A Walk Across Texas

Chapter Four

Chapter Four We walked past cattle Fat as big whales They stared at us And, swatted flies with their tails. Walk across Texas With its wonderful sights. Walk across Texas With its beautiful nights. Coyotes woke me up singing a wild symphony about a mile off in some pastureland. I lay there and listened and then kicked my sleeping bag off and crawled out of the Highway Hilton. Eddie had the coffee started and it smelled delicious. We drank coffee and talked about our coming day. Sharon Ellzey, owner of KEYE, the radio station in Perryton, had requested that we come and be on the early coffee hour program that she hosted each day. “I’ll give you all of the coffee you want plus I promise you will have a good time,” she said. “You are bound to be a hit. My gosh, three guys your age doing something like this. Hey the listeners are bound to find this interesting.” “We may become the next Edward R. Murrow,” said Eddie as we loaded up and headed for town. Sharon greeted us warmly. She’s a pretty woman with rust colored hair cut short. She is energetic and enthusiastic. We talked for a half hour, telling why we were taking a walk across Texas and why we felt anyone could do the same kind of thing if they just set their mind to it. After the show ended I visited for a few minutes with Bob Byer, the general manager. He is a retired marine and worked as a combat correspondent dealing with newspapers and broadcast media during his career. When he retired he heard about the job here in Perryton. He called and they said they needed someone with experience like his, someone they could trust. He gave them his background and he was hired. “I lived in a small town in Wisconsin. As a matter-of-fact there were only twenty-seven in my graduating class. So I took the job, and yes, we like it here,” he said. We drove back to where we had quit walking the day before and began our daily trek through Ochiltree County, which borders Oklahoma, and is in the Texas High Plains, located 120 miles northeast of Amarillo. We had passed from farming land and had reached the ranching country. The county spreads over 907 square miles of level prairies that are sliced through by Wolf Creek, South Wolf Creek, Palo Duro Creek, and Chiquita Creek. Native grasses and wheat, grain sorghum, corn, and alfalfa all grow on the clay and loam soils. The economy is helped by oil and gas production. Irrigation aided the crop production and the Perryton Chamber of Commerce said that led to the title, “Wheatheart of the Nation” when the county became the leading wheat producer in the nation. The chamber also notes that Perryton won the Texas Hardworking Rural Community award from the Texas Department of Agriculture in 2003 and the city’s Wright Elementary School won the 2004 Blue Ribbon No Child Left Behind award. As I gazed south at the distance that we were to cover, the immense nature of our task dawned on me. I knew we could do it, but I wondered what I would be thinking in two weeks when I looked south and realized that we still had two more weeks to go. I shook my head and laughed at myself. Here we were only on the second day of walking and already I was wondering if this was such a good idea. We passed the site of Ochiltree, the first seat of the county and once a town of 500 people. Today the location has a cemetery and a few old ruins. I recalled reading an unusual thing about the town in Dr. T. Lindsay Baker’s book, More Ghost Towns of Texas. He said that a popular activity at Ochiltree was automobile racing. In 1915 a track was built around a natural playa lake and local promoters advertised a coming race with $2,000 in prize money. “Entrants began arriving two and three days early, coming in cars from such manufacturers as Buick, Hudson, Stutz, and Pierce-Arrow. The first prize of $760 went to Charles and John Ensminger in a Hudson Super Six,” wrote Baker. “The promoters realized a profit and set up additional races, primarily to boost the image of Ochiltree in the surrounding country and also to bring visitors to the town.” But when...