INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
onAL HISTORY PROGRA~l
INTERVIEW WITH: Dr . Ben L . Parker
INTERVIEWER : James B. Sweeney
DATE : 3 February, 19 83
PLACE : The Longhorn Museum, Pleasanton, Texas
JS : Dr . Parker , it is my understanding that you arrived
in Texas as a pa sse nger in a covered wagon. I'lould you
tell us a little about t hose early days in Texas as you
r emembe r them:
BP : Thank yo u , Jim. NO , I did not arr ive in Texas in a
covered wagon but I did cross the wais t lin e of Texas in
a covered wagon i n the ea r l y part of this century .
My pater nal grandfathe r was John Henry Parker who
came to Texas fr om Georgia and set tled in the Corsic ana ,
Texas area . He is some relation to the Powells there who
own the rich oil fields . I ' ve never been able to r ake up
kins - folks with that side. I was born in Corsicana on
December 25, 1902 . That , of course, ha s been 80 years ago .
My maternal g ra ndfather , who inf luenced my life more
than anyone e lse , was named Sam \'ilson. He came t o Texas
from Arkansas and se t tled in the Sabine area on the Louisiana
border , something like in the 1890's . I do n 't know exactly
when . But he managed somehow or o ther t o bui l d a s aw mill .
And to get sufficient timbe r there to put up a planing mill .
Somewhere about 1903 or 04 , he traded this saw planing mil l
and the t imber wh i ch he controlled , to a Mr . Temple , who was
one of the promoters o f the Temple Lumber Company , o ne of t he
biggest in the state of Te xas . And whose g r a nd son , by the wa y ,
r.
I
i I 1
i
I
~
t.
f'
~
~ ;:
:.!
~
~
Parker 2.
BP : Buddy Temple , was candidate for governor during the
last election here in Texas . That, of course would be in
1982, last year.
My grandfather received enough money from the sa le of
the saw mill that he purchased 1400 head of ca ttle, of the
Longhorn lineage . By that , he bought several brands because
it was open grazing land and knowing my grandfather, I would
admit that he probably gathered some cattle that had other
brands on them . You und ers tand what I mean - .because he
taught me that no man could make a living if he ate his own
beef . He tried to i nstill that in us and we tried to live
up to it . At least until we were old enough to know better.
And so in 1906, he had amassed these 1400 cows; 186 horses
and mules; and enough oxen to substitute for the wagon teams.
Whenever the mules and horses could not maneuver , he called
i n the oxen.
His father had been a soldier in the Civil War. He wasn't
old enough to go himself but he went with his father as a water
boy; someone I suppose, like a Rudyard Kipling ' s Gunga Din.
He served as water boy . When the War was over, the negroes
refused to leave . . there were 20 families of them .. and they
stayed with his father . When his father died , he inherited
these negro people . And they lived with him .
And at Pineland , Texas , where he had this saw mill , he
built a big building. When one of his chi l dren married, he
built a building on the side of that . . room on to it . And for
the negroes , he had 20 little shacks in the back yard . When
,t.
~
k
r
I· !
!
U
~
"-, I
Parker 3 .
BP: the children had children he'd add on another building.
And so when he left there in 1906, I r ecall very vividly,
that he sold this house in which he lived , as a hotel . It
was ample room, too , because he had four families and they
had a lot of children. There were four children in my
. :
immediate family .
So we started out in these covered wagons in 1906 with
these cattle and we practically lived off the land; camping
out at night . When we got up in the farming areas of East
Texas around Liberty, I remember , they had a great deal of
difficulty there because the farms were so small and the
people objected to Us grazing too much up and down the lanes .
Gr andpa somehow or other got hold of a train schedule and
we started to following the railroads . And so he ' d know when
the train was coming. He ' d graze the railroad right of way
and move the cattle off when the train was coming . And then
when the train had passed, he'd put the cattle on again .
Shows you that he \Vas a very good business man .
When we got up to, I believe it was Milano, Texas,
(we'd been out several months , ) in the Hearne , Texas are a,
they decided that they would ship 800 of these cows to the
market. Well, they shipped 700 of them and left us 800 head.
My father and my grandfather and one of my uncles \Vent on this
trip and left us there with the other cattle at this little
place called Hearne .
When they got baCk, they had gone as far north as the
Parker 4 .
BP : XIT ranch and had purchased 25 white-faced bulls . Grandpa
had a negro foreman by the name of Sam . And Sam 'las so dis­gusted
because they had these white cattle . They were de­horned
, by t he way, didn ' t have any horns . The authorities
were gone on longhorn cows, you know . They had a big f uss
about it but finally Sam , he ag r eed to go on; he almost turned
back; didn ' t want to have anything to do with such an opera­tion
as that.
When they got back, we decided to ship and so we got on
the train at Milano, Texas and we rode the train to San Angelo.
And then my grandfather went out 12 miles from San Angelo,
little town by the name of Wall . I remember there was a gin
and a store there and a lot of cotton fields . The people had
been picking bolls--cotton bolls- - and they ' d left a lot of
cotton in the fields and so he grazed the fields.
He had this little grinding mill--I have it in the museum
at this time --where you grind up the burrs and the corn stocks
and everything together. He'd gather these corn stock s a nd
these hulls around the gin and he would run them through this
grinding machine. And then he had two carloads of molasses
shipped up from Hemphill, Te xas , eas t Texas, and he poured
the syrup over this waste , you might say, and so that ' s the
way he fattened his cattle.
Well, on the lOth of January, I ' ll never forget it, there
was one of the biggest freezes that ever occurred in that
area. And cattle died , helpless , s tanding up . When the
freeze was over, we had hides hanging on the windmill , on
the feed troughs, on the fences, on the ground, everywhere .
Parker 5.
BP: And out of 800 heads that were left , Grandpa had 14 of
the white face bulls. They had managed to survive out of
the 25 . And 134 of the 800 cows had survived only . Because
they were out of East Texas ; they were not used to that
terrible weather .
And so he decided then that he would go to West Texas and
somewhere out there in the Big Bend, he'd build an empire .
Well, when he got to counting his assets , he didn ' t have
e nough money . And so he got a chance to move up into Runnells
:::ounty. ''ih~n he got up i nto Runnells County , up above l"'1inters
Texas, to a little town by t he name of Antelope. He rented
wha t "'as known as the Fisher Ranch . We ' d call ita farm not
a ranch , because there was more farm land in it than there
was .ranch . I think it amounted to about 640 acres . And so
he decided to sell most of his cattle, which he did , to sor t
of get financed . And went into the sheep business and that
disgraced a ll of us because we thought then to be a "woolies "
tha t people called us, was a terrible thing .
Grandpa decided that he was going to build a gin and raise
cotton . He didn ' t have enough money . So he took the horses , the
maj ori ty of ' ein.' and 16 of the wagons and he gave them to the
negroes and gave them enough beef and enough food supply to last
them to go back to East Texas where they could find a job there in
the sugar fields there . Where he had employed them when they were
not working in the saw mill .
My father died in Runnells County after a few years and
after that my mother married again . I was 11 years old at the
·i
i
i
i
Parker 6 .
BP : time and thought that was a terrible thing . I had this
brother who was just two years older than I .. and he ' s still
living . . He and I decided that we would just go west . So Ive
went back to San Angelo , Tex as. When we go t back to San
Angelo, we joined a circus. I spent about 4 , 5 nights there
feeding these elephants. Never had such a time in my li fe .
