1883: At Skipper’s Gap, in May, a suspected rabid dog bit practically every dog in the community. In a state of fright, the citizens killed most of the dogs thought to have been bitten. Then many wondered if the dog had really been rabid. On June 5, one of the surviving bitten dogs went mad.

Stephenville Tribune

In 1883 a man named Keith came to Stephenville to ask about buying a farm. People gathered around him, amazed at his beard. Someone actually measured it it – it was three feet and four inches long. Mr. Keith said said he usually braided it and wore it rolled under his chin. A precaution he probably intended on his next visit to Stephenville. Stephenville Empire

In 1847 a Comanche war party started for Mexico from North Texas. Traveling outside the settlements, as agreed by treaty, they were attacked anyway by a ranger force under Captain William G. Crump. Comanche war Captain Carnebonahit followed the rangers and stole seven horses. The Comanches made a trail to one of the last Lipan villages to even an old score. The rangers followed the trail to the Lipan village. Chiquito, the Lipan Chief, tried to explain the situation, but the rangers did not listen; they killed 30 people and stole 200 horses. The surviving Lipans abandoned their Central Texas homeland and moved to Mexico, raiding back into Texas for years in an effort to get even.

Stephen B. Oats (ed.) Rip Ford’s Texas, By John Salmon Ford, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.

In 161 Samuel Kuykendall and a man named Splan were driving two oxen to their home on Resley’s Creek at Dublin. When they were overtaken by Comanches, Kuykendal tried to outrun them, but his horse bogged down in a creek at the present site of Carlton and they “literally filled his body with arrows.” Splan stood between the two oxen and they ignored him.

Floyd J. 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 Co., 1927.

The Ku Klux Klan fizzled out after Reconstruction in the South because the old Planter leadership was able to regain control and no longer needed a terrorist organization to resist Federal occupation. But the stress following WWI, the flu pandemic, mass unemployment, shocking social changes, and xenophobia brought out the worst in people. The KKK was reorganized and reached its peak in the 1920s. In Erath County this hysteria led to the removal of the graves of African-American pioneers/slaves from West End Cemetery to near St. John’s Church in 1922. That same year, in June, according to the Stephenville Tribune, 5000 Ku Klux Klansmen gathered between Dublin and Stephenville to vent their frustrations.