This long summer of heat and drought is finally coming to an end. I find myself thinking often about the old days out here in West Central Texas–thinking about changes in general. It’s a fun way to escape the doldrums of August.
I recently came upon an old story written by a man called C.M. Grady, who came out to the Brown County area back in 1874, during the time when a few Comanche still roamed the banks of Pecan Bayou. Herds of buffalo and antelope dotted the plains, and bands of wild horses foraged on Wild Horse Flat, which is known today as the town of Bangs. The land Grady found was basically the same as it is now, but many of his recollections are of animals, people and ways of living that are gone.
According to the story, published in Frontier Times magazine in June of 1934, Grady arrived in Brownwood in the fall of 1874. He described the town then as a scattering of log cabins housing about 20 families. “…a wild and wooly place indeed”, by which I take it he means there was a good deal of drinking and shooting going on in the brand new town.
Grady recounts that there were a lot of “big bad men” in the town, describing most of them as transient prospectors, perhaps on their way further west. Brownwood then was the very edge of the great frontier, Coleman County having not yet been organized. Heading west out of town, there was fundamentally nothing but endless miles of rolling grassland, along with the occasional military post, a handful of settlers and a few Comanche camps.
In January of 1875, Grady set off with a group of 4 other men to hunt buffalo in the area west of Brownwood. The group included two of his brothers, Jack and Will, along with Tom Clark and a man called Jake Carter. He wrote some details of the trip, including his encounter with a band of wild horses. “We had a two horse wagon, and also a wagon drawn by an ox team, two lead horses, four long eared hounds, and two greyhounds. We took the old Fort Concho and Brownwood road, west to East Mukewater, straight on to Santa Anna Mountains, making our own road over ditches, hills, cat-claws, and rocks. It surely was rough getting across the little creeks. Our dogs dug up a family of coons on West Mukewater Creek. […] As we neared the Santa Anna Mountains we saw a band of wild horses. It was my first sight of a band of wild horses. I was riding a good horse, a steel dust color, and he could certainly run, and Tom Clark rode a big bay pony named Pepper. As we rode out towards them, the most beautiful irongray pacing stallion I had ever seen came out in view. Well, the race was on! We went south towards Hay Creek, I soon passed Tom, and several of the horses. The gray stallion was still far in the lead, with his long mane hanging on each side of his neck, long tail sweeping the ground, skimming through the air like a flying bird, the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. I soon saw that I could not catch him, and gave up and came back to join the others.”
In June of 1875, Grady joined the Texas Rangers, Company E, whose base was along Home Creek. “I thought this the most beautiful place I had ever seen. Plenty of shade and water, a large spring came gurgling out of the creek bank,” he recalled. Grady described encounters with the vast herds of antelope and buffalo that once ranged freely over the entire area. The buffalo herds were estimated to contain millions of animals. He recalls falling asleep to the sound of wolves howling. finding the traces of Comanche camps with coals still warm, but it was the sight of the wild horse band, led by the coveted silver-gray stallion, that seemed to truly capture his imagination.
According to Grady, ranchers from nearby towns would abandon their work for days in favor of efforts to capture and tame the elusive horse. “My parents lived in Brownwood. Whenever I would go to see them, I would most always see that same bunch of wild horses, whose range lay from Hay Creek to the south and Santa Anna Mountain east through Mustang Gap to Wild Horse Flat, where Bangs is today.Their range extended all over Mud Creek and Buffalo Flats and Brushy Mountain to the headwaters of Mukewater Creek,” he wrote.
“Over on the hill south of Mukewater, we ran into the gray stallion again. When he spied us he paced around his herd, got them up and on the move. We chased them down the hill across the
prairie dog flat, down Cedar Prong of Mud Creek towards the Brushy Mountain […] he sailed on and on like a bird flying, more like a spirit horse,” Grady wrote. “There had been a corral built of brush and logs in the Mustang Gap, near my farm on the head of the Cedar Prong of Mud Creek, for the purpose of catching wild horses. We chased them many times, but never could get them into the pen. All the settlers, Staffords, St. Clairs, Hardins, Livingstons, and Robertsons tried to catch the gray horse, but they never caught that noted wild mustang. He moved west, the last I heard of him. His range lay west of Table Mountain and he was seen there several years later by Curly Thatcher and others, who were still trying to catch him. He moved on into the Golden West.”
Everything moves on eventually, but it does seem like they move on in a sort of circle. Change is in the air. August is fading quickly into autumn. The clouds are returning with long-hoped for rains. There has been a lot of suffering this summer, the heat and drought taking a toll on ranchers and town dwellers alike. As fall moves in, it is not hard for me to imagine there is still a gunmetal stallion roaming the flats outside of Bangs, maybe somewhere in a fierce gust of wind that will soon be coming from the North. Perhaps he will raise his head and snort once again. Maybe he’ll go racing over the hills towards the unchanging shadow of the mountain, silver mane flying like wisps of rain from a cold downpour, breaking the drought.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com