The Cross Timbers Read online

  The Cross Timbers

  MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD

  Personal Narratives of the West

  J. Frank Dobie, General Editor

  The Cross Timbers

  MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD

  by Edward Everett Dale

  Illustrated by John Biggers

  UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

  AUSTIN

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65–27540

  Copyright © 1966 by Edward Everett Dale

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-292-74921-4 (library e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-74922-1 (individual e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-74069-3 (paperback)

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

  Permissions

  University of Texas Press

  P.O. Box 7819

  Austin, TX 78713-7819

  utpress.utexas.edu/about/book-permissions

  To Judy and Everett whose childhood differed so much from my own

  PREFACE

  This story of my boyhood in the Texas Cross Timbers has been written largely from memory, although old letters and other family documents have been consulted to verify dates and some events.

  Whether the story is worth telling is a matter of opinion, but it reveals a pattern of life in rural America now gone forever. Moreover, it is not my story alone. Except for some minor variations due to climate and other geographic conditions, it is largely the life story of a vast number of other boys who lived on a woodland farm in the period from 1882 to 1892. Perhaps this is its chief value, for we are largely what the past has made us, and to some extent it is true that “the child is father to the man.”

  To all those who have given me encouragement and help in the work of preparing this little volume for publication I want to express my sincere thanks and deep appreciation. My special thanks are due to my secretaries, Judy Kaye Moore, Mrs. R. L. Pettett, and Loretta Sue Pillow, who typed the manuscript, and to my wife, Rosalie, who gave much aid in its revision and was often a patient listener.

  Edward Everett Dale

  Norman, Oklahoma

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Be It Ever So Humble

  2. Neighbors and Visitors

  3. Vittles: Plain and Fancy

  4. Reading: Common and Preferred

  5. “Six Days Shalt Thou Labor”

  6. Play and Playmates

  7. Young Nimrods

  8. Disciples of St. Peter and Izaak Walton

  9. School and Schoolmates

  10. Cross Timbers Society

  11. The Lure of the West

  Index

  The Cross Timbers

  MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD

  Introduction

  It is commonly said that the youngest child in a family is always hopelessly spoiled. If this is true I entered the world under a terrific handicap, for it was my fate to be the youngest of my father’s twelve children. Two of these died in childhood, but most of the remaining ten lived to a ripe old age.

  As the youngest, I had the good fortune to be born in Texas. My father was born in Kentucky on January 28, 1829, but in 1831 his Virginia-born father migrated with his family to Northwest Missouri, where he settled near Richmond, in Ray County.

  Here my father grew to manhood and in 1850 joined the gold rush to California, walking all the way beside the oxen that drew his covered wagon. After a year of digging gold, with only modest success, he returned home by way of Panama and married Louisa Colley, whose family had migrated from Virginia to Ray County, Missouri, by way of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers.

  Their first son, Henry, was born a year after their marriage and eventually five more sons and four daughters were born of this marriage, but one son and a daughter died in early childhood. Some years after the close of the Civil War, Louisa Colley Dale died; after a decent interval Father married her younger sister, Mattie Counts Colley, who became my mother five years after the birth of her first child—my brother George.

  Soon after George’s birth my father and his younger brother, Isaac sold their land in Missouri and removed with their families to Nebraska, settling on Rock Creek about sixteen miles northeast of Lincoln. Here they took land under the Homestead Act of Congress, built homes, broke the prairie sod, and planted crops, but the cold winters and a plague of grasshoppers caused them to remove to Texas after three or four years in Nebraska.

  My father reached the Lone Star State with all his family except Henry, who had a farm in Nebraska. The following spring the Nebraska sweetheart of the oldest daughter, Fannie, came to Texas to marry her and take her back to his home on Rock Creek. About the same time Father’s second son, Frank, returned to Lincoln to enter the University of Nebraska. In the meantime my father had rented for a term of three years a prairie farm in Tarrant County, two or three miles west of the edge of the Lower Cross Timbers. It was in the comfortable frame house on this farm that I was born on February 8, 1879, slightly less than three years before my father moved us to our new home in the Cross Timbers.

  The origin of the term “Cross Timbers” is obscure. We only know that during most of the nineteenth century it was applied to the two broad belts of timber that extended northward from Central Texas to the Red River and far beyond. The eastern belt, called the Lower Cross Timbers, was separated from the western belt, or Upper Cross Timbers, by a strip of blackland prairie, eight or nine miles wide where we lived, but much wider farther south. In the early spring this green prairie became a gorgeous carpet of wild flowers.

  The eastern edge of the Lower Cross Timbers was slightly west of Sherman and Dallas, while its western boundary was not far from the main line of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway. Obviously, the boundary was jagged and broken. Long “peninsulas” of woodland extended out into the prairie and small “islands” of trees were common, usually on top of a low hill surrounded by grasslands.