And then we were loading up the train , I didn't know what
t hey were goi ng to do, but they were pulling out to a place
called Plainview. I ' d never heard of it . And the train
started moving and I got to looking around for my brother
and I realized that he must be on that tra i n. And I didn't
know how to catch him . I tried , got thrown off in the ditch
there and the train pulled out . It was about 2 o ' clock in
the morning and t here I was in a strange town. No money ;
I think I had about a do llar in my pocket . t1y job was down
the railroad track at the circus; I d idn ' t know anybody . I
"ent do"ntm,m and met a pol iceman . I told him my condition
and he sai:'! , "1'1e 11, wai tat the old Landon Hotel " and he vias
sure that I could find a job .
Next day , this policeman t ook me out and fed me. I ' ll
never forget it . The restaurant they called the Horseshoe
Restaurant . It was breakfast. I didn ' t know how to order or
anything. I ordered chili and I got chili for breakfast . I didn ' t
know about eating eggs at that time because I t hink it was t he
first time I ' d ever eaten in a restaurant .
And so a man came along and wanted to know ~hat I could do
and I did what the policeman told him . I says , lt I can work ;
::
,~
I
,
I;1'
Ii
~
,•
t
Parker 7.
BP : do dishes or t ake care of your baby, or stay home with
your wife when you ' re gone or anyth ing. " So I told him that;
he smiled, and said , "Well, I 'll g i ve you a job . " So we "lent
up to Barnhart , Texas and went to work for a fellow by the
name of Owens . And they put me out on a 12 section ranch by
mysel f . They told me I could r ide eve rything there except
one horse there. He was a goat-roping horse and they wanted
me to l eave it alone because he was a very specia l horse .
Well, of course , I had everyth ing to myself; had to do
my own cookin' never had cooked before . It ,,,as an 8 room
house and I was really scared. I didn ' t know it but about
every Sunday night the men from town would come out. They had
a pool table there and they played pool and played poker . I
didn ' t know they were coming s o Vlhen they came out that almost
scared me to death . Then I was coming in one night from
greasing the windmills, I had 8 windmills , and was supposed to
grease these windmills at leas t once a week . So I went out
to check ' em, got in a little bit late and I couldn't get the
horse up to t he corral and I was riding this fancy roping
h o r s e that I wasn't supposed to ride. Not being able t o get
him up there, I just had to turn him loose out here in the
pas ture . Packed my saddle up . Went up to the house--there
was nobody there--didn ' t know why the horse objected to it.
So I got in the house and I heard something on the porch.
I knew it was a b urglar after me or somebody, you know . I was
way out in the country by myself . I was 16 miles from Barnhart,
the neares t town . So I finally got up enough nerve to open
1
a
~
I·
iI':
~
~
" ~
" .,
~
,~.
i'
i'
~
r
i
~
ii
::
h
tJ
Parker 8.
BP : up the door and, when I did that , he ' s standing there
in front of the door and I had this shotgun and I pulled
both triggers . It was a big shotgun and it kicked me down .
When I got up , I realized I ' d kil led him . So I thought well ,
I ' ve got to do something with his body. Wh en I walked out on
the porch , it was a billy goat . S t anding up t here and I
thought he was a man , that's how scared I was.
I knew that the fellow who m·med this ranch , Boad(?) Owen
thought more of those goats than he did human beings . So I
spent the rest of the night digging a grave out on t he tank
down to bury that billy goat . And then spent all the next
day t rying to get the blood off of that porch . I did every­thing
in the world . I scraped it; I rubbed it; and I tried
vinegar and coal oil and everything else I COUld. Still left
a stain there . I never did admit to killing one of those
goats. And he always accused a negro there of stealing one
of his billy goats . I never did clear up the ordeal .
Well , a fellow came along by the name of Punch McAdam and
he said he was going to the Big Bend and he was going to catch
horses . He first wanted to go to the A Bar ranch , south of
Big Lake, Texas and catch some gentle stallions--he called
them gentle ; they were really wild- -and tame ' em and we ' d
take ' em down to Big Bend and turn ' em l oose and catch these
mustangs that were then rife in the Big Ben d . So he had a
bunch of cow punchers there. One of them was named Claude
McManus . His father owned a taxi in San Antonio, Texas . And
then, a taxi was a way of saying he was a first-class bootlegger .
So Claude and I signed up to go with this last mustanger .
I
Parker 9 .
BP: We went out to what is known as the A Bar ranch owned by
a fellow by the name of Shannon . ~~ . Shannon made his money
hauling freight . He lived in a cellar. The ceiling was 6
feet. tall and he had to stoop down because he was more than
7 feet tall . His height really suited him because he had 6
fingers on each hand ; I ' ll never forget it . He vias an old
Scotchman and made his money out of freight ; had come there .
And this land consisted of 70 sections of land; pretty good
sized ranch .
And the ranchers would come through and some of the
horses would escape and the freighters would come through
and some of the burros would escape. So the first thing this
mustanger did .. \~ent out to this ranch and made a trade with
a fe ller to catch these burros and they were going to make dog
meat out of ' em . Can ' em . So we caught the burros and started
to kill them and the gove rnment come along and stopped it be-cause
they didn 't allow an animal like that to be shot and
killed . So he had all those burros on his hands. So we had
3 loads of those burros left and shipped ' em to Louisia na . He'd
trade ' em to those famers down there. He come back and told
us he was really selling, and Punch told us , that was his given
name, Punch , and said that he sold ' em to t hose farme r s down
there and he guaranteed that if they'd g ive ' em plenty of corn ,
in a year's time , they would increase their height and weight
by 50 percent . Those negroes down there weren ' t used to those
wild burros from west Texas so he traded ' em out and sol.d ' em .
He didn ' t have enough money so he traded what he had left
over for a car-load of sweet potatoes. He shipped the sweet
i
! •
~
i
,,~
,r
Parker 10 .
BP: potatoes back and we peddled sweet potatoes in Big
Lake and Barnhart and Sheffield and over west Texas out
there selling pota toes . Finally Sweeney Mercant i l e Company
came along and bought al l of his potat oes . Then we were
ready to go davin to the Big Bend because Vlhen he vias catch·-
ing these burros , Vie would fence off the Vlater p l aces and
the hor ses would come in . We ' d be hiding out here; we'd
slip out there and pull the gate to . And then we would take
the gentle burros that had marks on them , the shoulder mark
and all .. I remember I caught one one day - it had saddle
marks on it and I knew she was no good to ride . So I used
her as a pack mule and she was my partner there for about 4
years .
But we ' d take these burros in and we !d tie the rope
a round t.he burro ' s neck and turn ' em loose . We l l , before
we turned those burros loose , we would have them over to the
main headquarters where we wanted to corral the horses
and we ' d feed ' em cottonseed cake, just a little bit, and
that ' s tantamount to teachin ' a feller to smoke cigarettes ;
when he gets one , he ' s got t o have another one . And so
they would naturally crave to get back and get some of that
cottonseed cake. So that ' s the way I-Ie doped those mules .
In a few days, they ' d come in pulling t hat horse . . They ' d
be scatt ered allover and so would the horse . You ' d go ou t
and catch him by that rope and you could lead him anywhere
you wanted to.
And when \ole caught enough horses; he gelded the stallions
I
~
i
':
.'
~
fJ
Parker 11.
BP : he didn ' t want to keep; we got the other stallions and
we gentled 'em so they'd be gentle to rope . We taught ' em
to ride. And then he went down in the Big Bend. And we got
down where the .. I don ' t know what they call it now . . but
then , they called it the Basin . And the Johnson City ranch
was just south of there about 4 miles right on the Rio Grande
river. They didn ' t have any title to the land; they were
just squatters like we were . So they had what they called
tejanas , that was a depression in the earth that would catch
water. Some places were shallow and other places wasn't.
