Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Ozona-Barnhart Trap
April, 2003

Across from the courthouse in Big Lake, a fellow has been painting an old house. The front of it is white with green trim. He did a bang-up job on the doors, using faux-painting techniques to create the illusion of recessed panels. That’s not all – on the backside, the old box-and-strip walls are painted to look like a rock house. Philip Deusing is quite the artist.

He is also a grassroots historian – learning all he can about Reagan County. For example, up by Stiles he found a huge petroglyph of a man leading a horse. Rosario Ruiz carved and autographed it in 1956. Around it were petroglyphs of the brands of nearby ranches.

Mr. Deusing drops by my office at the Sibley Nature Center once every other month or so. We talk about the flora and fauna of the region, as well as its history and archaeology. The other day, he brought up the Barnhart-Ozona Trap Company. I had never heard of it.

I went on line, and found the text of an historical marker at a roadside park about half-way between Ozona and Barnhart. It is about the 34 mile long multi-armed corridor that provided ranchers a trail for driving livestock to the pens at Barnhart. The text of the marker is on the Rootsweb site for Crockett County.

“A map of the lanes makes a pattern somewhat in the shape of a man,” Deusing said, describing the extent of the trail driving lanes that constituted the property of the company. “The last drive was sometime in the 1950s.”

Another Internet hit was the archives of columnist Monte Noelke. He told of the day that 29 boxcars of lambs were loaded one day at Barnhart without making a dent on the sheep pouring through the “trap.” “Hard put to find a listener to stay through the tale,” Noelke wrote in 2001 in the Livestock Weekly. He should write down the stories of the lanes – he might find it surprising how many folks might want to listen!

About the only folks that remember the stories of the lanes are sheep ranchers like Noelke, and that is a crying shame. Every west Texan ought to know about the history of the regional sheep industry. Modern-day education does not teach anything about one’s own home region. Everybody should know our local history and geography, and know about the most common plants and animals that live with us.

How can folks be truly patriotic if they do not know diddly about their own home? We should be doing our best to gather up everything that has been written about our home area -- every painting, sculpture, and song, too. Hoity-toity intellectuals might decry such regionalism as “provincialism,” implying that only backwards and unlettered people are proud of their own home. To heck with them!

I asked Mr. Deusing if he had ever read “The Golden Hoof” by Winifred Kupper. My folks bought Kupper’s book when it first came out in 1944. It is printed on yellow paper. During World War II book publishers were restricted in the amount and weights of paper, so they used what they could, even big companies such as Alfred A Knopf, Kupper’s publisher. A black and white print of a N.C. Wyeth painting adjoins the frontispiece. In the painting a sheepherder smokes a pipe, with a book in hand, sitting next to a small fire, and in the background is a herd of woolies, the fleece glowing with moonlight. The image should grace the halls of every school in the region!

“The Golden Hoof” started as a Master’s thesis. Walter Prescott Webb made Kupper realize she had important firsthand knowledge of the subject, and J. Frank Dobie was her academic advisor. The Sheep and Goat Raiser’s Magazine published parts of the book as articles. J. Marvin Hunter of the Frontier Times helped her find source material, and Stanley Vestal critiqued the manuscript in its final form.

In the summer of 1917 Ms. Kupper was sent out to work on a sheep ranch, to learn the work of men who had gone to war. Robert Maudslay, a kinsman, was her teacher. Maudsley started out by describing the early day sheepmen. “The English and Scotch sheepherders chose reading as recreation. In their camps were complete sets of Scott, Shakespeare, and Jules Verne. Old copies of The Illustrated London News that they brought were the only newspapers I saw for the first few years.”

Kupper comments, “No wonder the cowboy and sheepman couldn’t get along – whoever heard of a philosopher painting a town red? The sheepherder had to be more adult. His solitary life called for intelligence and inner resources."

Maudsley’s first camp in the early 1880s was at the three-mile-long dry lakebed of Big Lake. He and his brother Harry learned to handle two thousand sheep from his neighbors – the 13 year old son of another sheepherder at the other end of the lake bed, and a Mexican “pastor” up the draw to the southwest. Later they grazed the upper end of Howard’s Draw and even as far as Live Oak Creek. In four years work they cleared five thousand dollars.

The free-range days were ending, so they bought land and built a house. By 1891 they supervised five herds. In 1892 and 1893 the rains stopped. The Panic of 1893 and the Wilson Bill of 1894 caused the price of wool to drop to nothing. Brother Harry put a bullet in his brain, but Robert started over.

He went to work for Swift and Company, driving five thousand sheep from Idaho to Texas. He had one dog, two herders, and a cook/wagon driver. Despite an early October blizzard on the Colorado plains, he did not lose a one, and got them safely to the ranges on the Devil’s River.

When a person reads about someone surviving such trials and travails, the reader is inspired, and learns a little bit about the strength and depth of the human soul. Like the stories of the Barnhart-Ozona Trap, Maudsley’s story is an exemplary tale of this place, the wonderful range country west of the 100th meridian. It should be a story all citizens of the region hold in common.

When Mr. Deusing asked where he could get a copy of the book I told him it was very rare. “If anybody can find a copy, it is Felton Cochran, at the Cactus Book Store in San Angelo.” I told him I believed the book should be reprinted, and put in every school library and public library of the region. It should be required reading, dagnab it!