Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > The Lighter Side
ROAD TRIP: A BBM Game
jpwagoneer1964:
Onion Creek, Tx
ONION CREEK, TEXAS. Onion Creek was a farming community on Onion Creek and the Rock Island and Pacific line, seven miles from Ennis in Ellis County. During the 1930s and 1940s the population there was estimated at twenty-five. County highway maps from the 1980s showed the Onion Creek community with two railroad stations.
Mark
MaineWriter:
Knickerbocker, TX
The town was once second only to San Angelo in size and political influence in the county after Ben Ficklin was washed away in the great flood of the Concho River.
The name comes from two of the town's early settlers who were related to Washington Irving, the American writer who was at the peak of his popularity at that time.
Diedrich Knickerbocker was the fictitious narrator of Irving's History of New York.
In 1875 the three Baze brothers donated land for a church, school, and cemetery on the northwest side of Dove Creek. They installed an irrigation ditch to grow hay, and melons to sell to the Fort Concho soldiers.
In 1877 Joseph Tweedy, J. Barlow Reynolds and the Grinnell Brothers drove their herds of sheep from their camp near Brackettville.
They established the Knickerbocker ranch / store on the SE side of Dove Creek.
A post office was opened in 1881. In the 1880s the Tweedy Mercantile Company dealt in oats, wheat, and corn. Second only to the crops was sheep production.
After a collapse in wool prices, the original settlers left, leaving only J.Tweedy. He platted a townsite on his land, and set up his own irrigation company for farms along Dove Creek.
Stephen Dexter Arthur planted cotton as an experiment in 1887 and produced Knickerbocker's first bale. The ruins of his water-driven gin can be seen near the bridge at Dove Creek. Arthur built a Methodist church on land donated by Joseph and Elizabeth Tweedy. In 1889 the town relocated to a site with better water.
The town had twenty-five residents in 1884, fifty in 1890 but by the late 1890s the population had swollen to 250.
During its boom times, Knickerbocker seemed to have two of everything. The town had two gins, two saloons, two blacksmiths, two hotels and two stores. It also had an undertaker - just one.
Kinckerbocker also had an early sanitarium since doctors all across the country were sending people to dryer climates. Later, nearby Carlsbad became a huge facility for tuberculosis patients.
Knickerbocker's adobe store / post office, built in 1896 remained standing until 1936. Knickerbocker got its first school, in 1889 and a school for Mexican children six years later.
A lawless element hung out near Knickerbocker and two members of this group staged a train robbery near Sanderson, Texas.
A brick school built in 1926, served until the school consolidations of the 1950s. In 1956 Knickerbocker merged with Christoval.
Today there isn't much left in Knickerbocker except for the brick community building.
Leslie
Meryl:
Rek Hill, TX
jpwagoneer1964:
Lusk, Wy
In 1918 the Buck Creek Dome oil strike briefly boosted Lusk's population to ten thousand. Today, only three thousand people live in the entire county. The Stagecoach Museum in Lusk is a wonderful place to explore another piece of Wyoming's history -- the glory days of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stagecoach route during the Black Hills gold rush.
A local character who epitomizes that era was Mother Featherlegs, an auburn-haired woman who wore red pantalets, ruffled drawers that tied at the ankle and flapped in the wind when she rode. An admirer said she looked just like a feather-legged chicken, and so she was christened. She and her cohort, Dangerous Dick Davis, ran a saloon and brothel out of their cabin southwest of Lusk. It was a favorite gathering place for those on the wrong side of the law. Her local fame soared in 1879 when she was discovered shot dead at her spring, with the missing Dangerous Dick's footprints all around. She was rumored to have had a lot of money hidden away. Whether it was stolen by her murderer or still waits to be found depends on whose story you believe. Either way, she is remembered fondly by local residents. A marker stands at the site of her cabin, and her famous pantalets have had adventures of their own. Stolen from the historic site in 1964, they graced a Deadwood saloon until 1990, when a determined posse of Lusk residents raided the saloon and got the pantalets back.
If you take Highway 85 north out of Lusk, you'll pass through the most dangerous and desolate section of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage route. Horse thefts, stage coach robberies, and other misfortunes were fairly normal, starring westerners with colorful names like Persimmons Bill Chambers, a famous outlaw, and Stuttering Brown, the man sent by the stagecoach company to stop outlaw depredations. Although many of these stories are tragic, some are triumphant, others are simply funny. In 1876 Persimmons Bill held up the stage and murdered the Metz family. Either plucky or foolish, Mrs. Thomas Durbin road the next stage north from Cheyenne with $10,000 in her handbag. She arrived safely in Deadwood and delivered the money to her brother-in-law who started up a bank, and hopefully treated his sister-in-law well the rest of her life.
Phatty Thompson's initiative was on a different scale. In 1877 he decided that Deadwood's population of shady women needed pets, so he purchased a number of cats at twenty-five cents each from enterprising Cheyenne youngsters, packed them in a huge crate, loaded them on his wagon, and set out for Deadwood. En route the wagon tipped over, the crate broke open, and Phatty's investment escaped. Fortunately, Phatty had some "tasty morsels" with him that eventually convinced most of the cats to return to the crate. Upon arrival in Deadwood, Phatty's business instincts proved sound -- his feline companions for lonely ladies sold for ten to twenty-five dollars each.
MaineWriter:
Kress, TX
Founded in 1890, the town had been named Wright, after a local preacher. On the stage coach line from Canyon to Plainview, with a school, post ofiice and store, it had everything a 19th Century town needed to prosper.
When the railroad arrived in 1906, the post office / store moved to the rails. The town was renamed for Pioneer George H. Kress.
In 1909 a promotional booklet gave the town's population as 500 - a number that was probably inflated. The first school opened in 1907. In 1915 the first garage and filling station was erected, a grain elevator was built, and a weekend rodeo was organized for local recreation.
The main highway through town (Hwy 87) has moved twice - forcing businesses to relocate as well. Infrastructure in the form of electricity and gas were introduced in the late 1920s.
Kress was home to over 650 people by 1953. A bank opened in 1963 - ending a bank-less period that had lasted from the 30s to that date.
Leslie
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