Robert E. Howard wrote the following in a February
1933 letter to August Derleth:
Whether
the history of Callahan County will ever be written is doubtful. At least, I’m
far too lazy to do the work necessary, though in a way it would be easier than
writing the history of Brown, since it was settled at a later date, and more
sparsely. At the same time, records of early settlement are not so plentiful.
If I ever write any chronicle of the County, it will deal only with the time
beginning at the date on which I came here. What with oil booms and the like,
its history during that time has not been tame, though undoubtedly lacking the
general interest of the early frontier days.
Of course Howard could not foresee the advent of
the Information Age and the invention of the Internet, which made the history
of everything, including Callahan County, easily accessible to everyone. You
can throw a dart at a county map of Texas and no matter which county the dart’s
point hits, odds are that county is going to have a violent and storied past.
Such is the case of Howard’s home county of Callahan.
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| Callahan County Courthouse ca 1900-1929 |
There were numerous clashes between the early
settlers and the local Indian tribes and Howard recounted some of these battles
in his letters. Here is a real life account of the Sipe Springs Indian
incidents, as told by Miss Carrie Childress:
Captain
M.W Hall organized a company of Minute Men in 1873 for protection of the
settlers against the Indians. In 1873 the Indians drove off the horses of a
ranching operation owned by a Mr. Justice and (Cal) Watkins on the Sabano. A man by the name of Gass Evans notified the
company and they followed the Indians into Callahan County and recovered the
horses. The last Indian raid was made in 1874, when the Indians killed Bob
Leslie on Rush Creek. In leaving the country they touch[ed] the point where the
house now stands on the old Tom Hale place east of town and swung into the
north and west. A few earlier raids had been made in the early part of January
1870, the Indians raiding the Schmick and Follis ranch, and driving off the
horses; Bill McGuire, the only man on the ranch who had been left to protect
the women and children shot at the Indians but they made their get-away with
their horses.
The Comanches remained a threat well into the
1870’s when a contingent of troops under the command of Colonel Ranald S.
Mackenzie defeated the Comanches at Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, which was to be the last battle in the Texas Indian
Wars. The few remaining hostile Indians were driven away later that same year
by William J. Maltby commanding Company E of the Frontier Battalion of the
Texas Rangers.
After the end of the Indian wars, more and more
settlers moved into the area – part of the ceaseless westward expansion.
Gradually, the string of forts manned by the US Army that threaded south to north
across the West Texas Plains were abandoned one after the other until the last
one lowered its flag in 1891.
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| Map of Callahan County |
Stations for the new Texas and Pacific Railway line were being built from Dallas to El Paso, with stops planned for Putnam,
Baird, and Clyde – small settlements which quickly developed into towns. The
railroad had completely bypassed Belle Plain six miles to the north. In January
of 1883, an election resulted in Baird being made the new county seat. The
effect of this outcome led to Belle Plain’s stone jail and most of the
residences being moved to Baird, leaving only a handful of families in the
dying town.
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| Texas farming ca 1890s |
The agriculture boom that Callahan County enjoyed
had its price. Increased demand for land caused the price of real estate to
rise. As a result of this, a lot of newcomers could not afford to buy land and
this led to an increased number of tenant farmers. By 1920 nearly half the
farmers (823 of 1,649) were tenants. The majority of these were sharecroppers
who were permitted by landowners to farm the land and collected only a share of
the harvest as payment for their efforts. While most sharecroppers in the state
were African American, the reverse was true in Callahan County – all but one of
the tenants was white.
Eventually, overgrazing, drought, soil erosion, and
a shortage of potable water took its toll on ranching and farming in the
county. This led to several conservation programs being established.
The decline in agriculture was somewhat offset by
the discovery of oil in Callahan County and adjacent counties in 1923. A number
of promising fields were found in Cross Plains, Pioneer, Cross Cut, and Blake,
and by the late 1920s the oil business was booming bigtime. The oil and gas
revenues generated from the production from the numerous wells in the area made
it easier for some landowners to survive the economic slump of the 1930s and even
made a few large landowners quite wealthy.
You’re
right about oil booms — they bring a lot of money into the country and take
more out, as well as ruining the country for other purposes. This might offend
men in the oil business, but it’s the truth that I’ve seen more young people
sent to the Devil through the debauching effects of an oil boom than all the
other reasons put together. I know; I was a kid in a boom town myself. The
average child of ten or twelve who’s lived through a boom or so, knows more
vileness and bestial sinfulness than a man of thirty should know — whether he —
or she — practice what they know or not. Glamor and filth! That’s an oil boom.
When I was a kid I worked in the tailoring business just as one terrific boom was
dwindling out, and harlots used to give me dresses to be cleaned — sometimes
they’d be in a mess from the wearer having been drunk and in the gutter.
Beautiful silk and lace, delicate of texture and workmanship, but disgustingly
soiled — such dresses always symbolized boom days and nights, to me —
shimmering, tantalizing, alluring things, bright as dreams, but stained with
nameless filth.
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| An oil well in Cisco ca. 1920s |
With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s,
many of the county's farmers, both tenants and owners experienced hard times
and were heavily indebted. A combination of falling agricultural prices coupled
with a boll weevil outbreak caused most banks to cease extending additional
credit to the struggling farmers, forcing many of them off the land they owned
or sharecropped.
By the end of 1936, the year Howard died, things
were turning around for Callahan County and the rest of the nation as it slowly
started climbing out of the depths of the Great Depression. While Howard had no
interest in writing the history of his county, he did have a strong desire to
write a great novel of his beloved Texas, a desire that went unfulfilled.
About Damon Sasser:
Damon Sasser has been a staple in Robert E. Howard fandom and REH Studies for four decades. He is the founder of REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website and journal. Sasser is a member of The Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHupa) and has written countless articles for various fanzines and journals.
Sasser also has a nice Facebook Page for both the TGR website and journal. Be sure and check it out and "like" the page. You will not only get updates about articles posted on TGR but other tid-bits of great information on REH, H.P. Lovecraft, pulp zines, and what is circulating around the REH scholarly network.
About Damon Sasser:
Sasser also has a nice Facebook Page for both the TGR website and journal. Be sure and check it out and "like" the page. You will not only get updates about articles posted on TGR but other tid-bits of great information on REH, H.P. Lovecraft, pulp zines, and what is circulating around the REH scholarly network.
