by The Story of Montie Gertrude McBride Rockwell
by Montie Rockwell
I was born on February 6, 1886 at Doan’s Crossing, Texas, fifteen miles north of Vernon, Texas, where the long drive of longhorn cattle crossed the Red River going north to market from north (sic) Texas and Mexico. In those days there were no trucks or cars. Everything was done on a horse, on foot, or by horse-drawn vehicles. The cowboy’s life was anything but a bed of roses! On those long drives there was drought, floods, lightning and thunderstorms to frighten the cattle, making them stampede. Only by going to the front of the here or line and getting the cattle to circling could the boys get the cattle to bunch up and settle down. Boys even lost their lives in the operation.
The herds stopped at Doan’s to get supplies. Since my mother and father ran a hotel and were very benevolent people, they had many friends among the cowboys. A baby in that out of the way place was quite a curiosity, and my mother told me that the cowboys from all around came to see Mrs. McBride’s baby. Mamma said that I was two months old when I was born (sic) and had dark curls. I guess that I really was a curiosity.
A lady by the name of Yantas, who was staying in the hotel, took quite a fancy to me. She would take me to her room and play with me. She dipped snuff. My mother was a very clean person who naturally abhorred such a habit. You can imagine her chagrin when Mrs. Y came down with her little daughter with a new hairset, all dipped in snuff. Mrs. Y also spanked me one day for wetting my pants, for which act my sister told on her. Sister was five years older than I. My memory begins about that time, and I remember the instance although not the details.
When my son was in his teens, we went to the Texas Centennial. We also went by Doan’s where we found a man who thought he remembered our family’s being there.
When I was two years old my father moved his family, consisting of Mother, two brothers, Robert and Amos, both teenagers, and my sister Dollie besides myself, to Amarillo, a little burg north and west of where the main part of town is now. The section Father filed on is now Olsen Park. Olsen Blvd was a dry draw, and I remember playing in that place. My brother Dave was born there.
Dugouts were the common mode of housing. We had our dugout where a $75,000 house stands now. I remember many of the people who lived there and many things that happened in the next three years that we lived there.
While Father was in Vernon attending to some business, a man came along and “jumped” our claim on the land in Amarillo. By doing a little more improving, according to the laws then, the man could take the claim away from my father. I have been informed in the last few years that my father took a “quit claim deed” for two dollars per acre.
My father, undaunted, moved his family of two girls and three boys west fifty miles to help build the town of La Platta. He took a section about three miles northeast of the town where we lived until I was nine years old.
La Platta no longer exists as a town. The railroad missed it by fifteen miles so the county seat of Deaf Smith County was moved to the railroad and called Hereford. The townsite (sic) is now a plowed section with a granite marker put up by the “Ladies of Hereford” in memory of the town and three graves.
Father was a surveyor (in fact, he could do almost anything he wanted to do), and I have been told that he laid off the road between Amarillo and La Platta. The road, as straight as a die, was marked out by fastening two ploughs together. I am not sure how it was done, but he was a stickler for straight lines in what he built, fences and the like.
We had a house in La Platta with a dugout back of it. My brother Teant was born there. I remember the dear little babe with golden ringlets over his tiny head.
Windmills in those days were the only source of water that we had. La Platta had one windmill where the “waterman” filled a tank and hauled water over the town. Each customer had two barrels which he filled about twice a week for a price.
While my father and Mr. Stovall were working on or putting up the windmill, they both fell to the ground among some timbers or logs. Apparently they did not get a secure platform, and it broke with them. Mr. Stovall was killed, and my father was very badly injured. He suffered periodically from the injury for the rest of his life. Probably that incident occurred before he filed on the section northeast of town. My father was the kind that nothing conquered so he went on with life in a big way.
We got our mail at La Platta. At one time Father had the contract to carry the mail from there to Endee, New Mexico. He hired a Mexican to carry the mail for him. One day, while my Grandfather Stringer was visiting us, the Mexican greeted my grandfather in Spanish. Grandfather, thinking that he was asking what to do with the horse or horses, told him to “turn him loose.”
I remember a wedding that took place there in town. A Miss Lois Dean married a man by the name of Dounds or something like that. Of course, in a little western town, there were no swanky houses of any kind, and entertainment was seldom. As I remember it, the whole town was invited to the wedding.
