SHELTON, JOHN M. (1853-1923)

John M. Shelton, Panhandle rancher and businessman, was born in 1853. He was one of four children. His father and older brother gave him his initial boost in the cattle business, and he began his career working with various open-range outfits in Shackelford County. J. M. Porter, who grew up with him and was for twenty years his "top cowhand," later recalled seeing him "go up the trail, standing night guard, riding all day and wearing the same old blue wool shirt for forty days on a stretch." In 1889 Shelton and Porter arrived in Wheeler County and first located on Sherrill Creek. Shelton began building his holdings by buying out other small owners, and his initial brand was a standing J and a lying down (or lazy) S.

By 1890 he had accumulated between 1,500 and 2,000 cattle and began his Lazy J brand. Eventually his ranch came to encompass 100 sections, nearly the entire southwestern quarter of Wheeler County. He continued to lease and buy other sections on occasion. Shelton also owned rangelands in Wyoming and Montana, where he grazed as many as 10,000 steers. At a time when modes of ranching were changing, he continued the old practice of raising calves from the parent herd and growing steers up to four years before shipping them to Kansas pastures to be fattened for market.

Shelton always enjoyed riding with the cowboys and was a favorite among them. He married Flora Exum, and the couple boarded at the home of E. G. Thurmond in Mobeetie, where their daughter was born. Later the Sheltons had a home in Fort Worth, where two sons were added to the family. In July 1904 Shelton and Oscar P. Jones opened the First State Bank (later the First National Bank) of Shamrock. In 1913 Shelton sold most of his Wheeler County holdings and moved his family to Amarillo, where he erected a spacious brick house at 1700 Polk Street. In Amarillo he opened the John M. Shelton Loan Company, which provided money for Panhandle stockmen and farmers.

Even during lean times, Shelton was known for his generosity; he never deserted anyone after extending aid and gradually obtained interest in several regional banks. On May 1, 1915, Shelton bought 221,062 acres of the former LE range in Oldham County from the Prairie Cattle Company for $3.50 an acre. He sold the portion south of the Canadian River to the Matador Land and Cattle Company and purchased the 111,000-acre Bravo Ranch, formerly the XIT's Ojo Bravo Division, in Hartley County.

Shelton and his children subsequently developed these properties as the JJ and Bravo ranches, which became known worldwide for their high-grade herds of Hereford and black Angus cattle. At first, Shelton used the old LE brand, but later the family adopted the Lazy J that he introduced. Shelton maintained a reputation as a successful rancher and financier and as a hospitable cowman in the old Western tradition.

He died at a Fort Worth sanitarium on December 7, 1923, and was interred in Amarillo's Llano Cemetery. Shelton's children and their heirs continued to operate the ranches in Oldham and Hartley counties. His son Jimmie used a Standing J brand, while his daughter Martha, who married E. C. Houghton, Jr., and inherited the old Romero Canyon headquarters, continued the Lazy J brand. The Houghtons resided in the Shelton home in Amarillo until 1965, when they donated it as a permanent headquarters for the city's Junior League.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Amarillo Daily News, December 8, 1923. Ellis A. Davis and Edwin H. Grobe, comps., The New Encyclopedia of Texas (4 vols., 1929?). Millie Jones Porter, Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers (Clarendon, Texas: Clarendon Press, 1945).

H. Allen Anderson

EATON, NICK T. (ca. 1839-ca. 1895)

Nick T. Eaton, Panhandle rancher, was born about 1839 in Missouri and appeared in the Panhandle in 1878, when he brought a herd up from the vicinity of Fort Griffin. Among his hired trail drivers were George Finch, W. K. (Doc) Franz, and James P. (Lengthy) Sutton, all of whom stayed to work on Eaton's new ranch, which he established twenty-five miles west of the site of present Wheeler. This ranch covered a third of Wheeler County and a third of Gray County.

The headquarters, built out of cedar posts, was located on Hackberry Creek, a tributary of McClellan Creek, six miles northwest of the locale of present McLean near the North Fork of the Red River. On his range Eaton ran 3,000 head of cattle that carried his U Bar U brand. Finch served as the first wagon boss but became an invalid after a year and died in 1888. He was succeeded as wagon boss by Doc Franz, who as state surveyor for the Clay District had helped survey the Panhandle in 1869-73. Franz also served as range foreman. Thomas T. McGee, later Hemphill county sheriff, was among those hired to drive U Bar U cattle to Dodge City.

