Charlie and Jenny Papworth moved from an area of Georgia plagued with malaria to Texas after the Civil War. They settled on Green Creek at a deep water bend in the creek known as McDow’s Hole, near Alexander. The nearest neighbors, the McDow’s and the Keiths, helped them build their log cabin. Five years later, Charlie received word that his parents had died and he had inherited a wagon load of furniture, to be delivered at the railhead at Texarkana. Charlie set out to collect the furniture in a wagon pulled by oxen, a trip that would take six weeks. While he was gone, arrangements were made for Jenny and her six-year-old son, Temple, and baby, to stay alternate nights at the McDows and Keiths. One night she failed to show up at either cabin and a search the next day revealed signs of struggle in the cabin. Temple was too shocked to offer much information other than the murderer had spoken English. A quirt made especially for W.P. Brownlow, along with his emotional insistence that it must have been an Indian raid, made him a person of interest, but that’s as far as it went. When Charlie returned, he also began to suspect Brownlow. Brownlow began a rumor that Charlie was a cattle rustler which led to a vigilante hanging near McDow Hole. Charlie was one of six men strung up from a large pecan tree – still there as of 1979 – but Charlie’s end of the limb touched the ground and he was able to survive until his son Temple cut him down. The father and son fled the county and disappear from the story. Bill Keith and his son claimed to have encountered Jenny, they asked her if she was real and had she survived – her answer was a terrible scream that launched a dozen stories over the next century.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, Jacobus Books: Stephenville, Texas, 2019; Mary Joe Clendenin. The Ghost of the McDow Hole: based on Stories Told by Joe Fitzgerald, New York: Carlton Press, A Hearthstone Book, 1979.

Word of Erath County’s vigilante executions reached Austin and during the winter of 1872 Governor E.J. Davis sent Reconstruction State Police to place the area under martial law. The incident brought to the governor’s attention was the hanging of four men, one of whom survived by holding the rope in his teeth. Chief of State Police, Frank L. Britton arrived with a list of thirty-five Erath residents and arrested several. The Grand Jury in Fort Worth was too fearful of retaliation and the vigilantes were released. Attorney Thomas Nugent, who defended the vigilantes, was driving his wagon back to Stephenville when one of the gang rode along side him and roped his dog and pulled him off of the ground to demonstrate how the victims had been raised and lowered before they died. Nugent asked that he not kill his dog but the torture continued. Afterwards the mob, as they were called, became more dangerous, targeting a wider range of victims, killing some and demanding that others leave the county.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, 2019; Lena Lewis. “Erath County: A Compilation.” Stephenville, Texas, 1938. Unpublished Manuscript in Tarleton University Library.

Not many people know very much about Erath County during the 1870s, mostly because nobody during that time dared say or write anything. If it were not for the careful research by James Pylant that period of lawlessness would still be unknown. Pylant is a local historian and prolific writer that has been able to track down stories from this period that had been long forgotten. The main problem with the 1870s was that official law enforcement was unable to function. After the Civil War the county was filling up with desperate Confederate veterans who were tempted by the only sources of wealth in Texas – land and the booming cattle business. Organized cattle rustling and casual murder and indictments without prosecutions drove the locals to take the law into their own hands. There were two competing vigilante organizations: The Keith boys around Dublin and the Turnbow family from around Stephenville. The number of people that they arrested and hanged was considerable. Some of the graves were so shallow that wolves were said to have dug them up, leading to the warning “feed the wolves” as a threat to anyone who spoke of the organizations. A minor dispute heated into a major confrontation between the two vigilante groups that met on both sides of Alarm Creek, with around one hundred on each side. These were Indian hunters and war veterans who would have butchered each other if it had not been for the dramatic intervention of well-known and respected Baptist preacher “Comanche Rube” Ross who dashed between the combatants with a white flag and worked out a compromise.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, 2019.

If a firearm was available, the creasing technique might be used: a careful shot was placed through the muscle just below the mane. If the vertebrae was untouched, the horse would survive and fall to the ground, briefly paralyzed, just long enough to rope and tie the anima. Even more prestigious was the rare and dangerous technique of lassoing a horse on the open range: the young man would determine which horse would be vulnerable to capture in a high-speed chase, especially after a long drink of water. The horse was lassoed and subjected to the taming ordeal. The horse was taken to deep water or sand for the first mounting.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

The herds of horses on the Southern Plains were one of the reasons that Comanches came to Texas. The most productive method for capturing these skittish animals was an adaption of the antelope trap: a corral was built, perhaps in a creek bed, lined with heavy set posts and tall heaps of brush, there were brush wings to guide the driven horses into the trap. Hidden riders would dash among the horses to rope and throw the lassoed animal on its side. The Comanche then jumped from his horse and tied the hooves together two by two. What followed was a gruesome choking treatment that some claimed rendered the horse ready to ride in a day.

Horses were as important as bison and there were plenty of mustangs, as well as tempting Spanish stock down at San Antonio. There is a probably apocryphal story that in 1690 Alonso de Leon left a “bull and a cow, a stallion and a mare at each river crossed” as he traveled to establish his missions in east Texas. By 1716 Spaniards reported black Castilian cattle and horses along the Trinity River and likely throughout Texas. The Apaches and Comanches hunted the cattle, called cimarrones, which were said to have been more difficult and dangerous to hunt than bison or deer. These cattle browsed along the Bosque River, removing thornless shrubs, so that when the Anglo settlers reached the river they found that the berries of thorny rusty blackhaw and redhaw much more common than today.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

The Comanches were the best known of the Indigenous peoples that frequented the area now Erath County. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt in the Southwest released thousands of horses that were traded northward, soon reaching the Shoshones in present Wyoming. The Shoshones both physically and politically lacked stature among among Natives venturing onto the Plains to hunt buffalo. The horse changed everything. Ethnographers have collected stories and legends that describe smallpox and violent incidents that led to the Comanches breaking away from the Shoshone parent group. Following the buffalo, the Comanches migrated south, following the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains into the Southern Plains as they gained respect from other Plains Indians for their early use of mounted fighting and specialization in equestrian bison hunting. The Spanish recorded the Comanche arrival at Taos in 1706 and they must have spread into Texas soon after. The Lipan Apache had recently begun to control the Southern Plains where they had been raiding Wichita villages for captives for the Spanish slave market in San Antonio and New Mexico. The Comanches overwhelmed the Lipans, driving them below San Antonio. The Comanches then established themselves as Lords of the Southern Plains and organized their own trade networks with the Spanish.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

1887: President Grover Cleveland was a Conservative Bourbon Democrat that did not believe that the government should ever help people under any circumstances. This week Central Texas drought sufferers learned that Cleveland vetoed a bill that would have provided $10,000 in seed to help farmers recover from the long dry spell. “Cleveland explained that the drouth was a local problem.”

C. Richard King. Wagons East: The Great Drouth of 1886. Austin: The University of Texas, 1965

1912: Cat fur gloves were popular among Alaskan gold prospectors. John Oxford collected 1,460 cat hides in Stephenville and shipped them to Alaska this week.

Stephenville Tribune

1860: Texas Ranger James Pike described the Central Texas secessionists as “mostly young men, both ambitious and fanatical, who had been led astray by artful demagogues. The unionists, on the other hand, were venerable men of property and character . . . but the secessionists, though few, were organized and armed.” Pike was headed out of Texas before the war started, in late February he passed through Cora, then the seat of Comanche County, and found armed secessionists operating the polls.

James Pike. Scout and Ranger: Being the Personal Adventures of James Pike of the Texas Rangers, in 1859-1860. Reprinted in Narratives of the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Princeton University Press, 1932.