(mellow acoustic music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is David Murrah, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Lazy S Ranch."

David, (claps hands) thank you so much for being here.

- You bet, I'm glad to be here.

- I'm so happy to have you.

Before we get too deep into the book, though, I want to give everybody listening a place setting.

So what part of Texas are we talking about?

What time in Texas are we talking about?

Set the scene for us a little bit.

- Well, it's a really unique setting, particularly relative to this part of the country.

It's, the story occurs in the heart of the Llano Estacado.

Now, Llano Estacado's the high plains, southern high plains of Texas and eastern New Mexico, and this ranch is set in the center of that in the most arid, treeless, waterless place that there was.

No running water, no trees or anything in that particular area.

The Llano Estacado runs from about Amarillo on the north to Midland on the south, and then from the eastern side of Lubbock over to the Pecos River escarpment in New Mexico, about 200 miles either way.

And this ranch sat right in the middle of it.

And the story is set around the turn of the beginning of the 20th century, late 1800s and early 1900s.

- Now, you may have partially answered this question, but in the book, you call this part of Texas the Last Frontier.

Why is that?

- Well, (clears throat) the county where the ranch was, Cochran County, Texas, was the last county in the state to be organized.

It wasn't organized until 1925, and up until then, I think in 1920, there were less than 60 people living in that whole county.

And so it truly was Texas's Last Frontier.

That term comes from the title of the county history there that a friend of mine wrote many, many years ago, "Cochran County, Texas: Texas's Last Frontier."

- Before we dive into the subject matter of the book, though, I want to ask you, how did you come to the study of ranching history?

Why did you make that your main focus of scholarship?

- Well, it all tied to this particular place.

I, in 1967, moved out to Morton, Texas, the county seat of Cochran County, the one I just talked about, to teach school, my second year to teach public school.

And, at the same time, I decided to work on my master's degree.

So I enrolled in the master's program at Texas Tech, which is 60 miles away.

And so when it came time to write a thesis, I began to look around for a topic and the same friend that wrote the book, "Texas: Last Frontier," he said, "You ought to check over at Texas Tech.

"They just got some of the records "of the old Slaughter ranch that was headquartered here.

"You might want to look into that, "maybe doing that for your thesis."

Well, I did, and it turned into a thesis, which turned into a PhD dissertation, which turned into a full-time job with Texas Tech.

And so, meanwhile, one book led to another and I was asked to write two more ranch histories, as a result of it.

- It's kind of interesting you started with this area, this ranch, and I won't say you're finished, 'cause I'm sure you're working on something else, but it's kind of come full circle.

You've come back to the same place.

- Exactly, and, in fact, I make this point in the book.

I began with this story and perhaps well may end with it, and, but it's been quite an adventure and I am so grateful for all of the circumstances that helped to bring that together.

It truly made a difference in my life, and I had the opportunity to do that.

- Well, you mentioned the papers at Texas Tech.

How do you do the research for something like this?

Is it just going into archives, reading letters, or what is that like?

- That's it, exactly.

What I discovered when I went over there to see what they had, my first visit to the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech, and they brought out a box of papers they had just gotten and they turned out to be the correspondence between CC Slaughter, the principal put together, and his oldest son, George, and their correspondence with one another, beginning about 1890 to George's death in 1915.

And so I looked through it and I thought, you know, I think there's a story here.

And certainly, it was.

And so I just went over there every Saturday and meticulously worked through that collection and found the basic story.

After I came to Texas Tech and went to work for the Southwest Collection, I was able to collect a whole lot more of the Slaughter records from different family members, and they're still collecting Slaughter records to this day.

- Well, it was a large ranch, as we'll discuss, so I'm sure there are a lot of records for it.

Well, let's dive in.

Let's talk about CC Slaughter.

Tell us about who he was.

- I'm sorry, the- - Tell us about CC.

- CC Slaughter.

He is part of, he's really part of the, one of the first families of Texas, so to speak.

His father, George Webb Slaughter, and family moved here 1830 into Sabine County.

And then, George Webb Slaughter, his father participated in the revolution, was a courier for Sam Houston, and he began to get into the cattle business in the 1850s.

And his family moved up the Trinity River to the north of us, Freestone County, ranch there, and then moved up to the middle Brazos area of Palo Pinto County west of Fort Worth in 1857.

And that was still a frontier, but they were raising cattle.

They were raising cattle well before the Civil War.

And CC, by that time, he, CC was born in 1837, and so when his family moved along the Trinity River, well, he was in his 20s when they moved to Palo Duro, not Palo Duro Canyon, but to the Brazos Valley of Palo Pinto, he was in his early 20s.

