Railroads, Windmills and Barbed Wire
(This article is one chapter
of a larger history of West Central Texas published in the 1990-1991 Texas
Almanac. It explains how the convergence of railroads, windmills and barbed
wire in that region in the late 1800s forever changed the face of the Texas
prairies and plains, as well as the complexion of the West Texas cattle
industry.)
The cattle industry's recovery from the financial Panic of
1873 was followed by an unprecedented boom that fueled a growing interest in
Texas cattle ranching. Agents sold range rights to eager speculators from the
East Coast and Great Britain. At least 13 British companies were formed
expressly to run cattle operations in Texas. Eventually the Scottish and
English stake in Texas ranching was estimated to be $25 million.
Several factors contributed to the ending of the era of cattle drives: the extension of railroads across the plains, the introduction of barbed wire and windmills in the Texas plains, and the demand from Northern markets for improved beef quality.
Cowhands gather 'round
the chuckwagon during a roundup on the JA Ranch
in Palo Duro Canyon in 1898. Charles Goodnight, co-owner of the JA Ranch,
invented the chuckwagon for use on cattle drives and during roundups on the
huge ranch.
Railroads Begin the End
of Cattle Drives
The coming of the railroads caused a revolution in the cattle industry. As the rails stretched across the plains, the reason for cattle drives -- to get the cattle to distant railheads for shipment -- faded away. The passing of the cattle drive was beneficial to the better breeds of cattle that were being introduced into the Texas herds, because they were not as suited to the long drives as were the longhorns.
The
first railroad to lay tracks across West Central Texas was Jay Gould's Texas
& Pacific Railway Company, the only railroad in Texas to operate under a
federal charter. The T&P reached Abilene, Midland, Odessa and Sierra Blanca
in 1881, having started laying the Texas portion of its tracks west from
Texarkana in 1873. From Sierra Blanca to El Paso, the T&P used the tracks
of the Southern Pacific line in a "joint track" arrangement.
Wichita Falls received rail service from the Fort worth and Denver City Railroad, which was building a line from Fort Worth to Colorado, in 1882, allowing Wichita Falls to develop into a major cattle-shipping point. The line was extended toHarrold in 1885 and to Chillicothe in 1886.
In
the East railroads were laid from town to established town, but few towns in
the Texas plains were large enough to attract a railroad on the basis of
population alone. In more populous regions, the revenue from shipping paid for
laying tracks between towns. On the plains, railroad companiese wanted to span
the vast distances as quickly as possible. To make laying tracks across the
plains attractive to the railroads, the state offered incentives. Under a
provision of the Constitution of 1876, grants were made of 16 sections of public
land (10,240 acres) for each mile of line constructed. The Texas & Pacific,
under an earlier provision, collected state bonuses of 20 sections (12,800
acres) for each mile of track, totaling more than 5 million acres.
In 1881, state officials were chagrined to discover that the supply of public land was exhausted, and that the commitments they had already made were 8 million acres greater than the amount of land available to distribute. At a special called session in 1882, the Texas Legislature repealled the Land Grant Act of 1876, ending the public land giveaway. Railroad construction slowed for severalyears thereafter.
Face of Texas Changed
by Railroads
Many communities that were too small to attract a transcontinental railroad faded away when the railroads bypassed them. Other towns picked themselves up and moved in order to be on the railroad. Still other communities offered incentives to get the railroad to come to them, usually in the form of free right-of-way. In some cases railroads demanded free right-of-way, tax abatement and cash bonuses to build through a town. And many a new town sprang from the nucleus of a temporary railroad camp or from townsite speculation companies,some of which were owned by the railroad or by railroad personnel.
Belle Plain was one of the towns that died. Belle Plain was the dream of a land
promoter, who, in 1876, platted the townsite near the center of what would
become Callahan County. The county's voters chose Belle Plain as the county
seat when Callahan County was organized in 1877. By 1880, Belle Plain boasted
about 300 residents and numerous stores and services. Belle Plain College, one
of the first colleges in West Texas, opened with 22 students in the fall of
1881, growing to 85 students the following year. But the Texas & Pacific
burst the town's bubble when, in 1880, it laid its track six miles north and
founded the town of Baird. Businesses moved from Belle Plain to Baird to be on
the railroad, and the county seat was soon switched to Baird. Belle Plain's
jail was taken apart stone by stone, hauled to Baird and rebuilt. A severe
winter, followed by an equally severe drought in 1885-1887, killed Belle Plain,
finishing what the T&P had started. The college finally closed its doors in
1892.
