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 Unpublished Manuscript, 2022.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

6,000 years ago Texas was nearing the end of a 1000 year mega-drought. About that time the earth experienced a two hundred year period of diminished solar activity that brought cooler temperatures to Texas. One of the remaining herds of the larger, nearly extinct Bison occidentalis, that required cool temperatures had been hanging on in the prairies west of the Ozark Mountains. When Texas became an inviting habitat these bison began to migrate into Texas and with them came the Calf Creek culture that had specialized in hunting these large animals for centuries. They brought with them a more advanced lithic technology than was common along the Bosque River: The Calf Creek people used one of two dart point types, the Bell ( illustrated; more common in the Erath area) and the even more astonishing Andice; heat-treated to enable the finest craftsmanship, the points were skillfully knapped into large, thin, and deeply basally-notched projectile points that fitted onto a five-foot dart launched from a spear-thrower known as a atlatl. (this was thousands of years before the bow). These hunters had a strong preference for their own flint collected Northwest of Texas, and rather than use the local chert varieties, they re-worked their broken points down to a nub barely recognizable as the Bell. (one clue is the unusually long base) There are clues that each band favored a specific color of flint, a concept still being considered by Texas archeologists. One reason these dart points are considered rare is that the cool spell was brief, only two hundred years, after which the larger-than-present bison type no longer frequented Central Texas and were soon extinct, replaced by the more heat tolerant modern buffalo.

1880 was a dry year in Erath County and the McDow Hole, one of the few sources of water at the bend of Green Creek, collected unfenced cattle from miles around every evening. So the area around the Papworth cabin was well known to teenagers sent to drive the cattle home. Charlie Atchison was a cabinet and coffin-maker from Pennsylvania, who moved into the abandoned Papworth cabin. Charlie played his violin every evening and the young men often stayed around to listen, which meant that the boys were late getting home, imagining that Jenny Papworth’s ghost was about to appear from behind every tree. When asked about the ghost, Charlie answered that she had not visited him yet and that he was not much concerned. Charlie did mention that the sound of the Death Watch beetle was a little creepy at night. [the deathwatch beetle, (Xesobium rufovillosum) made a ticking sound as it infested logs in early cabins was so named because in the quiet during the vigil kept beside the bed of the dying or dead], was also thought to foretell an impending death. A few weeks after that remark, cattlemen were unable to rouse Charlie from the latched cabin. On forcing the door open they were shocked to find Charlie dead, with no wounds, but with a horrible expression on his face. Erath County was now firmly imprinted with fear of Jenny Papworth.

Mary Joe Clendenin. The Ghost of the McDow Hole: Based on Stories told by Joe Fitzgerald. New York: Carlton Press, 1979.

Photo: The man on the left is John Gilbreath, the ex-vigilante who became sheriff when Sheriff William Slaughter was assassinated in the Stephenville square. Gilbreath is credited for putting an end to vigilante activity in the early 1880s. Next to him is the Deputy, John Caudle, and the jailer, W.H. Chaney. A Stephenville Historical House Museum photo.

An article in the 1877 Fort Worth Democrat advised: “March is unreliable and treacherous. It first leads you to believe that winter is gone northward, and toys with the buds, tender buds and small blossoms; it then dashes out, as if a lion, from its ambuscade and nips the whole young growth before strength warrants protection.”

Charlie and Jenny Papworth moved from an area of Georgia plagued with malaria to Texas after the Civil War. They settled on Green Creek at a deep water bend in the creek known as McDow’s Hole, near Alexander. The nearest neighbors, the McDow’s and the Keiths, helped them build their log cabin. Five years later, Charlie received word that his parents had died and he had inherited a wagon load of furniture, to be delivered at the railhead at Texarkana. Charlie set out to collect the furniture in a wagon pulled by oxen, a trip that would take six weeks. While he was gone, arrangements were made for Jenny and her six-year-old son, Temple, and baby, to stay alternate nights at the McDows and Keiths. One night she failed to show up at either cabin and a search the next day revealed signs of struggle in the cabin. Temple was too shocked to offer much information other than the murderer had spoken English. A quirt made especially for W.P. Brownlow, along with his emotional insistence that it must have been an Indian raid, made him a person of interest, but that’s as far as it went. When Charlie returned, he also began to suspect Brownlow. Brownlow began a rumor that Charlie was a cattle rustler which led to a vigilante hanging near McDow Hole. Charlie was one of six men strung up from a large pecan tree – still there as of 1979 – but Charlie’s end of the limb touched the ground and he was able to survive until his son Temple cut him down. The father and son fled the county and disappear from the story. Bill Keith and his son claimed to have encountered Jenny, they asked her if she was real and had she survived – her answer was a terrible scream that launched a dozen stories over the next century.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, Jacobus Books: Stephenville, Texas, 2019; Mary Joe Clendenin. The Ghost of the McDow Hole: based on Stories Told by Joe Fitzgerald, New York: Carlton Press, A Hearthstone Book, 1979.

Word of Erath County’s vigilante executions reached Austin and during the winter of 1872 Governor E.J. Davis sent Reconstruction State Police to place the area under martial law. The incident brought to the governor’s attention was the hanging of four men, one of whom survived by holding the rope in his teeth. Chief of State Police, Frank L. Britton arrived with a list of thirty-five Erath residents and arrested several. The Grand Jury in Fort Worth was too fearful of retaliation and the vigilantes were released. Attorney Thomas Nugent, who defended the vigilantes, was driving his wagon back to Stephenville when one of the gang rode along side him and roped his dog and pulled him off of the ground to demonstrate how the victims had been raised and lowered before they died. Nugent asked that he not kill his dog but the torture continued. Afterwards the mob, as they were called, became more dangerous, targeting a wider range of victims, killing some and demanding that others leave the county.

James Pylant. Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town, 2019; Lena Lewis. “Erath County: A Compilation.” Stephenville, Texas, 1938. Unpublished Manuscript in Tarleton University Library.