Eaton was a charter member of the Panhandle Stock Association, formed in Mobeetie in 1880, and served consistently on the association's executive board. He was also on grand juries, county commissions, and school boards. Eaton and Henry Cresswell became partners about 1880 in a cattle enterprise in which they used a Forked Lightning brand. Their cattle grazed on Eaton's U Bar U range until 1889, when the partners discontinued the brand, shipped out the cattle of that marking, and sold them.

Marvin V. Sanders, later Wheeler county sheriff, who worked for Eaton, told of one episode in which Doc Franz and Lengthy Sutton discovered a band of reservation Indians slaughtering some Forked Lightning steers near the U Bar U headquarters. Sutton allegedly rode eighteen miles to Fort Elliott in forty minutes to alert the military. Troops came to escort the Indians back to their reservation, and the government later reimbursed Eaton and Cresswell for the cattle. In 1885 Eaton filed an injunction against Abner P. Blocker to try to prevent him from driving the first XIT Ranch herd across the U Bar U rangeland to Dallam County. However, the case was "dismissed at cost of plaintiff."

After 1889 Eaton, who was approaching fifty, ended his bachelorhood by marrying in Kansas City. There he maintained a palatial mansion for his bride and commuted to his Panhandle ranch during cattle-shipping times. He was known among the "cowpuncher element" as an expert "brand man," straightforward in all his dealing. Eaton reportedly turned the U Bar U's registry over to J. P. Sutton after 1892. Some accounts related that Eaton later committed suicide after going broke.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Millie Jones Porter, Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers (Clarendon, Texas: Clarendon Press, 1945). Pauline D. and R. L. Robertson, Cowman's Country: Fifty Frontier Ranches in the Texas Panhandle, 1876-1887 (Amarillo: Paramount, 1981).

H. Allen Anderson

SIMPSON, GEORGE ALLEN (1852-1937)

George Allen Simpson, buffalo hunter and pioneer settler in the Panhandle, was born on February 28, 1852, in Boone County, Missouri, the son of John and Marietta (Foster) Simpson. His father died when George was a small boy. His mother, who also had two daughters, later married a man named Gibbs. Gibbs moved his new family to Nebraska and then Colorado while hunting buffalo for railroad construction crews. In 1867 the family traveled down the Goodnight-Loving Trail to South Texas. They purchased cattle on the way and planned to start a herd of their own.

In 1868 Gibbs's sons Elijah and Billy trailed the herd to Baxter Springs, Kansas. After living in Ellis County, Texas, for five years, the Gibbses and their trail hands drove a herd north over the Chisholm Trail, but danger from Indians and rustlers forced Gibbs to dispose of his cattle near Caldwell, Kansas. At Fort Dodge he formed a buffalo-hunting group with Elijah and Billy and his stepson, George A Simpson. George's mother and two sisters cooked for the hunters. They began their operations in the upper Arkansas valley in eastern Colorado. At Bent's Fort, Simpson met Sylvania Wood and her family, whom he accompanied to the Canadian valley in the Texas Panhandle in the spring of 1875.

The hunters established their operations at Hidetown (later Mobeetie), near the newly established Fort Elliott. With such men as John R. Cook and Sylvania's brother Buck, Simpson hunted the entire Panhandle-South Plains region for the next two years, until the buffalo were nearly exterminated. The men gradually made a great profit from the hides they shipped to Fort Griffin and Dodge City through the Rath and Hamburg firm. On October 4, 1877, George A. Simpson and Sylvania Wood became the first couple on record to be married in the Panhandle.

A Lieutenant Taylor performed the ceremony at Fort Elliott, and Lt. Theodore H. Eckerson, the post adjutant, drew up the certificate, on which he erroneously recorded the date as October 5. During the next two years the Simpsons lived near Junction in Kimble County, where they operated a gristmill. However, thieves stole most of their horses and cattle, and in 1880 they moved back to Wheeler County. They homesteaded land on Russell Creek near Mobeetie for five years and later bought property on Dry and Clear creeks in Hemphill County.

The Simpsons produced vegetables and supplies for the local market, raised a few cattle, and were said to have grown the first domesticated flowers (zinnias) in the Panhandle. They had two sons and five daughters. Simpson helped organize Hemphill County in 1887 and was a member of its first commissioners' court. For sixty years the Simpsons were prominent citizens in the town of Canadian. George died there on November 21, 1937; Sylvania lived her remaining years with her daughter at Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she died on September 30, 1939. She was buried at Canadian next to her husband. The Simpsons' land on Clear Creek later became the site of the Canadian country club.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: John R. Cook, The Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest Plains (Topeka, Kansas: Crane, 1907; rpt., New York: Citadel Press, 1967). Sallie B. Harris, comp., Hide Town in the Texas Panhandle: 100 Years in Wheeler County and Panhandle of Texas (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer, 1968). James M. Oswald, "History of Fort Elliot," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 32 (1959). F. Stanley [Stanley F. L. Crocchiola], Rodeo Town (Canadian, Texas) (Denver: World, 1953).

