in 1885, Frank Jackson brought a string of chickens to sell at the Farmer’s market on Stephenville’s square. ” 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 the hog and most of the chickens. Stephenville Empire

On August 1, 1863, several Erath County Confederate rangers attacked a mounty body of Comanches on Paint Creek, north of Erath County. The Indians appeared to retreat in two groups, but as the rangers charged between the two, “the Indians wheeled , scaring our leading horses, and in the confusion they charged upon us. When a sharp engagement took place, which resulted in the death of Serg’t Collins of Erath County, and the wounding of four others, each having received wounds from both arrows and lances. Not being able to dismount, our men were at a disadvantage, as the Indians manoeuvered with order and discipline, while but little was observed on our part . . . ” State Gazette (Austin)

In August of 1858, Comanches passed through E.L. Deaton’s place in Comanche County. The next morning he found his pumpkins and melons cut up and all the other vegetables pulled and piled in a heap. “It would be indecent for me to say what they left on top of them.”

Floyd Holmes, Indian Fights on the Texas Frontier, 1927

Among the Indigenous peoples that frequented the Erath County area when the first Anglo immigrants arrived were the Anadarko. The name, I found out recently, means “Those who ate the honey of the bumble-bee,” one of the agricultural Caddoan peoples that lived in East Texas for millennia. The Anadarko leader, Jose Maria, known among his people as Iesh, along with other Caddo Chefs, signed a treaty in 1835, in which they promised to give up their land and move west to the Trinity and Brazos Rivers. The Anadarko were the mounted fighting branch of the Caddo and were the equal of the Comanche in tactical skills. Jose Maria’s people became scouts and auxiliary cavalry in the service of the United States government and gained the trust of the earliest Anglo settlers. The year that John Stephen arrived at the site of Stephenville, 1854, with the first thirty wagons of settlers, was the same year that the Anadarko were placed on a reservation on the Brazos River. The Anadarko, and other Texas Indians built log cabins and cleared land for their crops. For a time, the Anadarko were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt black bear for their oil, but a couple of ugly incidents confined the Anadarko to the reservation except for military duty against the Comanches. Stephenville vigilantes harassed the reservation and murdered Indigenous farmers caught alone in their fields. On august 1, 1859, the government moved the Anadarko to a new reservation in Oklahoma, and the Texas Trail of Tears brought the surviving 462 Anadarko, Caddo, and Hasinai to the Washita River. The site where they camped has become Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, has been studying her ancestral language. She has found that Native languages in general extend the grammar of animacy to a wide range of objects that are regarded in English as inanimate. These beings are imbued with spirit. She points out that “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it.” Imagine walking the Bosque Trail in the company of nonhuman residents; plants and animals with names, personalities, gifts, and long histories of association with humans. Kimmerer has learned that it’s nearly impossible to learn a Native language, (especially considering that English has 30% verbs and Indigenous languages often have 70%) but we might expand our grammar. We should stop denying everyone else the right to be persons. The arrogance of English is revealed when we realize that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. A living landscape should not be regarded as “natural resources,” commodities to be bought and sold. If we were in the habit of referring to Stephenville’s heritage oak trees as grandfather oaks, for example, maybe municipalities would think twice before firing up the chainsaw.

As an Indian scout, Henry Strong had killed (and scalped, sometimes decapitated) dozens of Natives during his time in Texas after escaping here to avoid murder charges. Strong was on his way to San Antonio after spending the night with a friend near Dublin. He arrived in Comanche on January 5, 1877 as the bank was being robbed. Strong was put in charge of a posse that trailed the gang to San Antonio. They arrived just as the leader of the bank robbers, Joe Horner, was being arrested. Horner was caught as he was trying to convince a blacksmith to make him a bulletproof vest. Horner escaped from the jail, stole two horses, and robbed the stage at the Uvalde River crossing. He was captured soon after and taken to Uvalde where court was in session where he was immediately sentenced to ten years in the Huntsville prison. A couple of years later Horner escaped and was never recaptured.

