James Pike described his motivation for coming to Texas and becoming a Ranger in 1859: “Visions of wild horse chases, buffalo hunts, Indian fights, and a thousand other ‘manly sports,’ which I knew to be the chief sources of amusement and excitement in that wild, celebrated region.” Texas . . . where all is abundance, by the mere act of nature; where the ground is never dusty, though parched with drought; where grass grows green even in winter . . ” Ranger Pike experienced all of these activities. The most notable was when he partnered with a group of Anadarko Indians to ride into a Comanche camp shooting, then leading dozens of them into a deadly ambush. But in 1860, when Texas was voting to leave the Union, he had to leave the state before he could be arrested for not supporting the Confederate cause. Pike noted that all of the polls were operated by armed men.

James Pike, Scout and Ranger: Being the Personal Adventures of James Pike of the Texas Rangers in 1859-60. Reprinted in Narratives of the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Princeton: University Press, 1932.

December 17, 1898: There was a fatal shooting on the Stephenville Square: “Bad whiskey and a former grudge the cause.” Stephenville Empire

In December, 1886, the Johnson Coal Mine Company opened the first mine in what would become Thurber. Mary Jane Gentry, Thurber: The Life and Death of a Texas Town, Master’s Thesis, Southern Methodist University, June, 1939.

Andrew W. Blankenship was raised in a 12-room, two-story house on Alarm Creek (just south of Stephenville) among 14 other children. On December 15, 1895, he married Mary Almor Perritt on Alarm Creek. The marriage took place in a buggy, a popular Texas fashion around the turn of the century. Mary remembered: “I can recall my apprehension about the horses’ behavior, but they were intently still as if listening to the ‘I do’s’ also. In 1900, Stephenville lawyer, James Jarrott, traveled up to Lubbock to visit the Faulkner family that had earlier moved to the area from Stephenville. He found that 100 sections of state land would soon be sold and he decided to buy it and return to Erath County to sell land to anyone who wanted to migrate. The Blankenship family decided to make the move. “During the fall of 1901, we started the job of turning everything outside of bare necessities into cash . . . $500 in cash, $100 of which was credit from the grocery store on our egg money. We took all this in $20 dollar gold pieces, sewed them into a money belt to tie around [Mary’s] waist under my petticoats and full skirt . . . We had our pictures made together and left one with each family of kin ‘just in case’ . . . spent Christmas with the old folks, filled out water kegs, bid all good-bye, and hit the trail the day after Christmas.” The Blankenships and dozens of other families settled on their new land near Lubbock. But the land had been held in common by the the area ranchers who were so angry at the farmers that they harrassed them and hired an assassin to shoot the organizer James Jarrott to death as he approached his windmill and water tank. Some of the settlers returned to Stephenville while the Blankenships and most others defied the ranchers and held on to their land.

Seymour V. Conner,(ed.) The West is for Us: The Reminiscences of Mary Blankenship, Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1958.

December, 1887: Sue Sanders, who lived with her invalid mother and sister in a log cabin near Huckabay, described life after her father died: “Fannie was 12 years of age and I was seven when we took over all the work on the farm . . . By the middle of December we had the whole crop harvested, and things looked pretty good. Ma thought we had enough meat salted down to last until spring, and there was plenty of corn for meal. We had hilled up sweet potatoes to keep them from freezing, first digging a deep hole and lining it with straw and corn fodder. We also had winter turnips and enough feed for the stock.” But this was the week that the family’s mortgaged livestock was confiscated “so our debt kicked back on us as debts always do, and hit us mighty hard.” When Sue was older, she took a job waiting tables in a Thurber cafe. Listening to conversations about the new oil fields, she started a business delivering equipment to the wells from Texas to Oklahoma. She died a millionaire.

Sue Sanders, Our Common Herd, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1939.

