11 minute read
The Panhandle Code: Feed Travelers by Kenyon Bennett
Through grit, generosity, and frontier hospitality, Belle Gray and fellow Panhandle pioneers braved the unforgiving Llano Estacado—feeding strangers, battling the elements, and shaping the rugged legacy of West Texas.
Texas Panhandle settlers endured hardships: living in sod dugouts and harboring an almost endless supply of dirt; killing skin-colored stinging scorpions that had eerie pinchers in the front and a barbed, curled, and slightly elongated tail in the back; shooting coiled venomous rattlesnakes, usually of the Western Diamondback variety; and ignoring the constant high winds on the Llano Estacado, also known as the Staked Plains, in a region that is part of the Southern Plains. These less than satisfactory experiences did not deter hardy pioneers from building the sod dugouts on their primitive homesteads and establishing large or small ranches or farms in the Panhandle during the 1880s and ’90s. Houses built from lumber came later.
These pioneers exhibited character traits common to the Panhandle during that era of the Old West: a resolute determination to survive and thrive, a local philosophy to be generous, and the desire to extend friendly hospitality to others. Feeding travelers was one vitally important unwritten code they followed. Pioneers who became “old timers” in the twentieth century bemoaned later generations’ lack of frontier generosity and hospitality. One homesteader, Belle Gray, whose husband was Tristam “Tuss” Gray, was recognized as a big-hearted, welcoming, and resourceful woman.
Why? Starting in 1888, Gray served countless meals free of charge to lanky cowboys and transients journeying between Plainview and Amarillo or vice versa in the Panhandle. Weary travelers often stayed the night at the Grays’ homestead where the family had established a ranch near Tule Creek and Tule Canyon. Gray’s laborious efforts to feed travelers were notable and unselfish actions.
What was traveling like for cowboys and others? Long. The distance today between Amarillo, first developing as a settlement in spring 1887, and Plainview, established in 1887, but chartered in 1888, is approximately seventy-seven miles. Tulia, a community the Grays helped to establish with W. G. Conners around 1889-90 in what became Swisher County, lay fifty-three miles south of Amarillo and twenty-six miles north of Plainview.
During a personal interview that is now housed at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, Gray revealed in a firsthand account what her life had been like when settling in the Panhandle.
The Grays had lived at Blanco Canyon in 1884, over eighty miles southeast of where Tulia would eventually be settled. When they arrived by the new Fort Worth and Denver City Railway service in Clarendon, Texas, in December 1887, they began traveling southwest to reach their ranchland.
“We got off the train at Clarendon and came across through the canyon over the roughest road I think I ever traveled in my life. When I got up here, I didn’t have any place to live, so after about three weeks, we built a dugout where we lived for about five years,” Gray said, pointing out that most area settlers’ first houses were dugouts.
“There was no town of Canyon then. Our dugout was the only stop between Plainview and Amarillo. There was always someone camped at our place from one end of the year to the other. We had a dugout full of beds for the boys to sleep on account of storms and blizzards outside in wintertime. In summertime, the boys slept out on the ground,” she said.
“I couldn’t begin to tell the meals I have cooked for people that passed through. Of course, they were almost all cowboys, and after Amarillo started, it was transients and people traveling to locate at Plainview and down in there,” Gray revealed.
Gray wanted to buy a sewing machine. Most likely with a gleam in her clear eyes and a pragmatic attitude, she relied upon her personal grit when forming a plan to meet her needs. Cooking for so many dust-covered cowboys and others at her primitive dugout allowed Gray a definitive means to obtain what she truly coveted.
“I needed a sewing machine, so I decided I would charge the transients 25¢ a meal until I got enough to buy it. I didn’t charge the cowboys anything. Mister Gray didn’t want me to charge the transients anything, but he was away, and I needed the machine so bad. I decided I would do it. I got the machine in less than a month.”
The cost? Thirty dollars.
Was Gray breaking an unwritten Panhandle code by charging for meals? Yes.
Her husband’s objections? Out the window.
Even a man of the cloth did not deter Gray from reaching her goal. “Mister Nance, the Christian preacher at Plainview, came through, but I decided he just as well pay as anyone else. After I got my machine, I didn’t charge anymore. The next time Mister Nance came through, he insisted on paying, but I wouldn’t take it anymore. There wasn’t anything else I wanted,” she stated.
The Grays, like most Panhandle families, required store-bought food and supplies to partially sustain their needs. “We got our food twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. We could go to Amarillo and buy all our supplies and clothing to last six months,” Gray explained.
“We kept dried fruit, canned corn and tomatoes, beans and potatoes, and we always had lots of meat. Our sugar, we got in the barrel. They didn’t have it in sacks. We bought coffee by the sack. Feeding so many people, it took a lot. I suppose we bought it by the thousand pounds,” she said. The family stored feed, flour, salt for the cattle, and chicken feed in a small separate dugout.
