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She
didn’t have a particularly feminine sounding name, but the old heifer
they called Pecos sure came branded with a good story.
The tale came to light in the fall of 1928, when W.E. (Will) Pruett
of Santa Rita, NM showed up in Alpine
and Fort
Davis looking for old acquaintances.
His father, Philip H. Pruett, had been one of Fort
Davis’ earliest civilian settlers. He and his family had arrived
at the small town adjacent to the frontier cavalry post in what is
now Jeff Davis County in the summer of 1880.
Forty-eight years later Will Pruett found only two people still living
in Fort Davis
who had been around during his youth, and only one person in Alpine
. But at some point during his visit he ran into a newspaper correspondent
who interviewed him and wrote a story about him for the Dallas Morning
News. (The journalist may have been Barry Scobee, who came to Fort
Davis in 1917, but the piece does not have a byline.)
In
1876, Pruett related, his father took the family by train from White
County in Arkansas to Trinidad, Colo. From there, Philip Pruett carried
his wife Martha and five kids (then eight-year-old Will was the oldest
child) in a wagon to Santa Fe, NM. That fall Pruett bought a herd
of 40 shorthorn cattle and with his family and three cowboys left
New Mexico for West Texas.
All they had was one wagon and two horses. Along the way, they had
to melt snow to provide drinking water for themselves and their stock.
On New Year’s Day 1877, they finally reached Ben
Ficklin, at the time the seat of Tom Green County. The 500-plus
mile trip in the dead of winter had been hard on man and beast.
“After our long and perilous journey,” Pruett recalled, “all of our
herd died of the Texas fever [a tick-borne illness] except four dogie
calves and one 2-year-old heifer.”
That sturdy heifer was Pecos, named after the river the Pruetts had
to cross mid-way on their journey from Santa Fe to Texas.
Not yet named, Pecos joined the herd about a week before Christmas.
The Pruetts and their herders sat in camp on the north side of the
river near the present town of Pecos
when a rider approached. The man, who worked on a nearby farm, offered
a two-year-old heifer to Pruett in exchange for a pound of coffee.
“Father told the Mexican that he had no saddle horse and that the
heifer was wild and that he couldn’t keep her with the bunch,” Pruett
remembered.
The visitor said he would stay with them until the heifer settled
down.
“So my father told him that he would give him the pound of coffee
for the heifer,” Pruett continued. “Then the Mexican went from the
camp and in a little while came back with the heifer roped.”
The man tied her to a mesquite bush for the night. The next morning
they formally made the trade, cow for coffee. Soon after, presumably,
the previous owner of the heifer enjoyed a hot cup of Joe on a cold
December day.
Not long after acquiring Pecos, the Pruetts ran into a caravan of
traders on their way to Mexico down the Chihuahua Trail. Their wagons
were loaded with dried buffalo meat.
After that, Pruett said, they did not see anyone else for 19 days
straight, the time it took them to travel the stage coach road from
Horsehead
Crossing on the Pecos
to Ben
Ficklin.
The Pruett family stayed in the Concho country until 1880, when the
elder Pruett decided to relocate to Fort
Davis. They pushed a herd of Longhorns into that high country,
according to Will Pruett, “the first bunch of stock cattle ever driven
west of the Pecos.”
They lived two miles up Limpia Canyon, initially making a living by
selling milk and butter to the military garrison. Later the family
moved to Musquiz Canyon, where Pruett continued to run cattle. The
pioneer rancher also played a role in setting up one of the area’s
first school and helped blaze the road from Fort
Davis to the new railroad town of Murphyville, later renamed Alpine.
Pruett kept Pecos, the heifer he got for a pound of coffee, for the
rest of her long life. He had made a sharp trade. According to Will
Pruett, Pecos lived for 23 years, giving birth to 19 heifers and one
steer calf.
“Her increase ran to more than 200 head in a few years,” Pruett said
in his 1928 interview. “One thousand dollars profit on the pound of
coffee is a very conservative estimate of what the initial investment
brought.” |
©
Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" July
17, 2008 column
More Texas Animals
Announcement
Mike Cox's "The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900,"
the first of a two-volume, 250,000-word definitive history of the
Rangers, was released by Forge Books in New York on March 18, 2008
Kirkus Review, the American Library Association's Book List and the
San Antonio Express-News have all written rave reviews about this
book, the first mainstream, popular history of the Rangers since 1935. |
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