In March, 1891, “Be it ordained by the City of Stephenville: That hereafter it shall be unlawful for the owners of any cattle or horses, mules, jackes or jennetts to permit them to run at large upon the public square in the city of Stephenville. J.W. Jarrott, Revised ordinances and Rules of Order of the City of Stephenville, Texas. Printed and published by order of the City Council of Stephenville, Texas. Revision of 1893.

1900: “While being driven through town, a herd of horses stampeded and rushed across the square which was crowded with wagons and teams. Several teams became excited and broke loose. For a while it looked like there would be several runaways and many good farmers said some ugly words.” Stephenville Empire

1889: “Any person who shall recklessly ride or shall drive any horse, mule or other animal in, along, or across any public square, street or alley, or other public place within the corporate limits of the city of Stephenville at a gait faster than that of an ordinary lope or gallop . . . shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor.” Jarrott

1912: A great herd of two-year-old cattle were driven through Stepnenville, and much complaint was heard by people who own lawns and cement walks.” The herd destroyed newly planted trees on Graham Street because as the “drivers galloped horses on the paved walks and this caused much indignation.” Stephenville Tribune

J. Frank Dobie described early Stephenville; “There were six or seven log cabins, with shed rooms of rawhide lumber, strung along the trail out from it. The central and largest structure served as a courthouse. It had a gallery (porch) covered with boards made of pin oak. The liveliest place in town was a saloon where for two-bits, (a quarter) a purchaser could get a ‘fair-sized drink’ of wagon-yard whiskey drawn in a tin cup from a fifty-gallon barrel. Usually a group of cowboys were congregated here, but the dogs of the village far outnumbered the inhabitants and visitors. Dog fights furnished the chief amusement. The sheriff owned a large parrot that habitually perched on the roof of the courthouse gallery. It had picked up a considerable vocabulary from the cowboys, including ‘Ye-oh, sic’ em’, in a second all the dogs in town charged the steers. They stampeded, knocked down all the galleries, including the one the parrot was perched on, rammed through the sheds, and even demolished some of the shacks. Stephenville looked as if a cyclone had struck it.” J. Frank Dobie, The Long Horns. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1941.

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March 20, 1867: 14-year-old Ole Nystel had planned helping to plant corn, but his father instead sent him with a neighbor, Carl Quested, to Golden Mountain (part of the Chalk Mountain hills) to chop cedar posts (this is before overgrazing eliminated grassfires that restricted cedar to the hills) “I was at the wgon and Mr. Quested had gone off fifty steps to commence work, when I heard a noise, and on looking up I saw two Indians made hideous with war paint . . . It appeared to my excited imagination that they were devils who had come for me and I really thought I could see great streams of fire issuing from their mouths. I had been taught that ‘the devil would get me’ if I was not good . . . I take occasion here to enter my hearty protest against making such erroneous impressions upon the minds of the young . . . I run about forty yards when an arrow pierced my right leg . . . I was placed on a poor, boney horse without a saddle and you can imagine, better than I can describe, my discomfort.” The Comanche party eventually headed back toward the Panhandle, not making camp for five days. After about 200 miles they made camp, the Indians slept in a tent while Ole, suffering from the arrow wound, slept under a rock overhang to avoid the snow that fell that night. Ole T. Nystel, Lost and Found: Or, Three Months with the Wild Indians, a Brief Sketch of the Life of Ole T. Nystel, Embracing His Experiences While in Captivity to the Comanches, and Subsequent Liberation from Them. (Introduction and notes by Derwood Johnson) Clifton, Texas: Bosque Memorial Museum, 1967. Originally published in 1888.

1891: In March Dublin vigilantes raided and burned a Mexican camp just outside town. There were no details. Dublin Progress

In March of 1871, Ab Nystel (14) and an old man named Carl Quertod, were chopping cedar post near Chalk Mountain, when they were discovered by a Comanche raiding party. The boy was captured while Quertod escaped with an arrow in his arm. The Indians continued to raid through Bosque County before turning back toward the Northwest, where they killed an enslaved black man and captured a 14-year old girl. Several weeks later the girl escaped while the Comanches were crossing the Arkansas River. Nystel was eventually sold for $250 dollars. Floyd Holmes, Indian Fights on the Texas Frontier: A True Account of the Last Exciting Encounters with Redskins in Hamilton, Comanche, Brown, Erath, and Adjoining Counties. As Recorded by E.L. Deaton. Fort Worth: Pioneer Publishing Company, 1927.

1885: Hailstones the size of a man’s fist hit Erath County, killing cattle, splintering shingles, and mashing stove pipes. Stephenville Empire

1892: A traveler between Thurber and Weatherford investigated the source of “piteous moaning” to find a trained bear chained to a tree, nearly starved to death. Nearby were the bodies of two Italians who had been traveling across Texas performing with the bear. They had been robbed and murdered about a week earlier. Weatherford Enquirer

Another food source in times of drought is thistle, the one illustrated above by Rainey Miller is the Erath County variety, Texas Thistle, Cirsium texanum). This pant can grow to forty inches on bare, drought-blasted ground and even though it’s covered in yellow spines, the whole plant is edible. The seeds were eaten like sunflower seeds or ground into a flour, the artichoke-flavored taproot, and the trimmed and peeled stems and leaves were boiled. The nutrition level is pretty low but the plant has been a life-saver. Generations of reliance on these fiber-rich, low glycemic this mega-drought diet (including mesquite, Opuntia and yucca), that later generations would consider famine-foods developed in these early Texans a thrifty metabolism. Some of these plants were even insulin sources. Desert foods are rock-bottom on the glycemic index, at around 23, far below 55, the score beginning the low-glycemic zone. Over centuries the so-called “thrifty-genes” were locked in place and are driving the Native’s descendants toward obesity and diabetes when they collide with the Big Mac. Another dart point used during the last half of the Altithermal drought (8,000 – 5,000 BP), illustrated above by Jill Afford, is the Nolan (6,000 – 4,500 BP). These projectile points are sometimes roughly flaked and are easily recognized by their beveled stem.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

