Bull Town

Bovina, Texas, back in the day (KFDA)

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1899, Bull Town received the more refined name of Bovina when a post office was established.

The community’s obvious connection to the cattle industry dates from its origin as the site of the Hay Hook Line Camp of the XIT Ranch in western Parmer County.

In 1898 the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway steamed through the ranch, and cowboys unloaded feed at the XIT camp site. Continued

The Mathematical Windmill

 

(Wikipedia) The Aermotor Windmill Company is an American manufacturer of wind-powered water pumps. The widespread use of their distinctive wind pumps on ranches throughout the arid plains and deserts of the United States has made their design a quintessential image of the American West.
... The first Aermotor was sold in 1888, with 24 windmills in total being sold in the first year. Aermotor soon became a strong competitor among its contemporaries selling over 20,000 of its windmills by 1892. Over the next 30 years Aermotor grew and expanded, introducing accessories and variants on "the mathematical windmill." Continued

Rip Ford’s Risky Ranger Raid

Believed to be several of Rip Ford's men.

(Historynet) ... Governor Runnels had decided the only way to check the Comanches was to send Texas Rangers on a preemptive strike over the border into the heart of Comancheria without federal permission.
Rip Ford seemed the perfect choice to head such a force. He had fought with the Texas Mounted Rifles during the Mexican War, earning the nickname “Rip” for his habit of scrawling “Rest in peace” beside the name of each deceased when compiling company casualty lists.
In 1849 he’d signed on as a captain with the Texas Rangers, and for the next two years his company had fought hostile Indians along the Rio Grande. Ford had then taken a six-year hiatus to pursue political and civilian ventures before Runnels appointed him senior captain of all the Rangers in January 1858, tasking him with running down the Comanches. Continued

The Steer Branded MURDER

 

(Tales of Texas) The story begins on a cold, dust-blowing day with several local cattlemen working a roundup on the tan grass flat about thirty miles east of Fort Davis. 
Leader–or committee chairman–of the roundup was Eugene Kelley, and present was Henry Powe (pronounced “Poe”), soon to lie dead with several bullets in him.  He wore a full black beard and had lost his left arm at the elbow in service of the Confederacy.  He had come from Alabama to Texas in 1870 and had had some college education.  By 1883 he was grazing cattle on public land around Mount Locke, and he helped found the Methodist Church in Alpine. 
Two other men involved in the shoot-out were Finus (‘Fine”) Gilliland and Mannie (“Mannie”) Clements, both of stormy reputation. Continued

Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico: Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It

(NYTimes) Lenny Trujillo made a startling discovery when he began researching his descent from one of New Mexico’s pioneering Hispanic families: One of his ancestors was a slave.

“I didn’t know about New Mexico’s slave trade, so I was just stunned,” said Mr. Trujillo, 66, a retired postal worker who lives in Los Angeles. “Then I discovered how slavery was a defining feature of my family’s history.”

Mr. Trujillo is one of many Latinos who are finding ancestral connections to a flourishing slave trade on the blood-soaked frontier now known as the American Southwest. Continued

Republic of Texas passes homestead law, sets aside land for education

Log cabin, Muleshoe Heritage Center, Muleshoe, Texas (Sixgun Siding)

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1839, the Congress of the Republic of Texas passed two important pieces of legislation: a homestead act and an act setting aside land for public schools and two universities.

The homestead act, patterned somewhat after legislation of Coahuila and Texas, was designed to encourage home ownership. It guaranteed every citizen or head of family in the republic "fifty acres of land or one town lot, including his or her homestead, and improvements not exceeding five hundred dollars in value." Continued

New Mexico's many historic churches draw thousands of visitors

Sacred Heart, Dilia, NM (Sixgun Siding)

(Albuquerque Journal) ... For some visitors to the Land of Enchantment, churches and cathedrals are a big draw. And for some, churches are the reason New Mexico is their destination. Continued

Britt Johnson

"The Last Lull in the Fight" by Frederick Remington

(TSHA) JOHNSON, BRITTON (ca. 1840–1871). Britton (Britt) Johnson was born about 1840, probably in Tennessee.
He became a legend on the West Texas frontier after the summer of 1865, when he went out onto the Llano Estacado in pursuit of Indians who had kidnapped his wife and two children in the Elm Creek Raid of October 1864. Continued

Don Whittington

This Kremer Porsche 935 K3 won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1979, driven by
Klaus Ludwig, Don Whittington and Bill Whittington. (Dan Wildhirt) 

Reginald Donald "Don" Whittington, Jr. (born January 23, 1946) is an American former racing driver from Lubbock, Texas, who won the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans together with his brother Bill Whittington and Klaus Ludwig on a Porsche 935, although Ludwig, a multiple winner at Le Mans and elsewhere, did most of the driving in the heavy rain as the brothers did not have any real racing experience prior to the late 1970s. Don's brother Dale also competed in open wheel racing. His father, Don Whittington, Sr. was also an American racing driver in the USAC National Championship from 1957 to 1959.  Continued

