Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Fort McKavett
January 15, 2003

In 1869, a local settler told 9th Cavalry Sergeant Emanuel Stance that some horses had been stolen. Stance set out south with ten men following the tracks. As they rode along, they found a worn-out moccasin and an empty parfleche. From the ornamentation, they realized they were following a group of Kickapoo raiders from Remolino, Mexico. Sgt. Stance and his men caught up with the Kickapoo and recovered the horses, but then the Kickapoo attacked a nearby wagon train. The sergeant and his men saved the wagon train and Stance was awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts.

One of the officers at the fort was Abner Doubleday. Some believe that the very first baseball games were played on the parade grounds there. Every settlement in west Texas began to organize teams, and on July the 4th and other occasions they contended for bragging rights with neighboring villages. The tradition lasted until World War II.

Some of the settlers of the area were resentful of the buffalo soldiers stationed at the fort. One of the soldiers sent a note to Narcissa Jackson asking her to meet him. Her father, Humpy Jackson, took exception to the soldier’s interest and rode to the saw mill on the banks of the river. Hiding in the bushes, he shot one of the soldiers who ventured near. It was not Lanky Jim, the paramour in question.

Colonel Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie ordered Humpy’s arrest, but Humpy had lived on the frontier most of his life and took to the hills. A unit spotted him about twenty miles east of the fort and gave chase. Humpy tried to ride into a mesquite thicket, but the two horses with him went around a tree on opposite sides and he was slammed to the ground. The troops did not know Humpy was a hunchback and when they rode up, he was moaning and complained of a broken back. Humpy begged the soldiers to take him home before he died, which they did while sending several men to the fort to report his capture.

While a soldier stood guard inside, Humpy’s daughter helped him into bed and slipped a pistol under the covers. A group of Jackson’s friends attacked the other soldiers outside and Humpy killed the guard near his bed. One soldier escaped to report the firefight. Humpy gathered up food and ammunition and lit out again.

Col. Mackenzie ordered Jackson’s family arrested, the livestock killed, and the burning of the house, barn and crops. Several dozen of the settlers were arrested and questioned, but finally released. Humpy hid in caves along the river for three years.

When the county was organized and civil authorities took over, Humpy’s case was the first to be investigated by the new district court which refused to indict him. The fort had closed and the soldiers were long gone so Humpy was a free man.

In the late 1880s, the Toe Nail Ranch (so-named because it angled across the corner of the county) lay fifteen miles north of the abandoned fort. Folks traveling northwest from Scabtown (a mile from the old fort) had to follow a trail through the Toe Nail Ranch which became known as the Toe Nail Trail. The modern-day road that follows part of the old trail is still called by that name.

William Leslie Black moved to the area in 1883. He eventually owned 80,000 acres, including the old fort, a 300-acre pecan grove and the headsprings of the river. In good years, he stocked the ranch with 7,000 cows, 20,000 sheep, and 7,000 Angora goats. In 1892, Black built the first meat packing, canning, and rendering plant and tannery in Texas, located a mile and a half west of the old fort. Power for the operation was supplied by a water wheel that Black installed after damming up the headwaters of the river. He was the area’s largest employer with 80 or more men on the payroll and built a row of small houses and a commissary for their use. Black headed an effort by the National Wool Growers Association to establish a wool exchange for trading in wool futures. After 42 years of lobbying, trading in wool futures began at the New York Stock Exchange a week after his death.

Black was quite the inventor, developing a non-friction rod for windmills, a pecan sheller, a cotton-picking machine, and patenting a forerunner of the fire sprinkler systems now used in highrise office buildings. He wrote a book on Angora goats that for years was the best reference on their care. In his declining years, he wrote his memoirs.

By the mid-1890s, Scabtown (no longer a collection of bordellos and saloons servicing the soldiers) was renamed after the fort. It was now home to three churches, two hotels, a broom and mattress factory, and a weekly newspaper.

Two other folks that made a difference in their fields were born near the old fort. Dr. Harry D. Theis, the leading mycologist of the 20th century, first became interested in mushrooms as he explored the river valley as a youth. Billie Wolfe, one of the founders of the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock was also born in the river valley.

Amateur astronomers come from all over west Texas to set up telescopes near the old fort. The sparsely-settled country has very little light pollution. Amateur and academic dragonfly watchers take field trips to the river. The 2001 national meeting of the Dragonfly Society of America was held in Junction, not too far away.