, before its tracks were even laid through the area.

Pyote's name is of uncertain origin — it may come from railroad workers' mispronunciation of 'coyote' or from the peyote cactus found locally.

After oil was discovered in the nearby Hendrick field in Winkler County in 1926, Pyote became the trading and shipping center for area oil activity, and its population soared from about 100 to roughly 3,500 by 1928.

The boom collapsed in the 1930s after the railroad built a spur to Monahans, and by 1941 Pyote's population had fallen back to about 201.

In 1942 the military built Pyote Army Air Field on 2,745 acres of University of Texas land just southwest of town, and the rattlesnake dens uncovered during construction earned it the nickname 'Rattlesnake Bomber Base.'

Pyote trained B-17 Flying Fortress crews and then B-29 Superfortress crews from 1944; within four months of opening it had become the largest bomber installation in the country, peaking at more than 6,500 personnel in October 1944.

After World War II the base became an aircraft-storage depot that held more than 2,000 planes at its 1948 peak — including the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb, and The Swoose, General MacArthur's plane — before those famous aircraft were rescued by the Smithsonian Institution.

The base closed in 1966 and its land reverted to the University of Texas; today the Rattlesnake Bomber Base Museum in Pyote displays World War II memorabilia in an old building from the base.

Pyote's population today is a fraction of its boom years — 131 in 2000, 114 in 2010, and just 72 at the 2020 census, making it the smallest town in Ward County.