Post, Planned as a Utopia
C. W. Post was an inventor. His imagination ran the gamut—designing better farm implements, improving digestion with breakfast foods, creating a model town, and making rain by detonating dynamite—a genius who lived before folks talked about bipolar. They called him peculiar. Born in 1854, Post grew up in Illinois, attended two years of college at […]
A Mother to the Cowboys
She was called “Mary” by her husband Charles Goodnight, the best-known cattle rancher in Texas. Her distinguished Tennessee family referred to her as “Molly.” And she was known affectionately as “Mother of the Texas Panhandle” by the cowhands she doctored, fed, and counseled. Mary Ann Dyer Goodnight was loved and admired by all. She was […]
Post, Founded By a Cereal Magnate
C. W. Post was an inventor. His imagination ran the gamut—designing better farm implements, improving digestion with breakfast foods, creating a model town, and making rain by detonating dynamite—a genius that lived before folks talked about bipolar, instead they called him peculiar. Born in 1854, Post grew up in Illinois, attended two years of college […]
From “Booger Town” to “All-American City”
A friend told me that in the 1920s her father’s job of hauling construction materials in the Texas Panhandle required that he drive through Borger. The place had such a bad reputation that her father carried a loaded .45 on the seat beside him. On one occasion a man jumped on the truck’s passenger-side running […]
Texas Panhandle Nobility
In the late 1870s word spread across England of the fabulous money—returns of thirty-three to fifty percent on investments—to be made in American cattle ranching. Two British aristocrats, Sir Edward Marjoribanks the Baron of Tweedmouth and his brother-in-law John Campbell Hamilton Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, established the “Rocking Chair Ranche” in 1883. Courting dreams of […]
Texas Capitol Paid For in Land
The Texas Constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres in the Panhandle to fund construction of the state’s fourth capitol. Big land giveaways in Texas started in 1749 when the Spanish Colonial government began establishing villas along the Rio Grande. Mexico continued the practice of granting empresarial contracts to establish colonies in Texas. The Republic […]
English Nobleman in Big Spring
Texas claims its share of frontier characters—buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, gunslingers, and cowboys—who roamed and sometimes helped settle the vast western regions. The remittance man, although a less well-known frontier character, represents a few hundred wealthy Europeans, mostly Englishmen, who found themselves exiled in the wilds of West Texas. Although these nobles lost their positions […]