It would be difficult for people today to visualize, with all their sophistication, how primitive things were in 1892 or 1893. People did the best they could with what they had, and these people had gone out along the countryside gathering yucca. they decorated the long room where the wedding took place. I am not sure that there was any music, but they had fixed a wedding bell in a nice way on an arch. All in all, it was (a) memorable affair to me.
Speaking of music, once in a great while someone had an organ and a violin, which provided music for people to dance to. Dances were very popular. People went miles to them.
Some of the people living in the newly-made town were Dean, Byers, Ivy, Edgings, Witherspoon, McBride, Stovall, Frisby, Morgan and Worley.
When Mr. Stovall died a La Platta, they had to send out, maybe to Amarillo, maybe farther away, to get a shroud to bury him in. I guess all that they could get was a policeman’s uniform with brass buttons down the front on both sides and the sleeves. The front ones were about as big around as a quarter and the small ones were about the size of a dime. Both were dome-shaped. The buttons were cut off and apparently given to those who wanted them. My mother had one of each in an Indian basket, and I had them until a few year ago when I gave them to my oldest granddaughter. I think that one of the three graves still marked in the La Platta townsite is Mr. Stovall’s.
One day during this time, when Mamma had gone to town, my two little brothers Dave and Teant saw a skunk in the dugout, which had a ledge around the outer edge. Skunks, then as now, had lots of perfume and little welcome so I proceeded to get the ax and go around the ledge. When Mr. Skunk came by, I knocked him cold with the ax. We thought it would be quite a surprise to Mamma when she came home so we took the skunk in the house but decided that wouldn’t do. Instead we put it under the doorstep and went to meet Mamma and Grandpa. You can bet that we lost our glory for having killed the skunk.
When I was six years old, Mother took me and my little brothers to Aspen, Colorado. My Aunt Jenny was expecting her only child, and Mamma went to be with her through her confinement. Brother Dave was about four ears old and, in those days, little boys wore dresses until they were four. If their hair was curly, they wore it long until then. When we got ready to go on the train to Colorado, Dave still wore dresses. Mamma wanted to put him in pants for the trip, but he cried and cried and would have nothing of it. when we heard the train whistle, Mamma said, “Now you have made us miss our train.” He hushed and got into his new pants.
In Aspen I went to my first school; however, we were only there a short while until we went back to La Platta.
My two little brothers were my only playmates. Teant had pretty golden curls, and I would dress him up in my dress, which came to the floor. He and I would play dolls by the hour, but Dave was a “he man”. No dolls for him. Teant was one of the sweetest little boys I ever knew, and all through our lives, until his death, we clung together in a very strong bond of love.
My mother had great aspirations for her children and taught us at home as school was so far away. Each day we had our session with our books, after which we could play and play. The lessons came first. I often wonder where Mamma got the books, for books were a scarce article at that time. She use to read us stories, and one book from which she read was Buffalo Bill or Ways of the Wild West. I always, as a child, loved to be read to. Now one of my first of many hobbies that I have is books and more books.
My mother was a woman of culture, very tenderly reared by a Quaker lady. I think her name was Sarah Jane Cox. I am not certain of that as I had a great or great great-aunt whose name that may have been.
That was the day of burning cow chips when you took out more ashes than you put in chips. When we heard of a cattle drive north, we went to the bedding grounds where they had stayed a few night before. We got a big wagon load of cow chips, which we stacked in a round mound, covering them with a tarp or big canvas sheet fastened down to keep our fuel dry.
While we lived in La Platta, we had a few head of cattle and five horses that I remember. Two were small matched grays, one gentle and mild and the other all “fire and go”. We would drive up to a gate, which Mamma would let me out to open, while she would drive around. If she didn’t keep the team moving, Frank would rear at the delay. I would open the gate, and she would drive through and around until I got the gate closed and quickly got in the back.
There was a nice mare Fanny, a little yellow Indian pony we called Sheep, and a young grey horse we called Dandy. I could ride over the countryside to hunt cattle if necessary. I had a pretty white-faced heifer which turned up missing. I hunted and hunted for several miles around.
Papa brought home a tiny calf one day on his saddle up in his lap. He poked it under the cowlot fence and said that I could have it. Was I happy! Murp Morgan had given it to him so I called it Murp. I loved that calf and fed it dishwater, pumpkins and pie melons. The latter were about all we could raise on what we today call “dry land”. When it was about a yearling, I could have got $10 for it, but Papa traded it back to Murp Morgan for harness. I cried and cried.
