Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Northern Lea County
December 24, 2003

I recently reread Gil Hinshaw's “Lea, New Mexico’s Last Frontier.” A day after I finished, I received a phone call from Wes Harris, owner of Harris Wholesale Plant Nursery at Murphy's Chapel, a vanished community five miles west of Bronco, Texas. Bronco is almost a ghost town, too, with only two families living at the crossroads. The post office, general store, and gas station at Bronco closed up in the late 1970's. When I ran the Gone Native Nursery in the 1980's I used to obtain plants from Wes. I did not know, at that time, about his family's history in the region, nor of his interest in history.

Wes had called to ask where he might find a native species of willow to propagate, but the conversation turned to history when we talked of old springs at larger playas that used to have the willows. He mentioned a draw five miles north of his place that once had one old cottonwood surviving because of a shallow water table. I asked him about Debouillet sheep, a breed developed locally by rancher A.D. Jones, which led to talking about Hispanic pastores utilizing the area. He told me of a friend of his grandfather's who had been one, and of other folks with intimate knowledge of the region's history and natural history. We finally hung up the phone after an hour or more of chatting.

Lots of Midlanders go zipping down the road from Plains to Roswell on their way to Ruidoso. "A whole lotta nuthin" is how most folks perceive that stretch of road. Back in 1973 I was a jughand on a doodlebug crew in the area and spent most of a summer walking across that flat short grass prairie. Except for an occasional catclaw there is almost no plant that grows tall enough to dust off the top of a pair of workboots. At the time I wondered about the old rock house ruins dotted across the landscape, and a little cemetery with gravestones collapsed by time and gopher diggings.

Wes's great granddad settled at Murphy's Chapel in 1903. The huge LFD ranch that claimed the area from the Pecos River to the state line encouraged him and three sons to each start their own ranch to serve as a buffer from cattle thieves coming in from Texas. Henry Harris had been an Indian scout before the Civil War, and fought in the Civil War and then became a Texas Ranger. As "old-timey" Llaneros used to say -- "he was plumb salty," meaning he was tough, uncompromising, and knew how to use a gun. Sure enough, cattle thieves soon struck the LFD and Henry went after them. He caught them asleep and hauled them on in to Levelland to the authorities. The word got around and after that nobody else tried the "easy" way of making a living off the LFD range.

In 1912 New Mexico opened up its lands for settlement but only 320 acres was offered to each settler. The settlers were lucky for the first decade and a half. Thousands of people came to "prove up" on the free land. Until 1928 good rains fell and the area became a farming region with folks scattered all over the landscape. Farmers grew grapes, wheat, sorghum, milo, vegetables, corn and had fruit orchards. Cotton was not grown, for the growing season was too short. Wes says that winters were colder in those times, with snow being a common sight during the winter. In 1928 snow covered the ground in June, and the crops froze by September 15. In 1931 a cold front blew in during the first week of March sending the temperatures plummeting to -32, according to local lore. This freak cold snap killed almost all of the fruit orchards and shade trees of the region, which had prematurely leafed out with above average temperatures in late February.

The 1930s drought hit northern Lea County hard. The homesteaders of the Murphy's Chapel region went broke. 85% of the population of the region left, destitute, walking away barefooted, their earthly possessions sold in the struggle to survive. Wes's grandfather Harve helped as many as he could, even buying them shoes, so they could walk 50 miles south down at Hobbs or elsewhere in the new oil fields of the region. The drought destroyed the rangeland as well. Until then, wet years produced mid-sized sweet grasses like sideoats grama on the flats and taller grasses in the draws and playas. Most of the soil blew away and the gravelly subsoil now supports only buffalo grass and tobosa "for the main part."

Despite "the miles and miles of miles and miles" Deborah and I like the Plains to Roswell stretch of U.S. 380. We always "keep a lookout" for the small herds of pronghorn visible from the highway. In Vern Whitlock's memoirs he reports that mountain lions roamed the prairie in the 1890's, specializing in the fleet antelope. Whitlock's uncle was George Causey, a famed buffalo hunter originally based at Casas Amarillas (yellowhouse) west of Lubbock, which also became LFD range. Causey dug the first water wells and built the first houses in Lea County out of rock. In fact, the draw mentioned above has one of Causey's old buffalo hunting forts, which led me to wondering if he had planted the cottonwood there. Causey hauled cottonwoods and willows to Lea County from Midland in the 1890's and shared them with the other early ranching families. At least one of those houses he built is still occupied. He built them of rock because lumber had to be hauled from Big Spring.

Henry Harris hauled four wagonloads of lumber 140 miles from Big Spring in 1906 to help build the Murphy's Chapel School and church. Supplies came from that direction because of the Mescalero Sanddunes just west of the Llano Estacado. Until U.S. 380 was paved in the late 1930s, the sandy area made the seventy mile trip to Roswell "a dangerous proposition." The structure of the Murphy Chapel School and church was moved four miles north in 1924 to become part of the Highway School along with the Warren school and Harmony school. In the 1940s this school was consolidated with the Tatum, New Mexico school system, and in the 1950s the old Murphy's Chapel school building was moved there as well, to become a private residence.

Only one saloon is left at Highway nowadays -- back when I was a doodlebugging jughand our crew stopped in a few times at the end of a blistering blustery day. At noon we often would buy Vienna sausages and white bread for our lunches from the store in Bronco. I remember my coworkers wondering how people could live in such isolated conditions, an hour's drive from the nearest town big enough to have shopping centers, movie houses, and other "necessities." It is a peculiar feeling to drive past the gas pumps still posted with the "low" prices of the time of the store's closing, and remember sitting around "jawboning" with the locals as we gobbled our cheap lunches, enjoying the shadowy cool recesses of the building.

Deborah and I also enjoy the Chihuahuan Ravens that nest along the highway on every other telephone pole. Small family groups of the ravens are almost always playing in the steady southwest wind of the region, swooping and cawing, keeping a meticulous eye on every twitch in the landscape. Their ability to survive in what seems to be such a spare and sparse landscape is "nothing short of incredible." Both the pronghorn and the raven are icons of the region for us, creatures that symbolize the freedom of wide-open spaces. To survive they must rely on intelligence and keen eyesight and somehow for humans that alertness is interpreted emotionally into creating what might be called "a plainsman's soul." I, for one, always am flooded with a love of that Lea County landscape as we "hightail it" along the road.