Henry Strong, My Frontier Days and Indian Fights on the Plains of Texas. Waco: 1926; The Handbook of Texas.

The most common Opuntia (prickly pear) in Erath County is Opuntia engelmannii. Natives used every part of this cactus, including the stems, flowers, fruit, seeds, thorns, and sap. Of all the native plants of Texas, the prickly pear has been most responsible for keeping humans and animals alive during times of deprivation. The most obvious feature is the flat, oval pad, this is the stem, known as the cladode. The cladode has been an important food source and healing agent throughout human history in Texas. After the spines are burned off, the pads are ready to eat by boiling, steaming, roasting, or if they are new (nopalitos), they can be eaten raw. Buried deep in dry rock shelters and caves, the pads have been found that were split laterally and then sewn together again to form pouches. The pads were then used as steaming pouches for cooking meat, they have been found with different kinds of meat, fish, and even lizards inside. The name for this cooking process has been lost in Texas, but the Aztec name is mixiote (mee-sho-tah). The prickly pear pads were also used as a topical healing agent used to treat wounds, sores, swellings, and insect bites. The pad was split and the mucilaginous side was placed over the wound as a poultice. The antiseptic gel was used to stop the bleeding and reduce inflammation. The use of this healing method was learned by the Comanches from more ancient folk when they spread into Texas in the early 1700s. The Hispanics learned the technique from them and later the treatment became standard practice among early Anglo settlers as well. I have read in several places that this treatment was used successfully to treat serious bullet and arrow wounds. The prickly pear in the background is the Opuntia ficus-indica, the thornless variety developed by the Aztecs, the photo was taken in my garden, started from a cactus in Gene Porter’s garden over 40 years ago.

Matt Warnock Turner, Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives, Univesity of Texas Press, 2009.

An 1890 description of a dance between Stephenville and Hamilton: “We found about 15 girls . . . the orchestra consisted of one fiddle . . . I was rather bashful, but encouraged by a fierce-looking cowboy with a villainous eye, two big pistols and a pair of three-inch spurs. I selected a partner and we began. Nothing but quadrilles, [an early form of square dance] we danced. As the cowboys warmed up they occasionally aided the caller by calling out: ‘Everybody dance just as pretty as he can!’ ‘Climb he grapevine,’ or ‘Chase the squirrel,’ etc. At the conclusion of the quadrille I escorted my partner to a seat and attempted the polite in my best style. I noticed that all the cowboys left the room . . . Before long the newcomer was signaled by the cowboys outside to join them and was told that ‘I had committed a most serious breach of etiquette by talking to my partner . . . .” State Gazette (Austin)

An old settler noted in an 1884 Stephenville Empire that when he arrived in Erath County during the 1850s there were herds of fifty to seventy-five “red bucks” in the area. I have puzzled ever since I read this wondering if he was referring to elk.

For more than a century before Erath County was settled large herds of feral cattle and horses roamed the area. Non-thorny vegetation was browsed out of the Bosque Valley, allowing the black haw (Viburnum rufidulum) and red haw (Crataegus mackensenii) to become numerous. After settlement, when livestock was fenced away from the river, the haws were chocked out by competing vegetation. Recently Tarleton’s Dr. Alan Nelson, gave up trying to find any surviving haws and pronounced them extinct in the area. But in 1883, barbed-wire fences were so recent and destruction of the haws range still limited, that the haw population was harvested each November. This month groups of Erath residents gathered baskets of the little fruits for baking. The Comanches advised people to howl like a wolf before eating the red haws to avoid stomach cramps.

Stephenville Empire; Ellen D. Schulz, Texas Wildflowers, Chicago: Laidlaw Brothers, 1928; Nelson Coon, Using Wild and Wayside Plants, New York: Dover Publications, 1957; Robert Vines, Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of the Southwest, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960.