Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
West Texas’s first energy boom – prairie coal
February 28, 2007
Erasmus Ulysses Rainwater opened his eyes as his mother placed a candle lantern on the ledge at the head of his bead. The flickering light revealed the earthen wall of the dugout. The air felt humid. He groaned – his daddy would want to go harvest prairie coal today. If the fall brought many more days of morning fog and steady late night “sprinkles” the prairie coal would absorb too much moisture and might spontaneously combust where it was stored. The older boys (including Erasmus) had just finished roofing over a storage dugout for the family’s winter fuel supply.
The family had arrived in the spring, living out of the wagon and tents while they broke out 80 acres along the bottom of the draw. Uncle King James Rainwater had the older boys put up a series of cedar poles above the field, interlacing the smaller branches among them. “If there is ever so much rain that it fills the draw, that will slow the water and spread it out.” King James Rainwater had peculiar ideas that reflected his ancestors – his Scottish great-grandfather, trader par excellence to the Cherokees back in the Appalachians, had arrived in America with two trunks of books of the great masters of European and English thought. The library was what held most of the family together. When the Rainwater clan moved, they moved together.
For the previous two generations, the clan had farmed the Brazos bottoms on the coastal prairie, but the youngest adult generation decided to follow the dream of King James and move to the wilds of West Texas to the headwaters of the Clear Fork of the Brazos. The older generation remained on their farms, proud of the seven cousins and their families and their ambitions. Knowing that the Comanches had finally surrendered, they believed the dangers of the frontier were “handable.” Cattlemen claimed most of the land, but King James had been roaming the area for the previous ten years as a Texas Ranger, and had made friends with the first wave of cattlemen pressing westward..
The older generation had selected about a third of the books of the family library to go with the movers, “Take these, this is what you need to teach your children. You won’t have any schools where you are going. When more people move to your new home, some of you will become teachers.” As the summer heat blasted the landscape, King James and his cousins began fashioning the dugouts strung along a mile of the draw. King James had visited many other dugouts along the edge of the frontier and knew exactly what everybody should have. He thought big – using teams to scrape long trenches (up to 60 feet) about halfway up the slope of the draw. Each family’s dugout had five rooms. The interior walls were merely wagon sheets strung on ropes.
Erasmus’s daddy, Saint Augustine, leaned into the boys’ room. He was of the middle generation, and his kids were the oldest in the settlement. A large gentle man, the peacemaker and elder of the clan, Saint Augustine had modified the wagons for the harvest of the prairie coal, turning them into open-topped and high- paneled “ore wagons.” “Well, fellows, your mama has got a pile of biscuits and gravy full of the last of the bacon – a mighty tasty way to start a long day.” Saint Augustine stood in the doorway as the three boys (ages 11 to 16) tied their brogans.
About a mile down from the settlement the headwater spring of a branch of the Clearwater served as a landmark and watering hole for a series of cattle drives in May and June. Over 15,000 cattle had deposited the trail coal mine. The boys had been to the bedding grounds every day of the previous week turning every cow chip over so they would be thoroughly dry for the loading and hauling today. Erasmus (age 16) would be one of the wagon drivers hauling the loads back and unloading the wagons alone. Erasmus stood six foot two inches tall and had recently bested all but the youngest of his uncles in a weight-lifting contest at a chivaree for the neighbor rancher’s daughter and her new husband. 50 men had competed.
Erasmus was a smart young man. In the late 1880s and in the 1890s he developed a “chip hauling business,” supplying the new towns of Lubbock, Estacado, Emma, and others with chips. In Lubbock his men received as much as $10 a wagonload of cow chips. In later years he broadened the scope of the operation and hauled coal from the railroads that he sold at $2 per 100 pound sack. In the 1900s some of his crew became independent operators, and one even hauled cow chip loads as late as 1915. Cow chips were the major source of fuel for cooking and heating houses on the Llano Estacado for years. Some of the cow chip haulers’ roads eventually became the roads of today.
Cow chips burn without odor. They are clean to handle, and ignite readily when properly dried. Although smoky when used in the open air at a campfire, in stoves cow chips assume a dull red glow, and radiated high instant heat. Every house in West Texas had a “chip shed” until upgrading to other sources of fuel had been accomplished. More remote ranchers burned chips until the mid-1930s when kerosene from the new oil fields became readily available. Chip-shipping “warehouses” were the big cattle-shipping locations, such as Amarillo, Bovina, and Canyon. Wagon trains solely loaded with cow chips were not an uncommon sight during the 1890’s, heading out to destinations far from railroads. Return loads varied from wool, cowhides, to loads owned by folks that were giving up and moving back to more “civilized” country.
Cowchips have their own “ecosystem.” Termites, scorpions, the smaller ground dwelling snakes, and dung beetles utilize cow paddies. Box turtles and skunks spend hours flipping cowpies for the larval invertebrates. Nowadays cow paddies are under-appreciated. All hail the cowpie!