Texas Panhandle Tales

Author

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been fascinated with the history of the Texas Panhandle since the summer of 1961, when my dad took me to Mobeetie in that region’s northeastern corner to visit the site of old Fort Elliott.

Earlier that year, my seventh-grade Texas history teacher had all her students pick a topic on the state’s history and prepare a notebook on it as a semester project. I had chosen old Texas forts. The notebook was completed and earned me an A-plus, but putting it together hooked me on the topic. That’s why I talked my dad into taking me from Amarillo to Wheeler County to see where Fort Elliott had been.

The landowner and his wife graciously let us climb through the barbed-wire fence behind the roadside state historical marker near the site so we could walk around where the cavalry post had stood during its fifteen years of existence. I found a shoebox full of artifacts, including an old rifle cartridge, horseshoe nails, pieces of broken bottles and even the leather sole of an old boot I imagined had been worn by a cavalry trooper.

Also that summer, my dad let me ride the bus from Amarillo to Canyon to visit the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum. Not only did I go through all the exhibits, but I also spent time in the museum archive, reading up on Fort Elliott.

I was just a teenager then, but my interest in history has lasted, while my youth has not.

This book, the third in a series based on my weekly Texas Tales newspaper column, includes forty-six pieces focusing on the interesting people, places and history of the top of Texas, that straight-lined, near-square part of the state that early on struck someone as the handle of the pan that constitutes the rest of the Lone Star State.

Most descriptions of the Panhandle say it includes twenty-six counties, bordered on the south by Parmer, Castro, Swisher, Briscoe, Hall and Childress. That area covers 25,823.9 square miles, almost 10 percent of Texas. Nearly a half million people live there, but with that much land, there is still plenty of wide-open space, from the rich grasslands of Dallam County in the northwest corner to the awesome grandeur of Palo Duro Canyon to the south. The capital of the Panhandle is Amarillo, bisected by Interstate 40, the old Route 66. For this book, I have included some stories from the South Plains, as well as the Panhandle proper, but culturally and topographically, there’s not much difference between the two regions except altitude above sea level.

It’s too complicated a story to tell here, but while I was born in Amarillo (where my dad was a longtime newspaperman), I grew up down state, as they say in the Panhandle. Even so, since half my family lived there, I visited Amarillo regularly and still return every chance I get.

My dad, my grandmother and other immediate family members who lived in Amarillo are all gone, but the high, vast landscape, the deep canyons and all the stories they hold endure.

INDIANS

KATE POLLY’S PANCAKES

Next time you fry a stack of pancakes, imagine what it would be like if your life and the well-being of your children depended on it.

In the spring of 1874, Kate Polly and her husband, Ephraim, lived with their young daughters, two-year-old Katie and four-year-old Annie, in a dugout at the headwaters of Morgan Creek in what is now Hemphill County. They had been among the first Anglo families to settle on the High Plains. Back then, the Panhandle had yet to see a plow, its sweeping, treeless plains covered in luxuriant native grasses and vast herds of buffalo and antelope. A person could see for miles in any direction.

And one morning early that summer, bad trouble loomed on the horizon.

Home alone with her children, Kate busied herself with the daily chores. Her husband, who had been a hospital steward in the army, had left to tend to a sick buffalo hunter and then gather forage to sell to the military at Camp Supply in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). At some point, Kate happened to look outside and saw something not everyone lived to describe: hundreds of Indians on horseback, all armed with either bows or rifles, quietly encircling their dugout.

With gestures underscored by bruising pinches, the Indians’ headman communicated that he and the other Indians wanted food. Sizing up their number, Kate decided the easiest meal would be pancakes. After lighting a fire in her wood-burning stove, she donned her apron and started mixing batter. Whenever Kate had to stop and mix more batter, the next Indian in line would pinch her and motion for her to start cooking again.

A lone Plains Indian surveys the vast Panhandle landscape in this 1907 painting. Author’s collection.

One by one, the warriors filed through the Polly home, grabbing handfuls of steaming pancakes straight off the top of the hot stove and wolfing them down with great delight. (The Indians apparently did not need melted butter and maple syrup to enhance their enjoyment of Kate’s hotcakes.)

Finally, near sundown, the family’s 192-pound flour barrel ran empty. Exhausted, Kate picked up her youngest child and walked slowly outside, plopping down on a cottonwood log. Oblivious to the watching Indians, she opened her blouse and began nursing her daughter.

Seeing that their meal service had stopped, several of the Indians came up and pinched her again, pointing toward their stomachs and the dugout. They wanted more pancakes.

Dead tired, Kate shook her head and ran her finger across her throat in a universally understood gesture. She had been standing over a hot stove all day long, flipping hotcakes for hundreds of hostile Indians. If they wanted to kill her now, fine. At least she wouldn’t have to wash the dishes.

This watercolor by Charles M. Russell depicts Plains Indian holding a scalp. Author’s collection.

Impressed by her pluck, as well as her cooking, the Indians mounted their horses, rounded up the Polly family’s milk cows and rode off through a canyon to the northwest. The cows later wandered back, but not the Indians.