He married right at the beginning of the Civil War, 1861, and he and his first wife had five children, I believe, and then she passed away and he remarried.

So you had, he had two families, 10 children in all, nine of whom lived to adults.

And CC and his father and his brothers began to drive cattle up the Chisholm Trail in the 1870s.

Actually, they had accumulated a pretty good fortune even before then.

It all gets involved in what happened to the cattle market.

The Civil War created an appetite for beef in this country, and the price of cattle went sky-high.

And, of course, after the Civil War, Texas didn't have much, except it had cattle, and if you could figure out a way to get 'em to the market, and the Slaughters first drove cattle to Shreveport, Louisiana, and did very well.

That's where they really got their start, and went into banking.

And so, by the mid-1870s when they're driving up the trail, well, they were already pretty well established.

And that's before he even established his big West Texas ranches.

- I want to ask about Charles Goodnight, because CC had a kind of a relationship with him.

They were contemporaries, but I think everybody knows the name Charles Goodnight, but not everybody knows the name CC Slaughter.

- That is true, and that's one of the things I've wrestled with over the years.

To compare the two, they're so similar.

I mean, they were contemporaries.

They grew up just a few miles apart.

They both tried to go to Mexico together after the Civil War.

They didn't want to stay in the state for awhile.

And, in fact, CC was wounded by a accident on that expedition.

But that time, they kind of split their ways and Charles Goodnight went on to partner with Oliver Loving.

Of course, they drove the Oliver Loving Trail.

I contend that there's a whole lot more myth to Goodnight than there is to Slaughter.

And some people would argue with me, but the best thing I can point to is while Goodnight had quite a reputation as a frontier gunman cowboy type, he also lost two fortunes and was pretty penniless at the time that he died in 1929.

But the other thing that he did, he outlived Slaughter by 10 years, and that's just long enough to tell his story to young historians like J. Evetts Haley, who came along and copied all of that down and wrote the biography, "Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman."

And (sighs) some people would probably disagree, but I think he just kind of painted a little larger picture than was really right.

- A Texan painting a larger picture?

(David chuckles) I... (sighs) - Well, let me give you an example of that.

You know, in a lot of these, the movies that you see about Goodnight, you know, and particularly, his meeting Quanah Parker and all of this in Palo Duro Canyon, but I ran across a letter one time that said that when Goodnight got word that the Indians were coming, he sent a rider to Fort Elliott to fetch the soldiers to come and protect them.

(Christine chuckles) That's not the image that you get when you read Haley's book on Goodnight.

- Well, let's stick with CC, since he's our topic today.

(David laughs) How did he, so he started, before he started the Lazy, he had another ranch that he started in West Texas.

Tell us about that one.

- Yes, his first major ranch in West Texas was the Long S Ranch, as he called it.

And he acquired it, it was out in the Big Spring area, and it lay upon the right of way, not the right of way, but when the Texas Pacific Railroad surveyed through there, the state gave them 20 sections of land for every mile they were going to build, and so they got every other section.

So Slaughter, at one time, bought 128,000 acres of that land.

Now, it was kind of checkerboarded, so he had to buy the individual sections from the state or whoever would file on it.

Anyway, he was able to put together about 250,000 acres that he owned there, plus he leased or just used open range land.

And, at one time, he was using about a million acres of land that stretched from south of Big Spring all the way to Lamesa, which is just 60 miles south of Lubbock.

So there was 100, 120 miles there you would go, it was all Slaughter country in the 1870s and '80s.

But he didn't own all of that.

He only owned about 250,000 of that.

But that was the, what he called the Long S Ranch.

- So this book isn't about the Long Ranch, this is about the Lazy S Ranch.

Why did he decide to sell off that parcel and start over again with this new ranch?

- Well, actually he didn't.

- Oh.

- He simply expanded.

You know, by the 1890s, you know, the country out there was beginning to fill up with settlers, and he had to make some decisions.

But he had a couple of fellows approach him in 1897.

Two fellows, particularly one, a fellow named Fount Oxsheer, and Fount Oxsheer had ranched out in that country on just open range land, and Oxsheer ended up over in this Cochran County area west of Lubbock in the 1880s and '90s with the Beal Brothers.

But the '90s were a tough time on ranchers out there.

The drought, and they went broke, and more or less went out business and began to look for financial partners.

Meanwhile, another factor.

Back to Charles Goodnight.