Once I had a pet cat and how I loved that cat. When a child has no school, no church or Sunday school, and no playmates other than two little brothers, they love their pets very intensely. My kitty disappeared. I grieved and grieved and dreamed about it.
Another time someone brought us two prairie dogs. They make nice little pets that will follow one around. All too soon, though, they go underground, and on has no pets.
For other entertainment I rode the calve and got thrown in the lumber pile. I jumped off the barn and had all the fun I could.
Everything was horsedrawn, and a team could haul a wagon about twenty-five miles a day. They put a big, heavy collar around the horse’s neck and put shaped pieces of wood called hames around that and fastened them with a leather strap. To those were attached tugs, which were long heavy leather straps. They in turn were attached by bolts to s singletree. To guide the team, there was a bridle for each horse, to which bridle were attached long leather lines that ran through rings on the tugs, and we were ready to go.
Oh, yes, I knew how to hitch up the horses or horse, and I could saddle my own horse, too, if I could get a saddle. Speaking of saddles, in those days a woman did not ride astride. She rode a side-saddle, which is a seat with a rounded “horn” to put the leg around and another, I guess, to support that one. Mamma had one, and I wish that I had kept it. I just don’t know what became of it.
For Food, we had our own chickens and cows for those products. About once a month we would go to town for supplies. Available were flour, sugar, spices, and soap. One brand of soap that I remember well was Clairette soap. There were slabs of bacon, no nicely packaged sliced bacon, just long thick sides of the hog, maybe a foot and half wide and 2 or 2 ½ feet long. Nothing we have today tastes as good as Mamma’s good fat biscuits and bacon and gravy for breakfast. I you have never “sopped the skillet”, you have “missed half of your life”. We could get spices and extracts. Fruit was an almost unheard of article, except the wild plums and grapes out along the river. I think that I can remember the very first banana I ever saw. That was when I was half-grown.
I guess my father sold the place out at La Platta, and we moved back to Amarillo. I was then nine years old and got to go to school a few months. We were there through a Cristmas. The church had a Christmas ship instead of a tree. In that ship was the most beautiful doll I nearly ever saw, but it was not for me. I was a stranger in a strange land, and there was nothing on the ship for me. They wanted to give gifts to any child that did not get one, buy my mother was too proud to let me take one. While I was In Colorado, my cousin gave me a doll, which I still have, and a little music box.
Another interesting thing was the “halfway house”, meaning someone lived halfway between two towns or communities. Anyone traveling could stop, feed their horses, eat their “grub”, and not pay. The “latch string” was always on the outside at that time. The halfway house between Amarillo and La Platta was on the creek or, I guess, along the head of the Palo Duro as that was where we lived out there in the country. The people’s name was Flickenger. Northeast of Amarillo it was Rockwell’s (sic), my husband’s father.
My father’s brother Robert McBride visited us while we lived at La Platta. He was a Presbyterian minister and a large handsome man. It must have been at that time that my brother Robert, then a teenage boy, went home with his uncle to Topeka, Kansas to go to school and to stay with Uncle Robert. I do not know how far my brother Robert got in school, but he took penmanship and wrote about the prettiest hand I ever saw. He then or later became an architect and planned several of the houses in Bisbee, Arizona, where he lived.
Bisbee has the biggest open pit copper mine, I think, in the United States, and at one time my father had an interest in it. I have been told that since each holder had to have a certain amount of work on the mine done or he lost his share, my father did just that.
Brother Robert came home around the turn of the century, bringing his nineteen-year-old bride, a Jean Day, whom he had married in Topeka. They came home to live a least a little while, just as all the other children did. I didn’t believe in that so I did not.
While we still lived out in the country at La Platta, a very dear relative, Grandfather Stringer, Mother’s father, came to see us. He took me to see a trailherd of cattle, longhorned as all cattle were then, which we had gotten word were coming through within a few miles of us. The trailherds had to be strung out for the cowboys to be able to handle them. When two thousand cattle were strung out, one did not see too much of them at a time.
Another of my hobbies is flowers, and I remember the white and yellow daisies and Indian paintbrush that grew on the hillside back of the house. Even today I have such a pretty patch of white daisies and a clump of Indian paintbrush in my yard.
Domestic animals require salt in their diet, and at that time they sprinkled the salt on the ground. At least it was not brought in in square cakes like the cattle lick today. Not far from the house on the hill north was “salt lick” (sic). One day a beautiful buck antelope with nice antlers came and licked salt there.