We ,,,auld put brush over this , then we ' d run the horses in
there, then we caught ' em and that was the way we'd trap
em. Get ' em in here ; we didn't have to rope ' em. That
was a different story.
We took these stallions out when they were gentled,
and we ' d lead ' em around ' til they ' d get acquainted with the
country; then we got to feedin ' them dope up here by these
tejanas so they ' d come back every night to our c amp . Then
we got to where we ' d turn ' em loose. well, they got to
comin' back with their nose ripped off . Too much fightin ' .
So we had to go out and kill the old ones .
So they sent us out with the Winchesters and told us
that the horses would come to the same place every day .. the
stallions would . He would go ahead of the mare and look
around . And when he did , we would shoot him. The first day
I went out , and I saw a beautiful stallion come up and he
stood up just like they said and I let him have it, broke
,
~
I' i
r,
r,
t ~
j;
i'
f: ,
I'
I'
f
,; ~
r,
I' i
" ,
1
R
Parker 12.
BP : his neck . I was proud of i t and went over there and
it was the most beautiful thing I ' d ever seen in my life .
He was jus t a natural dun; his mane and tail were almost
the color of his skin ; didn't have a tooth in his head, very
beautiful , laid there dead , eyes lookin' at me . And I
was haunted to think I ' d killed such a beaut iful thing. I'd
never done a thing like that before.
Three more stallions came up and I refused to shoot ' em.
So that night they all made fun of me about being ' old kind-hearted
Ben. They said I had to ge t out of that; I had to
to kil l ' em . Two , three days I ' d get over it . So next day
I went back and I killed three. The next day I went back
and I got to where I was hard - hearted as they were and I
could shoot ' em without having any doubt as to what it meant .
Well, when we got all the stallions killed off , we
took these gentle ones in and we took them down a l ong the
river and we tied ' em to trees so the mares would come up
and ge t acquainted with ' em . Then we ' d go down and we ' d
feed them a little cotton seed cake and o f course the mares
would wander off and we ' d go back. And then we ' d t urn ' em
loose and they would bring the mares in. And they would get
to where the pen was; where the Basin is now .. we didn ' t have
a ny pen up there at the time so we'd chase them over to this
tejana and they'd fall in this water and then we could handle
them. It was just up to their neck; not enough to drown
'em. And by the way, it ' s still here last time I visited
about 10 or 15 years ago . Still there . So we could handle
1
~l
~
;
~
,,~.
i,.'
tj
~
I'
\. \:
~
!
!'
t: I:
,,
",:
~~
i.
ii
b
Parker 13 .
BP : those horses in the water. And so we caught 'em.
What they did with these horses? . there was a young
cattle rustler over in Chihuahua by the name of Pancho Villa
and his brother came over. Pancho Villa was getting ready
with a fellow by the name of Zapata , who was a bank robber
down below Mexico City , and they were going t o start a
rebellion . They needed horses . He bought both mares and
geldings . So we would sell these horse s to him .
I never saw him because they never let me go on a trip.
Never let me go on a trip at all. Made me stay there and
take care of everything . They went on one trip with the
fi rst herd of horses, delivered 'em to Villa and they went
over to what was known as the Rodriguez river. I was over
there later but at that time I didn ' t have any idea what
it was . They told me to take these burros , pack mules,
and go to Alpine , Texas which was 77 miles up there and to
bring back enough wire fe nce t o build a corral in there.
Going to start using a corral instead of this tejana.
Especially for our gentle horses.
So I took these mules up there . They would carry 300
pounds on a mule . I had 10 mules and 300 pounds that's a
lot of weight. So when I got back out of town that day ..
about 8 miles from town , I stopped to camp . I built me up
a nice fir e and had a nice meal, supper , as far as I was
concerned and breakfast the next day . Started loading those
mules; it was so hard and difficult getting those posts and
wire back on those mules I decided I was going to make a trip
Parker 14 .
without s t oppi ng . And so I rode in the other 70 mi l es ,
approximately, without stopping. I got my fill of pack trains,
you might say .
When the boys came back, and we got everything settled
out as far as the horses were concerned, they got another
herd and this time when they left, they left me with t his .
telling you about the boy whose father was a taxi driver.
.. old MacManus . He was a sort of a rowdy sort of a guy
and when they left he said, "Well , it's Christmas time.
Let ' s go over to Terli ngua." We went over by s tudy Butte
and Terlingua and when we got over there , there was a night
club in town . But they wouldn't let me go because I was a
],id . you know . He was old enough . He told ' em I was his
son . They knew it was differently but they let us go
anyway. That night they were having a big beer party and
all and as things will happen , old Claude MacManus he got too
much beer . So he went out to the only rest r oom that was
there .. an outside Chic Sales . . and it was crowded , he couldn ' t
get around the r e on account of the Vlomen . . so he just 'lent
ou t to a log and proceeded to relieve himself a nd a snake
bit h im . He rushed back in . . hollering that a snake had
bi t t e n him . Sure enough there was a big p l ace on his
buttocks . So the on l y thing to do is put a hole in that;
"you ' re his friend , you suck that blood out of him to save
his l if e ." (laughter) I wasn ' t afraid of the poison but
I disliked the location of the bite.
So about that time , one fellow had enough sense to go
:;
,
i~
1;
b
I
~
1:
il
i
i
I
!
,~
f
j;
!1
"I' il
I"'
II
~
['
~
l:
"I
1 ::
1:
\:
~
• . " ,
f
F
Parker 15.
BP : out there and see what had happened and it wasn't a
snake at all , it was an old Rhode Island red hen. She was
settin' on eggs and she pecked him real hard. That saved
me from being relieved of that snake bite .
But i n other words , when the horse s played out , we came
back to San Angelo, Texas . When we got over to Sanderson ,
they was havin ' a big to - do down there; some sheep herders
had come in .
We had a Mexican with us by the name of Lonjina . He
was a horse breaker; had him along for that purpose . So
they wouldn 't let me go down to this beer joint because this
she rif f said , no , he wouldn ' t allow it at all. He allowed
'em to have that beer joint down t here , but no kids . It
was a bootleg joint . Lo n jina promised that I wouldn ' t take
anything , wouldn't drink anything . And he ' d go down there
and see that we didn ' t . So I went down there with Lonjina .
They were having a good time . They went over to the table
where these sheep herders were and this old Claude MacManus
walked up and said, "It is true that you guys make love
to these sh~ep around here?" Well, that wa s the wrong
thing . Because a boy jumped up and said , "Well , if we
didn't, where do you think all these cowboys come from?"
You can imagine how t he floor broke out. I 'm tellin' you,
they really had a fi ght. I got out of there all right .
I got back down there to where our horses were, where
our camp was . And finally Punch MacAdams and the Mexican
Lonjina and old Claude MacManus , they showed up. And they
were really bruised. "You ought to see those other guys ."
~
i
'i "j
i
'I
i I
R
ni'
II,
t,
~
~
~, ;;
.,
I ,
Parker 16 .
BP: The sheriff come down there and he was going to arres t
them all f or figh t ing . So he said ! "Where are your witnesse s?'l
Well t hey didn ' t have any witness aga i st them. So he said,
"Just l eave town and never come back . "
Punch , he wanted to go to San l'.ngelo . And the Mexican
wanted to go to Ozona and wanted me to go with him . So I
went to Ozona . I stayed a few days and got separated from
him. I got a job working for the Blackstone Cattle Company .
The only job that they ' d give me was that o f a horse r anger .
So I worked out of Barnhart, Texas . And they ha d a r anch
down at Shef f i e ld .. the old Cannon ranch . So we went down
to Shef f ield . When we got to the r iver, they take young
cattl e down and they bring old cattle back; cattle for sale .