  In marked contrast to the rich, black soil of the prairie, that of the Cross Timbers was thin and sandy, with occasional outcroppings of clay. In a few places there were heavy flat stones, which the children called “iron rocks” to indicate their weight and to distinguish them from the red sandstone found in some places where rain had washed away the soil.

  The trees in this area included the blackjack, which seldom grew to a height of over thirty feet. Usually they were found on rough rocky land, and were sometimes called “poor-land trees.” On the level sandy land grew the post oaks, which might reach a height of fifty or sixty feet. On some of the sandy flats the principal trees were hickory, while along the small streams they were elm, cottonwood, hackberry, walnut, pecan, and chinaberry.

  Naturally, the youngsters of the Cross Timbers were most interested in the trees and smaller plants which produced something edible. Of these there was a wide variety, including dewberries, blackberries, mulberries, three or four kinds of plums, persimmons, black haws, red haws, and at least three varieties of grapes. The mustang grapevines sometimes climbed to the top of tall trees. Other types of grapes were the winter or “possum grapes,” not ripening until late autumn, and sand-beach grapes. Both blackjack and post-oak trees produced quantities of acorns, which pigs ate greedily, but which were too bitter for human consumption. Therefore, the only nut-producing trees were pecan, hickory, and walnut.

  Other plants of interest to adults were found in these woods. Redroot, horehound, and stillingia were said to have much medicinal value. Housewives often picked lamb’s-quarter, poke leaves, and dock leaves to be boiled and eaten as “wild greens.” There were also plants to be avoided, such as poison oak, poison ivy, stinging nettles, the big bull n
ettles, and sand burrs. Most children seemed to be immune to poison ivy and poison oak but many adults were not.

  With the exception of cottontail rabbits, fox squirrels, and ’possums, few wild animals lived in the Cross Timbers. A few raccoons and skunks could be found, and possibly a fox or a prairie wolf might be seen once in a period of ten years. The big jack rabbits were found mostly on the prairie. There were snakes, but the only poisonous ones were the copperheads. Many birds of various kinds lived in the Cross Timbers, including the big turkey buzzards, crows, mockingbirds, shrikes, quails, turtledoves, meadow larks, bluebirds, several kinds of hawks, blue jays with their bright-blue coats and white underclothes, hoot owls, screech owls, whippoorwills, and woodpeckers.

  It was my privilege to live in the Lower Cross Timbers for ten years. Looking backward over three quarters of a century, I see it now as an excellent place for a growing boy to have lived, as I did from the age of three to thirteen.

  1. Be It Ever So Humble

  One evening when I was about four years old we had supper a little later than usual, and at its conclusion my father said that he believed he’d walk over to Jim McCarty’s home to return a spade he had borrowed, adding that he might stay and visit for an hour or so. The rest of us, consisting of my mother and half-sister Mattie, who was then about sixteen, my brother, George, aged about ten, and myself, lingered at the table.

  The atmosphere cleared a little when Father was gone, for though all of us had for him the highest respect and a deep affection, he was a dignified and fairly stern father, so we usually felt some constraint in his presence. He had had twelve children and a family of that size must be managed somewhat like an institution. In consequence, he demanded respectful and prompt obedience from the younger generation and frowned upon their manifesting any symptoms of what the old-time Puritans referred to as “light carriage.”

  Upon this particular occasion I was sitting on a bench behind the table, Mattie was opposite me, and Mother at the foot of the table near the stove was telling some stories of her girlhood days in Missouri. Said she:

  One morning in October two boys came to our house. The older seemed to be about twelve and the other was a little fellow not much bigger than Ed here. They had run away from home and it had rained the night before, so they had slept in a straw stack but were wet, cold, and hungry. The larger boy said he was looking for a job with someone who would let him keep his little brother with him. The little fellow had been crying and I felt so sorry for him, but we had no work for his brother to do. We brought them in and gave them a good breakfast and they went on with the older one saying that he just had to find work.

  Apparently no one had been paying any attention to me, sitting behind the table and trying to make letters of the alphabet with my knife, fork, and spoon. When my mother concluded, however, I spoke up with a little sob in my throat, “You bet I never will wun away and leave my home ath long ath there’th a pieth of it left that big,” and I held up a small thumb indicating to what tiny dimensions my home must shrink before it should cease to be blessed by my presence.

  George and Mattie laughed loudly, but my mother rose and came over to put her arms around my shoulders and whispered that she was glad I loved my home and did not want to leave it. She then added that she hoped I would someday have a home of my own that would be just as happy as this one. Thirty-five years were to elapse before this hope of my mother’s was realized.

  This home to which I had pledged such undying devotion was a fifty-six–acre farm located at the western edge of the Lower Cross Timbers of Texas. The term “farm” is used because at this time and place a home was far more than the residence in which a family lived. It included not only “the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood” but the barns, cribs, garden, fields, pastures, and fences. The house, to the kids at least, was only more or less incidental, and in good weather they stayed inside it just as little as possible.

