In September of 1892, Will Ewing stepped out of the Flat Creek church, 18 miles from Stephenville into a crowd of about 40 people. Someone walked up behind him and and shot him to death and got away without being caught or recognized. Dublin Progress

On September 3, 1918, oil was discovered in Desdemonia. Stephenville and Dublin competed to see who could tap into this new source of business by attracting the railway through their towns. Dublin won the economic boost by convincing Jake Hammon to build the line through there in exchange for a $125, 000 gift and free right-of-way.

M.L. Auten. A History of Erath County. Unpublished master’s thesis, Hardin-Simmons University, August, 1951, in the Texas Tech Southwest Collection.

1891: Jennie Sadler, “from a respectable Erath family,” had been missing for several months. In September she was arrested near Valley Mills dressed as a man and driving a herd of stolen horses. “Her strange conduct is simply unaccountable. Stephenvile Empire

In September of 1891, “A peddler with a varied and sundry assortment of goods drew a good crowd in Stepehnville. Some of the crowd seemed spellbound . . . hanging their jaws a foot or more . . . The peddler became a little nervous, but there was no danger ahead, some men hang their jaws and show their teeth simply through force of habit.” Erath Appeal

In reworking my manuscript in hopes of publication I found new research that caused me to totally rewrite the Younger Dryas Event. During the last part of the Pleistocene the climate was warming up. In Central Texas it was wetter as well, with increased forest cover. It was during this period when the First Texans showed around 18,000 years ago. The Clovis period marked a spike in population about 13,000 years ago, then Bam! everything changed close to 12, 900 years ago. The temperature in the Northern Hemisphere dropped in just a decade or so to where it was during the Last Glacial Maximum 20, 000 years ago. It was the beginning of the end for megafauna like mammoths and life for the Clovis people was no longer so easy. The trigger that set off the Younger Dryas event is the subject of fierce argument among Paleo-climatologists, all manner of scientists, archeologists, and others concerned with deep history. Among the theories I’m sifting through the most exciting is the possibility of a comet strike in Greenland, but the evidence is piling up against that one. Another hypothesis argues that melting glacial water overloaded a giant lake that burst and loaded the North Atlantic with fresh water, screwing up the convection belt. There’s another odd one about a cosmic burst above the ozone layer. I’m going to have to go with the one supported by two or three Texas sites – a really big volcanic explosion in Germany that dusted the globe with a layer shown to be volcanic dust. The timing is close, within a hundred years. The Clovis mammoth hunters had to change their hunting kit to Folsom and start to target the now extinct Bison antiquus, a larger type of bison than today’s buffalo. The part I haven’t figured out yet is why this cold period – cold enough to chase the black-tailed jackrabbit from the archeological record in Texas – lasted a thousand years. Volcanos can’t do that.

In early September of 1912 Uncle Mart Fleming heard that the large liveoak tree on the southwest corner of the Comanche square was to be cut down. “It was in the way of commercialism.” Fleming had camped out under the tree forty years before and regarded the tree as a reminder to this “decadent age” of past times. Fleming rode into town with a shotgun and posted a “notice of warning” on the tree. The tree still stands today. Comanche Chief

Rewriting over the last couple of days has been centered around the earliest date and most likely route for the First People’s arrival in Texas. I’ve looked into the Beringian Corridor through the ice when the two glaciers began to pull apart and found that archeologists are struggling to find evidence for a date early enough to explain earlier, solid dates below Beringia. (by the way, Beringia was more than a land bridge, it was a continent the size of Texas). The earliest date of artifacts in the corridor is 14,200 years ago. So I considered the alternative hypotheses for early arrival. There is a good one that has moved from marginal to wide acceptance by archeologists and geneticists – The Kelp Highway. This explanation points out that the ancient Beringians that were holding up in South Beringia, on the Pacific Coast during the harsh Last Glacial Maximum, where they learned the ways of coastal existence, developing a taste for kelp. Traveling south (around 17,000 years ago) from the corridor would have stalled people migrating through different ecosystems, while the Pacific Coast offered the same environment all the way to Tera del Fuego. At any time the people could have followed a river into the interior and where they might decide to follow the herds they found. I rechecked the date of the earliest habitation at Gault (near Austin) by emailing some of the principle diggers and this morning I find that there were people there at 16,500 years ago. And there are other early American sites, like Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania at 16, 000 years ago. These very early people used a dart point (a five-foot shaft launched by a spear-thrower) called the Western Stemmed that pre-dates the Clovis, and guess what? The Gault authorities won’t identify the pre-Clovis as Western Stemmed, but they do say that they resemble each other. So, if there were people living a little south of us – they must also have frequented the Bosque River, that was much, much larger then.

It’s been so long since I submitted the manuscript that new research has come along and the rewriting will have to include the new research. Trying to keep the summary of the First Texans and how they got here brief, I have to resist so much new material – like dogs. Morphological differences between dogs and wolves so subtle that the exact time that dogs became domesticated is vague, some time after 50, 000 years ago. We do know that dogs were domesticated from a now-extinct species of Eurasian wolf. The linage is complicated because dogs kept breeding back with wolves. It’s not until 11,000 years ago that dogs stabilized into five lineages, one of which became the Siberian dog , from which the American dog originated. It is supposed that this dog was brought to America with the First Peoples sometime around 24,000 years ago, though the first actual dog grave wasn’t until 10,000 years ago. These dogs are now all but extinct, being mostly replaced by European breeds – and this is weird, among the survivors of the First Dogs – is the chihuahua. This is all very interesting but it doesn’t help shorten my story about the First Texans.

Jennifer Raff. Origin: A Genetic History of the Americans. New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2022.

I have worked on a history of the Native Peoples along the Bosque River for decades – the working title is When the Bosque Ran Clear. I sent the manuscript to A&M Press and they responded a couple of days ago. They didn’t say no. The editors are divided, one says we can publish the book if you do these things; the other says this manuscript is loaded with problems and we can’t think of publishing it unless you do these major changes. It amounts to re-researching some points and rewriting huge portions of the narrative. I’m retired and should be able yo do this – I”ll post tidbits from this effort as I go.

In late August of 1898, “A tornado struck the south side of Alarm Creek . . . blowing down many trees, tearing the Alarm Creek school in half, throwing people from their wagons, and picking a mule straight up that has yet to be found.” Erath Appeal