Take the heifers and the young steers down and bring the old
heifers and s teers back to drive them to San Ange l o to market .
So we were taking a young herd dOloJn. When we got to the Pecos
River, we had to swim ' em across . When they got across, I
was about three miles down the r iver because my horses went
down this stream. The cattle did climb ou t on the other side
all right.
When I got back , t hey told me to get on the drag , t hat ' s
on the end of the herd , and to keep pushin ' the cattle up .
Th ey were a little disturbed at that time , new territory .. wet
from crossin ' the river a nd c old . They were trying to keep
' em from runni ng . I don ' t know what happened , everything was
real quiet, and some guy up there did something like clap
his hands o r something and the cattle turned and t hey went ,
they ran on me. Just between me and the river. I had been
!
F
Parker 17.
BP : told that cattle would always go clockwise. I
turned clock wise and they didn ' t-went anti- clockwise.
They just followed me around; they were fo l lowing me, so I
had to out-run th e~ . Finally they did stop . And this old
horse of mine, was just nearly dead, running in that mud .
And I remember that they ran along and fanned him with
their coats and all, trying to keep him breathing .
lose him.
Didn ' t
Well, we got everything straightened out and we went
into Sheffield about 5 miles away, I suppose it was at t ha t
time, and they were having an old-time revival meeting. The
cattle got into that tabernacle. You know what happened
when they pulled all those posts down and then they all got
to running. So the preacher came up there and went out,
got aholt of the foreman, Mr. Moore of this outfit, and
told him he was going to have to pay for that tabernacle.
So Mr . Moore came back and assured us that we woul~ never
go to Hell because he bought a tabernacle ; paid enough for
it to assure us an entry into Heaven . . So we felt we c ould
do most anything because we were going to Heaven , anyway,
because Mr. Moore had paid our way through this preacher.
That night, we had a boy named Leo Bake r . And Leo
Baker was one of the most mischievous boys you ' ve ever s een .
He always found a little fellow to pick on . Of course , I
was a (short?) horse man, he ' d pick on me . When we got out
of town that night , he decided he ' d start a stampede. He told
me, "You tell anybody I'll kill you" He went up there and he
Parker 18.
.':.
BP : just chucked the cattle like that and sure eno\lgh, ,
being young cattle, they tore loose . And the wagon that was
following us and I had the horses following me right ahead
of the wagon . The wagoner and I ' d stay with the wagon . It
t urned over and t he o l d negro Tobe, he broke his arm. The
cattle , I th ink it was over 166 got ki lled that night, broken
l e gs , etc . They had to kill that many, crippled up anyway.
And so Toby, being crippled up , the boss said I would have to
cook under his instructions .
We wen t dm·m a nd we herded another bunch of catt l e , got
' em together, got back and I cooked as well as I could . Tobe
showin ' me how. I thought I was a pretty good cook but this
Neil Baker came in and said, "Boy, I ate those b e ans today
and out there roping a calf, going up and down there, made so
much racke t, scared my horse, went to pitching a lmost threw
me off. " Said 1 wasn't cookin ' right . Everything he'd eat
he ' d say, "My goodness, what did you do with th is ? Did you
boil this instead of fry?" Always makill ' fun oj' (!Je> .
Well , he got sick. Old negro Tobe , beside his broken
arm, he had arthr itis in hi s shou lders. lle had used th i.s
croton oil for this pain and i t worked . I d idn ' t know about
croton oil for pain but I knew what it would do . So old
Baker got sick. He laid it off on me. Cooked the wrong f ood
and he got sick . And old Tobe said, "Wel l, we ' ll fi x you
some medicine." We got the whiskey down a nd pu t some lemon in
it. I put about ~ cup of croton oil in it and he was really
sick! ( la ugh t.er) That started a feud b e tween us. To make a
Parker 19.
BP : long story short , we got back with the c a t t le all right .
I did the cookin ' all the way back . When we got back, we
got to headquarter ranch at Barnhart, Texas . When we got to
t he ranch , they told us to unload everything and take our
horses and turn 'em loose. We were going to have about a
week's vacation . This guy kept a jumping on me; every time
I ' d turn around , he ' j say something . I ate a little bit
too much and he said, "Well, I declare , ole Slim ' s going
to have a baby." Had a big stomach . So we got in the pen
and I thought I ' ll jus t try him . He was about 19 years old
and I was just about 12 years old . So I just grabbed him
a round the waist and he began to hol ler . People thought he
wasn ' t in trouble. He was in more trouble than he thought he
was. Because I had prepared for him . This old negro had put
me up to it . They ' d taken the negro down town to put him on
the train so he could go to San Angelo to be treated for his
broken arm. Because they had it wr apped up in barrel staves.
When they came out then , they saw what was the matter .
I had his ear in my mouth next to his skull and I was just
che,"in' it off . But he was r eally hollerin ' . . "Get this kid . . "
They thought he was making fun . lIe's finally having his fun:e:
After a while , when they did see what was happening, they
pu lled me loose . I just spit his ear out there on the ground .
They carried him down to town, about 2 miles from ranch head ­quarters,
down to Barnhart, and the doctor s aid they better
send him to San Angelo because that was a serious thing. He
might bleed to death . They said he couldn ' t go because the
train had gone up that day, take him back and send him next
Parker 20. u
::
BP: day if it didn ' t get any better . "
So Mr. Moor e, the boss , came out and said, "Ben, you ' d
better get your horse and that pack mu le"--I was tellin ' you
I
about awhi l e ago, the mule with the-- I ca lled her Mabel be- ~
cause I named her after my first sweetheart. We almost
married when we was 9 years old. So I called this old mule
Mabel . I decided that was a good thing because he said, "If
Baker comes back you ' ll have to kill him and that would be a
bad thing to do, or he 'll kill you . He hasn 't got any sense . " I
So he gave me some money , got my horse and I started out for Stiles , Texas . Every time I ' d look back, I could see that I
guy coming . So I went up to S t iles , Texas and the fel low
said , "Now you can sleep in the Methodist Church over here ;
I ' m a steward down there i n the church. Turn your horses
there in the yard . That' l l be all right . They can graze .
You can go up there to the hotel and eat ." I started up to
the hotel, just a little old boarding house . I saw a feller
get out of a --they ca l l ed it a stage at that day and time ,
but it really was a motor bus . N)out the first one I ever
saw . And he had th i s ear, left side, all paved up . Th at ' s
the one I ' d bitten off . Scared me to death. I k:18w he \vas
fOllowing me . . So I went back and I slept all night with that
6 shooter that I had down there. I didn't s l eep all night .
That door--I knew that guy was going to step up on me any
minute .
I went down next day . Fella said , "You look like you
didn ' t have any sleep. I said , "Well, I didn ' t ." To l d him
/'
Parker 21.
BP: what happened. He sai d , " No , that ' s a fellow says he
got a cancer. They got a new treatment now. They treat it
with X ray . Said he went to San Angelo and has this cancer
treatment wi th X ray . That wasn ' t this fellow you was lookin '
at at al l. " I felt like I'd really scored .
He said, t> you want a job? " "Yes , I do . " "There 1 s a
fellow here I think would give you a job . He ' ll be in, in a
little while and I ' ll have him talk to you." So I went down ,
got my horses , and waited for the fellow to come. When he
came , he to l d me that he just wanted somebody to stay on the
ranch while he was gone . I said , "Well , how long are you
going to be gone?" "vlell, I don ' t know . I may be gone 6
weeks . I may be gone f or 2 months . I want you t o stay t here. "
So I went up there and found out why he wanted me to stay
there . His wi fe had died and he ' d buried her in a shallow
grave because he'd promised her if she come out there with
him he ' d take her body back to Kentucky and bury her. He
hadn 't had a chance to.
