Brownwood, Texas has a larger and lengthier trove of Old West history than the more famous Old West icons like Deadwood or Tombstone. That’s saying a lot, and most people don’t know it. But it’s true.

A couple of columns ago I was talking about families and communities purposely hiding, and then later maybe remembering their history.

The point was that the general tendency of the blind, almost manic, impulse to “progress,” is to always portray oneself as modern and acceptable in every way. To bury the past and cover it up by making it bland, but functional. The instinct is to make a place acceptable to the largest portion of the unthinking mass.

Fort Worth was already safe and civilized when Brownwood was still being written about by journalists as the last real wild border town before the vast and dangerous stretches of the wild frontier. Beyond here be buffalo, endless, and wild cattle and Indians and horse thieves, robbers and gangs.

Deadwood had a flash of notoriety, just moments really, and the rest was made up by Hollywood writers. Same with Tombstone. What they had going for them was cool names. Brownwood’s history stacks up with that of Dodge City, Kansas – complete with cattle drives, gunfights, range wars, saloons and cat houses, posses, murders in the streets and on the prairie, gambling dens, fence-cutting wars, vigilantes, shootouts, bank robberies, and the like.

But most of America got their ideas about the old west from Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny. You could sell them stories about “Deadwood” and “Tombstone.”

Heck, even “Yellowstone,” a name which is also made up of a color and a natural material, is more Hollywood than “Brownwood.”

Here is where the real stories happened, and more of them.

West of Brownwood – just west – was the home of criminals hiding from society, stagecoach stations, forts, brave pioneers trying to escape the westward march of modernity by carving out a life in the wilderness, Indian bands trying to hang on to their way of life, Indian fighters, soldiers, gunfighters and bank robbers. Brownwood was where you came to trade Buffalo pelts or whatever you could raise or grow in exchange for coffee and supplies… even shoestrings or boots. Men, it is said by journalists and writers, came to Brownwood once a week – finding any excuse – because here you could find conversation, a saloon and a glass of whiskey, a faro game, a brothel, or a fight if you wanted it.

East Broadway was only occasionally called that. To most it was known as “Battle Row” because the young men would go into the street to fight when they didn’t want to wreck the saloons and go to jail.

The truth of it would make for a better television series than the Hollywood fantasies that have to be embellished by rich writers with narrow imaginations. First, the penny stories sold in New York City and Chicago, and then the radio and early TV glorified the tall tales (many made up) of places with cool and scary-sounding names. Tombstone became famous for one gunfight. But the name “Tombstone” is just cool. If the Ok Corral was in Paducah, you probably wouldn’t have heard of it.

There are more stories and a longer history right here. Dodge City became famous to Hollywood writers as a station or terminus of the famous cattle drives, but those cattle started here. They were gathered from the wild mustang cattle (Longhorns) from here and out west. They are called “Texas Longhorns” and not “Kansas Longhorns.” To the Hollywood writer, Dodge City is a cooler name than Brownwood.

Brownwood was a trading center on the line between civilization and the peril of the unknown. It was this “frontier” that the sci-fi writers and space scientists invoked when they called space “the final frontier.” It was here that the cattlemen and the farmers fought over barbed wire. It is said that there are still bullet holes in the walls here. The gunfighters and bank robbers passed through here, either escaping to the hideouts and anonymity in the west or sneaking back eastward through to visit families.

Our tendency as humans, and it is often a fatal one, is to always look forward and never back. To sterilize things and misremember. Some wise folk realize you can look forward and back.

Anyway, there’s a treasure trove of material here, ripe for tourism and books and movies and other entertainment if only we were wise enough to capitalize on it.

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