Sweetwater
Sweetwater, on the other hand, survived and prospered. To meet the demands of bison hunters working in the area, Billie Knight opened a store in a dugout on the banks of Sweetwater Creek in newly created Nolan County in 1877. By March 1879, a post office called Sweet Water was established there, and Sweetwater became the temporary county seat of Nolan County two years later. When the T&P laid its tracks two miles northwest of the town in 1882, the citizens of Sweetwatersaved their town from certain death by moving it to the railroad.
The year before the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad reached Wichita Falls, the town comprised eight families living in three small box houses and several dugout homes. Wichita Falls was named for five-foot waterfalls on the Wichita River, which were destroyed when a flood in 1886 washed out a dam.
Tradition
holds that J.A. Scott won the site of Wichita Falls in a poker game in
Mississippi in 1837. Tom Buntin and his family moved to the area in the late
1860s, and John Wheeler settled nearby in 1875. Scott's heirs sent M. W. Seeley
to map the site and plan a town in 1876.
To
persuade railroad officials to lay tracks to the town rather than bypassing it
by several miles, Wichita Falls offered the railroad half the property along
the right-of-way. The first train arrived in September 1882, spurring interest
in the sale of town lots. Named the county seat of Wichita County in 1883,
Wichita Falls soon became the terminus of a series of freight lines and the
milling and supply center for Northwest Texas and Southern Oklahoma. By 1909,
the town had 30 miles of sidewalks and more than 100 businesses, of which 21
were saloons, earning it the nickname of "Whiskeytaw Falls."
As the T&P moved west, laying track at the rate of about a mile a day, the company relocated its camps every 30 to 60 miles, and each camp was potentially a new town. The list of railroad-spawned towns includes Gordon, Eastland, Abilene, Colorado City, Big Spring, Midland, Odessa, Monahans and Pecos, amongothers.
In midsummer of 1880, the site of Abilene was a desolate prairie in Taylor County. By the following summer, it was a flourishing settlement, the offspring of the T&P Railway and several local cattlemen. Before the coming of the railroad, the population of Taylor County was concentrated around Buffalo Gap, about 10 miles south of present-day Abilene. When the county was organized in 1878, Buffalo Gap was the logical choice for county seat. Then the T&P promoted an auction of lots in their new town, named for Abilene, Kan., on March 15, 1881. Trainloads of immigrants and speculators flooded in for the event. A tent city sheltering about 300 potential buyers sprang up on the prairie as they awaited the auction. About 1,000 people attended, and in two days, 317 lots weresnapped up.
The Bone Trade Flourishes
For several years after Abilene was born, the main cash crop in the area was
bison bones. Quite a business developed in the gathering and marketing of the
bones, remnants of the bison slaughter of the mid-1870s. The calcium phosphate
content of the bones was used in sugar refining and in fertilizer. Ash from
some of the bones was used in the production of bone china, and firm bones were
used to manufacture buttons. Bone brokers bought piles of bones from the
gatherers and contracted with freighters to get them to the railroad at
Abilene, as well as Sweetwater, Baird and Albany. The bone pile at the railroad
terminal in Abilene was described by an early settler as being about 30 feet
wide, as high as a boxcar and extending four or five blocks along the tracks.
Altogether, more than a half million tons of bones, selling for an average
price of $6 a ton, were shipped out of western Texas by rail.
Abilene
was incorporated in 1883 and soon wrested the honor of being county seat away
from Buffalo Gap. By 1885, Abilene was the second-largest wool-shipping center
in the Southwest, but that industry soon waned. Farmers among the early
settlers in Taylor County raised wheat, corn, oats, sorghum and cotton. In
1886, the New Orleans Picayune was
quoted in the Taylor County News as
saying, "Farmers are pouring into Western Texas so fast that ranchmen have
just time enough to move their cattle out and prevent their tails being chopped
off by the advancing hoe."