The first thing I had to do- -when the sheriff came out
and this man--we had to dig up that grave and I was scared to
death of dead peop l e anyway . He told me I could sleep any -
where around there but no t to sleep in his house . I could
sleep out here in the shack or I could sleep down in this old
shed but not sleep i n t he house over there because it was
haunted . I didn ' t believe in haunted hous e s, of course .
When he left that day , I'll never forget it. He had that
w
Parker 22.
BP: thing i n the back of hi s wagon . Started off . That
a fte rnoon , two fel l ers came over . They said they were l ook-ing
for some calves; they ' re stolen . They t ook advantage of
t he fa c t they knew t his fellow 'das gone and I was there .
They could steal his cattle.
So 'dent up there . They described these cattle. He had
told me about these calves . I said , "I can ' t let you have
' em ." So I 'douldn ' t let ' em h ave the cattle but they came
back that night and they got away wi th t he cattle anyway .
So I f ollowed t he t rail where i t was . I knew they had it .
I went in and told the sheriff . They caught this fel low and
they sentenced thi s fellow t o the penitentiary . The trial
lasted--from the time they caught h i m--the time they had
this tra i l and the time he went to the penitentiary was less
than 3 days . I remember th at . It was speedy justice in
that day and time. When he went to the penitentiary, he
said, " I ' l l be out in a year's time and you ' d better watch
out." I knew it was time for me to ge t g o ing .
I de cided I wouldn ' t 'd ait for him to get out of the
penitentiary . I went back and I got my horses , my horse and
my pack mule , l oaded up and started out . I got to thinking
" I ' ve done this man wrong because he expected me to stay
there ." So I decided I would go back. But I 'dasn ' t going
to sleep outside . So I 'dent dO'dn and slept i n this old
haunted house. I suppose it was a dream because they had
told me that a man had been p l ay i n ' poker up there and
I ,
t
" ~
l
i
1
f
I
!
I
"
~
~
il
i
~
•
~
~
Parker
BP : somebody killed him and three people had walked down
the stair steps . After it was over with, his wife was down
stairs , the stairs came down by her bed , and for some
reason or other that night, I was disturbed by that racket
u p sta irs . I heard the fight going on ; and I heard the shot;
I heard the ghost walk i ng down the stairway. I couldn ' t
stay in there any longer . I got out .
I ",en t over to a neighbor ' s house and I told him abou t
it . So they ",ent over there the next night and t hey put
up a screen ",ire and wanted to see i f they could catch the
ghost that ",ay . They believed what I "'as tellin' ' em
because I ",as so scared .
Neverthe l ess , the old man returned and he said, "The
story is true." This man ",as killed over there ; the house
is haunted; I told you about. You shouldn ' t have gone
over there . "
23 .
I went back home . I went up to Runnells County . I ,,,a s
there a short time. I decided I "'ould look for higher
s take s and decided I might go to school.
END OF TAPE r, SIDE 1
Tape I, Side 2
BP: I was ta lking about going to greener pastures . r
should probably state here that the rancher that r was work ­ing
for , the ranch on "'hich I ",as ",orking , belonged to a
Max Brandt. Mr . Brandt , as you recall, had taken his
"'ife to Kentucky , fulfilling a promise he had made to her
18 years before, when they ' d come out to that ranch in West
Texas . . and taking her body back to her home state . He
Parker 24.
BP : s t abled his horse up at Big Spring and said he'd be
back wi t hin a period of 6 weeks .
But in the meantime, the sheriff came over from Stiles,
Texas . He was Mr . Jepson .. to inform me that he had word
from Mr . Brandt, that he would be two weeks later coming
back. That would make a total of two months he ' d been gone .
So I had a little more time to think over things . The sheriff
also brought two other bits of information out . He not
o nly to l d me about t he delay but he also said that Mr . Brandt
was goi*g to bring his nephew back and the nephew was going
to be there with him on the r anch and also t old me that since
I was responsible for catching the th i eves who had stolen
his cows .. they were a fellow by the name of John Scoggins and
his son , 'l'om Scoggins . The sher iff said that due to the evi -
dence that I had given , tha t had caused them to be caught in
the act , the trap that they'd set for them, I woul d be the
recipient o f a $500 reward from the Tri- County Cattlemen's
Association . That was three coun ties: Upton , Regan , and
Glasgow counties. They had been harrassed by cattle rustlers ,
not on a big scale, but on a pet ty scale and they were glad to
get rid o f them .
Now it turned out later that instead of the $500 I only
got $250 because it was supposed to be for one event . Of
course , if two people were i nvolved , only one e vent and
naturally I only got the $250. I even said elsewhere, not
thinking , what ' s $500? But I was figu r in ' on t he both of ' em . . .
pay in , off.
~
H
I.''
I
j
!
I j
i
~
,'I
)
1
Parker 25 .
BP: In the meantime I'd also come into possession of a
new friend . I looked across the prairie one day while
riding a pasture and I saw a strange sight . It appeared to
be a coyote that was comin ' toward me and draggin' a trap
on one of her front feet . But when I approached , I found
that it was not a coyote , it was a full blood female blood
hound . I got down to take the trap off her foot-of course
she was very reluctant about le t tin ' me touch her and I
could understand it . So I finally worked a r ound a nd got
a leat her str ing which held my riding chaps together and I
t i ed her nose .
JS : What was this? It wasn ' t a coyote it was a .. . ?
BP : I t was a blood hound . A female blood hound dog . So
I tied her mouth so she couldn ' t bite me and I proceeded to
take the trap off with a great deal o f difficulty . It hadn ' t
broken the foot, it had merely caused it to swell. I suppose
I left the string around her mouth fo r about 20 minutes ;
petting her and trying to make friends with her so she would
really be my friend . After while , she relented and I s aw
she was going to become my friend and I turned her loose .
And after that , we had a strange rappor t . She became one of
the best friends , probably , that I ever had in my l ife .
At the end o f two weeks Mr . Brandt re t urned and he a lso
told me that his nephew wanted to wait until his new wife,
who lived in Kentucky , had her baby . Then t hey we r e going
to come out in two months time . He asked me t o stay because
he ' d been there 18 years with his wife ; he ' d never been
there alone ; and he didn ' t want to go through tha t experience .
I,.
t
\
I ,!
I
Parker 26 .
BP: I told him I would. So I stayed another two months.
And then I decided I ' d go up to Palo Duro Canyon and work.
for the J . A. ranch that was owned by Mr . Goorlnight , a famous
cattle trailer I ' d heard a great deal about it . I rode out
that d ay, leav ing the Brandt place when the newphew carne,
and before I got as far as Big Spring , which is , I suppose,
about 20 miles above the Brandt ranch , I decided to go home .
I'd left home when I was 11 years old; I was now past 14;
I thought it was time that I went by to see how the folks
were gett ing along. In the meantime , a great deal of things
had happened over there . My grandfather had moved from
Antelope, where he first settled after he had his disaster
down in the San Angelo area with all the c attle freezing to
death except t he 134 head. He moved up to Antelope in the
southeastern part of Runnells County ; a little community.
I n the meantime he had moved up to the high pla ins of Texas
setting out 28 miles east o f Lubbock, in a l itt l e Quaker town
by the name of Estacada. My step-father had moved up to the
northwestern part of Runnells County to a little t own by name
Wingate. He was leasing a quarter section of l and in which he
had sowed oats . And he ' d also gone into partners with a man on
the McNay ranch . The McNay r anch is still in existence today.