Still speaking of La Platta, there was a dry draw with, now and then, a pond when it rained. Once in the winter one of the ponds was frozen hard enough to skate on. My little brother and I had a lot of fun skating. We even built a small fire to warm our hands.
Somewhere along the line my sister went to stay with my aunt in Aspen, Colorado in order to go to school. Probably that happened while we lived in Amarillo the first time. She was fifteen when she came home.
In the fall of 1895 we moved back to Amarillo. Being fifty miles away, and since horses could only make about twenty-five miles a day drawing a wagon, we had to camp out. We made our pallets on the ground, and that night the stars seemed the brightest I ever saw them. In the night it turned cold, and the next morning we got up to a frosty world.
In Amarillo we lived in a two-room house in the south part of town and had as our neighbors the Murphys, Plemons, Ridings, and Haydens.
I had the mumps there, and I really had them on both sides. I looked like a big fat man. Oh, how they hurt! I would cry at night, and Mamma would rub my jaws, trying to comfort me. Mamma took the mumps and was terribly sick, almost getting pneumonia. Old Dr. McGee came, and Dave and I peeped through the keyhole to see what was going on. When Dave had looked, I asked him what was happening. Dave said, “Shaking a bottle and picking his beard.” Mustaches and beards were very common then.
My few months in school there were difficult because it was all so strange. There was an aggressive girl who did not like to be outdone so she changed the grades put up on the blackboard. I believe that Flora McGee was our teacher. I guess that she was the doctor’s daughter.
My sister Dollie came home from Aunt Jennie’s that year of 1895, and then in the fall of 1896 we moved to Canyon. We lived southeast of town, and I went to my first whole term of school.
The school was in the west part of town so we drove a gig to school until one day the horse got mad and kicked out of the harness. Dave set the dinner bucket down where the pigs got it. So I “took my foot in my hand” and walked to school without any dinner. The school must have been about 1½ to 2 miles from our house. Today a school occupies that same location. There were two rooms in that school. One room held the older children taught by Cyrus ________. The other held the smaller children whom Miss Gillian Sink taught.
Many of the descendants of those children still live in and around Canyon. There were the Pricharts, Lairs, Barks, Thompsons, Wirts, and maybe the Shotwells and Gatewoods.
All of the social activities, such as Sunday school, church when it was held, and dances were held in the courthouse building in Canyon. My mother did not believe in dancing so I did not dance. My father, brothers, and sister were good dancers. A Mr. Hutson, or more probably Hudson, gave a big dance at the courthouse. I had fun carrying a sweet little fat baby girl around most of the evening.
There could not be much classification in the schools with so many different ages and only one teacher. As a young woman, I started teaching as the only teacher in a school with forty pupils at $40 a month. I held what we called a second grade certificate issued by the state.
On the south side of the square in Canyon, there was a wagon yard and a blacksmith. Every town had its blacksmith shop for repairing harness, etc. The wagon yard was for the convenience of anyone coming to town in a horse-drawn vehicle. One could stay in the yard to camp or just leave the team and wagon for a price.
On the east side of the square, Mr. Redfern had a general mercantile store. He also had the only forceps in town. When I was having a bad time with one of my molars, I went to see him early one morning before school He took me to the back of the store for the benefit of the light from the sun and extracted the tooth.
The drugstore on the north side of the square was run by Lorenzo Wirt. Mrs. Wirt left town once and came back with a little baby. The Wirts now have a good electric business.
As I’ve said before, back then little boys wore dresses until they were four years old, and if they had curly hair, even wore long curls. My little brother Teant had such beautiful curls. When he was just past four years old, Mamma cut his curls off. I still have two of them, and they are as pretty as when cut off.
At Canyon we lived on the Tierra Blanca Creek, and with my brothers, I played along the creek. One day we saw a rattlesnake with quite a bulge in his middle so we proceeded to cut him open to investigate. It was either a ground squirrel or a prairie dog. I don’t remember which.
There were fish in the creek, and the family went fishing at night. One night Mamma fixed a pallet for me to lie down by the wagon while she went with the others to fish. I did not go right to sleep and kept seeing what looked like sparks from a cigarette. I was worried so I went to hunt Mamma. The sparks were only fireflies. One time Dave and I were playing along the creek when in his dry humorous way, he invited me to go on down the creek to where he said there was a “real sweet odor”. Of course it was dead fish where the fish had died.
