In Comanche County T.D. Reynolds and two others, Mason and Roberts, were arrested by vigilantes. They explained to those watching that they were taking the three to the Erath County jail. On the way out of town Dr. Windham bought 36 feet of rope. About midnight on October 20, 1872, the prisoners were hanged and a hasty inquest the next morning found that “the prisoners came to their death by parties unknown.” The bodies were so poorly buried that a few days later “that wolves dug them up and fed on them.” Britton [I’ve lost the rest of the book information]

in October of 1872 a vigilante group lynched a tree-full near Stephenville and rode off without noticing that one of the victims, overweight Jim Latham, had bent his limb low enough to put his feet on the ground. Latham, the only survivor of the purge, (a different source said his son came out of the brush and cut him down) was able to escape to Austin (another source said a couple that helped him were later murdered) and reported the lawlessness to authorities. Stephenville was placed under martial law for the winter while state police tried to convict the well-known vigilantes. Nobody would testify for fear of “feeding the wolves,” a reference to the shallow graves associated with vigilante death squads.

Lena Lewis, Erath County: A Compilation, Stephenville, 1938. [manuscript in TSU Rare Book Room].

“The enrollment of John Tarleton College has passed the 150 mark. This is beyond the expectation of the most sanguine at the time the school began.” Stephenville Empire

In October of 1836 George B. Erath became a lieutenant in the Texas Corps of Rangers (not the same as later Texas Rangers). Texas could not afford to pay them except in land and loot from raiding the Indians. Erath and his men lived off wild game and carried honey in deerskin bags.

Lucy Erath, (dictated to) The Memoirs of Major George B. Erath 1813-1891. Waco: The Heritage Society of Waco, 1956.

For years Erath County Prohibitionists had been trying to get enough votes to turn the county dry, but every year the Thurber vote kept the county wet. The 1903 October issue of the United Mine Workers Journal charged that Erath County went dry this year because W. K. Gordon, the “King of Thurber,” made a deal with the Erath County Commissioners to exempt the Thurber vote. Mingus remained wet because it was in a different county.

Weldon Hardman, Fire in a Hole, Gordon, Texas: Thurber Historical Association, 1975.

Before barbed-wire, Erath fences were made of post oak rails, stone-walls, and bois d’arc hedges. They were used not to enclose livestock but to keep them away from crops. In 1874 J.F. Glidden of Illinois patented a mass-produced barbed-wire and moved to Texas where he gave away several rolls free as advertisement. Sales took off by 1883 and soon there were wire fences all over the county. With the new wire fences, cattle were pinned rather than being moved seasonally to maintain a healthy prairie. It wasn’t long before the native grasses were grazed out and replaced with low nutrition invasives. Without a thick grass cover, rainfall eroded deep gullys and lowered the water table. Sparse grass meant fewer grassfires and cedar was then able to move down from the hills and choke the prairies.This was about the time that prairie chickens became extinct in the area. “The barbed-wire changed the entire system of western agriculture, and the open ranges disappeared.”

John Spratt, The Road to Spindletop: Economic Change in Texas, 1873-1901. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955.

In October, 1875 just ahead of the first norther, clouds of Rocky Mountain grasshoppers flew over Central Texas. This now extinct specie of grasshopper would morph into a flying locust under crowded conditions and take to the air to avoid cold weather. Sometimes a norther overtook them and they fell from the sky like hail. Waco Daily Examiner

In October, 1922, thirty-one members of the Ku Klux Klan marched into the Stephenville First Baptist Church, lined up in front of the congregation and presented a well planned program. The congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner, and afterwards the Klansmen filed out as quietly as they had come in.

Stephenville Tribune (This was the same year that Black graves were dug up from the cemetery and moved to St. Johns.)

The town of Mingus was founded by a woman of that name in 1856. The settlement began to grow with the opening of nearby Johnson mines. When Col. R.D. Hunter took over the management of the Thurber mines in 1888, he lowered wages which caused discontented miners to move to Mingus and to a tent city between Mingus and Thurber known as Striketown, later as Grant Town, then as Thurber Junction. The community was a thorn in the side of Mingus officials as a haven for radicals and as a source of low cost groceries that were smuggled into Thurber to avoid company stores. In the 1890s when Erath officials managed to discount the Thurber vote, Mingus was across the county line and became the only place to get alcohol until Erath County went wet a couple of years ago.

Thurber Papers, Thurber Collection, Southwestern Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.

Recent discoveries in a Nevada cave show that early Americans consumed grasshoppers at least as far back as 14,000 years ago. Other cave finds along with ethnographic information show that grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids were ground on metates into a meal, mixed with berries, animal fat, and an unidentified molasses-like substance, and baked into fruitcakes. In the early 19th century Native Americans traded insect fruitcakes to immigrant wagon trains, helping people survive the westward trek. A popular species was the now extinct Rocky Mountain locust, (Melanoplus spretus) the swarms of which made Erath County farming impossible at times. And here is a gaggy bit of news, many dieticians are now saying that its an acceptable dietary practice to replace meat from animals with insects, because of their nutritious bulk and environmentally sustainable existence.

Katy Dycus, “Dining on Locust at Crypt Cave,” Mammoth Trumpet, Volume 39, No. 4 (October, 2024), 1-5.

The Bosque River begins in Erath County and flows into the Brazos at Waco. The word “bosque” is Spanish for wooded, and that may be the source of the name. The river may have been named by the Spaniard Marquis de Aguayo in 1719, or for the despised French trader Juan Bosquet, who lived along the river among the Tawakoni Indians in the 1770s. Handbook of Texas