From Morgan Creek, the war party rode on to a buffalo hunter’s camp at a place called Adobe Walls in what is now Hutchinson County. At dawn on June 27, the Indians attacked. Aided by Billy Dixon’s famous near-mile-long shot that toppled the Indians’ medicine man from his horse, the buffalo hunters managed to hold off the warriors, and all but two of the defenders lived to tell about it. The incident triggered the Red River War, the last stand of the Plains Indians in the Panhandle.

When Ephraim returned from his trip, he found the dugout surrounded by unshod pony tracks and estimated that as many as seven hundred Indians had descended on the place in his absence. He reckoned them to have been a mix of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne.

When the U.S. cavalry marched into the Panhandle to deal with the hostile Indians, the Pollys moved back to Fort Hays in Kansas, which is where they had come from. They returned to Texas at the end of the war in 1876 and operated a stagecoach stop on Commission Creek (in present Lipscomb County, south of what would become Higgins) along the road from Dodge City, Kansas, to newly established Fort Elliott near Mobeetie in Wheeler County. The Pollys stayed there until 1885, when they returned to Hemphill County. When that county was organized two years later, Ephraim got elected as the first county judge.

Hemphill County is where the couple stayed for the rest of their lives. Kate died at fifty-seven on May 2, 1899, and was buried in Canadian. Her husband joined her in the same cemetery after his death on April 21, 1905. He had made it to sixty-three.

Fortunately, the story of Kate’s 1874 pancake dinner did not die with the pioneer couple. Kate’s oldest daughter, by then Mrs. D.M. Hargrave, had been just old enough to remember the incident and passed the tale on to her daughter, the future Mrs. E.R. Cloyd. Mrs. Cloyd, in turn, put the story on paper for inclusion in a history of Lipscomb County published in 1976.

Whether Kate Polly could ever stomach cooking pancakes again is not recorded, but given her grit, she probably did. After all, flapjacks saved her scalp and probably averted a life of captivity for her children.

THE GREAT PANHANDLE INDIAN RAID

Destined to gain a national reputation as a fearless Texas Ranger captain, when William Jesse McDonald arrived in the Panhandle in the winter of 1891, he expected to stay busy as a law enforcement officer in a still sparsely settled section of the state. But he sure didn’t anticipate what happened on the night of January 29 that year.

As a teenager, McDonald had come to East Texas from Mississippi after the Civil War. Having studied business at a commercial college in New Orleans, he evolved from merchant to lawman, serving as a deputy sheriff, special ranger and deputy U.S. marshal. By the mid-1880s, he had moved to Hardeman County in northwest Texas.

A skinny six-footer as tough as a tar-soaked telegraph pole, McDonald soon established a reputation for effectiveness as a peace officer, but his long-standing friendship with the newly elected governor, Jim Hogg, is what got him appointed as captain of Company B when S.A. McMurray left the force. McDonald assumed command of the company in Amarillo, a fairly new railroad town on the High Plains.

Arriving on the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad about midnight on January 29, 1891, McDonald found a hotel and went to bed as soon as he could. He had just drifted off when someone banged on his door with an urgent wire: Indians had raided Hall County, about one hundred miles to the west. His blue eyes smiling, the new captain read the telegram and laughed, assuming some of the rangers in his company had decided to welcome him into state service with a practical joke. It had been a decade since any hostile Indians had caused problems in Texas.

An array of Comanche Indians after they were relegated to a reservation. Author’s collection.

McDonald went back to sleep. But soon, other telegrams came, including a dire-sounding message from the railroad superintendent. Still not believing that Indians had dared leave their reservation in Indian Territory, McDonald nevertheless realized he had to investigate. The new captain dressed and walked to the telegraph office for more information. After an exchange of messages with the operator in Salisbury, who ended his last transmission with Good-bye, I’m going now myself, McDonald got the railroad to put together a special train for an emergency trip to Hall County.

At virtually every point in the Panhandle that had telegraph service, word sparked across the wire that Comanche and Kiowa Indians were spilling into Texas from their reservations in Indian Territory. People’s reactions ranged from pure panic to expressions of bravado from young cowboys eager to prove their mettle in an Indian fight.

In Armstrong County south of Claude, Virginia Hamblen happened to look out her kitchen window toward the nearby Luttrell place. Seeing her friend Molly Luttrell frantically chasing a horse around their yard, Mrs. Hamblen knew something unusual was afoot. As she continued to watch, she saw Molly finally catch the horse and swing up on its back. Once in the saddle, the housewife started galloping across the prairie in the direction of the Hamblen residence.

A group of rowdy cowboys led to the Great Indian Raid, but these High Plains waddies preferred a game of low-stakes poker. XIT Ranch Musuem, Dalhart, Texas.

Molly, what in the world is the matter?

The Indians are coming! she cried.

What do you mean? Virginia asked.

The Indians are coming. They are tearing up the railroad track, killing women and children and burning houses! What are we going to do?

As soon as both families got everyone rounded up and threw their essential belongings in wagons, they left for the more easily defended dugout of another nearby family. When