John Conner, as Houston’s aide, was present at nearly all negotiations and treaties during the 1830s and 1840s not just as an interpreter, but as a persuasive diplomat to the Comanches, whom he successfully convinced to attend treaty talks, which were made more difficult after the 1840 Council House treachery. Conner was described as “justly renowned as having a more minute and extensive knowledge of the continent than any other man,” making him the ideal choice for frequent missions into Mexico and as a guide to the Chihuahua-El Paso Expedition in 1848. He was compensated with a league of land (4,428 acres) granted by the Texas legislature in 1853, the only Native American to receive such a grant. By 1857 Conner was dividing his time between Texas and Kansas when he was authorized by the U.S. Department of Indian Affairs to become the principal chief of the Delaware Nation. Two other Delawares spent time in the Bosque River village were the brothers, Jim (Bear Head) and Bill Shaw (Tall Man). Jim Shaw was described by William B. Parker as “the finest specimen of the Indian I saw during the trip, about fifty years old, full six feet six in height, as straight as an arrow, with sinewy, muscular frame, large head, . . . his countenance indicative of the true friend and dangerous enemy.”

There were only about five hundred Delawares in Texas when Sam Houston enlisted some of them in a brigade to help in the Texan War for Independence. Houston later referred to them as “the most efficient auxiliary corps to the main army.” Delaware men were well-off financially, serving as guides, translators, skilled hunters, trappers., and traders, often traveling long distances to hunt or gather intelligence. Ranger Captain John C. Hays was invited in the fall of 1838, to travel on foot with an expedition from the Western Cross Timbers to the Pecos River with seventeen Dalawares. One of their party was killed by Comanches and the young Ranger was amazed to see the Delawares run for hours at a time, until they caught up with the Comanches on the Rio Grande after a few days. They killed almost all of them in a morning attack. Needless to say, Comanches behaved themselves when they stopped at the Bosque “town” to trade.

Contributing to the collapse of the Penateka Comanches, (Honey-Eaters) that frequently camped on the Bosque River, many young men turned to whiskey sometime after the Texan War for Independence. The source of some of that whiskey might have been a community that began as a haven for Delaware and Shawnee Indians as a reward for their services as interpreters and diplomats with the Comanches and as auxiliaries in Texas’s War for Independence. Sam Houston gave land on the Bosque River to twenty Native families, relatives and friends of the tireless advocates of peace: John Conner and Bill and Jim Shaw. The location of this grant is still unknown, but I have the impression that it was somewhere along the middle of the river. It was described as a “heavily wooded spot untouched by settlement on the river.” The Delaware and Shawnee peoples had endured two hundred years of useless treaties and forced removals and had acquired much of the Anglo lifestyle, including clothing, log cabins, and a rational mindset. Perhaps the most outstanding personality in this short-lived “town” as it was called, was John Conner, whose father was a successful trader in Ohio. His mother was an Anglo woman captured and raised by the Shawnee. Conner lived among the Delaware people and married the daughter of a prominent chief. Around 1820 he headed west, driven by what he later called an intense “wanderlust.” Conner traveled alone and on foot to the Pacific Ocean and then down to the Mexican Southwest in his early twenties. He traveled to Mexico City and wandered around northern Mexico for three years until moving to Texas and joining the Delawares, who had migrated in from the crowded east.

In July of 1899, on a farm near Hickey School House on Alarm Creek, a man noticed small boys raiding his chicken house. He waited until they had filled their pockets with eggs before firing his shotgun over their heads. The scare caused them to fall down as they ran away – soaked with eggs. Erath Appeal

As native grasses began to disappear because of poor land use, dozens of unwanted plants soon arrived to fill the void. Some were brought in on purpose, like Johnsongrass, and others found their own way to Erath County on their own. Perhaps the first report of grassburs in the area was July 5, 1884, when a description of them along Resley”s Creek was published in the Stephenville Empire.

For Stephenville residents that could afford it, sewage was kept in privately owned vaults, pumped out periodically by low-paid “scavengers.” The majority of people used backyard outhouses set over a hole in the ground and theoretically moved to a fresh hole as stench demanded. This was the rainy summer of 1908 and nobody, not even the wealthy, had window screens, so flies were everywhere and the whole town suffered from fly-borne diseases. When a majority of citizens wanted to modernize by building a city-wide sewage system, the minority well-off enough to have private sewage vaults, tried to turn public opinion against the idea. An anonymous group known only as the “taxpayers” fought a circular and poster campaign against the proposed system. On July 14, 1908, sewer bonds were passed by a vote of 183 to 71. In 1909, this article appeared in the Stephenville Tribune: “Sewers would be a Godsend to the people of Stephenville in that they would greatly minimize the fly nuisance, hence there would be fewer cases of typhoid fever. Filth accounts for a large percent of unnecessary human suffering.”

