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{204} The End of the Trail T he Panhandle truly had an economic miracle after 1900. She converted from ranch to farm country within a decade. Her clannish Anglo-Southerners, with their twangy speech patterns and pioneer folkways, were diluted with tens of thousands of midwesterners, especially at the height of the excursion sales by the Iowa land companies. A melding of these regional cultures laid the foundation for the modern Panhandle. The older residents had experience, labor, and fortitude. The newcomers had technology, character, and capital. The colonization towns took advantage of both old and new railroad lines to connect the region with a national infrastructure and economy. This connectivity was crucial to have the machinery and coal brought in efficiently and the abundant crops and harvests rapidly shipped to market. The transformation simultaneously developed and exploited the region. White-faced Hereford cattle arrived in large numbers, but species that had survived the ice ages and Holocene extinctions (e.g., gray wolves, prairie dogs, blackfooted ferrets) were hunted to near extinction. Two extractive forces further shaped the region. First, the discovery of hydrocarbon reservoirs around Borger and Pampa transformed Hutchinson and Gray counties from bucolic ranching into industrial zones. The oil and gas industry brought jobs, better educational facilities, and royalty wealth to the region. Second, the arrival of new agricultural technology was crucial to the transformation of the High Plains landscape. Steam plows turned and worked the old XIT pastures as mules could never do. In the process the Panhandle became rooted in advanced agricultural technology, with a proclivity to think big, invest big, and dream big. By the 1920s the agro-industrialization process had transformed the region. Tractors, automobiles, motion pictures, washing machines, and Kodak cameras had converted a worn frontier landscape into a Roaring Twenties Garden of Eden. At least until commodity prices fell, and droughts and financial meltdowns in the 1930s hit, and the good times were gone. Not all boomtowns survived in the land of the boomers. Indeed, the visual history of the Panhandle is littered with ghost towns: Ware, Oslo, Ochiltree, Mendota, Benonine, Goodnight—even poor Phillips blew up in 1980 and was then killed off by a corporation in the twenty-first century. National economies, new technologies, and market forces ultimately determine the fate of a hopeful community much more than civic virtue and razooper spirit. The land of boomers is littered with failures. Driving the many back roads one sees lonely sentinels of the past: the abandoned farm houses, the leaning old sheds and garages, the closed rural schoolhouses. The Panhandle still had its romantic horizon in 1907 when the boom photographers arrived in large numbers. Owen Wister’s The Virginian appeared in 1902 and triggered a national craze for cowboys (and cowgirls). Amused cowhands on the old Panhandle ranches posed for photographs much as the Texas Rangers had before them. The land companies created a huge market for photography with their brochures, pamphlets, and postcards. The railroads routinely employed photographers for their slick and lavishly The End of the Trail {205} illustrated publications, such as the Santa Fe Railroad’s magazine Earth. Photographers delighted in documenting the boom times, and some were drawn by the medium itself into artistic modes. Many of the Panhandle photographers were creative, even gifted. Seeing their rediscovered portfolios nurtures a respect not only for their considerable technical skill but also for the world depicted in their photos. They captured on film the monotony of the level plains as well as their grandeur. Lugging their cameras up water towers, on to roofs, and atop windmills, they took a bird’s-eye view of their world, a perspective detached from the earth, floating like the mind’s eye. In 1920 many of the most talented gathered in Amarillo at the first meeting of the Panhandle Professional Photographers Association. We have traveled back in time a hundred years. We have seen fast automobiles, bustling towns, old cowboys, new schools, farms and fields, pioneers and children. We have journeyed from the far plains of Dallam County to the rugged, eroded canyons of Briscoe County. But those are not the only parts of the great state of Texas to which shadow catchers and their successors traveled. There are other regions of Texas to discover, other landscapes equally enchanting and equally stunning to explore. Regional visionaries from all across the state encapsulated an era, preserving its everyday moments, its disasters, and its triumphs. Those visual legacies will be preserved in the...

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