In December of 1881, two horse thieves stole several horses from Dublin and headed SW passing through Brown County on the 13th. They rode up to a house and asked for breakfast, as was he custom. In the house a man named Carradine recognized the horses as belonging to his father-in-law. As the two men waited for breakfast, Carradine pulled a pistol on them and held them until the sheriff arrived.

Comanche Chief

In researching for my book project, a history of the Bosque River, I ran across a megadrought. Paleoclimatoligists are still trying to find out what caused this event: Centered around 4,200 years ago, the Indus Valley Civilization collapsed, Egypt’s Old Kingdom fell, the Liangzhu culture in China disappeared, and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia was gone in only fifty years. These calamities all occurred in the Northern Hemisphere at the same latitude. It just stopped raining for a century or more in huge areas along the middle latitude, and became more rainy in some places. In North America, the drought centered in the mid-continent, exempting Central Texas. In 2018, the International Union of Geological Sciences, determined that this event would mark the beginning of the current stage of the Holocene, they named it the Meghalayan Age. And in Texas, the Late Archaic begins at the same time 4,200 years ago, not because the ecology was wrecked, but because of the refugees that moved in from the drought-stricken areas in the north and northeast. The Late Archaic occupation sites along the Bosque River show intense use and increased populations. There are more dart point types (darts were about five feet long and launched with a throwing stick, this is before bows) and the suggestion of competition and conflict.

In August of 1898 the Erath Appeal ran a story about a fight that began when a white 8 year-old girl threw a rock at a black girl on “aristocratic college hill” and called her names. When the unnamed black mother went to the mother to complain, the mother, Mrs. Skipper-Williams, attacked the black mother with a buggy whip. The black mother took the whip away and used it on the hostile mother. The father stood by and according to the Erath Appeal did nothing to help his wife. When the Erath Appeal ran the story, the father was referred to as a “skulking cur” for not getting involved. The morning after this story appeared, Mr. and Mrs. Skipper-Williams went to the Erath Appeal office and the mother knifed the editor, Austin King to death. In December, the parents were sentenced to prison, 18 years for the father and 20 for the mother. The Erath Appeal ran this notice: The time will come when a newspaper can tell the local happenings of the day without endangering the editor’s life . . . “

1898: “A crowd of young country gents have concluded they own the city of Stephenville and come in once or twice a month, get drunk, curse, rave, make knife and pistol displays and abuse anyone they think they can outman or bulldoze. This will have to be stopped, if not by the proper authorities, the victims of their outrageous actions will likely stop it at the cost of bloodshed.” Erath Appeal

December 11, 1854, Rube Burrow was born in Lamar County, Alabama. In 1872 he rode into Erath County and worked as a cowboy near Stephenville. He married in 1876, but his wife died in 1880 leaving him with two children. He remarried in 1884 and settled on a farm near Alexander where he gained local fame as a marksman. Burrow became a train robber on December 1, 1886.

Dan Young, Erath History Calendar, 1987.

1886: From their base at Cottonwood Springs, Erath County (near Alexander), Rube Burrow, his brother Jim, and a friend, Nep Thorton, rode north to Bellevue, Clay County, and held up the Fort Worth and Denver train. Thorton held the engineer and fireman at bay , while Rube and Jim went through the coaches, robbing the passengers. Rube Burrow stopped at a farm house in northern Tarrant County as his recent robbery was being discussed. Someone said: “If I’d been a man I’d a-shot some of them plagued varmints that was agoin’ through that train a slappin’ women in the face and skeerin’ the children.” Then Rube “he flared up, kinder mad, like, and said something about a man named Jay Gould [a Robber Barron who said he could pay half of Texas to kill the other half] who owned the train and had all that money piled up adoin’ nobody no good, and it was about half right to sorter scatter it around ” After Burrow left, the farm family agreed that he sounded “mighty like one of those anarchy fellows that they hung up in Chicago.”

Dan Young, Town and Country Bank, A Calendar of Erath County History, 1987. (December)