Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

The Flache-White Ranch
March 28, 2007

Retired MISD teachers Martha and Dan Kallus recently took me to the historic Flache-White Ranch near Vincent, Texas. (Flache is pronounced Flocker.) Martha’s grandfather Ame Flache and his wife Lizzie settled the ranch in 1903. Martha spent her childhood there. Vincent is on Highway 350 between Big Spring and Snyder. Once a thriving farming community of over 100 families, Vincent now “consists of the Baptist Church and its parsonage, one occupied home, a closed café, a deserted gin, and two vacant houses” according to Billie Harding’s “Vincent, A History.” (The closed café is now open again, after standing empty 30 years.) Ms. Harding’s book is an excellent example of “grassroots history,” the product of a long-time resident’s love for home.

The Flache-White ranch is along some headwater draws of Willow Creek northwest of Vincent. Willow Creek eventually empties into the Colorado River ten miles below Lake J.B. Thomas. The landscape is gently rolling and covered with tobosa grass, prickly pear, and mesquite pastures dotted with occasional algerita. The draws have soapberry, hackberry, and chittamwood. A small portion of the ranch is on the “caprock,” the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, where some juniper and javelina bush grow. Along one stretch of a draw many Indian artifacts have been found, and when I visited the site we found a number of chimaya plants, a favorite root vegetable of Indians. (Type “chimaya” in the search box at left to learn more!) Some of the ranch is farmland (which is partially enrolled in the CRP or Conservation Reserve Program of the USDA.)

Martha and her brother Binie White have preserved many family photographs. In 2004 the Texas Family Land Heritage Program honored the ranch for being in continuous production by one family for over 100 years. Wire stretchers and de-horners from their ranch are displayed in the Agricultural Museum Room in the State Capitol. The family’s old buggy is in the Terry County Museum in Brownfield. Binie and his wife Edna live on the ranch, along with their assistant Albert Sanchez and his family.

Binie and Edna live in a house originally built in 1910 to replace a half-dugout house erected by the first settlers of the land, Monroe and Rebecca Sawyer, who also built a round rockhouse that supported a wooden water tank for the original house. The Sawyers moved to Brownfield, Texas. One of their sons moved to Tatum where his house still stands west of town. Martha and Binie’s father moved the house 1/2 of a mile in 1934 when Binie was four years old. Binie rode in a little wagon behind the house while the movers worked with logs and small equipment moving it. The move took four days.

“The wood for the house had been hauled by wagon from the railroad stop at Iatan, located between Coahoma and Westbrook. Some of it was old flooring event then,” Binie told me. “The house was built with double walls, unusual for the day and time, but it made it much warmer than the old “box and strip” construction.” At the original site a concrete tornado shelter still remains, sometimes used by wintering rattlesnakes as a den. Another concrete tornado shelter was built at the new site. The family added more to the house over the years. Martha and Dan built a house nearby in the 1990’s and visit often.

Binie, Martha and I toured the ranch on a cool and cloudy morning, bouncing down the gravel roads, feeding cattle, checking fence, and examining historical landmarks. Here and there we stopped among the mesquites to dump out bags of cattle feed, first visiting the bull pasture, then a pasture with cows and calves, and finally a pasture where a longhorn bull named Wimpy lorded it over more cows and calves. The mesquites are trees, averaging almost 20 feet in height. Early photographs show the mesquites being the same height even in the early 1900s, but it does appear there are more present today.

As we toured, I reflected on the family’s ability to visit various places on the ranch and tell stories about what an ancestor did at that very location over 100 years ago. To live in a house that one’s grandfather built is “mighty unusual.” There were also mysteries – we visited a rock stuck in the ground over 120 years ago by the first surveyor to visit the region. Etched letters and numbers were faintly visible on the marker that delineated the Borden/Howard County line. Despite trying to find information about the marker, Mrs. Kallus had not yet discovered the story of the surveyor, or even the exact date of the survey. In another pasture we visited the remains of an old windmill and its ancient timbers of a 20-foot tall tower originally erected by the Sawyers in the 1890s.

“The first stock tanks were dug with fresnoes – you know what they are?” Binie asked. He seemed a mite surprised when I told him the Sibley Nature Center has one. Fresnoes were the early version of what became bulldozer and maintainer blades. Teams of mules dragged the blades to not only dig out stock tanks, but also to make roads and pull dirt and rock in the construction of railroads. When I mentioned that Johnson grass, a pest in modern agricultural fields, was brought to west Texas as a crop for farmers to grow to supply feed to fresno teams for the railroad construction, he shook his head, “You never know what’s going to happen, do you?” I told him that by 1900 it became unlawful to plant Johnson grass. Johnson grass is almost impossible to totally kill – if even one piece of its root is left in the soil, it will resprout.

“Most of the windmills tap into gyppy water at about 150 feet, but the well at the old house was handdug and hit water at 50 feet. Gyp water rusts metal tanks, so we keep our watering troughs dry when cattle are not in that pasture. Cattle will eventually die if they drink stagnant gyp water, so we also drain the troughs when the cattle leave so the deposits do not build up.” Binie served as tour guide. “That was an old bracero house,” he said as we went past a ruin. “We have never gotten around to tearing it down.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s the bracero program brought cotton-pickers from Mexico. By then, most farmers had tractors. When cotton-harvesters were invented, the program was phased out. “We ran sheep during that time, too, but when the oil field opened up in the 1950s the oilfield workers moved into camps in the community and brought dogs that ran in packs and killed many sheep.”

“Our mother was a great roper, and there was nobody better at handling a whip when herding livestock. She built fence, plowed with a mule team, and wore pants when few women did,” Martha told me as we flipped through photo albums after eating a beef-stew lunch. After that we visited the nearby Fairview school, which I had photographed two years before and had wondered about in the first photoessay in the "recommended daytrips" section of the Sibley Nature Center website. Martha’s great-aunt had taught there! Check out the breaks and canyons section for a photoessay of our tour of the ranch (and some of the family’s old photographs.)

Related: Photoessay