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CHAPTER 1
The Precipice
Inside the prairie schooner Mary Blankenship froze in terror and clasped her six-month-old baby to her breast as the wagon wheels inched ever closer to the edge of the precipice. She dared not look down at the yawning canyon floor; there, far below, it patiently awaited their arrival ... their eternity.
It had taken the homestead seekers — Andrew and Mary Blankenship and their baby, traveling in the lead wagon with Solon Cowan and Griff Hiser in the second — two weeks of hard, slow going, first near their tree-shaded home territory, fording flowing streams, and then into West Texas where the landscape changed. Drastically. Their wagons bumped over and around the rough, broken, and eroded red clay terrain of dry gullies, shallow canyons, and low cedar-splotched mesas to reach the precipitous Caprock escarpment, above which lay their destination: El Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains.
January 8, 1902. At the foot of the escarpment they had reined their mules to a halt and stared in awe and dismay at the almost vertical stone wall that in places soared to a height of 300 feet: layer upon layer of residue which, over eons of time and tides, had accumulated and fossilized. Winding up the escarpment was a steep, rocky, and narrow wagon trail that was hardly reassuring and seemed, in fact, to dare mere mortals to try it.
Then the weather turned against them.
A frigid, dust-laden, dry January norther swept down from the high plains and met them head-on, the cold blasts blowing into the open front of the covered wagons and swelling the canvas covers until the prairie schooners looked like giant balloons. At that point the home-seekers wisely decided to join forces and attempt the ascent one wagon at a time — the Blankenship wagon going first.
Slowly they climbed higher. Halfway up, the trail narrowed, the wind got colder and more violent, and the mules got more stubborn, and when the winding trail turned once again, the winter blasts hit the wagon broadside and that's when it began its terrifying skid toward the brink of the canyon. Toward the brink of eternity. While inside the prairie schooner Mary froze in terror clutching her baby, outside Andy and the two fellow homesteaders fought desperately to avoid the yawning chasm of disaster. Andy lashed the stubborn mules, their heads lowered, both straining against gravity and the norther's frigid gale to pull the heavy load up the steep trail; the other two men struggled to pry the front wagon wheels inward and guide them away from the precipice.
Mary: "I tried not to see our predicament or hear the deafening shouts of the men as they maneuvered the team and wagon."
Slowly. Very slowly the three struggling men and the two reluctant mules climbed ... inch by inch ... foot by foot ... until at last they finally reached the top of that long and treacherous trail up the escarpment. Then they stopped. And, once again, they stared in awe at what they beheld. There, stretched before them — stretched to infinity it seemed — was a boundless, treeless, uninhabited ocean of grass that rolled on and on to the distant horizon where it melded into the western sky. A vast melancholy land where there was nothing to cast a shadow.
When the dry blizzard abated and the dust settled, they sensed another presence as real as it was invisible: silence. Silence — heavy, oppressive, and eternal — days on end of unbroken silence which, when coupled with the everlasting wind and the emptiness of the plains, evolved into a solitude tinged with sadness. Especially for the women. Years later, Mary Blankenship reflected: "We all had heard of the loneliness of the country in which we were to make our stand to live and die." But the stark reality of that lonely land they now beheld overwhelmed what mere words could never convey. "In just eight days, old things had passed away, and all things had become new ... we had stepped over the threshold into a new world."
Mary Blankenship was the first pioneer woman to make her home — a tent, as it were — on the South Plains of El Llano Estacado. She, her husband, Andy, and their baby boy were among the first of twenty-four hardscrabble, rural settlers who had uprooted, loaded all their dreams and earthly possessions into a covered wagon, and headed west. These twenty-four "nester" families had trusted and relied upon the reassurance of their leader, James William Jarrott, the young lawyer who had surveyed and then staked out homestead tracts on those uninhabited plains southwest of the tiny village of Lubbock, Texas. Jim Jarrott was the only one of the pioneers who had actually seen the home sites — or the Llano Estacado itself, for that matter — before the settlers made that life-changing decision to stake their futures on the new frontier. Jim Jarrott and his wife, Mollie, also staked a homestead, thus bringing the total to twenty-five claims.
Loneliness was not the only problem the homesteaders faced. They had no preconceived illusions that their lives would be easy on this semiarid, windswept wilderness where there were no trees nor any flowing rivers or streams. Many of their neighbors who were back home in their safe, tree-shaded world predicted that they would return, tails tucked between their legs, within three months — a year tops. The pioneers also realized that their very survival on this new frontier depended on daily, daylight-to-dark drudgery, or, as Mary Blankenship later put it in a colloquial expression of the time, it was "root-little-hog-or-die."
