Geographic Humor

“I guess you know the true story behind the founding of Amarillo?” asked my old friend Larry Todd.

Being a native son and having written about the city’s history, I figured I knew the story of Amarillo’s genesis well enough. Essentially, it has to do with cattle and railroad tracks. But it sounded like Larry had a good tale to tell, so I said, nope, I hadn’t heard the real reason Amarillo came to be.

“Way back there,” he began, “a wagon train was crossing the Panhandle. They stopped for the night in about the middle, 10 or 12 miles north of Palo Duro Canyon.”

Continuing, Larry explained that the wagon master circled the wagons as a protection against hostile Indians and to keep the livestock from wandering off during the night. That done, the pioneers collected enough buffalo chips for their cooking fires and enjoyed a hearty supper after a long, hard day of travel in a relentless wind that stung eyes and chapped lips.

After the evening meal, the wagon master (picture Ward Bond in the old black-and-white TV series “Wagon Train”) called everyone together and said:

“Until this dang wind stops blowing, we’ll just stay here.”

As soon as I quit laughing, it occurred to me that Larry’s story was only the second Texas place name joke I had ever heard. But surely, given the several thousand towns and cities in Texas, there are more such jokes.

Oddly, the only other Texas town-origin joke I know has to do with how another Panhandle community got its name.

In the case of this particular town, a pioneer and his wife had set out alone on their westward journey. Traveling slowly across the sea of grass that constituted the Panhandle before it saw its first plow, the couple proceeded until the woman declared that she needed to answer the call of nature.

Reining in their team, the man looked at his wife and said, “Anywhere you want, dear.”

Surveying the desolate landscape from the seat of their wagon, the pioneer woman saw no outhouse or any other structure. In fact, the vast openness stretched from horizon to horizon.

“Right here in plain view?” she said.

And thus came to be the county seat of Hale County, Plainview.

Amazingly, there’s a third joke involving the naming of a Panhandle community – Mobeetie.

Originally known as Sweetwater, the Wheeler County town couldn’t keep that name because there’s another Sweetwater downstate in Nolan County. So, the story goes, someone asked a reservation Kiowa Indian from nearby Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) what the Indian word for “sweet water” was. He said the rough translation would be “mobeetie” and the town had a new name that stuck.

Sometime later, the joke goes, one of the residents of the newly named county seat was walking across the street when another friendly Indian who happened to be in town pointed to a large and very fresh cow pattie the fellow unknowingly was about to plant one of his boots in.

“Don’t step in the mobeetie,” the Indian cautioned.

Distinctive as it is, the Panhandle can’t be the only part of Texas with jokes about how some of its towns got their name. If you know any other Texas place name jokes, email me at mikecox@austin.rr.com and I’ll share them with other readers.

A possible fourth contender, though it doesn’t speak to how the town got its name, is the old joke about two men who stopped for a hamburger in the Limestone County town of Mexia.

“How do you pronounce the name of this place?” one of the men asked the woman at the cash register.

“I beg your pardon,” she replied. “What do you mean?”

“We’re from out of state. How do you say where we are?”

Finally grasping what the customer was talking about, she spoke as slowly and distinctly as she could:

“D-A-I-R-Y Q-U-E-E-N.”


© Mike Cox - December 27, 2012 column
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