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40 Tom Green and the counties surrounding it were big range country in the 1890s. The 23-acre section (13,720 acre) pasture, with nearly two thousand cattle which the Ellis Brothers of Schleicher County sold to Godfrey Miller for $20,000, was a pocket-handkerchief size compared with some of the other spreads. John Loomis, whose ranch headquarters were eight miles west of Paint Rock, Concho County, could offer to rent out “130,000 acres in a body,” and men like Charles B. Metcalfe, of the XQZ, with enough of a home range near San Angelo to support several thousand head, could take up the lease. Loomis could also lease out the “pecan privilege”—the right to collect the product of every pecan tree in a twenty-seven mile belt alongside the Concho River.1 West of Loomis’s headquarters were the holdings of J. Willis Johnson. With his Crows’ Nest and Door Key ranches, located respectively to the east and south of San Angelo and embracing between them well over 100,000 acres, and with a variety of interests elsewhere, Johnson would become the county’s leading landowner before the end of the decade. Unlike some of his neighbors, he had come to Tom Green County with nothing except native ability and industry. His fortune was founded in the purchase of a few cattle in 1881. Three years later, at about the time of Berry Ketchum’s arrival from San Saba County, Johnson beat the incumbent, James D. Spears, in the shrieval elections and entered the first of his four consecutive terms of office.2 Among the other massive cattle operations in that sector of Texas were those of the previously mentioned Collynses, whose holdings included the DOK outfit, and Richard Franklin (usually called Frank) Tankersley, of Dove Creek and the Middle Concho; Funk Brothers, of Arden, on Rockey (or Rocky) Creek, with half a dozen brands; the Sawyer Cattle Company, or Bar S, whose headquarters were sixty miles from San Angelo, near the western boundary of Irion County; the Comer Brothers’ 4 Cross Bar L, whose 200,000 acres included a fifty-mile stretch beside the Middle Concho; J. Blakely Taylor’s 4 Cross D outfit, generally called “Dr. Taylor’s ranch,” which had several large pastures, the biggest being by Devil’s River; and, greatest of + 4 ∂ WILL, LAURA, AND BEN; THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE? Will, Laura, and Ben; The Course of True Love? 41 all, the 300,000 acre domain of the Half Circle Six—“the Sixes,” or “the Six”—with the main headquarters ranch at the head of Dove Creek as its radial point.3 Typically, the Sixes crew would leave its headquarters at the head of Dove Creek, near Knickerbocker, early in May, and head south through Schleicher County for the town of Sonora, seventy miles to the south. There, in the Devil’s River country of western Sutton County and eastern Crockett County, at the southernmost limit of the Sixes range, they would begin the real work of the spring roundup. Robert A. Evans, a Schleicher County rancher who had been a Sixes cowboy in his youth, recalled that during the winter blizzards“cattle from the Plains and San Angelo country drifted southward to the Devil’s and the Pecos Rivers, and to the Rio Grande,” keeping the men in the saddle day and night.: “It was a hard, gruelling life, with the men usually dead for sleep.” Yet, said Evans, some of the hands gambled after every long day’s work was done.4 By the third week in June, or the beginning of the fourth, they might be back at Dove Creek, where the roundup would be completed. Many of the cowhands would take a day or two off for the Fourth of July, which Knickerbocker celebrated with unfailing fervor, copious speeches, overflowing refreshments, a picnic, and a dance.5 Fall roundup would begin before the middle of September. The crew might work the upper ranges first, and then move south to Sonora and beyond. Finally, in the first days of December, the hands would set out for the winter roundup, again working the range as far south as Devil’s River. Most of them would be discharged, or leave of their own will, just before Christmas.6 Roundups on some of the ranches would recommence as early as February, but many cowhands would not be re-engaged until late April, May, or even early June. The Sixes, Tankersley...

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