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The
T Anchor Ranch in the Texas
Panhandle began in the simple twinkling of cowboy Leigh Dyer's
eye and became, for a time, one of the largest ranches in the state,
home to the world's largest cattle drive and some peculiar economics.
Leigh Dyer was a cowboy and Charles
Goodnight's brother-in law. He worked as a drover for Goodnight
in 1867 over the Goodnight-Loving Trail to Fort Sumner, New Mexico
and beyond. He was there in 1876 when Goodnight moved his operations
from Colorado and drove the first herd of Texas
longhorns into the Palo
Duro, thus establishing the first ranch in the Panhandle, the
JA.
A year later, Dyer drove his own shorthorn cattle, crossbred with
JA bulls, to a 320-acre site near the present-day town of Canyon.
Dyer and his brother Walter cut surprisingly large cedar logs from
canyons at Fal de Hour waterfalls on the Currie Ranch and hauled them
along an old Comanche trail to the home site near Palo Duro and Tierra
Blanca creeks. That was the first house in Randall
County and the beginning of what would become the T Anchor Ranch.
The early 1880s was a good time to go into the cattle business. As
a 1938 Amarillo Globe News story put it, "The buffalo were gone and
the grass was free."
A year after starting the ranch, Dyer, who had only a claim of priority
on the land, sold the claim to the surveying firm of Gunter, Munson
and Summerfield. Unappropriated public land in the Panhandle
was subject to land certificates, most of which sold for 25 cents
an acre. The firm got title to Panhandle land by finding the old certificates
and surveying them in partnership with land companies.
"They gained possession of the land so rapidly that Col. Goodnight
was forced to buy from them the land of which he settled," a Randall
County history notes. "He paid 75 cents an acre."
Jule Gunter, a nephew of the surveying company's Jot Gunter, bought
Summerfield's share of the operation in 1881. Around that same time,
the ranch fenced about 240,000 acres of formerly open range to keep
the ever-increasing T Anchor herd from drifting out of sight and out
of touch, marking the official end of the open range and free grass.
In
the very early days, the ranch operated under the GMS and Crescent
G brands, but when Jule Gunter brought a herd with the T Anchor brand
from his Burneyville ranch in the Indian Territory, the ranch formally
adopted the T Anchor brand and the name T Anchor Ranch. Dyer signed
on as a ranch boss.
Under the T Anchor brand, the ranch was the site of the largest single
cattle drive in Texas history on Aug. 24, 1882 when T Anchor cowboys
rounded up and drove 10,652 cattle from Tulia
to Canyon,
a distance of about 30 miles. According to the Texas State Historical
Association:
"On August 24 the T Anchor men began combing the canyons and rounding
up the cattle to drive them back to the home ranch. Though {Jule}
Gunter had planned to divide the herd into two groups, a chance decision
resulted in the largest single cattle drive in history. Sixteen cowboys
with a remuda of 125 horses herded 10,652 cattle to Big
Lake and took half a day to run them through the fenceline gate
while Vas Stickley and Jule Gunter counted them. That night the cattle
were bedded down over an area so large that it took over an hour for
a horse to circle them at a fast trot."
At its peak, the T Anchor covered most of Deaf
Smith and Randall
Counties and parts of Swisher,
Castro, Armstrong,
Briscoe and Oldham
Counties with 480,000 acres under fence. The Gunters sold out to Munson
in 1883. By then, everybody and his brother wanted to get into the
cattle business, and Munson didn't like it. He saw a time coming when
there would be too many cattle on the land and the market for the
business to remain profitable. In 1885, he sold the T Anchor, including
225 sections of land, 25,000 cattle and 325 horses, to the Cedar Valley
Land Company for $800, 000.
Cedar Valley operated the ranch until 1902 then broke it into blocks
and sold them to farmers and ranchers. The state later bought the
old headquarters and 200 acres of surrounding land for West Texas
State College, now West Texas A&M University.
In 1975, when a flood threatened the house that the Dyer brothers
built by hand in 1877, the college dismantled the house, moved it
to the Panhandle-Plains
Historical Museum in Canyon
and fully restored it to what it was like when Dyer and his brother
built it.
As for Leigh Dyer, he kept cowboying and ranching and was known as
a superb and humane breeder and handler of horses. He helped establish
the Shoe Bar Ranch on the Red River in Hall
County, trailed the first JA herd of longhorns to Dodge City and
managed the Quitaque Ranch for Goodnight. He died in 1902, the same
year that the land company sold off the T Anchor in bits and pieces.
© Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas"
April 7, 2018 column
Related Topic: Texas Ranches
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