Wilbur Scoville

(Wikipedia) Wilbur Lincoln Scoville (January 22, 1865 – March 10, 1942) was an American pharmacist best known for his creation of the "Scoville Organoleptic Test", now standardized as the Scoville scale. He devised the test and scale in 1912 while working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company to measure pungency, "spiciness" or "heat", of various chili peppers.
... In 1922, Scoville won the Ebert prize from the American Pharmaceutical Association and in 1929 he received the Remington Honor Medal. Scoville also received an honorary Doctor of Science from Columbia University in 1929. Continued

Mason County courthouse burns

Scott Cooley
(Find-a-Grave)

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1877, the Mason County courthouse burned, destroying all early county records, including those pertaining to the Mason County War.
This deadly episode began as a feud over cattle rustling but grew into a conflict between the Anglo and German elements in the community.
The violence began in February 1875, when a mob took five suspected cattle thieves from jail and killed three.
Shortly thereafter, another suspected rustler was killed by twelve men with blackened faces, prompting his friend Scott Cooley, a former Texas Ranger, to seek revenge. Continued

Heroism of the Texas Division

Litter bearers bring back wounded during attempt to span the Rapido
River near Cassino, Italy.” 23 January 1944 (Wikipedia)

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1944, the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division, nicknamed the "Texas Division," began its "two-day nightmare," the crossing of the Rapido River in Italy.
General Mark Clark needed pressure on the German defensive line below Rome to prevent the Germans from counterattacking the projected Allied beachhead at Anzio. Further, an Allied breakthrough into the Liri valley would facilitate the march toward Rome. Continued

Bryce Alford

(Wikipedia) Bryce Alford (born January 18, 1995) is an American professional basketball player for the Oklahoma City Blue of the NBA G League.
He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins. He set school records for the most three-point field goals made in a game, season, and career. He earned first-team all-conference honors in the Pac-12 as a senior in 2016–17.
As a senior in high school in New Mexico, Alford set a state single-season scoring record, and was named the state's top high school player. Continued

American Schemers: “Pappy” O’Daniel

(American History Magazine) W. LEE “PAPPY” O’Daniel started out selling flour but ended up selling himself, riding the radio waves to fortune, fame, the Texas governor’s mansion, and the United States Senate.

He was the first celebrity of the mass media age to win high office—but not the last. Continued

Alianza Hispano-Americana founded

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1894, the Alianza Hispano-Americana was founded in Tucson, Arizona, by Carlos I. Velasco, Pedro C. Pellón, and Mariano G. Samaniego, as a fraternal benefit society.
It fanned out across the rest of the Southwest over the next sixteen years, spreading to Texas by June 1906. It grew into the biggest and best known of the Mexican-American sociedades mutualistas in the Southwest.
AHA was set up to offer life insurance at low rates and provide social activities for Mexican Americans. Its goals were similar to those of other fraternal aid groups in the United States, which began to multiply in the late nineteenth century among European immigrants. Continued

I trekked to a graveyard to learn how my ancestors died. But can genealogy help predict how long I will live?

 

(Washington Post) Fascinated with genealogy, I’ve started spending too many hours chasing snippets of family stories.
I figure if I can learn something about my family tree, it might shed light on my health and how long I will live. Continued

A. B. Guthrie Jr.

(Wikipedia) Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. (January 13, 1901 – April 26, 1991) was an American novelist, screenwriter, historian, and literary historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950 for his novel The Way West.
... His novels include Murders at Moon Dance, which was published during 1943. The Big Sky appeared during 1947, with a young person's edition during 1950. The Way West, a novel about the journey of American expansion in the old west, was first published during 1949.
Guthrie continued to write predominantly western subjects, including the Academy Award-nominated script for the movie Shane during 1953 and the novel These Thousand Hills during 1956. During 1960, he published his first collection of short stories, The Big It and Other Stories. Fair Land, Fair Land, the third novel in the chronology begun with The Big Sky, was published in 1982. Continued

Female Ranchers Are Reclaiming the American West

My grandmother (left), working the ranch near Tucumcari, circa 1915.

(NYTimes) … the brothers, sons and grandsons who would have historically inherited a family ranch have, in the last decade, opted to pursue less gritty work.

As a result, in 2012, 14 percent of the nation’s 2.1 million farms had a female proprietor, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

That ratio may rise, as over half the farms and ranches in the United States are expected to change hands over the next 20 years. Continued

Clyde Kluckhohn

(Wikipedia) Clyde Kluckhohn (January 11, 1905, Le Mars, Iowa – July 28, 1960, near Santa Fe, New Mexico), was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.
... In 1949, Kluckhohn began to work among five adjacent communities in the Southwest: Zuni, Navajo, Mormon (LDS), Spanish-American (Mexican-American), and Texas Homesteaders. Continued

