On the 26th, “A tornado struck the south side of Alarm Creek blowing down many trees, tearing the Alarm Creek School in half, throwing people from wagons, and picking a mule straight up that has yet to be found.” Erath Appeal

1889: “Our mines are still booming . . . the most pleasing fact about the Thurber mines is that all the laboring people are bitterly opposed to strikes – a bane to civilization. Here capital and labor are on the best of terms and are working in harmony – treating each other as friends.” State Gazette (Austin)

In the early 1960s, Tarleton students found Clovis points at the site of the new Senior Citizen’s Center, in the city park. The Bosque River channel was much closer to the Clovis camp than today, and the climate (even though this was the Pleistocene) milder and wetter than today. The site is registered with the Texas Historical Commission. The very rare Clovis points were used to kill big game like mammoths, giant bison, camels, and horses, but the weapon system used is still under debate because of lack of evidence. Skeletal remains of these early people (3,500 – 2,900 BP) are also rare, yet tell an interesting story about the Clovis hunters. Bioarcheologists have noted than people in these centuries were as tall as modern populations today, their bones show fewer health and stress indications, their teeth were well spaced so that they had fewer carries, and the wisdom teeth were not crowded like today. There were fewer enamel defects (caused by malnutrition) or other growth disturbances like bone infections or porotic hyperostosis. I find it interesting that the femur midshaft is flattened and thicker, something only found today among Marathon runners. I get the impression that Pleistocene (this is true worldwide) traveled long distances. Then everything changed with the Younger Dryas Event (12,900-11,700 BP) which destroyed the Clovis way of life and reduced the population in North America drastically. The megafauna died out and the kind of vegetation in Central Texas changed dramatically. Later, when agriculture replaced hunting, human bones show a round femur, indicating a more sedentary lifestyle, disease indicators on the bones increase, osteoarthritis from hard work became common, and people were shorter. This hunting to farming change in health was true all over the world because all domestic plants have nutritional deficiencies compared to animal protein. The catastrophic effects of Younger Dryas was disastrous in North America, yet bump-started agriculture in the rest of the world. We lost our large animals that would have been domesticated, while the rest of the world progressed faster with the help of horses and cattle. If it had not been for the Younger Dryas setback – Columbus could have confronted warriors mounted on camels or horses.

John Reilly, an English sheepman, was pistol-whipped and eighty of his sheep were clubbed to death near Carlton in late August. In the same area, E.G. Pendleton was tied and blindfolded while 100 of his sheep were killed. Tombstones of sheepmen were destroyed at the Honey Creek cemetery. In early September, sheepmen planned to gather at Carlton for a meeting, but the cattlemen took possession of the city hall first and refused to let the sheepmen inside. The cattlemen held their own meeting to decide what to do about the sheepmen. On September 19, Texas Rangers arrived and began their investigation into the violence. I don’t know if anything came of the investigation. State Gazette (Austin)

in 1885, Frank Jackson brought a string of chickens to sell at the Farmer’s market on Stephenville’s square. ” A long, lank, hungry hog rushed up and appropriated them and went flying across the square. The chickens were squalling and the air was full of feathers.” Jackson finally caught the hog and most of the chickens. Stephenville Empire

On August 1, 1863, several Erath County Confederate rangers attacked a mounty body of Comanches on Paint Creek, north of Erath County. The Indians appeared to retreat in two groups, but as the rangers charged between the two, “the Indians wheeled , scaring our leading horses, and in the confusion they charged upon us. When a sharp engagement took place, which resulted in the death of Serg’t Collins of Erath County, and the wounding of four others, each having received wounds from both arrows and lances. Not being able to dismount, our men were at a disadvantage, as the Indians manoeuvered with order and discipline, while but little was observed on our part . . . ” State Gazette (Austin)

In August of 1858, Comanches passed through E.L. Deaton’s place in Comanche County. The next morning he found his pumpkins and melons cut up and all the other vegetables pulled and piled in a heap. “It would be indecent for me to say what they left on top of them.”

Floyd Holmes, Indian Fights on the Texas Frontier, 1927

Among the Indigenous peoples that frequented the Erath County area when the first Anglo immigrants arrived were the Anadarko. The name, I found out recently, means “Those who ate the honey of the bumble-bee,” one of the agricultural Caddoan peoples that lived in East Texas for millennia. The Anadarko leader, Jose Maria, known among his people as Iesh, along with other Caddo Chefs, signed a treaty in 1835, in which they promised to give up their land and move west to the Trinity and Brazos Rivers. The Anadarko were the mounted fighting branch of the Caddo and were the equal of the Comanche in tactical skills. Jose Maria’s people became scouts and auxiliary cavalry in the service of the United States government and gained the trust of the earliest Anglo settlers. The year that John Stephen arrived at the site of Stephenville, 1854, with the first thirty wagons of settlers, was the same year that the Anadarko were placed on a reservation on the Brazos River. The Anadarko, and other Texas Indians built log cabins and cleared land for their crops. For a time, the Anadarko were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt black bear for their oil, but a couple of ugly incidents confined the Anadarko to the reservation except for military duty against the Comanches. Stephenville vigilantes harassed the reservation and murdered Indigenous farmers caught alone in their fields. On august 1, 1859, the government moved the Anadarko to a new reservation in Oklahoma, and the Texas Trail of Tears brought the surviving 462 Anadarko, Caddo, and Hasinai to the Washita River. The site where they camped has become Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, has been studying her ancestral language. She has found that Native languages in general extend the grammar of animacy to a wide range of objects that are regarded in English as inanimate. These beings are imbued with spirit. She points out that “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it.” Imagine walking the Bosque Trail in the company of nonhuman residents; plants and animals with names, personalities, gifts, and long histories of association with humans. Kimmerer has learned that it’s nearly impossible to learn a Native language, (especially considering that English has 30% verbs and Indigenous languages often have 70%) but we might expand our grammar. We should stop denying everyone else the right to be persons. The arrogance of English is revealed when we realize that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. A living landscape should not be regarded as “natural resources,” commodities to be bought and sold. If we were in the habit of referring to Stephenville’s heritage oak trees as grandfather oaks, for example, maybe municipalities would think twice before firing up the chainsaw.