History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
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But the plains at first did not seem hospitable to wheat. The white and soft red winter varieties grown elsewhere failed from lack of moisture. But in 1873, a group of Russian Mennonites from the Crimea brought to Halstead, Kansas, a variety called Turkey red, and it changed the face of America. The hard red winter wheat required less moisture; anyone with good soil and blessed with moderate rainfall could grow it, from Texas to Saskatchewan. It kernels were rich in protein and were quickly preferred by millers for making the best bread flour. Almost 60 per cent of the nation’s wheat is now hard Turkey red.
A Mediterranean variety of wheat called little Red May was first grown in Texas about 1870 on the Red River prairies north of Dallas by cotton farmers. During the next twenty years the wheat-growing region spread to Wichita Falls and on west to the Rolling Plains of the southern Panhandle, where the hard red winter variety opened up these regions of less rainfall. But in the 26 counties of the Texas Panhandle, before the first farmer broke the virgin plains to sow the first seed of wheat, there were cattle.
In 1876, two years after the last Indian battle in the Panhandle, Charles Goodnight brought 1600 head of cattle to the rim of Palo Duro Canyon and began the first great cattle ranch in Texas. He declared all the land he controlled off limits to whiskey; today, sixteen Panhandle counties are still dry. To stop rustling he formed the genesis of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers. In 1866, when he was 30, he blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail, driving cattle north from Central Texas to Wyoming. During his fifty-year career he introduced many practices on the million-acre JA Ranch that would become standards of cattle ranching-improved beef breeds, manmade watering facilities, barbed-wire fencing. In 1928, at the age of 92, he told J. Frank Dobie that he felt fine, but his new wife, Corinne, had just suffered a miscarriage. Charles Goodnight died three months shy of his ninety-fourth birthday, but his presence is still felt on the Panhandle. Its first pioneer, he have the region a staunch model of independence and perseverance.
During the 1880s American and British capital flowed into the Panhandle after reports of 30 to 50 percent returns on first-year ranching investments. Huge ranches were developed-the three-million-acre XIT Ranch, four times the size of the King Ranch and occupying most of ten Texas counties, the Rocking Chair Ranch, owned by British Royalty, the Frying Pan, Three Seven, Doll Baby, and Turkey Track ranches.
The end of the cattle empire came in the late 1880s. Beef prices crashed from $9.35 a hundred pounds in 1882 to $1.90 in 1887. Two terrible blizzards, coupled with the drought of 1886, reduced some herds 60 and 70 per cent. In 1893, after another four years of drought, an invasion of grasshoppers stripped the vegetation, devouring half a mile of countryside a day. The great cattle ranches, unable to continue, were carved up into farms. With development of new farm practices, cheaper fences, windmills, and steam-powered machinery, farming replaced cattle ranching as the business of the Panhandle.
The flatness of the Panhandle was an attraction, but the farmers had to adjust to the lack of surface water and the shorter growing season at the higher altitude. Rainfall in the southeastern Panhandle counties averaged only 21 to 23 inches yearly, and in the northwestern counties it drops off to 16 to 18. The rule of thumb is that for every 25 miles east of Amarillo you gain an inch of rain; for every 25 miles west, you lose an inch.
The railroads and state law both encouraged Panhandle immigration. An individual who promised to live on property for a three-year period could purchase a maximum of one section of agricultural land at $2 an acre and three additional sections of grazing land at $1 per acre, with payments spread over a forty-year period at 3 per cent interest. The first large tracts of the XIT Ranch went for $2 an acre in 1901. By 1910, that price had climbed to $12, still cheaper than land farther south, say, in Eastland County or Wichita County, which cost up to $48 an acre. With the continued breakup of the large ranch holdings, the average farm acreage went down. Fifty-nine per cent of the Panhandle farms contained more than 1000 acres in 1900. Ten years later, 75 per cent were less than 1000. Since then the Panhandle has basically remained a region of small farms.
While most of the new settlers in covered wagons, many came on the railroad’s “immigrant cars.” For $25, a family could rent a boxcar and transport their household good, building supplies, two head of stock, farm implements, and themselves to the vast new country, where excited settlers reporter you could plow a mile straight and never hit a stump or rock. By 1900, only five Panhandle counties lacked access to the railroad. One of these was Ochiltree.