In addition to my first whole term of school, I was able to go to Sunday school. Mrs. Reeves was my Sunday school teacher; Mr. Reeves was the superintendent. It was Jim Reeves’ little girl whom I carried around at the dance. For fear of dropping the baby, I would sit and scoot down the long flight of stairs. (Vince Reeves’ wife still lives in Canyon.)
Up on the hill south of us lived a family by the name of Roberts who had some little kittens. They told Teant and me that we could each have one when they were big enough to wean.
On December 31, 1897, the young people of Canyon were invited to come to a New Year’s Eve party twelve miles up the creek to the Roffman’s. They went in wagons and by horseback. My sister Dollie and brother Amos were among the crowd. A big Texas blizzard came during the party. Mamma was nearly frantic but could do nothing buy worry. The air was so full of snow and the wind so strong you could hardly see your hand before you. If you can, imagine a group of teenagers marooned in one house to feed and care for through a raging blizzard. The youngsters danced ’til they got tired and sat around the wall napping and eating everything in sight. Wouldn’t you have loved to be their hostess? When the storm abated and it was possible, my brother and another boy went horseback to get food. I don’t remember just how long they had to stay there. A Texas blizzard can pile the snow several feet high where there is an obstruction to stop it.
About this time the English syndicate that owned land along the Canadian River________________________________________________. (sic) My father, in his great love for the land, found four sections that he liked and filed on them. It was move again, this time to where there was no school, no church, and the neighbors three, five, ten, fifteen miles apart. The land was on the Canadian River thirty-five miles north of Amarillo. My father said that it was so nice out there you could lay your hat down and the wind would not blow it away. Mamma’s retort was, “If you put a rock on it.”
Well, we were off another move (sic). It was quite a caravan with two or three wagons and the milk cows going across country. Dollie was a very proud girl, still in her teens, and you can imagine how she felt passing through Amarillo, driving a wagon with a coop of chickens on top of the other belongings. Maybe we missed town by a little.
Teant and I got the little kittens we had been promised, his Goldtop and mine Goldie. Goldie was yellow and Goldtop yellow with white spots. Those kittens were very dear to us. I took over as nursemaid, and since we had to camp out on the fifty-five mile trip, I put the kittens close to my pallet on the ground where I could reach out and touch them. If they cried in the night, I would get up and give each of them some milk.
On the tenth day of June we reached the valley of the Canadian, having traveled along a road through what is now called the Flint hills of the Alibates. Riding in open wagons through heat hotter than hot and sandburs, we arrived where we would live until Father moved a house from La Platta. He built a leanto to live in until the house came. It was located by a beautiful rounded hill, over which was scattered small white rocks which Teant and I played were pigs. We had matchboxes with strings on them for wagons, and we made roads up and down on the bank of the little draw where we were camped. We had bullet hulls for people. With lots of make-believe we had hours of fun.
A short distance from there was the now famed Alibates Creek, and we children went there a lot to play. There were trees and a stream of water, and we could wade and had lots of fun.
Then Father discovered that we were just off of our own land and moved the house to the land we owwed. It was in a circle of hills and one spring, the wild primroses were just beautiful. Up in the hills, in a little draw there was a wet weather spring. We could carry water for the house’s use from there when there was enough moisture. They plowed up a little patch and planted watermelons. A second crop came up and when the weather turned cold, they put a lot of the melons under shocks of feed. If I remember, we had ripe melons at Christmas.
For a long time I longed to go to school and used to go up on the hill and cry. Finally a friend visited us, Judge Heare, the father of the late Clayton Heare of the law firm in Amarillo. Judge Heare and his wife were both schoolteachers, and I guess that it touched his heart to see a twelve-year-old girl out of school. He told me to come to Henrietta, Texas, where they lived, and stay with them. I could help Mattie and she could help me to go to school. If Heaven had opened its Pearly Gates to me, I could not have been happier. I asked Mamma, who said, “Whatever Papa said.” When I asked Papa, he said “Whatever Mamma said.” So I began to make ready to go to Henrietta and to school, the dream of my life.
I love to sew and Mamma had taught me a lot about it. When the machine broke down, we sewed with our fingers. Mamma made me a pretty white sunbonnet. That was all the hat I had and in those days, all the girls and women wore hats and were not dressed well if they had no hat to wear. Hat or no hat, I was bound for school. When on the train a gust of wind almost got my hat, I guess I would have been tempted to jump out the window if it had blown out.
Transcribed by Genna Keeter (eldest granddaughter)