It consisted of approximately 6 sections o f land . It is a
famous l and site because there is a mountain peak in the plac e
known as Chur ch Peak . You can stand on that peak and look
in any direction and see at least 20, 25, even at times 30 ,
miles of distance either way. I t ' s a small mountain in a
coun try where there are no mountains . . put it t hat ,.Jay . It IS
Parker 27 .
BP: called Church Peak because it ' s believed that the Indians
used to have the i r worship servi ces on the top of this mountain .
And t hey even wen t to the e xtremes at times , so people believed ,
a nd offered u p human sac rifices on their altar s . I don ' t k noH .
of course that is not documented . . and that ' s just the sayings
of the old - timers .
But in other word s , this place Has very famous because
it had a c reek going through it , known as Bull Snake DraH ,
s i mply because it was crooked , like a snake . lI.nd a bull
snake , you know , will coil up not in one body but part of his
body ,viII be coiled one way and part another . So they
named this l i ttle creek , Bull Snake Draw . It was lined
with old and neVI live oak trees , Vlhich VIas very nice .
But there VIas one place o n this l i ttle creek you could
stand and you could throw a rock 30 feet t o the east and it
would land in this stre am 2 miles up stream . You could turn
the other direction and th r ow a rock and it would fa l l
i n the stream . . 30 feet over t here .. it ~l as a mile downstream.
You could see how crooked the little river VIas .
In the meantime, they ' ve gone in there with a bull do zer .
I visited there a few years ago .. and they ' ve ploVled dOVln the
trees and they ' ve changed the course of this Bull Snake Draw ..
it ' s no more . They made it i nto one single straight channel
and called it Fish Creek and built a dam across it , I suppose ,
to confuse the fish . It sort of made me mad to see that they ' d
changed everything in the way that they had.
I landed there and I had the same anima l s I started out
Vlith . By the way, the horse I VIas riding , that I ' d picked up
i
. I
I
I
i
I I ,
1
Parker 28.
BP: from Punch McAdams, down in the Big Bend , who paid me
my final check . He paid a portion of it with a horse that
he won in a poker game . I 'm sure he ch e ated me b ecause he
charged me $50 for the horse and we called him Poker . Of
course , I had the mule I was tellin ' you about, named Mabel
af t er my best girl friend. And then I had Minnie, this new
dog I was so crazy about and $250. That made my stepfat her
extremely happy to see me b ecause he was in need of more
than $250 because he had a very unreliable partner in the
McNay ranch .
In other words, we arr ived there and it was at the
beginning of summer. A very dry time . As I said , the
partnership was not ve r y happy but they had 100 steers and
200 mother cows on this 6 sec tions of land plus t he 160
acre s of oat land . I remember my stepfather drew up the
papers, and borrowed the $ 250 and gave me a mortgage on
the 160 acres of oats . 1 didn ' t know at the t i me the oats
had come up and didn ' t get enough rain t o mature . But I
signed the pape r , I guess i n about 15, 20 places . It did
seem very important that I was i n the money-lending busi-ness
.
Some cousins came through at this time a t the beginn ing
of summer--\olasn ' t very much to do- - and they were on their
way to New Mexico . They were going out t here to estab l ish
a broom f acto ry . They were goi ng to raise broom corn and
manuf acture brooms and ship ' em back to Texas; thought they
might become millionaires . When they saw old Hinnie they
became very happy about the possibility of bre eding her
\
I
i
I
I
Parker 29.
BP: to their dog, a famous wolf hound . I didn ' t have any
better sense to let them talk me out of it because they said
we could raise these pups and probably make a lot of money
out of them and they ' d guarantee to have her back within
a year ' s time or probably sooner . They would give me 1/3
of the puppies that she had . When I tied old Minnie to the
back of that wagon, it was one of the saddest days of my
life , up to that time , because I could see that she was
resisting the fact that she was leaving me.
As I said , there was n ' t much to do and my step-father
told me to go over in Coke county were he had an uncle . He
needed somebody to thresh mesquite beans for him . You know
in south Texas we feed prickly pear but out there they
would thresh these mesquite beans, when they got ripe
on the trees there , when the first summer months came . You ' d
knock those mesquite beans off and the cattle would eat ' em
and they ' d not only survive but sometimes they ' d get fat on
them . They are even good for human consumption . I tasted
them a few times ; I don't like 'em but a lot of people d o .
So I went over there and threshed beans . About
30 days after that, I was up on the horse up at one of the
tree s; I was threshing the beans; I noticed the cattle were
milling around me there, got a little bit excited and started
to run . I didn't know what was wrong and looked around to
s e e and, 10 and behold , in the distance , I saw old Minnie
making her way to me . It isn ' t strange that she found me
ther e except for one thing ; I could understand how she had
I ,
I
I
I
I,
,
I ,I
Parker 30 .
BP: found her way from New Hexico back to the McNay ranch
because she practically dragged all the way and she could
come back by the scent . But how she found me at least 20
or 30 miles west on that ranch I ' ll never know unles s it
was by an accident .
Since I ' ve become older in years , that ' s the one t hing
I've tried to solve . How was it?
And so being familiar with horses and being familiar
with dogs I got ahold of a book entitled "The Ki ngdom of the
Horse" and the fellow who wrote it really opened my eyes .
He stated that God dreams in the animal and that ' s why a
horse has problem- solving ability . He dreams in the dog and
that ' s why the dog has prob l em-solving ability. So I ' ve
just s i mply got to admit that I honestly believe that was
how old ~linnie found me .. tha t God dreamed in her . I know it
sounds ridiculous , such as the Immaculate Conception, the
Resurrection of the Dead , sometimes those things we have
to accept on faith.
Well, I went back home after the end of two months and
Mama told me about old Minnie comi n ' by and the things that
had happened there . She said that they were going to di s so l ve
the partnership and that we were going to move out to the plains
in a short time . The partnership however , could not come to an
end because they couldn ' t disso l ve it at the present time because
the bank woul dn't permit it. So we decided to stay there for
the rest of t he winter , anyway . And that' s when those oak
trees came into existence. I attended school at the l ittle
Wi ngate school and they operated in very much the same way as they
I
·1
I
I,I
\:
!
,t
Parker 31.
BP : operate the GED test that we have today . You don't
have a diploma; you can t ake a certai n t es t a nd they ' d give
you an examination . I went ove r and due to the e xperience
that I' d had, and due to my wide reading, which I ' d done when
I was in the c ow camps , and due t o the fact that I ' d fi nished
the third grade before I ' d l eft home , they let me t ry t he 6th
and 7th grade and bel i eve it or not , I made it . I made the
6th , 7th grade there in 8 months time in s chool. Not only
that , but I worked after sch ool and I worked a ll weekends
and sometimes late at night with my s t epfather . We were
feedi ng these cattle ; it was dry; we didn 't have any feed and
the oats on which I had the mortgage didn ' t materialize and
so we didn 't have any grazing land but we ' d ride up under
t hose trees with little axes and hatchets and we' d chop off
the l imbs and we ' d cut and the cattle would eat these leaves .
Believe you me , i t' s a very s ustaining food . I had learned
out in west Texas that the r anchers gave their cattle suffi­cient
amount of vitamins by mix i ng cotton s eed meal and salt
on the basi s of ha l f a nd half . The cattle would eat all the
salt they wanted and no more . But in doing so , they would
eat a s much meal as they needed t o give them t his --which we
learned l a ter-- prot ection against a vitamin deficiency . But
we didn ' t know then that such things as vitamins existed .
But now v,e know what it lS .
At the s ame time I tbld him that in west Texas we also
had used the idea of burning prickly pear . That was somet h i ng
new at t hat time. They would t ake coal oil and put i t under
Parker 32 .