Those nester settlers did not, however, anticipate another life-threatening danger that they all would soon face. One that no one had warned them about. One that was lurking just ahead. Out there on the lonely Llano Estacado.
CHAPTER 2
El Llano Estacado
"I traveled ... until I reached some plains, with no more landmarks than as if we had been swallowed by the sea."
So reported Francisco Vasquez De Coronado after crossing El Llano Estacado in 1541 in search of the fabled "Seven Cities of Cibola." He found neither gold nor water on that featureless sea of grass.
In 1820, almost three centuries after Coronado, Major Stephen H. Long, a member of the US Corps of Topographical Engineers, was dispatched to make a scientific investigation. "The Great American Desert," was the way Maj. Long described what he found. It was an epithet that was accepted and perpetuated for years by civilized folks back East. During his trek across the plains Maj. Long also encountered a camp of Kiowa-Apache Indians who the major pronounced "the most degraded and miserable Indians" in the West — inhospitable savages living in an inhospitable land, Maj. Long concluded.
A few years later, in 1849, US army captain Randolph B. Marcy led an expedition across what he called "the dreaded Llano Estacado ... the great Zahara of North America." Marcy's report continued:
It is a region almost as vast and trackless as the ocean — a land where no man, either savage or civilized, permanently abides; it spreads forth into a treeless, desolate waste of uninhabited solitude, which always has been, and must continue, uninhabited forever ...
Marcy's prediction was wrong. The "great Zahara" was to become Texas' last frontier.
El Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains — the southern extension of America's Great Plains — a vast windswept and semiarid mesa sprawling over more than 30,000 square miles. It straddles the Texas-New Mexico border, and its land mass exceeds the combined size of seven of the original thirteen states of the United States. The Canadian River at the top of the Texas Panhandle marks the northern boundary of El Llano Estacado, and then to the south it extends 250 miles into West Texas to the edge of the Edwards Plateau and the town of Odessa. The Mescalero Escarpment, just east of the Pecos River in New Mexico, is the western boundary, and the plains sweep eastward 150 miles to the steep canyon escarpment formed by the headwaters of the Red, Pease, Brazos, and Colorado Rivers in Texas. Llano Estacado is the tableland remnant from the apron of outwash that stretches eastward following the uplift of the Rocky Mountains some seventy million years ago.
ANGLO SETTLEMENT
Until well after the Civil War there was no settlement on El Llano Estacado. It was the domain of the buffalo, the Apache (and later the Comanche), and the Kiowa. At the conclusion of the Red River War in 1874, the Indians were driven off the plains of Texas and onto Oklahoma reservations, and by the early 1880s hunters had slaughtered most of the buffalo herd. Thereafter, a few cattle ranchers began to stake out big spreads in the northern portion of El Llano Estacado. Charles Goodnight drove the first herd of cattle to the Palo Duro Canyon in the Panhandle of Texas in 1875. Settlement didn't really boom, however, until the Fort Worth & Denver City Railroad crossed the Texas Panhandle in 1888. Amarillo became the commercial hub on the North Plains area.
It would be more than two decades before any railroad extended its line to the town of Lubbock, establishing it as the commercial hub of the South Plains. (The North Plains of Texas — the Panhandle — consists of twenty counties. The South Plains of Texas consists of the seventeen counties adjacent to, and south of, the North Plains.) The sparse population of the South Plains didn't justify the cost of building a railroad until 1909. The 1900 federal census revealed that the county of Lubbock was populated by only 293 hardy pioneers. Four counties, Hockley, Cochran, Terry, and Yoakum, all lying west of Lubbock County, were even more sparsely populated, each having less than 100 inhabitants. Moreover, none of those counties were "organized" counties, meaning that they had no county government, no county seat town, and no judicial system. All these counties were attached to nearby organized counties for local governmental and judicial services.
Settlement on the South Plains had been slow not only because there was no railroad lines connecting it to the rest of America, but also because out there on that flat sea of grass there was little wood or water. Although there were no flowing creeks or rivers providing a reliable source of water on the South Plains, it was discovered in the mid-1880s that there was an enormous sea of fresh water lying only about 120 feet or less below that sea of grass — the Ogallala Aquifer. The big ranchers solved their water problem by digging wells and erecting towering forty-foot Eclipse windmills about every four miles across the prairie. (The cattlemen knew that their cattle would graze up to two miles from their water source but no farther.)