H. Allen Anderson

O'LAUGHLIN, THOMAS (1844-1923)

Thomas O'Laughlin (O'Loughlin in many sources), the first white to settle his family permanently in the Texas Panhandle, was born in Ireland in 1844. He immigrated with his family to the American Midwest and during the Civil War worked as a government teamster at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There he met Ellen Gilmore, whose parents had immigrated from Ireland to Dubuque, Iowa. They were married at her hometown in 1869. Soon afterward they moved to the Kansas frontier and started a small dugout store on the Santa Fe Railroad at Pierceville, Ellsworth County. There they had two children.

In 1874 the O'Laughlins were compelled to flee their homestead after being warned of a party of Cheyennes coming north on a rampage. These disgruntled warriors destroyed the family's possessions and burned the dugout. After that the family went to Lakin, Kansas, where Tom's brother John ran a store. During a Christmas visit to Dubuque in December, while O'Laughlin was in Texas hunting buffalo, his wife gave birth to a third child. In the spring of 1875 the O'Laughlins moved from Dodge City to the Panhandle, following the troops sent to establish Fort Elliott.

After camping with the troops on Cantonment Creek, they squatted on a section of land halfway between the new fort and the buffalo camp of Hidetown. Three months after they settled there, the O'Laughlins received word of the death of their daughter from rabies. Having been bitten by an infected skunk, she had been left behind in Lakin, where medical attention was available. When the town of Sweetwater, later Mobeetie, was founded on O'Laughlin's section, he was persuaded to trade it in for 100 lots in the new townsite.

The O'Laughlins built a restaurant and a boarding house out of pickets and sod in Mobeetie. Charles Goodnight was said to have passed the night there in 1876 when he first came to the Panhandle to establish the JA Ranch. A year later his wife, Mary Dyer Goodnight, reportedly spent her first night in the Panhandle with the O'Laughlins. The family saw their share of quarrels settled by guns; the fatal shooting of Granger Dyer by John McCabe occurred in front of O'Laughlin's restaurant. Once the buffalo were killed off, O'Laughlin started a cattle herd, while his wife continued to operate the boarding house.

After Wheeler County was organized in 1879 he often served as a juror. In 1885 the O'Laughlins expanded their business into the frame Grand Central Hotel, one of the town's most ornate buildings. The O'Laughlins' younger son died in 1895. During this time, O'Laughlin began breeding Hereford and shorthorn cattle on land in Gray County. In 1901, after Mobeetie declined, the O'Laughlin family moved to Miami, in Roberts County. There Miles, the remaining son, subsequently became an outstanding citizen.

In 1904 he married Annie Elizabeth Earl, who had worked in Mobeetie as a governess to the children of "Big Johnny" Jones. Miles O'Laughlin, who had three sons, took over the family's ranching operations after the death of his father in Miami on February 23, 1923. His mother died in Miami on January 18, 1931. Both are buried in the Miami cemetery. After Miles's death in 1942 successive generations of O'Laughlins continued to call Miami their home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ernest R. Archambeau, "The First Federal Census in the Panhandle, 1880," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 23 (1950). Sallie B. Harris, comp., Hide Town in the Texas Panhandle: 100 Years in Wheeler County and the Panhandle of Texas (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer, 1968). History of Miami and Roberts County (Miami, Texas: Roberts County Historical Committee, 1976). Millie Jones Porter, Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers (Clarendon, Texas: Clarendon Press, 1945). Glenn Shirley, Temple Houston (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).

H. Allen Anderson

DUBBS, EMANUEL (1843-1932)

Emanuel Dubbs, pioneer, minister, and county judge, was born on March 21, 1843, on a farm near New Franklin, Ohio, the youngest of the six children of Daniel and Elizabeth (Meckley) Dubbs. He attended Mount Union College and at the outbreak of the Civil War enlisted in Company I of the First Ohio Infantry. After the war he moved to Elkhart County, Indiana, and engaged in the lumber business with his brother. He married Angeline Freed in 1868.

