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Texas Tales

published: March 5th 2010
by: MIke Cox

The flashlight beams crisscrossed in the darkness as the young men and women made their way through the thick post oaks.
    Ernie May, who worked in the drug store at Breckenridge’s Burch Hotel, his wife and some of their friends were camping on Hubbard Creek off the old Canyon Road southwest of town. They had been fishing, but when the sun went down they built a campfire and had been sitting around it telling stories.
    About midnight, their conversation drifted to the old days when hostile Indians prowled the wild country along the Clear Fork of the Brazos. That’s when one of their number said he knew of some old graves not too far from their camp. Grabbing their flashlights, the campers followed their friend into the night. Not far from a landmark known as Rattlesnake Den, their guide’s light illuminated three mounded graves topped with limestone slabs.
    Carved on one of the rocks they could see the word “Hazlewood” and the number “68.”
    While their guide had known where to find the graves, what happened next caught everyone by surprise.
    About 30 yards from the graves, Mrs. May walked up on an old rifle thrust barrel-first into the ground. Shining their lights on the rusty weapon, they soon spotted a second old gun not far from the first.
    When they later broke camp, May took the old rifles home with him. As word of the discovery spread, he agreed to loan them for display in the lobby of the National Theater. One of the weapons was a flintlock rifle, the other was described as “a Minnie ball caliber” rifle with a shortened barrel. The stocks had just about rotted off from both weapons.
    The discovery of the old guns soon made the weekly Stephens County Sun, which published a page-one story on April 28, 1933.
“Old timers recall that Hazlewood was a great Indian fighter of many years agone,” the newspaper said. “That he was trapped and killed by the red men but not before some of their own lives had been taken by this intrepid fighter.”
    Hazlewood, having died game, had won the respect of his attackers.
    “The Indians, as a mark of recognition to bravery, would leave an arrow sticking upright in the ground by an victim whose valor and fighting spirit they respected,” the newspaper continued. “When Hazlewood’s body was found, so goes the story, an arrow so upright bore evidence…to his courage.”
    Admitting that he had “picked up only a thread of facts” the author of the story said, “Mr. May would like to know and the Sun would like to publish” the rest of the story.
    The Sun editor soon got more details from Elisha L. Christessen, then Stephens County’s oldest resident. Christessen said one of the graves belonged to George Hazlewood, killed by Indians on March 2, 1868. Two of his daughters, Mrs. Donna Cain and Mrs. Belle Ferguson, still lived in San Angelo, he said.
    “He was a good shot, a brave spirit and when caught out by a bunch of red skins he cut down on them and gave a mighty good account of himself,” the old man said. “In fact, he killed three Indians and wounded very badly both a negro and a Mexican who were along with the Indians.”
    If it hadn’t been for a strong south wind that blew sand into Hazlewood’s eyes, he likely would have killed  more of his attackers, Christessen said.
    And then the old man offered some interesting insight on Indian-fighting.
    Indians armed only with arrows and riding ponies almost always prevailed over any lone rider they encountered. The reason, Christessen said, was that the people caught out alone would quite understandably panic, spur their horse and ride the wind out of it trying to escape.
    On the other hand, he continued, Indians rode smarter, never winding their mounts if they could help it. Consequently, they usually could outlast a better mounted rider. Christessen said Indians also would fan out in their pursuit so that if the person they were after tried to turn one way or the other, he would ride into their line of fire.
    Experienced fighters would high tail it for cover. If they could manage to take a steep enough toll to demoralize the Indians, they often would give to cut their losses. 
    Hazelwood had been armed with a Sharp’s rifle, a .50 caliber weapon that would kill a buffalo. It only fired one round at a time, but one account says some 40 empty shells littered the ground around him when he was found. The Indians took that rifle, his horse and other equipment, but they left him unscalped as a testimony to his bully fight.
    The Indians who killed Hazlewood rode up Hubbard Creek to its headquarters and raided a settler’s house near the old Ledbetter salt walks in present Shackleford County. Soldiers from nearby Fort Griffin took up the trail and killed or captured the Indians.  
