Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Memories of Elderly Ranchers of Stiles
March 12, 2003
Savvy Midlanders know the Stiles shortcut when heading to San Antonio and the southern Hill Country of Texas. The old Stiles courthouse is a well-known landmark. A number of people have told me that they have visited the Stiles graveyard. I have driven by the area all of my life, and have stopped to admire the courthouse and graveyard, as well. When I did so, I would wonder about the lives and stories of the settlers and present day inhabitants.
I already knew the history of the courthouse. Stiles’ first courthouse was a small frame building. The stone courthouse was built in 1911. A nearby prominent landowner near Stiles refused to sell the right of way to the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railroad, so that same year the railroad was built twenty miles to the south. The railroad company sold lots at what became Big Lake. In 1923 the Santa Rita oilwell was brought in just west of Big Lake, so the new town boomed. In 1925 a vote for moving the county seat to Big Lake passed, and Stiles began to decline in population (the Stiles elementary school finally closed in 1947.) The courthouse then served as a school for a year, then became a community center for barbecues, community parties and dances. Before it was burned in the 1990’s it had also served as a residence for a county worker that looked after the Stiles Cemetery. The rock walls still stand.
Recently Mrs. Ann Schneeman, the director of the Reagan County Historical Museum, arranged for Stiles ranchers Stanley and Patricia Turner and Japson and Dorothy Pettit to visit with me. In the Reagan County Historical Museum is a wonderful old bed made from parts of a wagon that brought Jim Belcher (grandfather of Stanley Turner) to Stiles. “In 1888 my grandfather left Comanche County, heading for Arizona. At Horsehead Crossing, one of the ox team hit quicksand and drowned. While the family was hanging up wet clothing to dry, George Nobles rode up and offered him a job on the TX ranch. Instead of moving on, he took the job for the next three years, and then he worked as the windmill man on the J.M. Ranch owned by Henry Halff, Sr. By 1895, he established a ranch near the old Butterfield Stagecoach Station in Centralia Draw, a few miles west of what would become Stiles.”
Japson Pettit’s grandfather, Henry Japson, came to Stiles in 1902. He first clerked at a grocery store, and then operated one of the two hotels on the courthouse square. He helped organize Reagan County, and served 14 years as its first sheriff. Sheriff Japson also leased a 25 mile-long stretch of University Lands from Big Lake almost to Rankin.
The Turners and Pettits kindly chatted with me for over two hours. Our conversation ranged from early day trails, to the changes in the landscape and wildlife populations over the last one hundred years, to the damage done to the land by early oil-field development, to Dr. Hinckley and Dr. Warnock at Sul Ross University, and to stories of hard times.
“Centralia Draw can fill up with a flash flood,” said Mr. Pettit. “When we would see a thunderhead building up we would get on our horses and herd the sheep up out of the draw. One time, during shearing, a big rise came up with all the sheep in the pens. Fifteen hundred sheep died. I have seen the draw run with water as many as three times a year. One time it ran for twenty-two days and we got a little crazy and got a boat and went downstream quite a ways. And, something weird happens when it runs – catfish will come up out of the Middle Concho and swim upstream. They end up dying high and dry when the water quits running.”
“When they were drilling the first oil wells up at Best and Texon, sometimes they would hit salt-water pockets. It would gush up and they built some dams to try to stop it, but sometimes they broke, and the salt-water would go on down the draw. That caused some problems – the water wells in the draw became contaminated, the hackberry trees in the draw died out, and big gullies formed.” Mr. Turner shook his head, “There used to be low places in Garrison Draw (the south fork of Centralia Draw), that would often hold rainwater almost year around, but the gullies cut right through them.”
“The salt water killed the big mesquites in the draw, as well,” Mr. Pettit added. “In the early days the manager of the Bar S (now the Rocker B) used to let folks go cut firewood – dead wood only – the trees were as big around as a man and over twenty feet tall. There was some scrub mesquite here and there, but the pastures did not get choked up with them until after the 1940s. The south Texas prickly pear and the tasajillo came in during the 1930s. The cedar has always been on the slopes along the draw, but the creosote bush and tarbrush moved into the western parts of the range in our lifetime.”
Mrs. Pettit told of the hard times during the drought of the late 1940s. “Every morning we would get up daybreak, run our traplines, and feed the cows. It seemed like the winters were worse then – it seems like we had to break ice in the troughs every morning for months. When we took the kids to town for school we would stop and pick up every animal that was roadkill. We paid our grocery bill from the pelts we sold. We would not of kept the ranch, had it not been for the kindness of the banker carrying the note long.” Mr. Pettit added that he has not had livestock on the ranch for the last six years during the present drought.
“Javelina and deer moved into this country in the 1940s. We have always had some antelope. Foxes moved in since the 1950s, as did the porcupine and ringtail. We haven’t got any feral hogs yet. Years ago some of the folks let hogs run wild and then round them up, but some of the boars would cripple horses, so we took to roping and dragging them. Just about everybody had turkeys too – the wild turkey toms would come and lure the tame hens away, so I imagine the turkeys we have now have got a lot of the genetics of the domestic turkeys.” Both men took turns filling me in about the wildlife.
That morning I took fifteen pages of notes. I hated for the conversation to end, but Mrs. Turner stood up and said it was time for lunch. It still took another ten minutes for the storytelling to finally wind down.