The Cross Timbers
Authors: Edward Everett Dale
The Cross Timbers
MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD
Personal Narratives of the West
J. Frank Dobie, General Editor
The Cross Timbers
MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD
by Edward Everett Dale
Illustrated by John Biggers
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65â27540
Copyright © 1966 by Edward Everett Dale
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-292-74921-4 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-74922-1 (individual e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-74069-3 (paperback)
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
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To Judy and Everett whose childhood differed so much from my own
PREFACE
This story of my boyhood in the Texas Cross Timbers has been written largely from memory, although old letters and other family documents have been consulted to verify dates and some events.
Whether the story is worth telling is a matter of opinion, but it reveals a pattern of life in rural America now gone forever. Moreover, it is not my story alone. Except for some minor variations due to climate and other geographic conditions, it is largely the life story of a vast number of other boys who lived on a woodland farm in the period from 1882 to 1892. Perhaps this is its chief value, for we are largely what the past has made us, and to some extent it is true that “the child is father to the man.”
To all those who have given me encouragement and help in the work of preparing this little volume for publication I want to express my sincere thanks and deep appreciation. My special thanks are due to my secretaries, Judy Kaye Moore, Mrs. R. L. Pettett, and Loretta Sue Pillow, who typed the manuscript, and to my wife, Rosalie, who gave much aid in its revision and was often a patient listener.
Edward Everett Dale
Norman, Oklahoma
CONTENTS
4. Reading: Common and Preferred
5. “Six Days Shalt Thou Labor”
8. Disciples of St. Peter and Izaak Walton
The Cross Timbers
MEMORIES OF A NORTH TEXAS BOYHOOD
Introduction
It is commonly said that the youngest child in a family is always hopelessly spoiled. If this is true I entered the world under a terrific handicap, for it was my fate to be the youngest of my father's twelve children. Two of these died in childhood, but most of the remaining ten lived to a ripe old age.
As the youngest, I had the good fortune to be born in Texas. My father was born in Kentucky on January 28, 1829, but in 1831 his Virginia-born father migrated with his family to Northwest Missouri, where he settled near Richmond, in Ray County.
Here my father grew to manhood and in 1850 joined the gold rush to California, walking all the way beside the oxen that drew his covered wagon. After a year of digging gold, with only modest success, he returned home by way of Panama and married Louisa Colley, whose family had migrated from Virginia to Ray County, Missouri, by way of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers.
Their first son, Henry, was born a year after their marriage and eventually five more sons and four daughters were born of this marriage, but one son and a daughter died in early childhood. Some years after the close of the Civil War, Louisa Colley Dale died; after a decent interval Father married her younger sister, Mattie Counts Colley, who became my mother five years after the birth of her first childâmy brother George.
Soon after George's birth my father and his younger brother, Isaac sold their land in Missouri and removed with their families to Nebraska, settling on Rock Creek about sixteen miles northeast of Lincoln. Here they took land under the Homestead Act of Congress, built homes, broke the prairie sod, and planted crops, but the cold winters and a plague of grasshoppers caused them to remove to Texas after three or four years in Nebraska.
My father reached the Lone Star State with all his family except Henry, who had a farm in Nebraska. The following spring the Nebraska sweetheart of the oldest daughter, Fannie, came to Texas to marry her and take her back to his home on Rock Creek. About the same time Father's second son, Frank, returned to Lincoln to enter the University of Nebraska. In the meantime my father had rented for a term of three years a prairie farm in Tarrant County, two or three miles west of the edge of the Lower Cross Timbers. It was in the comfortable frame house on this farm that I was born on February 8, 1879, slightly less than three years before my father moved us to our new home in the Cross Timbers.
The origin of the term “Cross Timbers” is obscure. We only know that during most of the nineteenth century it was applied to the two broad belts of timber that extended northward from Central Texas to the Red River and far beyond. The eastern belt, called the Lower Cross Timbers, was separated from the western belt, or Upper Cross Timbers, by a strip of blackland prairie, eight or nine miles wide where we lived, but much wider farther south. In the early spring this green prairie became a gorgeous carpet of wild flowers.
The eastern edge of the Lower Cross Timbers was slightly west of Sherman and Dallas, while its western boundary was not far from the main line of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway. Obviously, the boundary was jagged and broken. Long “peninsulas” of woodland extended out into the prairie and small “islands” of trees were common, usually on top of a low hill surrounded by grasslands.
In marked contrast to the rich, black soil of the prairie, that of the Cross Timbers was thin and sandy, with occasional outcroppings of clay. In a few places there were heavy flat stones, which the children called “iron rocks” to indicate their weight and to distinguish them from the red sandstone found in some places where rain had washed away the soil.