BP: pressure in a t ank and i t would make it a sort of flame
th r ower. They ' d go up to a p r ickly pear and the y ' d burn
off the s tickers and t he cattle would eat the p rickly pear .
I don ' t know if you are acqua inted with that or not but
that ' s the way they feed ' em and i t ' s a ve r y g ood feed .
In fact, my wife a n d l , since we ' ve owned the ranch we ' ve
had in At ascosa County , she bur ned pear s for our cattle
out there s ome th ing like 50 , 60 head for two different
Hinters . They survived on it wi thout any other type of
feed except for the rreal and the salt.
I-Ie didn 't have any prickly pear but what I suggested
to him Has that we had there an enormous numbe r of agarita
berries. They have little pods on them that are similar
to the hackberry tree . If you crushed a well-ripened
p l um and a well-ripened strawberry and mix it up and taste
it , you have an idea what agarita berries Hould taste
like . You 'd know why they make such delicious je lly
when t hey're cooked proper l y and made int o jelly. But
the leaves are always green , like live oak trees . But
they have a needle at the end of each stem that ' s about 11;;
or 2 inches long and it 's alway s sharp . When the frost
comes , or when the winter comes , the plant dies from the
wan t of Hate r , for example, but the leaf would stay green
for a l ong time but th e s t em will always die when the berries
produc e . The sticker is still on there and the cattle can't
eat it. I suggested t o my grandfather , to my stepfather,
probably if we had one of t hose pear burners , that we might
Parker 33 .
BP: be a b l e to burn those agar ita berry bushes and the
cattle would eat th em. And so we burned some just as a
test with paper and wood and stuff and we found out that
they took to them like children would take to ice cream .
So he got a blacksmith to make a flame thrower and we
burned t he agarita berries along with the live oak bushes .
When I was in Stiles - -that's when I worked for Mr. Brandt ,
the ranch out there , the man that lost his wife- -1 took my
horse in one day to have him shoed . That old blacksmith was
a very talkative fel l ow and he told me that when God made
the buffalo , that he gave him something that he didn ' t give
to cattle . He said he gave him a couple of extra incisors
on his lower jaw . And that ' s why the buffalo coul d exist
where catt l e could not because they cannot eat the leaves of
bear grass . The blades are too r azor sharp , and the stickers
are too thick on the end . But the buffalo , he said, would
take these teeth and they ' d dig, as you would with a shove l,
and uproot the bear gras s and eat the roots . It ' s a huge
thing. So I to l d my stepfather about it and we decided
we ' d try it in a different way. So instead of trying to grow
incisors, we got some grubbin' hoes and we'd uproot that bear
grass- -had plenty of them on the ranch . And sure enough it
was really good feed . And so with bear grass and agarita
berries and live oak, we came out in the spring with some
mi ghty good cattle. We had 100 head of steers and 300 head
of cows . And they all came through. We sold the calves off .
Then the dissolution of the partnership came .
r got one trip that r think I should include in here .
A neighbor asked me to go with his son up to Lockhart , Texas
Parker 3 4 .
BP : t o bring back 60 mules for him, before we went to the
Plains . My stepfather agreed it was a good time because he
said we' d n eed the money and we had the time. We went up to
Lockh art , Texas , to the Baker Brothers and picked up 60 mules
and came back . But the day t hat I left, it was very evident
old Minnie , my famous dog , was going t o have p ups . I was
afraid she couldn ' t make the t ri p . \ve didn't know how to get
away from her because I cou l d hardly separat e myse l f from her .
We we r e almost i nseparab l e . Bloodhounds are just like tha t .
So my stepfather said he'd take care of it . So he got a gun-­she
liked to hunt--and he took her off hunti ng . And while he
was gone, I got on my horse and rode away . A little s hower
came up and blotted out the scent and s o that ' s the way I go t
away from old Binnie and went up above Amarillo and Lockhart,
Texas .
We gathered t hese mules and brought ' em back for Mr. Wheat
who was a mu le trader there . I got some bad news. When I got
b ack Mama told me the sad story that old Minnie had absolutely
grieved herself to death . She lay on the porch ; she ' d climb
allover my bed, and she couldn ' t find me . And finally one
day they wen t out and found her and she was unconscious and
there was nothing they could do about her . She died. My step­father
did take her out on Chur ch Peak , the highest spot in
the country, and buried her there whe r e the Indians used to
worship . And so , a s he said , she could always l ook out over
the ranch ",here s he used to live .
I did get s ome good news , however . My mother was a s ubscriber
Parker
BF : to the semi-weekly Farm News; that was a famous farm
paper that was published in Dallas. Texas . I picked it up
a nd it had just the news . done in the encyclopedic form . .
35;
just 1.2 . 3. 4. 5 • . .. certain things happened . One thing I noticed
that made me jump with joy and that was a little story about
1 paragraph which said . Leo Baker was robbin' a store in
Coleman. Texas and as he left the store. he turned his back
on the owner and the owner shot him in the back and killed
him. You wonder why I was so joyful about Leo Baker's death .
He was the fellow whose ear I chewed off and everywhere I'd
go I ' d look back over my shoulder and figured I saw him coming.
All the shadows then really disappeared in my life and I didn ' t have
anything else to fear . That is. after that time. because every person
I saw with a bandage on his fac e or every man I saw that looked
a bit strange. every man that had a deformit y on the side of
his face. I fe l t that was Leo Baker . And then I was sure t hat
he was gone . And Mama sort of reprimanded me because I was so
happy to hear that Leo Baker had died . Nevertheless . be that
as it wi ll .. that was how it happened.
The dissolution of the partnership was made and the bank
was paid off . When they got through . my stepfather had 80
mother c ows . two pairs of mules aw1 two wagons .
from the 7th and 8th grade. the Wingate school .
I had a diploma
And I also had
won the s pelling contest and had to enter as the 6th grade
because I had to have finished the grade before I go to 7
a nd they let me take both grades at one time so I entered and
won the state championship of 6th grade spelling in the state
of Texas . The fellow who missed the question on the 7th gr ade.
Parker 36 .
BP: if I'd been in there I could have won it, too , be c ause
it was reconna issance and I knew I could spell that . Why
I ' d become such a good speller i n all these years that I 'm
tell i n' you about , I had only two b ooks to read and that
was the dictionar y and the Bib l e . In fact, they cal l ed me
the parson. I used to ge t up in t he chuck wagon and they ' d
say , "Well let old Ben tell us a story ." And I ' d ge t up
and tell them the story of Elijah ; I ' d t e ll them the story
of Ahab ; I ' d te l l them the story of Adam a nd Eve ; and Moses
in the wilderness taking car e of his father's sheep and a l l
of those things and so I ' d become pretty well famili a r with
it. In fact, I can say this , and I hope it ' s not being boast­f
ul, I almost h ad t he Bible memorized by the t ime I was 16
years old. Because i t was the only thing I had to read .
But i t did help me with spel l i ng ... all those names: Hezekiah ,
a nd Isaiah, e tc. reconnaissance , asafetida , and things like
that, easy t o spell.
We ll , we made out for the high plains of Texas. It was
60 miles , approximately , there from the McNay ranch to Sweetwate r .
It was 100 miles from Sweetwater to Post , Texas. Approxima t e ly
so. And 40 miles from Post over to Estacada , 30 mi les east of
Lubbock in what wa s the first Quaker town that was f ounded on
the high plain s of Texas . That was where Gr andpa was. Now to
show you t hat my Gr andfather had trained my stepfather well he ,
too , l ived of f the land . And we traveled that d istance , 200
miles , approximately a little over 3 miles a day . As you say ,
we would just ooze along or inch along. He did what Grandpa d i d .