Pollen evidence establishes the agave family as another suit of xeric plants that were useful during the dry centuries. More often called yuccas, ( the Erath County variety is Yucca arkansana) they provided edible blossoms high in vitamin C and the asparagus-like shoots were roasted for a special treat. The fibers were processed into fishing line, bowstrings,(after 500 CE) snares, baskets, sandals, and nets. Yucca cord was sometimes woven with strips of rabbit fur to make coats and blankets. The root contains a caustic detergent that burns the fingers, so the fibers are released from the blade-like leaves underwater containing ashes (scutching). The juice was used as a body wash and soap. Comanche ceremonies required people to shampoo their hair with pieces of the root shaved off and pounded on a rock to make a foamy lather.

A nutritional bright-spot in the Western Cross Timbers was the mesquite tree, whose pollen signature appears around 7,000 BP, but was probably here far longer. The mesquite migrated northward and covered the Southwest, the species that made itself home in the post oak’s retinue is the honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa). This desert-bred tree has roots that spread fifty feet with a taproot that can grow one hundred feet deep. Travelers complained that in Texas one had to dig his firewood because most of the tree’s wood is underground. Early observers found that mesquites were part of the post oak community, well-behaved in those days because fire and crowding caused them to grow vertical and those grassfires refused to allow them to spread away from the timber. The mesquite brought to the area what neither pecans nor acorns or buffalo could provide, a nutritious food source that actually produces more pods in a dry year. Every part of the tree was used, besides food, the red-purple hardwood twice as hard as oak, was used for atlatls, clubs, digging sticks, and later bows, The sap made a glue for hafting projectile points. Mesquites can produce twenty pounds of pulp-laden pods by fall. Each of the pod’s summer stages had a name and method of preparation. The flavor and food value of the pods varied from tree to tree, and since the trees lived for hundreds of years, Native families must have claimed the rights to specific trees. Select pods of these “sweet trees” contained up to 35% sugar, twice that of sugar cane. The pulp was rich in minerals and had 13% protein. A syrup was boiled out of the green pods, but the main event was was the fall preparation of the beans for winter food. They were toasted, soaked to make an energy drink, then ground on the metate, the meal was sun-dried and stored for winter atole or flatbread.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

Whenever drought removes grasses Opuntia (prickly pear) covers the land. The Opuntia descended from Cretaceous ancestry in South America; then some early forms migrated into North America during the warm part of the Pliocene Epoch about four million years ago. Having adapted to arid conditions, the prickly pear’s situation, like that of grasses, expanded and contracted with the Pleistocene’s conditions. Though not impervious to the driest conditions, the prickly pear evolved some drought protections; since leaves lose moisture, Opuntias got rid of their leaves and turned their flattened stems into energy-gathering pads called cladodes. The evolved skin became thick and waxy to hold the water content around 90%. Like the grama grasses, the roots reach out widely and are shallow enough to catch mid-drought sprinkles. On open soil without competition, the Opuntia covered the landscape.The whole plant is edible any time of the year but is especially desired in the spring when the first cladodes appear: the thornless (except for the tiny brown glochids) , easily consumed nopalitos. These and the more fibrous summertime cladodes contain up to 8% protein (corn has 10%) as well as important vitamins. Archeologists have found cladodes in dry West Texas rock-shelters (the Erath County shelters are too moist to preserve vegetation) cladodes split laterally and stuffed with small fish, lizards and other foods,

likely acorn meal. They are thought to have been used as cooking pockets that were laid over coals and steamed. The purple tunas are loaded with 70% sugar and were rolled in the coals to remove the tiny glochids and eaten raw, stored, brewed into beverage or dried as fruit leather.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.

Sometimes the border of the Chihuanhuan Desert reaches into this part of Texas and brings with it intense desertification. From 8,000 to 5,000 years ago was the time of the Mega Drought, officially known as the Mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum among paleoclimatologists and to archeologists as the altithermal and the early Archaic period. One explanation is that a wobble in the Milankovitch Cycle caused increased solar radtiation which drove up the temperature on the Great Plains by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This heating pulled the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, the rain belt, to the north and supressed El Nino activity for a very long time. Below the equator where it was cooler and wetter, the Sahara Desert was green, it was springtime in Mesopotamia. But in Texas is was scorching , the Bosque River dried up and the people moved away. Almost. Droughts are associated with significant erosion and sedimentation because the sudden hurricane-related rain event will not be restrained by thick grasses, so many archeological sites were scoured away and buried.Cactus and some grasses (like Texas grama) used wide-ranging shallow roots to capitalize on rare rainfall and then store the moisture. Historians/archeologists have been slow to piece together information to explain the sequence of events during the altithermal. Ice cores are usually loaded with information about world climate history, but during this period the arctic ice was melting. Pollen studies in Texas show that post oaks and even pecan trees were holding on. Human occupation along the Bosque River is lightly indicated by an Early Archaic split-stemmed dart tradition represented locally by the Gower type. These people introduced the use of the metate, a sandstone grinding slab, hot-rock baking, and a broader adaption on plants – especially prickly pear (Opuntia).

Dan Young, Unpublished Manuscript, 2022