Ochiltree County sits in the far northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle; it is 797.4 miles north of Brownsville, but only 43 miles south of Kansas. It is closer to five other state capitals-New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas-than to Austin. Ochiltree County is on the southern edge of the Great Plains. It sits west of the 98th meridian, west of the 2000-foot contour line that falls between Mississippi and the Rockies, and west of the twenty-inch rainfall line, all three boundaries that define the eastern edge of the Great Plains. Ochiltree enjoys rich clay and loam soil, made richer by the humus of grasses and fertilized for hundreds of years by huge herds of buffalo. Periodic mud deposits form throughout the county, the result of the drying up of the temporary lakes; they were called buffalo wallows before their namesake disappeared.
In Ochiltree County there is a sense of vast space, a practically treeless 360-degree horizon, punctured only by austere “prairie cathedrals,” the towering grain elevators. There are violent storms—northers, blizzards, tornadoes, hailstorms, cloudbursts, thunderstorms—all caused by the unrestricted flow of air masses colliding across the flat expanses. There are spectacular sunsets, the most unfettered and vibrant color shows on the continent, which wrap around the western, southern, and northern skies. And way back in 1865, before the white man arrived, there was a sea of blue grama and buffalo grass, which would prove very nutritious for cattle.
The flatter northern part of the county is 360 feet higher than the watershed of beautiful Wolf Creek, which wanders in the breaks beneath the northern edge of the rugged Canadian River cap rock. In the cliffs along the creek golden eagles nest, and at night coyotes race among bedded-down cattle, and rattlers warn intruders who walk the rocky slopes. One hundred years ago, after spotting the clear, running water, and the turkeys, wild grapes, plums, onions, currants, apples, pears, mulberries, and Indian breadroot, Tom Connell and Dee Eubanks founded the county’s first ranches along Wolf Creek in the 1880s. Flour was then an imported luxury.
Wolf Creek’s banks support the only native trees in Ochiltree County. The willow, the most relaxed and abandoned of trees, bends with the wind as it weaves and dips it branches in the water. Hackberries also grow along the serpentine banks, but dominating them all are the grand old trees of the plains, the cottonwoods. With only their higher branches showing across the bare landscape, they wave like the helmut plumes of a band marching along the creekbed, their hidden trunks gnarled and creased like an old cowboy’s hand.
The upper half of Ochiltree County is wheat country, so flat you can see nothing but sky between the legs of a steer; flat enough that if you lie down on your back, you lose sight of the ground; flat enough that if your adventurous son ran away, you needn’t worry—you could still see him three days later; flat enough that from the outskirts of Perryton on a clear night you can see the lights of Spearman 25 miles west and the lights of Booker 16 miles east.
The first farmer to plant wheat in Ochiltree County was J.R. McMillen, who sowed it by hand in 1900 on four sections in the southwest portion of the county. He made twenty bushels an acre, which is still the dryland wheat average. McMillen took his wheat to market in Canadian, 45 miles southeast. The trip took four days by wagon, including fording the Canadian River. McMillen’s wagon carried eighty bushels and he received 80 cents a bushel for his year’s work.
One man realized what McMillen’s $64 worth of wheat could mean to Ochiltree County: George Morgan Perry, who had arrived in April 1886 from Meade, Kansas, wearing a dashing round straw hat and riding a horse named Buster. The son of a John Deere dealer in Grinnell, Iowa, Perry settled in the village of Old Ochiltree and became the first county clerk and county judge, bank president, cattleman, and cornet player in the Whippo family orchestra. No matter how much quality wheat his neighbors produced, Perry knew that without the transportation provided by the railroad Ochiltree County would remain underdeveloped and unpopulated.
The first train arrived at high noon on August 22, 1919, which was promptly declared the birthday of the new town of Perryton. Steam-powered tractors moved buildings north from Old Ochiltree and south from Gray, Oklahoma, for the founding day celebration, an event chronicled in Popular Mechanics and the London Illustrated News. The celebratory speeches, picnic, baseball game, and fireworks were marred only by the town’s first fatal accident: a stunt pilot’s plane crashed at the present site of the Balko Machine Shop, just north of the tracks.
Perryton was incorporated in November 1919, and at the first council meeting, thirteen ordinances were passed, among them laws prohibiting public intoxication, disorderly conduct, prostitution, unlicensed dogs, and gambling and setting speed limits for horses and autos at twelve miles per hour. By the city’s third birthday, it called itself “Wonder Town of the Plains” and had 2000 citizens, concrete sidewalks, three banks, two mills, five grain elevators, and all-night streetlights. Civilization had arrived.
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