Battle of Bear Valley

(Wikipedia) The Battle of Bear Valley was a small engagement fought in 1918 between a band of Yaquis and a detachment of United States Army soldiers.
On January 9, 1918, elements of the American 10th Cavalry Regiment detected about thirty armed Yaquis in Bear Valley, Arizona, a large area that was commonly used as a passage across the international border with Mexico. A short firefight ensued, which resulted in the death of the Yaqui commander and the capture of nine others.
Though the conflict was merely a skirmish, it was the last time the United States Army engaged hostile Native Americans in combat and thus has been seen as one of the final battles of the American Indian Wars. Continued

Patrick Hurley

(Wikipedia) Patrick Jay Hurley (January 8, 1883, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory — July 30, 1963, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was a highly decorated American soldier with the rank of Major General, statesman, and diplomat. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to 1933.
... Hurley was the Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate for the state of New Mexico in 1946, 1952 and 1958 but he lost all three attempts against the Democratic candidate Dennis Chavez. Continued

Tankhouse and Barn

I've posted this scene before, but I like this angle better, though you lose the truck.
Either way, it's in Roosevelt County, New Mexico.

Nancy Lopez

(Wikipedia) Nancy Marie Lopez (born January 6, 1957) is an American professional golfer. She became a member of the LPGA Tour in 1977 and won 48 LPGA Tour events, including three major championships.
Lopez won the New Mexico Women's Amateur at age 12 in 1969, and the U.S. Girls' Junior in 1972 and 1974, at ages 15 and 17, respectively. Shortly after graduation from Goddard High School in Roswell, she played in the U.S. Women's Open as an amateur in 1975 and tied for second. Continued

A closer look at Tucumcari Mountain

Photo by my grandmother, Florence Surguy, circa 1915

(Quay County Sun) How much do you know about Tucumcari Mountain?
The uniquely shaped mesa just south of Tucumcari remains the most recognizable natural landmark in Quay County and a symbol of the city itself. Tucumcari Mountain is shown on the city's and county's websites and has sold countless postcards over the past century. Continued

Zebulon Pike

(Wikipedia) Zebulon Montgomery Pike (January 5, 1779 – April 27, 1813) was an American brigadier general and explorer for whom Pikes Peak in Colorado was renamed (from El Capitan). As a U.S. Army officer he led two expeditions, first in 1805-06 to reconnoiter the upper reaches of the Mississippi River, and then in 1806-07 to explore the Southwest to the fringes of the northern Spanish-colonial settlements. Pike's expeditions coincided with other Jeffersonian expeditions, including the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) and the Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis expedition (1806).
Pike's second expedition crossed the Rocky Mountains into southern Colorado, which led to his capture by the Spanish, who sent Pike and his men to Chihuahua (present-day Mexico), for interrogation. Later in 1807, Pike and some of his men were escorted by the Spanish through Texas and released near American territory. Continued

Bose Ikard dies

Bose Ikard

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1929, Bose Ikard died in Austin. Ikard, born a slave in Mississippi in 1843, became one of the most famous black frontiersmen and trail drivers in Texas.
The Civil War left Bose a free man, and in 1866 he went to work for Oliver Loving as a trail driver.
After Loving's death, Ikard continued in the service of Loving's partner, Charles Goodnight. The two men became lifelong friends.
Goodnight later commented that he trusted Bose Ikard "farther than any living man. He was my detective, banker, and everything else in Colorado, New Mexico, and the other wild country I was in." Continued

Samuel Pomeroy

Santa Fe R.R. streamliner, the "Super Chief," being serviced at the depot, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Servicing these diesel streamliners takes five minutes (Jack Delano, Library of Congress 1943)

(Wikipedia) Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (January 3, 1816 – August 27, 1891) was an United States Senator from Kansas in the mid-19th century, serving in the United States Senate during the American Civil War. Pomeroy served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
A Republican, he also was the mayor of Atchison, Kansas, from 1858 to 1859, the second president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the first president to oversee any of the railroad's construction and operations. Pomeroy succeeded Cyrus K. Holliday as president of the railroad on January 13, 1864. Continued

Roger Miller

(Wikipedia) Roger Dean Miller, Sr. (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer-songwriter, musician, and actor, best known for his honky-tonk-influenced novelty songs. His most recognized tunes included the chart-topping country and pop hits "King of the Road", "Dang Me", and "England Swings", all from the mid-1960s Nashville sound era.

After growing up in Oklahoma and serving in the United States Army, Miller began his musical career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, writing such hits as "Billy Bayou" and "Home" for Jim Reeves and "Invitation to the Blues" for Ray Price. Continued

Confederates attack Union forces in Galveston

(Wikipedia) "The bold, intrepid, and gallant conduct of Maj. Gen. J. Bankhead Magruder, Col. Thomas Green, Maj. Leon Smith and other officers, and of the Texan Rangers and soldiers engaged in the attack on, and victory achieved over, the land and naval forces of the enemy at Galveston, on the 1st of January, 1863, eminently entitle them to the thanks of Congress and the country...
This brilliant achievement, resulting, under the providence of God, in the capture of the war steamer Harriet Lane and the defeat and ignominious flight of the hostile fleet from the harbor, the recapture of the city and the raising of the blockade of the port of Galveston, signally evinces that superior force may be overcome by skillful conception and daring courage." Continued