Gray felt that she cooked well, but sometimes the meal variety suffered. “It was beans and meat and bread and potatoes and potatoes and bread and meat and beans,” she joked.
“I used to get so tired of cooking the same thing. I was a good pie and cake maker at that time, and everybody was always hungry at mealtime, and I guess it tasted good to them,” she said.
Nocturnal noises sometimes awakened Gray from sleep. Coyotes yipped in high pitches at night. If wolves were nearby, their drawn-out howls broke the serenity of inky nighttime darkness blanketing the Southern Plains. Other wild animals slyly visited at nightfall.
Gray revealed an early event at the homestead. “When we came across the country over here, we heard a panther hollering. I woke Mister Gray. I said, ‘What is that?’ He went back to sleep. I said, ‘What is that?’” she revealed.
“Now, you stay awake,” she warned her husband. “I want to know what this is hollering.”
Tuss heard the outdoor noises arising from a point past their dugout. “It is a panther,” he replied.
“Where is the ax?” Gray immediately asked.
“I think it is off out there where we staked the horses,” he answered.
“One of the horses was so scared it pulled and broke the rope. The panther only hollered three times,” Gray remembered.
Entertainment provided a reprieve from loneliness in desolate locations. Owners of large ranches sometimes hosted dances that entertained local settlers. “We would go to the ranches and have a dance occasionally. We always danced all night and stayed all day and had all we could eat,” Gray said.
“Once, a bunch of us went over to the XIT Ranch and stayed two days and two nights and danced. The lady was not used to a bunch coming, so she did not know how much food to prepare. I remember she only made twelve lemon pies. This was not a taste for the people there to [for] the dances,” Gray said.
Although Comanches, a fierce nomadic Southern Plains people, were mostly relegated to the Fort Sill reservation in southwestern Indian Territory by 1890, some Panhandle settlers felt that uprisings could occur. Apaches lived on other reservations. “We had an Indian scare after Tulia was organized. We lived west of town about four miles. Mister Gray had been over to the breaks, and when he was coming home, they had the report out in town that the Indians were coming across. He said we must all come to town to stay. We came in that night and stayed all the next day and all the next night, but the Indians did not come. It was a false report,” Gray said.
Local families frightened by the rumors sequestered themselves in Tulia. The men “made a fort out of the wagons for the men to shoot behind. We had a good deal of fun, anyway. One girl said, ‘Gee whiz. I wish they would come on if they are coming. If there is going to be any fun, I want to have it.’ Everybody came from thirty miles around,” Gray recounted.
Gray and her family encountered additional perils on the Llano Estacado. “I have seen blizzards, storms, and prairie fires. There was one prairie fire I remember—it did not burn our house, but it did burn all our grass and burned fifteen head of cattle. The cattle would keep right in the fire until it killed them. Mister Gray came out and fought the fire and did not let it catch the house. We carried water in buckets and kept the house from burning,” Gray said.
Women desired neighborly visits. On occasion, pioneering women raising children in remote areas near Tulia grew despondent. They missed having female friends. Such was the case for Laura Word, married to Charles Thompson Word. Gray initiated the custom to “spend the day” with other women on neighboring ranches or farms.
Amarillo, Tulia, and Plainview have grown since 1890. According to the World Population Review in 2024, the population of Amarillo was 203,035; Tulia, 4,390; and Plainview, 19,180. Panhandle pioneers like Gray, once noted for their unbridled generosity, helped establish the settlements that became cities. Gray, like the other hardy settlers, staunchly observed the unwritten Texas Panhandle code: Feed travelers.
Kenyon Bennett, nonfiction historical writer, specializes in Old West adventures. She has passionately researched cattle drives originating in Texas, notorious Texas outlaws and gunslingers, brothers becoming cattlemen, a U.S. Dragoons expedition, and more.
Bennett grew up working on her family’s cattle ranches in Lampasas County, Texas. Her insider’s knowledge of actual cowboys and their dry humor helped foster her deep affinity for the Old West.
True West Magazine has published her features: “Bold and Lethal” (2018), “The Santa Fe Trail Beckoned the Mosty Brothers” (2021), and “Rowdy Cowboys, Outlaws, and Blood Feud” (2023). Bennett was a finalist for the 2024 DOWNING Journalism Award, sponsored by Women Writing the West, for “Rowdy Cowboys.”
Bennett’s historical work has appeared elsewhere. The Lampasas County Historical Commission published “Watering Station, Heaven or Hell” (2020). She presented “Henry Dodge and the Dodge-Leavenworth Dragoon Expedition of 1834” to a local historical society in 2024.
Bennett currently writes historical and modern-day features for The Dodgeville Chronicle and The Democrat Tribune, southwestern Wisconsin newspapers. Long-term projects on cattle drives and a young nineteenth-century Lampasas deputy sheriff also take her time.
Bennett earned her Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Education degrees and taught English for two decades.