    Though several writers over the years have offered a version of the Hazlewood story, no one seems to have explained the old guns Mrs. May found that spring night 65 years after the battle. Nor has anything turned up indicating what happened to the vintage firearms beyond having been displayed for a time at a Breckenridge movie house.
***
    One of my earliest memories is tagging along with my granddad back in the early 1950s when he went to the Capitol every Sunday to check his mail.
    Yes, the big red granite building in downtown Austin used to have a post office known as the Capitol Station. All the state agencies got their mail there, but rental boxes also were available to the general public. And yes again, the government actually used to put mail in boxes on Sunday, though only once. On Saturday, as on every other day of the week, mail got placed in boxes or delivered twice a day.
    When I was about four, I got lost on one of those Sunday visits when Granddad and I were probably the only two people in the whole building. I wandered around the wide, silent halls crying until he finally found me, that day’s mail clutched tightly in his hand.
    With email and other forms of digital communication virtually (pun intended) having killed old-fashioned first class mail, it’s time to pay more attention to the history of all the hundreds if not thousands of post offices Texas has had over the years. Many have been closed and it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that as postal revenue continues to decline, more shuttered post offices will follow.
    Each of Texas’ 254 counties has its own postal history, but commonalities exist. The prime postal history story in any county has to do with how a particular post office got its name. Often, a spelling error or a mistake by the ubiquitous Washington bureaucrat will be the story behind an unusual name. The other standard tale is how a community went through several prospective post office names before the folks in D.C. finally gave their approval.
    The best example of that is Mobeetie. Back in the 1870s, folks in future Wheeler County wanted to call their town Sweetwater, but there was already a Sweetwater in Nolan County. So someone asked a friendly Indian how to say Sweetwater in whatever language he spoke. His reply was “mobeetie.” Later, the possibly made-up story goes, a cowboy was walking across the street when another Indian cautioned him not to step in a steaming pile of mobeetie.
    Another aspect of Texas postal history that transcends county lines is that post offices were more than a distribution point for written communication and published material such as newspapers and magazines. They amounted to the social center of a community. 
    Often, the post office was in the town’s general store, a place to buy groceries, clothes, barbed wire, horse tack, and candy from the barrel – anything people needed, all in one place.
    On the left border of the state, just across from New Mexico, is Yoakum County. Not organized until 1907, it still has only 7,000 or so residents.
    Settled in 1903, Sligo had the county’s first post office. Pat McHugh, the first resident, named the new community for Sligo County, Ireland. He and his family lived in a half dug out, but four years later he built a small house which became a way station for travelers as well as the post office.
    Yoakum County’s second post office was in Bronco, a town founded and named by H. “Gravy” Field. As postmaster, Field used the bed of a covered wagon, with wheels removed, as a post office.
    Field also operated a store. Since he was most often out riding the range looking after his cattle, his store was not only self-serve, it was based on the honor system. Cowboys came in, collected the supplies they needed, left a list of what they had bought and settled up later.
    Most of Bronco’s residents lived in dug outs, but Field had a wooden two-room house. When a neighbor woman died, because of the scarcity of wood in the county, they removed a partition from their house to build her a coffin. 
    W.J. Luna filed on four sections in the middle of Yoakum County. In the spring of 1906 he set up a post office in his home. They named the post office Plains, after the wide open space that constituted Yoakum County. 
    Originally from Canyon, Luna had lumber shipped from there to build a general store. When the store opened, he moved the post office there.
    While Sligo and Bronco have long since disappeared, Plains remains the county seat and one of only two towns in the county, the other being Denver City. (Don’t go there looking for any snow-covered peaks.)
    Of course, it does snow in Yoakum County. When a particularly heavy snow hit during the winter of 1917-18, the women who then served as postmaster, Mrs. Thomas W. Hague did extra duty by officiating at a funeral because no preacher was available.
    P.S. A genealogical researcher in Austin County is looking for information about two places she believes were post offices in that county back in the 1870s – Pittsville and Iron Creek. Both were near the historic town of San Felipe, which during the days of the Republic of Texas was a postal distribution center because it sat on two major postal routes, Austin to Houston and San Felipe to Velasco on the coast. If you know anything about those places, email me and I’ll pass it along.
SLS