A Brief History of Hereford College (1)

Deaf Smith County Texas

"Hereford Will Soon Be the Educational Center of the Plains."

The headline of the local newspaper for July 19, 1901, captured some of the excitement. Community leaders in Hereford, a northwest Texas town named after a sturdy breed of beef cattle, were nothing if not ambitious. Now they had a new ally.

As the paper explained, Randolph Clark had recently visited Hereford at the invitation of G. R. "Rat" Jowell, a prominent local rancher, the Deaf Smith Count surveyor, and a founding member of the local Christian Church. Clark, a graduate of Bethany College and a long-time educator and preacher among the Christian churches, had changed his mind about Hereford. Before his visit, "the idea of a college at this point or in this section of the country" never entered his mind. He considered the region nothing more than "a waste desert and wholly unfit for anything save cattle raising." But now, said the paper, Clark recognized

the health-giving properties of this dry atmosphere, the excellence of our water and the ease and little cost of obtaining it, the vigorous growth of trees, shrubbery, flowers and all kinds of garden produce and grain, the thriftyness [sic] and high moral standard of our citizens, the excellent drainage of Hereford and the easy access to it from all parts of the country.[1] 

The "easy access" to Hereford had come just two years earlier, in 1899, when the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway completed track running southwest through the town all the way to Farwell at the New Mexico border. As a result, Hereford enjoyed a railroad connection to Amarillo and, from there, to other parts of the U.S.[2]

It was an exciting place at an exciting time. When Clark made his first visit to Hereford, the town was only three years old. But it was already home to more than one general store, a grocery store, a meat market, drug store, restaurant, confectionery, hotel, saloon, furniture store, and feed yard. Hereford had a barber, a blacksmith, and a postmaster.[3] Something else would soon be added. In the summer of 1901, a front-page story announced, "We Will Have a College."[4]

Notes

[1] Editorial, Hereford Reporter, July 19, 1901. The URL for this issue is as follows: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142256/m1/1/, accessed April 15, 2019. For G. R. Jowell as an active, successful rancher in Deaf Smith County, see, for example, notices in the Hereford Reporter, August 6, 1901, p. 5.https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142259/m1/5/?q=Rat%20Jowell  For Jowell as the county surveyor, see "A New Firm," Hereford Reporter, August 6, 1901, p. 6 https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142259/m1/6/. For Jowell as a founding member of the Christian Church at Hereford, see The Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Christian Church, Hereford, Texas (Hereford, TX: First Christian Church, 1949), 5. G. R. Jowell's middle name was Ratliff, which appears to be a variation of an old family name, Radcliff. Apparently, somebody once called George Ratliff Jowell by the name "Rat," and it stayed with him. For the nineteenth-century image of the Great Plains as the "Great American Desert," see G. Malcolm Lewis, "William Gilpin and the Concept of the Great Plains Region," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 1 (March 1966): 35-36.

[2] Handbook of Texas Online, H. Allen Anderson, "HEREFORD, TX," accessed December 28, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/heh02; H. Allen Anderson, "PECOS AND NORTHERN TEXAS RAILWAY," accessed December 28, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eqp09. For Amarillo's railroad connections to other parts of the U.S., see Paul H. Carlson, Empire Builder in the Texas Panhandle: William Henry Bush (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 85-86.

[3] Bessie Chambers Patterson, "Hereford: From Cow Town to Capitol [sic] of Farming Empire,1898-1952," 4. This manuscript is housed in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, TX.

[4] Hereford Reporter, July 19, 1901.

Origins of the Texas Cattle Kingdom

Meta Chestnutt's arrival in Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, in 1889 coincided closely with the end of the great cattle drives that began in central Texas and traveled north through Indian Territory and into Kansas. The story of Silver City had always been part of the saga of the cattlemen's empire and the fabled Chisholm Trail. What were the origins of the tremendous cattle industry that was centered in post-Civil War Texas?

Beginning with Christopher Columbus's second voyage, the Spanish brought to the Western Hemisphere both horses and cattle. Along with the animals, they also brought a culture of ranching and horse breeding. Their plan was to establish "husbandry on a European model in the Indies."[1] Centuries later, the enduring vocabulary of the American cowboy points back to the Spanish origins of his world. The terms are numerous: lariat, lasso, remuda, corral, chaparreras (chaps), rodeo, etc.[2]

As early as 1716, missions in Spanish Texas raised cattle. By 1770, the Mission La Bahia del Espiritu Santo, near Goliad, boasted herds totaling 40,000 head. Missions and private citizens in Texas became wealthy when cattle were driven east towards New Orleans, or south and west into modern-day Mexico. Those drives of the eighteenth century were harbingers of greater things to come.

During the Mexican War (1846-48), ranchers in Texas sold beef to the military and drove some of their cattle to New Orleans. In the 1840s and '50s, some cattlemen identified St. Louis as an excellent market. Following what they called the Shawnee Trail, they drove their herds north and east through Choctaw and Cherokee country in what is now eastern Oklahoma, into Arkansas and finally Missouri. Their destination was the livestock cars at either Kansas City or Sedalia, Missouri. But not until the after the Civil War did the Texas cattle kingdom emerge. During the war, the Union was eventually able to blockade the South, which prevented drives eastward. Consequently, by 1865 perhaps as many a 5 million cattle grazed on the Texas prairies, many of them unbranded and wild.[3]

Texans who served in the Confederate military and were fortunate enough to have survived the war returned home to find that during the years of conflict local herds of Longhorn cattle had grown. But great numbers drove down local prices for cattle and beef. In 1866, longhorns in the central part of the state sometimes sold for as little as $4 a head. But in major cities far to the north and east, those same cattle might bring as much as forty dollars and more. By driving their herds from Texas north through Indian Territory all the way to railroad terminals in Kansas, ranchers could get their cattle to those places where they would sell at a premium.[4]

Notes

[1] William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 194. The authors cite Bartolome de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Agustin Millares Carlo. 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1951), book I, chapter 82, I:346-49.

[2] I was reminded of this by T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. Updated ed. (New York: Tess Press, 2000), 556. See also Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 302-04.

[3] Joseph A. Stout, Jr., "cattle industry," in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 176; David Dary, "Cattle Drives," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed February 12, 2018); John R. Lovett, "Major Cattle Trails, 1866-1889," in Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 4th ed., Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 116-17.

[4] Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 296-99.