Goodnight had sold off his cattle and a neighboring rancher out there had bought those cattle, and then he decided not to keep them and he put 'em up for sale in 1897, and Oxsheer wanted to buy 'em.

And he approached, went to Dallas to the bank, where, bank where Slaughter owned in Dallas, and wanted to borrow the money to buy those Goodnight cattle.

And Goodnight said, "No, I'm not gonna loan you the money.

"I'll buy them.

"I want to buy 'em, myself."

Because Slaughter had gotten into improved cattle, and these were improved Hereford cattle that Goodnight had upbred.

And so he made a deal with Oxsheer to board those cattle for him, and Slaughter bought this herd, sight unseen, for $50,000, which, you know, in today's money would be, oh, a couple of million dollars, I guess.

- A lot of money, yeah.

- And so he bought those, and then he began to learn a little more about that country.

And what was so unique about that opportunity was, back on his old ranch, the Long S, these homesteaders were coming in and settling on the sections that he could not buy, because they were reserved by the state.

But out there, there was about 200, three, 400,000 acres of land that the state had given to various unorganized counties, some 50 counties, and they had given each county a block of land, four leagues or 17,000 acres each.

So you could go out there and buy one of those pastures, 17,000 acres, and no homesteaders.

Well, that's what Slaughter wanted.

So he jumped at the opportunity, made a deal with Oxsheer to buy as much of that land as he can.

In fact, he had to send, use secret agents like Oxsheer to go to these various counties to buy it because, by this time, most of the counties are controlled by farmers.

And the last thing they want is some big cattleman coming in there and buying that land.

So he did it kind of stealth-wise, and went out and they put together, they actually had 300,000 acres under contract, but they were only able to sell, acquire 250,000 acres.

And so that's what's one of the really unique things about this book is that Slaughter did that at a time when no other big ranches were being formed.

This was past the big ranch era.

But he put together this ranch between 1898 and 1901.

- Yeah, you call it the, and it probably was, the last big ranching operation- - [David] Exactly.

- That the state saw.

So his, you describe his intention of putting together this massive, you know, one of the last big ranches, as kind of a legacy for his family.

- That, see, he was in his 60s when he started this, (clears throat) and he just, he wanted to make it an indivisible empire, what he called a living insurance policy, and he said "By darn, it is not to be divided or sold "until at least the death of the last of my children."

Okay, he made that statement in 1898.

The last of his children died in 1964, I believe.

But, unfortunately, the family divided it two years after Colonel Slaughter died.

He just, he failed in his documentation to make a tight contract there that was unbreakable.

He expressed his desire, but he never put it in such terminology that it couldn't be broken.

- Well, and I'll jump ahead a little bit.

We might have to jump back, but with nine living adult, well, it was eight by the time he died, adult children, that's a lot of people with a lot of different interests.

- It is.

In fact, that's another thing that's, it's sort of unique about this story.

I got to thinking about, there are, you know, at that time, families were large.

My mother was one of 13 children, but to have a large, wealthy family is fairly unique.

Wealthy people typically didn't do that, but Slaughter's family was actually over two different families, had by its first wife, and they were a frontier family.

They grew up out on the frontier.

You know, the Indians were just 20 miles away when, where they lived, and the second family was a Dallas high society, urban society.

So this time period from the 1860s to 1900, he's got these two families.

And so, there's almost an immediate dichotomy between the two of them.

And so, but that's who he intended, for his nine children, plus his wife.

Of course, she was 15 years younger than he was, and so she was going to outlive him, but that was his desire.

And so he put together this ranch and did a great job.

He was a shrewd cattleman and a businessman, and he made the ranch a model show place.

He put those Goodnight cattle in there, and then he spent a fortune buying the best Hereford bulls in America to breed those cattle.

- You talk about this land.

You describe it as kind of desolate.

I mean, there's no, there's very little water, there's no trees, but there's also no infrastructure.

I mean, they had to build this land up to be, they had to put in phone lines.

I mean, you, there's a little bit of, like, a mini history of infrastructure in, hidden this book, because they had to make everything to make the ranch work.

- Yes.

They had to haul fence posts early on from as far away as Colorado City.

Now, the railroad finally did build through over to Portales, New Mexico.

So they were about 50 miles from a railroad to haul fence posts and wire in.

But one of the first things they did was fencing.

And then, of course, the key factor was water, and he did that by windmills.

He had, I believe, 44 windmills on that ranch, and he had some pretty, he put in double windmills at most places.

He had built a dirt tank, and then have two windmills there to ensure that he'd always have enough water.