  Our house stood on a tree-crowned hill near the center of the little farm and faced the west. From the front door we had a magnificent view of the broad, flower-spangled prairie, which lay beyond the railroad that skirted the western border of the farm. The original house was built of logs and consisted of only two rooms and an attic bedroom reached by a sort of combination of ladder and stairway. When I was about three, however, my father had added on the north a large kitchen built of lumber, where we cooked and ate. It was furnished with a big wood stove with a kitchen table beside it, and the large dining table covered with oilcloth except if “company” came, at which time a white or red tablecloth was spread over it. In addition, there were two or three chairs with rawhide seats and a tall cupboard called a “safe,” where the dishes and leftover food were stored. With respect to food, however, the term “safe” was something of a misnomer with a couple of ever-hungry boys in the house.

  The small rear room was Mattie’s and had her bed and a couple of trunks that held linens, shirts, and underwear. Outer clothing was hung on nails driven in the walls, while surplus bedding was stacked on two or three shelves.

  The large “front room,” as we called it, had a big stone fireplace on the north side and from each corner of the mantle was hung a glass tumbler in a crocheted mesh bag. These held buttons, pins, needles and thread, and other small objects. The big bed of my father and mother stood in the southeast corner of the room. It was covered with a white counterpane and had a bolster and two large pillow shams.

  A small trundle bed on rollers was kept under this big bed by day and rolled out at night. I slept on this until I was four or five years old, but then demanded permission to sleep with George upstairs in the attic. A couple of rag rugs on the floor, a rocker or two, and three or four straight chairs completed the furnishing of this principal room of the house. The problem of storage was in part solved by a big cellar in the back yard, where my mother kept milk, butter, and jars of canned fruit, preserves, and pickles. There were also bins for the storage of turnips, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables.

  Some distance south of the house were pole-fenced lots for the horses and pigs, and sheds, stables, and corn cribs. Our front door opened upon a small porch from which a path led to the front-yard gate. On either side of this path was a Russian mulberry tree and flowers, including zinnias, phlox, pinks, and iris—then commonly called “flags.” North of the house was the garden and beyond it an orchard of more than a hundred trees, mostly peach, but with a few apple, pear, cherry, and plum trees.

  This fifty-six–acre tract of land was only three miles east of the prairie farm which my father had rented a few months after his arrival in Texas. He had bought it about a year or so after moving onto the rented place from Ike Roberts, an old cowman whose father had received a large land grant in this area from the Texas Republic. Ike had inherited this grant at his father’s death and was selling it in tracts of a size to suit the purchaser. He still retained a huge acreage, however, on which his cattle grazed, as did the milk cows of the nearby farmers since most of his pasture land was not fenced. His home was a large ranch house on top of a small tree-covered knoll, well out on the prairie and commonly called “Brushy Mound.”

  When my father bought this little parcel of land it was covered with timber, largely blackjack, but with many large post-oak trees which could be used in building a house and out buildings. During the years before the lease expired on the prairie farm he spent every day that could be spared from growing and harvesting crops to improving his new property. He cut down the larger trees and squared the logs for the house and barns, cleared away the underbrush, and planted an orchard.

  When a field had been cleared he enclosed it, in Indian fashion, with a brush fence, pending the time when he could split enough rails to replace this with a rail fence. At times it must have seemed an almost hopeless task, for after the trees had been felled the stumps must be grubbed out with a mattock, or “grubbing hoe.” Moreover, the forest fought back in a most stubborn fashion, for sprouts persistently spr
ang up in a desperate attempt to resist the work of man and again “let in the jungle.” He never despaired, however, and just before I was three years old he moved us into our new log house and soon added the large kitchen.

  Most of the people in our community, and throughout the Texas Cross Timbers, had homes like ours, except perhaps for the big orchard. Some of our neighbors, however, had much larger houses, especially if they had large families of children, but it must be confessed that there was little relationship between the size of a family and that of its living quarters. The Clarks, who owned a twenty-acre farm joining ours on the east, had five children, but lived for some years in a crude, two-room log house before adding another room at a cost of forty dollars!

  It must be admitted that our little house would be considered very small today, but in the 1880’s it seemed quite adequate for a family of five. All my father’s older children were grown up and out on their own. The first and second sons, Henry and Frank, and the oldest daughter, Fannie, were in Nebraska. The third son, Tom, had married Lucy, the youngest daughter of an old Texan of the neighborhood who had deeded the young couple a farm about a mile southeast of ours. Alice, the middle daughter, had a job in a Dallas hospital. As to the other two sons, Jay was bookkeeper for a large general merchandise store at Fort Griffin, Texas, and his younger brother, John, was teaching school near that little frontier post.

  Humble as was our little home, it was a very happy one. My father worked from dawn to dark improving the farm, and my mother was a remarkably good cook who prepared excellent meals, sometimes from quite meager resources, and kept every room neat and clean. Most of the food came from the farm, since we had milk cows, chickens, and pigs. The orchard and garden furnished an ample supply of fruit and vegetables, and half a dozen stands of bees yielded plenty of honey.