What is interesting about the local Flame-leaf sumac is its role in prairie maintenance. Instead of covering acres like its aggressive cousin in the east, sumac lives in tiny groves about the size of two pick-up trucks. Sumac groves are really clones, because like bamboo, the grove is a single plant, not a collection of different trees. The sumac borg-grove is best visualized as a nomadic cluster of little trees, slowly creeping across the prairie. For more than thirty years I have observed several of these traveling groves and it seems to me that they migrate about twenty feet per decade. The grove extends underground roots, (stolons) forward in a moist year a few feet, then only a few inches in a dry season. The forward end of the grove is made up of the most recent growth, knee to waist high. The tallest trees, about eight feet, are in the middle, then on the diminishing end, the rear, is made up of dead trunks. I get the impression that the sumac terminates its own growth after a few years, perhaps by toxins released in the soil that shortens the tree’s lifespan. These same chemicals appear to stimulate the growth of little bluestem. When walking into a sumac grove, the first thing I notice is the quiet, next, it seems there is much less wind. I think the inside of the grove is an nursery for grasses. The grove leaves in its wake the tallest little bluestem that I’ve seen in Erath County – waist high.

At some point during the mid-grass stage, bird-dropped sumac seeds will take hold. The two Western Cross Timbers sumacs, Rhus copallinum and R. lanceolata, are both known as flame-leaf, or just “shoe-make.” The name sumac causes easterners to cringe because of the cedar-like behavior of the smooth sumac, Rhus glabra, that grows in rich, rain-blessed eastern prairies. There is also an eastern variety called poison sumac, a swamp-dweller that is often compared to poison ivy. The sumac of the Western Cross Timbers is not toxic; Comanches used the fall red leaf (temaichia) in a tobacco blend, and the fruit was used to make a tart, apple-like drink. There is a low bushy Fragrant sumac, Rhus aromatic, known in Erath County as skunkbush, that provided both a cooling drink and and the stems were split to make long-lasting baskets. Indigenous peoples used sumac foreshafts for compound arrows made of river cane. What is interesting about the local sumac is its role in prairie maintenance, which I’ll get to next time.

There is a story that illustrates the lush grasses in the 1870s before barbed-wire fences made it possible to crowd cattle and destroy the land by over-grazing. A teenage girl fell from her horse and broke her leg near Alarm Creek, a few yards from the Alexander-Stephenville spur of the Chisholm Trail. On the approach of the Chidster Stage, the girl held her bonnet up on a stick which was noticed by the coach passengers. Some of the travelers warned that it might be a Comanche ploy, but a physician from San Antonio insisted on approaching the bonnet and found the grateful girl. Her leg was set and she was delivered to her house. Today a traveler can pause on the Alexander road near Alarm Creek and grimly note that the area looks like a blast site, non-native stubble and rocks mark the site where tall grasses had hidden the girl. In the 1870s Alarm Creek was deep enough to drown that girl’s family goat. Now the creek is bone dry except for a fifteen minute trickle after a rain. The only native grasses to be seen survive between the fence and the the paved road, just out of reach of too many cattle.

This is one of the stories that I collected by interviewing residents at Stephenville nursing homes.

The first grasses to arrive on ruined soil are among the most valued by buffalo, the Bouteloua family. Many species still carry the Spanish name for grasses – grama. The Bouteloua are typically little tufts of thin, wiry, drought-singed leaves that hardly ever grow to a foot tall. The gramas evolved on the fringes of the Chihuanhuan Desert, a dozen of these nutritious little grasses migrated into Texas after the Pleistocene when most tall grasses were dying out. The gramas prefer plenty of space, which is no problem at the close of a barren period, and they will hold on until crowded out by the next stage in restoration. Most of these grasses keep their ideal spacing of about one clump per foot in the Trans-Pecos, but in the Cross Timbers area, the easily over-looked Texas grama (Boutelous rigidista) and slightly taller gramas, will close ranks, and hold enough moisture in the soil to invite the next stage, the more robust Meadow Dropseeds, (Sporobolus asper), and (S. texanus). These mat-forming grasses will choke out the gramas and prepare the conditions for the next stage. Dropseed is only moderately interesting to grazers, but as the name implies, the seeds release easily for wildlife and have even provided gruel for human use. The Dropseed is a medium grass growing as high as two feet and it holds enough moisture to host the final stage grass, Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium. This grass brings the prairie into balance and can last for centuries – or until the next megadrought. This is the grass that early settlers said covered 90% of the Western Cross Timber’s prairie patches. Later I’ll explain how Sumac facilitates this restoration.