By 1890, Abilene's population had reached 3,194, and the Abilene Electric Light and Power company began operating in 1891. After a group of private citizens built an earthen dam on Lytle Creek in 1897, assuring a stable water supply, Abilene's appeal to potential immigrants was greatly enhanced.
Farther west, Midland's first official building was a railroad mail car, brought in to serve as a post office, depot and trading house when the T&P Railway arrived in 1881. Midland was first called Midway for its location half-way between Fort Worth and El Paso. Herman Nelson Garrett, a California sheepman, arrived in 1882 to become the first permanent white settler in the area. He was joined by others in 1883. The name was changed to Midland about the time town lots were offered for sale by the Midland Town Company in 1885, the same year that Midland County was created. At that time, the business district of Midland comprised two saloons, two general stores, a restaurant and a wagon yard. At first, water was hauled from Monahans, but soon windmills dotted the growing town. John S. Scharbauer, who had raised sheep in Eastland, Taylor, Nolan and Mitchell counties, moved to Midland in 1887. He switched from sheep to cattlein 1888 and soon had a large herd of registered Herefords.
Odessa, also spawned by the coming of the railroad, was named by Russian railroad workers, who thought that its wide, flat prairies resembled the steppes near the Ukrainian town of Odessa. A group of Pennsylvania realtors formed a townsite company to sell lots in the fledgling town, and the glowing descriptions published in their pamphlet in 1886 persuaded several German Methodist families from Pennsylvania to settle there. Although some early settlers dreamed of making the area a wheat center, the realities of the western Texasclimate dictated that it become a cow town.
The Texas Central began laying tracks in the West Central Texas region about
the same time as the T&P, reaching Albany from Ross, McLennan County in
1882 and making it possible for Albany to develop into a cattle-shipping point.
The first public-school district in Albany was established in 1883, and other
public and private development was quick to follow.
The
Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe began building west from Belton in Central Texas in
1882, reaching Brownwood in 1885, extending on to Ballinger in 1886, and
reaching San Angelo in 1888. From the late 1880s into the 1920s, the G, C &
SF and her sister line, the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway Company,
crisscrossed West and West Central Texas by a combination of construction of
new track and the acquisition and linking of smaller, short lines, bringing the
efficiency of rail transport, with its attendant access to markets, to
virtually all the region.
As
the railroads spanned western Texas, stagecoaches were put out of business.
Some short feeder routes operated through the end of the 19th century, however.
A mail line linked San Angelo, Sherwood, Knickerbocker, Sonora and Ozona for a
number of years after the turn of the century. The operator used automobiles
after 1908, but kept two horse-drawn hacks to use in bad weather. The last trip
on that route was made in 1910.
Upgrading Cattle Quality
Even
before Northern markets demanded a better quality of beef than that provided by
the rangy Texas longhorn cattle, scattered attempts had been made to upgrade
cattle herds in West Texas. In 1871, C.C. Slaughter brought shorthorn bulls
from Kentucky to breed with selected heifers. Brothers W.D. and George T.
Reynolds introduced Durham cattle from England by way of Colorado onto the
range of their Clear Fork Ranch in Shackelford County in 1875. By the early
1880s, Durhams were also found in several other widely dispersed counties in
the region, including Tom Green. William S. Ikard brought Hereford stock to his
ranch in Wichita, Clay and Archer counties as early as 1876, and 29 Hereford
bulls were imported by a Fisher County ranchman in the late 1880s. Attempts
were made in Shackelford and Taylor counties in the mid-1880s to create a
dual-purpose animal by cross-breeding beef cattle with dairy cattle ñ Jerseys
in Shackelford, Holsteins in Taylor. But any improvement in the quality of
Texas cattle depended on fencing the Texas plains to separate blooded animals
from common range stock.
