Through Time and the Valley

2. Shine Popejoy

2 Shine Popejoy TheTexas Panhandle is a very young country, and like most young countries it has spawned an inordinately large number of ghost towns: Old Ochiltree, Old Hansford, Sweetwater, Taz, Zulu, Timm's City, Hogtown, Parnell, Tascosa, Oil City, GeWhitt, and Plemons, to name but a few. Around 1895, Plemons appeared in a lovely little valley on the north bank of the Canadian River, about a mile south of the caprock. In 1901 an election was held, Plemons won the county seat of Hutchinson County, and a courthouse was erected on Main Street. Later came a post office, boardinghouses, two general stores, and a doctor. By 1920 Plemons had taken a good strong grip on the prairie, and its future as a town seemed secure. 9 10 -.- Through TiIne and the Valley Plemons, once the county seat of Hutchinson County, died when the oil boom of the Twenties and Thirties went to the town of Borger across the river. Today, the old Plemons cemetery lies all but forgotten on a private ranch in the Canadian River Valley. Then in 1926, the Dixon Creek Oil Company discovered oil on the Smith Ranch near the river. Drilling crews filled the boardinghouses at Plemons and it appeared that the boom would make a city. But promoters had come to the country and were driving stakes and pushing the new towns of Borger and Stinnett, and that is where the boom went. When the Rock Island railroad passed up Plemons and built a line into Stinnett, Plemons's doom had been sealed. Another election was called and the county seat went to Stinnett, and when the residents of Plemons threatened a court suit, the newly elected county commissioners held a midnight meeting, backed a truck up to the courthouse in Plemons, and drove off to Stinnett with all the county records. Shine Popejoy -- 11 Bill Ellzey and I spent an hour poking around what is left of Plemons, which now lies abandoned on a private ranch north of Borger. The courthouse and most of the homes had been moved elsewhere, and those that remained were slowly rotting into the ground. The discovery of oil radically changed the complexion of Hutchinson County. Towns with names like Signal Hill, Electric City, Oil City, and GeWhitt bloomed and withered like prairie flowers after a spring rain. Wooden derricks, pump jacks, and tank batteries sprang up on the mesquite hills along the Canadian River, and streams of black crude oil oozed down the sandy draws. In six months, Borger swelled into a tent and sheet iron city of fifty thousand . (It has been estimated that 3,500 of the citizens were prostitutes and dance hall girls.) Drillers, salesmen, speculators, and promoters poured in from the boom towns of Oklahoma and East Texas, and right behind them came some of the toughest hoodlums in the Southwest: Yellow Young, Ray Terill, Spider Gibson, Wireline Yerkey, and Shine Popejoy. A good deal has been written about the promoters and speculators who made their fortunes in the oil fields of Texas, so let us tum our attention to the second group and spin a few yams from the life of Shine Popejoy. Johnny Waltine Popejoy was born in Huntsville, Arkansas, in 1885 and came to manhood in Henryetta, Oklahoma, a part of the world which had already spawned more than its share of outlaws. In 1905 he married Rosie Bruner, a full-blooded Choctaw Indian, and when she died at the birth of their second child, Shine placed the children with relatives and began to roam. Since he had never cared muchfor sweat-of-the-brow forms ofwork, he turned to gambling , robbing, bootlegging, and moonshining. It was from this last category that he acquired the name Shine. Mozell Eslin, Shine's only daughter, first learned ofher father's activities when she was very young. One day while playing in the front yard, she looked up and saw a cloud of dust coming up the 12 - Through Time and the Valley road. A moment later Shine's steaming automobile slid to a stop in front of the house. Leaping out of the car, he pointed to a pile of canvas bags in the back seat and shouted, "Grab the sacks, daughter , they're after me!" He had just held up the Henryetta post office . Mrs. Eslin recalled another story about her notorious father. It seems Shine had hired a...