Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Small town schools are great places for students to learn
March 21, 2007

“Many of the kids that started school in Bledsoe before the school closed made a mark for themselves in their new school. I’d like to think that is a reflection on our school. We did a lot of things to teach the kids about their home. I developed an oral history project for my fifth graders. I took them various places in the county during the school year. Small classes are a great place for kids to learn. A teacher gets to know her kids better and work more with them.” June Gandy taught school in Bledsoe for 24 years.

“When I was in school in Bledsoe in the 1970s, 200 people lived in town,” Rene Franks, the assistant City of Midland Engineer told me later. Ms. Gandy had reported that today only 86 people live in the 100 square miles surrounding Bledsoe. Most of the folks left in Bledsoe are retired. Ms. Gandy’s son and daughter are the only people that are “middle-aged” (40-50). John is a pumper, and Michelle is a secretary in the Whiteface School (30 miles away). Michelle and Rene were classmates and were part of a 5 student graduating class. Rene, who was a National Merit Scholarship finalist at Bledsoe, remembered the three books that Ms. Gandy had read to her 5th grade class, “But I can’t remember any other books that other teachers made us read.” The Gandys are part of a 501c3 non-profit that now owns the Bledsoe School and use it for annual reunions.

Whiteface is a very small town. Wikipedia reports that 465 people lived in 207 housing units in the year 2000. “We had two kids from Whiteface win national awards in Washington last year in the eCYBERMISSION program. To have two kids from such a small town win national awards is pretty amazing,” Michelle added to the discussion about small town schooling. (eCYBERMISSION is a web-based science, math and technology competition for 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th grade teams. Teams propose a solution to a real problem in their community and compete for regional and national awards, challenging students to explore how science, math and technology work in the world.)

On a previous trip to Cochran County to visit Laura Wilbanks at the Whiteface School, I had learned that Ms. Gandy was an avid Cochran County historian. Ms. Wilbanks received a grant from Texas Parks and Wildlife for an eCYBERMISSION team to create a trail and educational signage at the Apache Oil recreational facility just south of town. I had volunteered to deliver a “care package” of books and binoculars from Vicki Sybert, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Interpretative Specialist for the Panhandle Region. The recreational facility is a picnic area around a water well-filled pond in a playa. On March 28th I will return to Whiteface to work with the team on their project.

When David Crum of the June Leland Wildlife Foundation asked the Sibley Nature Center to help on the “Bring Back the Boom” project to encourage landowners of the Gaines County to Bailey County region to participate in Lesser Prairie Chicken conservation I had no idea of “what I was getting into.” The project first involved the Sibley Nature Center with representatives of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Playa Lakes Joint Venture consortium, and then introduced us to members of the New Mexico Fish and Game Department and the Milnesand New Mexico Prairie Chicken Festival.

As we began working on the project, it also has been introducing us to many folks within the region of interest. We met Lacy Vardeman, president of the 50 member Bailey-Lamb County Sandhills Recreation Association, a group of landowners that encourage “landowners in their efforts to implement proper wildlife management and habitat management practices as a means of increasing the beauty and value of their property.” On the way to meet Ms. Gandy, we met Tom Hogue of Brownfield accidently.

Mr. Hogue was fixing fence on the road between Plains and Lehman, so we stopped to “palaver.” He owns ranch property just north of the land leased by the June Leland Wildlife Foundation, but farms near Brownfield. His wife is the principal at the Welch Consolidated School northwest of Lamesa. The school has 180 total students in grades K-12. Welch is an unincorporated village. Mr. Hogue comes to feed his cattle every five days and spends all day tending to the ranch.

“The mottes like that one,” said Mr. Hogue as he pointed to a group of 15 foot tall shinoak trees, “are superb places for wildlife and their young. I have found adult and young prairie chickens, quail, and mule deer together in the shade of such mottes.” The mottes are a mystery. Normally the shinoaks are shin high, but here and there a patch (usually less than an acre in size) of much larger plants are found. The mottes are often circular in shape. Some only have rings of trees around open sand, while others are groves of trees.

“When I do brush control to increase the amount of grass for my cattle, I leave the mottes,” he continued. When asked about the predators that might affect the prairie chicken population, Mr. Hogue commented, “ I believe coyotes are the worst threat at present. Coyotes are abundant here. A few years ago when it was terribly dry they were starving so much that they even attacked some of my calves. I have not seen a hawk dive on a prairie chicken. I imagine the feral hogs will do some damage now that they are increasing in the region.” Mr. Hogue went on to describe how the coyotes and hogs ranged, stating that he believed each drifted around the region over several square miles.

“A few years back, maybe 1990 or so, we saw over 100 prairie chickens in a group in the late summer. Some of the birds were definitely young, not fully grown,” John Gandy told us. “The most amazing thing I saw a prairie chicken do, however, was when I was plowing. Each rooster would attack the tractor as I passed through its territory. They are cocky little dudes with attitude. We once tried to raise a couple of baby prairie chickens when I was a kid, but we failed.” Ms. Gandy told us that the prairie chickens lekked next just south of the Bledsoe School as recently as the 1980s. “Some of the early settlers, back in the 1920s and 1930s hunted prairie chicken for the table just to survive. During the hard times if a family had meat it meant that someone had been hunting. Some even ate rabbit.” John added that he had eaten prairie chicken but was not fond of its sagebrush taste. “Many years ago, maybe in the 1960s, members of the community would have a prairie chicken fry as a social event.”

It is a pleasure to listen to folks talk about the sandylands landscape and the history of their interactions with their “home place.” A sparsely populated landscape creates people of character and depth.

Related photo essay: Lesser Prairie Chicken