Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Preface

xiii Preface This is a book I tried to write many times over the years, but somehow it kept eluding me. In my first attempts I approached it as a piece of impersonal history, where I hovered above the story and simply directed traffic. When that didn’t bring a good result (too stiff, no passion), I tried stepping into the story and giving myself a strong voice. That failed too, this time because the writing became too emotional. Then I tried several times to make it a novel, but that yielded the worst results of all. Released from the discipline of history, I made the characters whomever I wanted them to be, and that was wrong. So I put my research notes away in a drawer and forgot about them. Years passed, decades. When I went back to the material in May of 2004, my motivation was simple and thoroughly unprofessional: I needed an escape from the boredom of sitting in my writing office every morning for five hours. Anything would do. This volume began without fanfare, cunning, or literary ambition, and it felt right from the start. The first draft came quickly and I finished it in six weeks, although revisions and additional research kept me busy for several more months. This brings to mind a nugget of psychology gleaned from four decades of matching wits with horses. When you desperately need one for some pasture work, if the horse senses your need, he will laugh at your offer of sweet feed and leave you afoot. The best way to catch a clever horse is to convince him, through an elaborate xiv Preface theatrical performance, that you really don’t care whether he comes into feed or not. So it was with the writing of this story. When I gave up stalking the beast, it plodded into the corral, and I managed to slip around and shut the gate. The voice I have used is a combination of storyteller and historian, and the result might be something close to what Dan Flores has called mythic history: the record of a people in the context of a specific place that has shaped them. That place is the flatland prairie of northwestern Texas that has gone by various names (High Plains, South Plains, Staked Plains, and Llano Estacado), as well as the rugged country on its eastern boundary, often referred to as the “caprock canyonlands.” I am better suited to storytelling than to scholarly pursuits, but I recognize the importance of a disciplined treatment of the past. It really does matter when and where an event occurred, and who said so, and I have tried to adhere to the high standards of historical research laid down by the scholars in my region who have blazed a clear trail: J. Evetts Haley, W. C. Holden, David Murrah, Dan Flores, Charles Townsend, Frederick Rathjen, Jack T. Hughes, John Cooper Jenkins, Ernest Wallace, E. A. Hoebel, and Pauline and R. L. Robertson. My scholarship isn’t likely to impress professional historians, but they might recognize it as a pretty good effort for a purveyor of dog stories. In documenting my sources, I have adopted the system used by archeologists. It seems the simplest and least intrusive of any I have found. It takes the form (Rathjen 1973: 44), listing the author, year of publication, and page number. Readers who wish to check a reference can turn to the References for the complete citation. Unless the source is cited as a letter, interview, magazine, or newspaper article, it came from a book. This system suits me, and I hope that readers will approve. Finally, I need to pass out flowers to the many people who have helped me in my research: To my mother, grandmother, and great-uncles, all deceased, who were kind and patient enough to answer my questions in interviews xv Preface and letters. They are mentioned in the text and bibliography, and the importance of their contributions should be clear enough. Without them, there would be no stories to tell. To my Aunt Bennett Kerr, always a reliable source of family lore; cousin Mike Harter who offered advice and criticism of the manuscript, and drew the maps; and cousins Barbara Whitton and Martha Marmaduke who gave encouragement and spent many hours gathering up family photographs. To the archivists and librarians at the Southwest...