“The story begins in the late fall of 1886. As I recall it now, the fall crop had just been harvested and the Knox family was on its way to a new home . . . twelve miles due north of Dublin . . . The family consisting of a father, mother, and nine children all the way from a youth of sixteen to a baby in arms, were either in the Ox-wagon or scattered advantageously around it, best suited to the function he or she was to preform on the trip. There was hardly a semblance of a road for us to follow until we came to Hazeldell. So father and brother Jimmie, carrying axes, walked at the head of the procession cutting away the underbrush and guiding the four-head of oxen along. The wagon was piled high with household plunder. It was covered over with a wagonsheet fastened down at each side, leaving a small opening at the hindend. A chicken coop, bulging with various colored chickens, cackeling and crowing continuously, was fastened to the hind-end of the wagon, while a mother pig with her litter of ten babies found travel accomodations in a huge box fastened beneath the latter. Mother sat on the flat board placed across the wagon at the front end to assist in directing the procession and otherwise keeping an eye on things in general. In her lap was baby, Hawkins, who fretted continuously because a little baby lamb, riding at my mother’s knees, kept sharing the refreshments at my mother’s breast with him.”

Effie Knox Cooper. Egg Custard and Blackstrap Molasses: Tales of Texas Pioneers. Dallas: The Story Book Press, 1954.

1889: There was a Stephenville ordinance against riding “any horse or beast of burden into a saloon or other business, or public or private residence, or into any public building within the corporate limits of the City of Stephenville.” J.W. Jarrott. Revised Ordinances and Rules of Order of the City of Stephenville, Texas. Printed and Published by authority of the City Council of Stephenville, Texas. Revision of 1893.

Erath resident T. Ed Northcutt took his own life in 1886. His brother, Luke went to Church of Christ preacher William A. Jones for counseling, but instead of offering words of comfort, Jones declared that the brother had gone to Hell, it was Jone’s notion that suicide was an unpardonable sin. A few days later, the preacher was driving cattle by Northcutt’s house at Cow Creek, west of Dublin, when Northcutt walked outside and threw a rock at Jones. Preacher Jones responded by killing Northcutt with his shotgun. Later that morning Jones was arrested in Stephenville and a grand jury found the preacher’s shooting was with “felonious intent.” I don’t know what happened after that.

This story is among those found in Erath historian James Pylant’s, Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Town, Stephenville: Jacobus Books, 2019.

In 1885, Frank Jackson brought a string of chickens to the Stephenville square to sell. “A long, lank, hungry hog rushed up and appropriated them and went flying across the square. The chickens were squalling and the air was full of feathers.” Jackson finally caught up with the hog and retrieved most of his chickens. Stephenville Empire

An 1881 article in the Fort Worth Democrat reported: “The surveying corps of the Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railway Company reached Stephenville on August 19. When they reached a point opposite the public square, one hundred guns were fired by the enthusiastic people in commemoration of the event. The generous people also prepared a splendid dinner for the corps.” The railroad reached Stephenville ten years later.

As an example of how dense the post oak forest was around Stephenville as recently as 1898: Ira Cain was returning to town after dark from Raven Hill when his buggy strayed off the sandy path and he became lost among the trees. He was found the next morning in a blackjack tree where he had climbed to escape imaginary wolves. Erath Appeal It was said that a squirrel could climb a tree in Stephenville and not come down until it reached Dublin.

There could be locusts. Like the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) that lived along both sides of the Rocky Mountains in prairie areas. Entomologists believe that they depended on tall grass prairie plants where they lived in small numbers like the grasshoppers to which thy are related. But then, as a survival mechanism, when they become crowded during drought, chemical cues and frequent bumping into each other trigger a metamorphosis into a longer creature with larger wings that had rather eat than breed, and an urge to fly hundreds of miles. The swarm has been described as a “metabolic wildfire,” was a drought-related phenomenon on the Great Plains since before Euro-American settlement. They arrived like a “great white cloud, like a snowstorm, blocking out the sun.” They ate not only the grass and valuable crops, but also leather, wood, sheep’s wool, and sometimes even the clothes from people’s backs. A famous sighting in the 1870s was calculated by telegraph operators to be the size of California (described in Laura Ingall Wilder’s historical fiction novel, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937) bore down on Erath and Bosque Counties; it was described by Ed Nichols: ” . . . while playing in the yard one day, I noticed grasshoppers lighting on the ground. Chickens and turkeys ran out and began gobbling them up. They continued falling so fast that I ran in the back door and told mother. She looked out and hurried to close the door . . . chickens kept picking them up until they could hold no more and died . . . In two hours time there was there was not a green thing left . . . That night a hard rain fell, washing them into the branches and creeks. Numbers of stock died from drinking the water.” Since the invasions happened in August or later (there are descriptions of a swarm that was overtaken by a cold front and unable to fly, fell to the ground like hail.) switched to winter wheat, which matured in the early summer, before locust were able to migrate. The locusts became extinct by the 1890s probably because more and more prairie soils were plowed.

Ed Nichols. Ed Nichols Rode a Horse (as told by Ruby Nichols Cutbirth.) Dallas University Press and Texas Folklore Society, 1943; Jeffery Lockwood. “The Death of the Super Hopper: How Early Settlers Unwittingly Drove their Nemesis Extinct, and What it Means for us Today.” Organic Ancient (February 3, 2003); The Rocky Mountain Locust, Wikipedia.

August 12, 1891: A tornado, “Like a large rolling ball,” struck Dublin today, destroying several houses, the dance hall, and blowing the spokes out of a buggy’s wheels without moving the buggy. Stephenville Empire

In the August, 1912 Stephenville Tribune, Will Hickey wrote that Alarm Creek, where he grew up, was once fresh, spring fed, with an abundance of fish. But when the area timber was cut, and the grass grazed away, the creek dried up, “It’s glory has departed forever.”

1840: “The Rio Bosquere is a beautiful clear stream which enters the Brazos from the west. Towards the head of this stream the country is beautiful, and the land rich and well timbered.” The Comanche called this area Teha Lanna, the land of beauty.

George W. Bonnell. Topographical Description of Texas, 1840. Reprinted by Texian Press, 1964, 79-95.

August 20, 1908: Before Social Security: “Our county poor farm has more pitiful cases of destitution than at any time in its history. Perhaps if our boys and girls were just a little more prudent they might save up enough before reaching decrepit old age to save them from a pauper’s fate.” Stephenville Tribune