So he put the money into the ranch to make it work.

- I want to talk about his son George, because he seemed like a driving force in making sure this ranch was working while he was still alive.

- George was the oldest and probably, the wisest and most practical.

He'd grown up on the ranch.

He became a ranch manager at 20 years old.

He managed the Running Water Ranch for his dad.

That was up near Plainview, Texas, until they sold it, and then George went into banking, himself, at Roswell.

But then, he took over the management of this ranch after, when his dad put it together, and he helped put it together, as well.

And it all would've worked, had George lived.

But, unfortunately, he was struck by lightning in 1915, died a couple of days later from a heart attack apparently related to the lightning, and the family, the leadership, and particularly, his younger brothers who were running the ranch at the time, it all began to kind of disintegrate after that.

But, in all fairness, you have to take into account the circumstances.

1915 cattle prices were shooting up because of the war in Europe.

But 1917 and '18 was terrible drought out in that area.

And when the war ended, the price of cattle collapsed.

And so anyone was going to lose money.

But, unfortunately, these younger brothers had already spent all the reserve money that they had.

And so, it helped to end the ranch.

- I was gonna ask about that.

There, you can kind of see, even before George dies, there's a little bit of hints of what's to come.

There's some money that goes missing, at one point.

They want to pay themselves dividends before maybe they should.

I mean, there's just a little bit of foreshadowing, I think, in this story.

- Exactly.

Well, I did a quick comparative with another ranch, the Pitchfork Ranch that I did the history on, and, one year, while the Slaughters were paying 150% dividend, I think, the Pitchfork paid a 6% dividend on their value.

That's the difference.

Those younger brothers, all they saw was that this ranch was gonna be a money cow, and so they gave themselves, you know, 10, $15,000 dividends, which, again, like $150,000 or more today.

It just wasn't fair to the ranch, itself, to do that.

You know, if you're gonna farm or ranch in West Texas, one thing you better learn is you better have a cash reserve, because not every year is going to be a good year, by any means.

- Yes.

I want to ask you, too, there's an amusing anecdote about how CC would come to the ranch and he had modified an old army ambulance?

Can you talk about that?

- He, you know, we think of, well, they must have had a hard time getting around.

He would get on the train in Dallas, ride the train out to Big Spring or Colorado City.

His son would pick him up there in this modified ambulance, which was a big stagecoach, if you will, but it had beds in it and so forth.

Sort of a early day Winnebago.

Team of matched horses to pull it.

He would tour all of his ranches from there out to the ranch at West Texas.

Take just three days to go across country, that 150, 200 miles, and then when he'd get through touring it, 50 more miles over to Portales, get on the train there up to Amarillo and back to Dallas.

And he could do all of that in a week's time.

- Not bad, not bad.

We're running a little bit short on time, (claps hands) so we've got about three minutes left.

I know we haven't probably hit all the high points.

Is there anything else you want to say, or any points you want to sum up for everybody?

- Well, first, I want to be sure and thank Ted and Nancy Paup for underwriting this series.

They have done so much for the history of West Texas ranching by designating funds for these books, and I am so grateful to that.

It's been sort of a rebirth of ranching interest history, thanks to their interest.

This book, I think, you know, it's got a very narrow focus, in terms of geography, but I think the broader story was to have appeal to almost anyone of what can happen in a family.

And, you know, and perhaps there's some lessons in there to learn, that if you make a big crop one year, don't spend all your money that year.

Save some of it for hard times.

- (chuckles) That's a good point.

And I want to say, I'm no ranching historian, but you're right.

This book, the story is more, it's a story of a family, at its heart.

It's a story of hard times, of struggle, of not, of good times, but it's really more universal than I think people would assume.

So I would hope people would pick it up and read about it, because, and it's written so well.

It's so easy to read, for a non-ranching historian.

- Well, and, of course, the family, many of 'em came out ahead.

There's the Slaughter Oil Field, one of the richest in Texas, that's laid underneath that ranch, and that's produced 2 billion barrels of oil since.

- Yes, some of 'em got very lucky.

- Some of 'em did very well.

- In the end, which, of course, they could have never imagined, I'm sure, in the 1800s when they were buying this land.

Well, thank you so much for coming.

Thank you for talking and telling this wonderful story.

I really appreciate it.

- My pleasure.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

Well, that is all the time we have today.

The book, again, is called, "The Rise and Fall of the Lazy S Ranch."

I was talking with David Murrah.

Thank you so much for joining us, and I will see you again soon.

(mellow acoustic music)