After a fire destroyed his sawmill in 1871, Dubbs and his wife moved to Kansas, where he worked for a time with railroad-construction crews and then engaged in buffalo hunting and dairy farming. He was said to have built the first house in Dodge City. In 1873 he opened a dairy farm and beer garden on Duck Creek about five miles from Dodge. He served beer and "milk punch" to passersby, and soon his "Buttermilk Ranch" became a favorite refreshment stop for travelers.

In 1874 he accompanied A. C. Myers and Charles Rath to the Texas Panhandle and helped construct the buildings at the Adobe Walls trading post. He claimed to have taken part in the second battle of Adobe Walls, on June 27, 1874 (see RED RIVER WAR). The accounts of William (Billy) Dixon and others at Adobe Walls do not mention him, however, and the most reliable sources indicate that he was not present at the battle; Andy Johnson, an eyewitness of the battle, stated that Dubbs was at Dodge City at the time.

Dubbs continued hunting and reportedly had two more close brushes with Indians. He also rode in the posse that broke up "Dutch" Henry Born's horse-stealing ring. In 1875 Dubbs and his hunting party established a headquarters camp near the site of present Clarendon. His dairy cows all died of milk fever, but by 1877 he had accumulated about 400 longhorn cattle. Weary of a barkeeper's occupation, Dubbs sold his ranch and in the spring of 1878 moved his wife and three small sons to Sweetwater Creek in Wheeler County. Near Mobeetie he built a rock house with a dirt floor and roof and made money by selling meat and vegetables to the troops at Fort Elliott. Two more sons were added to the Dubbs family in Wheeler County.

When the county was organized in 1879, Dubbs was elected its first judge. Lacking practical experience in law, he often made decisions with little consideration for legal technicalities. He was shortly compelled to resign and go to Dallas to stand trial for ruling a series of arrests by a deputy United States marshall illegal and releasing the prisoners. He was acquitted, and in January 1880 was unanimously elected to serve again as county judge. He was subsequently reelected to that office in 1884, 1886, and 1888.

In 1890 he moved to a ranch northwest of Clarendon near his former buffalo-hunting campsite in Donley County. Having always been active in church work, Dubbs became a Disciples of Christ minister in 1896 and was placed in charge of that denomination's mission work in the Panhandle. In 1898 he was made pastor of the Christian church at Clarendon, where he made his home until 1922. Dubbs contributed several sketches, including his own reminiscences of his early years as a buffalo hunter, to the book Pioneer Days in the Southwest, published in 1909. His wife died in 1910, and after 1922 Dubbs moved to Amarillo to be near his sons. He died in July 1932 and was buried in Clarendon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison, Adobe Walls: The History and Archaeology of the 1874 Trading Post (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986). Virginia Browder, Donley County: Land O' Promise (Wichita Falls, Texas: Nortex, 1975). Seymour V. Connor et al., Battles of Texas (Waco: Texian Press, 1967; 3d ed. 1980). Millie Jones Porter, Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers (Clarendon, Texas: Clarendon Press, 1945).

H. Allen Anderson

COOK, JOHN R. (1844-1917)

John R. Cook, soldier, hunter, and author, noted for his narrative of buffalo hunting in the Panhandle, was born at Mount Gilead, Ohio, on December 19, 1844. In 1857 he moved with his parents to Lawrence, Kansas, thence to Peru, Indiana, where the family remained until 1861. Cook joined Company E, Twelfth Kansas Infantry, at Lawrence, Kansas, on September 2, 1862, and, after defending the Kansas border against guerrillas and operating in the Arkansas region, he was mustered out of the service at Little Rock, Arkansas, on June 30, 1865. He located 160 acres in Labette County, Kansas, in 1867 and became the township constable.

In 1873 he traveled to Denison, Texas; later the same year he returned to Kansas. In the spring and summer of 1874 he prospected around Santa Fe, New Mexico; in the fall he went to the Texas Panhandle, where he arrived for the first big year of buffalo hunting. He remained in Texas until 1879 and was one of the organizers of Wheeler County. He returned to Kansas, became a temperance orator, met and married Alice Victoria Maddux in 1883, and moved to the Dakota Territory. In 1892 he moved to Eugene, Oregon, in the Cascade Mountains; there he wrote The Border and the Buffalo (1907). In 1906 he returned to Kansas, where he died on March 25, 1917. He was buried in the Kansas Soldier's Home at Fort Dodge, Kansas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: John R. Cook, The Border And The Buffalo: An Untold Story Of The Southwest Plains (Topeka, Kansas: Crane, 1907; Rpt., New York: Citadel Press, 1967).