Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Three: The Quakers

12 Chapter Three: The Quakers John Graves has observed that “most of West Texas accords ill with the Saxon nostalgia for cool, green, dew-wet landscapes” (John Graves 1960: 5), and any journey that begins in Austin and ends in Seminole or Lubbock provokes the question, “Why did people ever come here?” Why did they pass through the softer, greener counties in central Texas and keep following the sun until, two hundred miles west of Fort Worth, they climbed the caprock escarpment and looked out on that vast expanse of featureless prairie known as the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains? Even the Comanches didn’t spend much time on the Llano, but used it as a temporary refuge from the U.S. military. When the soldiers followed them out into the dry wastes of the Llano, it usually turned out badly for the boys in blue. The Comanches survived because they knew the location of every spring and hole of water. In dry years, they cut small slits into the jugular veins of their horses and drank the blood. The soldiers—those who didn’t perish from thirst—wandered their way back to civilization, having gained a hard education about the Llano Estacado. Today, the Llano is home to more than a million people, most of them residing in Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, and Odessa. Irrigation water from the Ogallala Aquifer has transformed the Llano into a very productive breadbasket region, yielding enormous quantities of cotton, corn silage, feed grains, wheat, wine grapes, and sunflowers. The 13 The Quakers discovery of oil and natural gas has broadened the economic base and providedemploymentforthousands.Ifyouhappentobedrivingbetween Amarillo and Lubbock in August of a good crop year, you might mistake this fertile tabletop for the countryside around Modesto, California. Technology and settlement have gone a long distance toward defanging the Llano, muting the qualities that caused members of Coronado’s 1540 expedition to exclaim that they were passing through a land “as bare of landmarks as if we were surrounded by the sea.” (Jenkins 1986: xi) But make that same drive in a drought year and you might see snowplows pushing dunes of red sand off the highways and tumbleweed cannonballs snapping power lines and laying barbed wire fences flat on the ground—things my mother remembered during the drought of the 1930s. In February, you might step outside and feel the slash of Arctic winds that can freeze water in minutes, winds that penetrate human flesh like a razor and evoke thoughts of a frozen hell on Mars. In 1849 Captain Randolph Marcy saw the face of nature’s wrath on the Llano. After his expedition along the Canadian River had endured broiling heat, bad water, a pestilence of biting insects, and a barrage of hailstones that had dented their steel helmets, he wrote this bitter assessment of the place: “The great Zahara of North America . . . a timeless, desolate waste of uninhabitable solitude, which always has been, and must continue uninhabited forever.” (Jenkins 1986: 2) So why, I wondered, did the Underhills, Grandmother Curry’s grandparents, leave Huron County, Ohio, in 1881 and move to Estacado, Texas, a tiny settlement huddled upon the eastern fringe of the Llano? The audacity of the move takes the breath away. It suggests either courage or ignorance on a grand scale, and maybe both. These Quakers were the very antithesis of our notions of frontiersmen. John W. Murry, the editor of Estacado’s newspaper, described them this way: “The Quakers were a peculiar people. The women wore full skirts and bonnets. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and tight fitting trousers, and rolled their long hair at the ends in William 14 Chapter Three Penn style. These people, not used to the ways of the Gentiles, were sorely tried by their cursing, drinking, and gambling, and were irritated by the cowboys, who constantly courted and often won the hearts and hands of their lovely daughters. The Quakers could hardly endure this.” (Jenkins 1986: 150) Here is another description of them: “Their peculiarities of speech in the use of thee and thou, instead of you, marked them from other religious groups. [In West Texas] they hoped to establish this religion in its purer form, isolated from other religious sects, so that their children, being associated with none other than [members of the Society of] Friends, would naturally marry those of like belief, thereby keeping their religion...