Barbed Wire Leads to Better Beef
Cattle
raisers in the Cross Timbers and farther east had easy access to fencing
materials in the wooded lands around them. They generally kept relatively small
herds on stock farms and managed easily with rail or stone fences. But on the
plains, the amount of land required to maintain each animal was much greater,
and water was much scarcer. Traditional fencing materials were not readily
available, and even when they were obtainable, buying enough to enclose the
enormous tracts of range lands on the plains was prohibitively expensive.
Barbed wire made fencing these vast expanses feasible.
Barbed wire was first patented in November 1874 by Illinois farmer Joseph Farwell Glidden, who invented it, some say, to keep dogs out of his wife's flower garden. Soon Glidden was manufacturing the stickery stuff in a factory in DeKalb, Ill. Called by some "the devil's hatband," barbed wire first appeared in Texas in the late 1870s. In an effort to encourage customers to try the unfamiliar fencing material, one enterprising hardware-store owner offered to replace his customers' rail fences with barbed-wire fences and sell the fence rails thus replaced for firewood. In some cases, the sale of the rails it replaced more than paid for the wire fence. There were eventually more than athousand different designs of barbed wire patented.
The cattlemen who were determined to improve the quality of their herds soon
strung miles of barbed wire. In fact, they often fenced not only land that they
owned or leased, but also public land that was supposed to be open to all. When
asked how much land he claimed, one cattleman replied, "Everything from
Fort McKavett to Coleman," a distance of some 80 miles encompassing untold
thousands of acres. In their desperate grab for range land, some cattle raisers
even fenced off small farms and ranches belonging to others. In some places,
fences blocked public roads. Farmers, pushing ranchers' cattle before them onto
the plains, fenced their land to keep the cattle out of their crops and away
from their precious water sources. Meanwhile, ranchers who still believed in
free grasslands were infuriated to find fences blocking their access to
pasturage and water for their animals.
In
addition, sheep became a factor in the range wars. Sheep were brought into the
German colonies in the southern part of West Central Texas in the 1850s, and
their range soon extended west into the Trans-Pecos region. Because sheep crop
the grass too short for cattle to eat, cattle ranchers despised them, prompting
a Texas law that made it illegal to drive sheep across private lands. No such
prohibition was applied to cattle.
Fencing
disputes pitted not only cattlemen against farmers and sheepmen, but also
free-grass ranchers against fenced-range cattle raisers. The conflicts were
exacerbated by droughts. Fence-cutting became common, in some areas reaching
the dimensions of a full-scale war. The Comanche
Chief reported in 1883 that no fewer than 75 miles of fence had been
destroyed in Comanche, Brown and Coleman counties in a single night. By late
1883, more than half of all Texas counties had reported incidents of cutting
and wrecking of fences and burning of pasture lands. Damages from fence-cutting
were an estimated $20 million, with at least $7 million of that in Brown County
alone. But damage to property was not the most serious result of the fencing
conflict: In some areas, tempers ran so hot that gunfire erupted and lives were
lost.
Although politicians generally tried to ignore the problem, Gov. John Ireland called a special session of the legislature in January 1884, and after much controversy and debate, fence-cutting was made a felony, punishable by a sentence of one to five years in prison. Fencing of public lands or other owners' lands was declared a misdemeanor. Existing fences were ordered removed within six months. Wholesale fence-cutting stopped, but the problem continued on a small scale,especially during droughts.
Improvement
of beef herds began in earnest when windmills came to West Central Texas. The
transcontinental railroads first brought windmills to the Texas plains to
provide water for their engines and crews in the early 1870s. When ranchers
were able to fence and cross-fence their lands into different pastures, they
were able to control breeding, the first requirement for improving herd
quality. With a well and a windmill in each pasture, they no longer needed
direct access to a stream to provide water for their cattle. Ranchers could
have separate summer and winter pastures, bull pastures and pastures restricted
to blooded stock.
With the protection of the land with wire and exploitation of the underground water supply with windmills, more high-quality animals were imported. By the 1890s, shorthorns and Herefords were dominant.
Written by Mary G.
(Crawford) Ramos, and firstpublished in the 1990-91 Texas Almanac.
©1999 The Dallas Morning News.
http://www.dallasnews.com/