Lining Main Street of your town with the above-ground tombs of several victims of Indian attacks is, if you ask me, expert preparation for status as a bonafide ghost town in the future. That is just what Trickham, Texas became. It’s a little bit of an eerie feeling, walking down the dirt road that was once the primary street in a bustling little town on the edge of the great frontier and seeing nothing but a few rugged, cairn-like graves and a sign describing the fierce fight for existence the town once endured. Nothing of the town remains but those graves, a locked up community center, a church and, buried in heavy brush, the foundations of a few buildings.
Along the banks of Mukewater Creek, in what was once Brown County, now part of Coleman County, the town of Trickham sprung up in the 1850s. It was the earliest settlement in the county, located in the Southeast corner, near the original site of the military post Camp Colorado, which was a few miles further along the creek before it was moved further north.
Cattleman Jesse Chisum owned some land near Trickham and maintained a ranch headquarters a few miles away along Home Creek. Chisum opened a store of sorts at the location in the late 1850s. The town was a stopping place along the Western Trail, which ran through Trickham, up to Santa Anna then through Coleman to Abilene.
Chisum’s store, run by his brother-in-law Emory Peters and a man called Bill Franks, was a place where a cowboy could get a drink of whiskey and some grub for the journey north. Franks had a wicked sense of humor, and named the store Trick ‘Em and Skin ‘Em as a reference to his dubious business practices, which included selling cowboys watered down whiskey once they were headed up the trail–by the time the trick was discovered, it would be too late for a cowboy to turn back and avenge the prankster. Franks applied to the post office to name the town Trick ‘Em, but had to settle for Trickham.
Early Trickham settler Dick Fiveash described the town as it was when he and his family first lived there. (taken from Into the Setting Sun, by Beatrice Gay). “I was born in Erath County in 1862 and moved with my parents to Coleman County in 1864, ” Fiveash recalled. “We settled on Mukewater about a mile south of where Trickham is now. My father built a log cabin to live in […] There was lots of wild game in the county when we first came, and a long while after. I’ve seen the valleys of the creek black with buffalo plenty of times, and we could always find deer and turkeys. We had to go to Austin after our flour and it cost $20.00 a barrel. It generally took us two weeks to make the trip.” It is recorded that around half a dozen settlers were killed by Comanche along Mukewater Creek, including a relative of Dick Fiveash. Fiveash himself claimed to have seen the gruesome results of Comanche attacks on 3 victims killed near Trickham.
As if the dangers of the frontier were not enough for Trickham’s settlers to contend with, a vicious epidemic of smallpox broke out there in 1876. The pitiful conditions were described by Fiveash. “My father sent Lot Ellington to Ft. Worth after supplies and somewhere he was exposed to smallpox. Soon after he got back he took it and died. Then all the family took it from him. My father and mother both died and so did Tom Moss. Everyone was afraid to come near enough to do anything for us, since in those days, in 1876, doctors didn’t know much about treating smallpox or vaccinating against it. Dr. Edwards at Brownwood was the only doctor we knew. He came and looked in at the door and when he saw how terribly bad it was, he turned and went back home without doing anything at all for us.”
“There was a young Dr. Page at Brownwood then who had been there only a short while, a friend of the Grady and Cheatham families, who had all come from Kentucky. When Dr. Page heard about what Dr. Edwards had done he got on his horse and came out to see about us, and stayed with us ‘til the disease had run its course. Dr. Page had been vaccinated and he had a light case of varioloid, but soon got over it. When my father and mother died, no one could be found to help the doctor prepare them for burial. They were wrapped in blankets and buried at night. The people did dig the graves, but they didn’t help fill them up. Charlie Shield, brother of Lee Shield, helped dig the graves and kept them from digging one for me, as I was not expected to live.”
There was no doctor in Trickham for several decades. A midwife by the name of Mrs.
McElereath was the only medical practitioner in town. McElereath came from Georgia in the
mid-1870s, She helped at the birthings of most everyone in town. The townspeople called her “Grandma McElwreath”, and warmly remembered her as a woman of “indomitable strength and vision.” As the lone medical practitioner in a violent, sometimes even savage, unsettled frontier town, one can only imagine the hardships and difficulties she must have faced. McElwreath continued her solitary practice in the Trickham area until 1908, when a few, perhaps less hardy, set up shop in the area.
The decline of Trickham began in the early 1900s. In 1936, the school closed. In 1976, the general store shut its doors. The post office was shuttered in 1979. The town’s last estimated population is 12.
Today, no dust-covered cowboys ride up to hitch their mounts at the store while they take their chances on Frank’s firewater, no Comanche war cries echo from the surrounding ridges. It’s hard to believe even 12 people live there, the place is so empty and quiet. Maybe ghosts do still linger in the place–there is a feeling there. They must be tough ghosts though because they’re from some pretty tough men and women who traded tears, blood and endless hard work for an often meager living in a once upon a time small town in the wilderness.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com