With water available, those unfenced miles of protein-rich prairie, buffalo, and gramma grasses turned into a beef bonanza for large operators — free grass. At least, as it turned out, parts of those thousands of acres of that rangeland were free grass, and the rest could be leased from the State of Texas for a few cents per acre. Under those circumstances, there was really no incentive for any rancher to buy land from the state. Nevertheless, the owner of one ranch — and it was a very, very large ranch — did own the land. It was the three-million-acre XIT Ranch, granted to the owner by the Texas Legislature. Unlike any other state in the United States, Texas actually owned the land within its borders. The land ownership was reserved to the state by the 1845 annexation treaty between the United States and the independent Republic of Texas when Texas joined the union. The State of Texas, therefore, enacted its own land development and homestead laws.
In 1879, the State of Texas was in dire need of a new state capitol building in Austin — the old capitol building having burned down. But there was a problem. Texas was broke. The state may not have had any spare money, but it did have an enormous amount of unsettled land available. In 1882, the Texas Legislature awarded a Chicago consortium, "the Capitol Syndicate," a 3,050,000-acre land grant in consideration for the construction of a red granite state capitol building — a frontier skyscraper 311 feet high, taller even than the US Capitol. The impressive edifice still, to this day, graces the capitol complex in Austin.
And that was how the Capitol Syndicate earned ownership of the vast XIT Ranch, which extended some two hundred miles north-to-south along the western edge of the Texas-New Mexico border, all the way from the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle down to its southern boundary near the present location of Levelland, Texas, and about thirty miles west of Lubbock. The XIT thus came to own a sizeable part of the north half of Hockley County, Texas — a fact that was to become important to this story when two decades later, J. W. Jarrott and his band of homesteaders began staking claims in the southern part of Hockley County.
THE FOURSECTIONS ACT
The passage of the Four-Sections Act in 1895, as amended in 1897, was a watershed event in Texas history. Until 1891 executive and legislative sympathy in Austin had favored large ranching interests, railroads, and corporations. That changed with the election of Populist governor James S. Hogg, who took office in January 1891. He was succeeded by the election of another Populist governor: Charles A. Culberson, who held that office from 1895 until January 1899. By the passage of the Four-Sections Act, the Texas legislature signaled a reversal of sympathy in favor of the farmer-stockman and a growing number of rural pilgrims such as small town developers, merchants, schoolteachers, and religious leaders as well as homesteaders.
More than any other factor, the passage of the Four-Sections Act brought about the settlement of West Texas. Pursuant to that legislation a genuine Texas homesteader (not a land speculator) could purchase four sections of land under very favorable terms. As noted previously in the preface, Panhandle pioneer James D. Hamlin, "The Flamboyant Judge," commenting on the effect that the passage of this act had on the settlement of the Panhandle area in the North Plains, said that it "set off an influx of settlers fanning out through the large ranches." Settlement under the Four-Sections Act progressed at a faster pace on the North Plains than on the South Plains, and this was because by 1888 the North Plains had a railroad, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad, that traversed it East to West. On the other hand the South Plains had no railroad until 1909. That retarded Four-Section Act settlers considerably. For instance, a Four-Sections Act settler who staked his claim west of Lubbock had to travel by horse and wagon 110 miles to the southeast to reach the Texas and Pacific Railroad station at the town of Big Spring for food, supplies, and markets. This round trip took up to fourteen days, or even longer if it snowed and obliterated the wagon trail. If that happened the homesteader had to hunker down and wait for a thawing to uncover the wagon trail across that sea of grass so he could continue his journey home.
After the Civil War, the State of Texas still retained ownership of almost all of the unsettled lands in the western part of the state. In addition to the Four-Sections Act, the Texas legislature, in a further effort to encourage settlement and development of the state, had designated a large portion of these state lands as either "school lands" or "railroad lands." The object of a "railroad land" designation was to encourage settlement of West Texas by the construction of railroads. The state granted title to sixteen sections of land in favor of any railroad as a reward for constructing one mile of railroad track. On the other hand, the proceeds from the sale or lease of "school lands" went back into the Texas treasury and were designated for the support of education in the state. And, unlike "railroad" sections, "school" sections could be sold to individuals (provided they were Texans), and the four-section homesteaders eagerly seized upon the opportunity to finally realize their share of the American dream: own their own piece of land, start their own business, become their own boss, and, hopefully, become prosperous.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Death on the Lonely Llano Estacado"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Bill Neal.
Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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