The trees in this area included the blackjack, which seldom grew to a height of over thirty feet. Usually they were found on rough rocky land, and were sometimes called “poor-land trees.” On the level sandy land grew the post oaks, which might reach a height of fifty or sixty feet. On some of the sandy flats the principal trees were hickory, while along the small streams they were elm, cottonwood, hackberry, walnut, pecan, and chinaberry.
Naturally, the youngsters of the Cross Timbers were most interested in the trees and smaller plants which produced something edible. Of these there was a wide variety, including dewberries, blackberries, mulberries, three or four kinds of plums, persimmons, black haws, red haws, and at least three varieties of grapes. The mustang grapevines sometimes climbed to the top of tall trees. Other types of grapes were the winter or “possum grapes,” not ripening until late autumn, and sand-beach grapes.
Both blackjack and post-oak trees produced quantities of acorns, which pigs ate greedily, but which were too bitter for human consumption. Therefore, the only nut-producing trees were pecan, hickory, and walnut.
Other plants of interest to adults were found in these woods. Redroot, horehound, and stillingia were said to have much medicinal value. Housewives often picked lamb's-quarter, poke leaves, and dock leaves to be boiled and eaten as “wild greens.” There were also plants to be avoided, such as poison oak, poison ivy, stinging nettles, the big bull nettles, and sand burrs. Most children seemed to be immune to poison ivy and poison oak but many adults were not.
With the exception of cottontail rabbits, fox squirrels, and 'possums, few wild animals lived in the Cross Timbers. A few raccoons and skunks could be found, and possibly a fox or a prairie wolf might be seen once in a period of ten years. The big jack rabbits were found mostly on the prairie. There were snakes, but the only poisonous ones were the copperheads. Many birds of various kinds lived in the Cross Timbers, including the big turkey buzzards, crows, mockingbirds, shrikes, quails, turtledoves, meadow larks, bluebirds, several kinds of hawks, blue jays with their bright-blue coats and white underclothes, hoot owls, screech owls, whippoorwills, and woodpeckers.
It was my privilege to live in the Lower Cross Timbers for ten years. Looking backward over three quarters of a century, I see it now as an excellent place for a growing boy to have lived, as I did from the age of three to thirteen.
1. Be It Ever So Humble
One evening when I was about four years old we had supper a little later than usual, and at its conclusion my father said that he believed he'd walk over to Jim McCarty's home to return a spade he had borrowed, adding that he might stay and visit for an hour or so. The rest of us, consisting of my mother and half-sister Mattie, who was then about sixteen, my brother, George, aged about ten, and myself, lingered at the table.
The atmosphere cleared a little when Father was gone, for though all of us had for him the highest respect and a deep affection, he was a dignified and fairly stern father, so we usually felt some constraint in his presence. He had had twelve children and a family of that size must be managed somewhat like an institution. In consequence, he demanded respectful and prompt obedience from the younger generation and frowned upon their manifesting any symptoms of what the old-time Puritans referred to as “light carriage.”
Upon this particular occasion I was sitting on a bench behind the table, Mattie was opposite me, and Mother at the foot of the table near the stove was telling some stories of her girlhood days in Missouri. Said she:
One morning in October two boys came to our house. The older seemed to be about twelve and the other was a little fellow not much bigger than
Ed here. They had run away from home and it had rained the night before, so they had slept in a straw stack but were wet, cold, and hungry. The larger boy said he was looking for a job with someone who would let him keep his little brother with him. The little fellow had been crying and I felt so sorry for him, but we had no work for his brother to do. We brought them in and gave them a good breakfast and they went on with the older one saying that he just had to find work.
Apparently no one had been paying any attention to me, sitting behind the table and trying to make letters of the alphabet with my knife, fork, and spoon. When my mother concluded, however, I spoke up with a little sob in my throat, “You bet I never will wun away and leave my home ath long ath there'th a pieth of it left that big,” and I held up a small thumb indicating to what tiny dimensions my home must shrink before it should cease to be blessed by my presence.
George and Mattie laughed loudly, but my mother rose and came over to put her arms around my shoulders and whispered that she was glad I loved my home and did not want to leave it. She then added that she hoped I would someday have a home of my own that would be just as happy as this one. Thirty-five years were to elapse before this hope of my mother's was realized.
This home to which I had pledged such undying devotion was a fifty-sixâacre farm located at the western edge of the Lower Cross Timbers of Texas. The term “farm” is used because at this time and place a home was far more than the residence in which a family lived. It included not only “the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood” but the barns, cribs, garden, fields, pastures, and fences. The house, to the kids at least, was only more or less incidental, and in good weather they stayed inside it just as little as possible.