"hen he got to Swee twater, he , too , got a train schedu l e to
Parker 3 7 .
BP : graze the right of way, to graze the railroad . We
grazed other places and when we could , we slept in people's
pastures and stayed a little wh i l e and went on up the way .
In other words , when we g o t up to--we ' d been 60 days on
t he road and a little over 3 miles a day .
fooled along , makin ' that trip.
You knew how we
When we got close to Post Ci ty , Texas, we de c ided to go
across coun t ry instead of going through town. We had to water
the cattle . So I L'emember that my stepdaddy came b ack --he ' d
gone ahead to make a deal there to water our catt l e - - and he ,
th e farmer , wanted 10¢ a head . And for 80 cows that cost a
lot of money . $8.00 . And th at ' s a l ot of money . So he
couldn ' t s tand that and he come back and he cussed every farme r
on t he face of the earth, how sorry they were, people trying
to take advantage of a poor man trying to get along in the
wor ld . He hoped lightening s truck ' em and e verything else .
And Mama was reprimanding him and she said let he r go ahead
and let her trade with the man . So she went ahead , I had a
h alf-brother and half-sister in the wagon with her . She was
drivin' 4 mules to the two wagons.
a head , So that was more like i t.
She made a trade for 2¢
And not only t ha t , but he
a llowed us to camp in a corner of his pasture t hat night .
It's h a rd, of cours e , for any person to turn down a woman,
especially one in a covered wagon who had two little bab ies - ­one
of ' em just a few weeks old .
And so that night , while we wer e in the corner, my step-f
ather woke me up and told me to go out and watch the cows . He ' d
Parker
BP: watched ' em and I could watch them a couple of hours .
Well, I thought I ' d get even with the old farmer yet . He
38 .
had a young calf t here that weighed about 100 pounds . Very
gentle . His ca t tle came up on the other side of the fence .
Ours weren ' t about to run because they were gentle, too , ann
they were flir t in ' with the other cattle across the stre et ,
across the fence . So I got this calf , gentle, and led him out
to an abandoned prairie dog town. It viasn ' t abandoned except
for this reason that t hey had poisoned the prairie dogs and
the holes were empty . There were no prairie dogs in it but
they were not closed up . So I proceeded to butcher this
calf .. I got his off als and stripped the skin and h i s feet
and all , tucked it down these p r airie dog holes , well hidden ,
but I couldn ' t ge t the head down there, d idn 't have anything
t o chop it up with , except a hatchet and a pocket kni fe . So
I decided to bury it . So I dug a hole and buried the he ad .
Next morning, I told my stepfather what I ' d done and he
wasn't reluctan t about doing some of those things himself .
I remember he patted me on the back and said , "Ben , you 're
going to be a Bishop someday . God bless you ." Well, Mama
had a different idea . When my stepfather went ahead and told
her what had happened she decided we were all going to the
penitentiary . He was also a Bible scholar himself and he got
the Bible and handed it to he r and said, "Show me in there
where it says, "thou shalt not rustle." I t says t hou shalt
not steal, thO'l shalt not kill and those things but it does
not say, thou sha l t not rustle . When you take other cattle ,
that's rustling a nd the Bible doesn ' t have anything against
Parker 39.
BP : it . " Well , Mama said, "We're all going to the peniten-tiary
if that man catches us ." "Well , he ' s not going to
catch us if you ' ll just help us here a little bit." "But
look what we ' ve done ; i t will be on our conscience . " My
stepf ather t u r ned over to pau l 's letter to the Corinthians
and h e read her this verse of Scripture . I'll always remem-ber
it. "If thee need offend t hy brother , eat no meat . " He
said, "Now how that ' s going to offend the man if he does n' t
even know we ' re eatin ' h i s meat?" And believe i t or not ,
that satisf i ed Mama and we went on up to Grandpa ' s with a
clear consc i ence .
When we got t o my grandfather ' s place , he couldn ' t find
a place big enough to take care of these cows , thes e 80 mama
cows . And 50 he kept 20 of the cows and he leased out the
others in the sense that he l et the farmers take those cows,
20 apiece , that had the land a nd the feed and they gave him-­the
cows were still his --but they gave him half of the in-crease
. So he made pretty good money at that . You've got 30
calves coming out of 60 cows.
add the 20 cows that he had.
They all had calves . Then you
Then he got a job from two boys known as the Brown
brothers . The Browns . That was known as the Brown Brothers
Sheep Ran ch. Had a big sheep farm . They had 1200 sheep and
they were going to give him ~ the increase o f those sheep for
taki ng care of those sheep .
I enrolled in the Estacada school . And there again , they
allowed me to enrol l in the 8th and 9th grade . I did most of
t he sheep- her ding to tel l you the truth about it. My grandfather
Parker 40 .
BP ; did mo r e visiting than anything else . These sheep , when
they lamb , the sheep has a very short memory. They would
leave the lamb and walk a mile to water because a se ction of
land, you know , is a mile long . It would be in the back and
they'd walk to wate r . By the time they got back , they ' d for-gotten
they had l ambs . That seems like an absurdity but that
is a fact . Thei r memory will not last . And you have string
around the lamb 's leg and one on the mother at the s ame place
if you ' re going t o match them back together . Sometimes she
wo n 1t claim l em . You have to take her and rub her wool on it
and di r t on it and ge t the lamb to smelling like her . Some-times
even take some o f her urine and pour it on the lamb so
she ' ll claim the lamb as her own . And so I devised the system
that we--s ince i t was a plains land--that we just dig holes
out there and keep ' em full of water . That ' s the way I watered
the sheep and t hey didn ' t have any lambing troub l e . We didn ' t
have to put a pain t spot on one ' s knee and one of the mother
at the same place or the lamb a t the same place or tie dif ­ferent
strings a round at different places . We just kept th em
there at the water and we fed 'em there . Where the water was .
We ' d go wi t h the wagon and bring the water in and haul it down .
In the lOth of January , 1918 it was, was the wor s t
snow storm that ' s ever happened on the p lains . Nothing's
happened since and nothing happened before tha t people c an
remember that was bad as it was . And so my stepfather told
me I was goi ng to have to get out of school . He went over and
t alked t o the professor. He said if I wasn't gone over a month
Parker 41.
BP: he ' d let me go and he'd see when I got back I 'd have a
chance to make it up .
He gave me a saddle horse and a jar of water because he
didn't have time to stop and melt the snow . It was the cold
wind that wa s so biting cold. In fact the horse wouldn't go
into at all , he'd go from it. And he gave me two pairs of cut­ting
pliers and a sack of bread and told me to take those sheep
to somewhere I found shelter in t he Yellowhouse
Canyo n . The one that we ' d come through when we'd come out to
the p l ains .
After two days and two nights , I arrived at the Yellowhouse
Canyon and went down in the little valley and t.here was a small
ranch house . No one was at. home. But there ~as food in the . .
they didn ' t have refrigerat.ors at that time .. they had ice boxes ..
food in the ice box , there were no horses in t.he corral, no
chickens around , no cattle, no s heep, no sign of anyone . There
was about two tons of coal, burning coal, piled up against t.he
house on t.he outside. So I just went in and t.ook charge.
They had a feed yard full of kaffir corn , which is a type
of feed they raise up there . It has a head on it like maize .
They cut. it. in the st.alk and st.ack it up there for feed . They
also had a windmill but the ice had frozen on the t.ank and t.he
windmill had s t opped pumping long enough to freeze up . t.he
t.ank wa s full of water but was frozen over . And the windmill
had broken and was running wild . I climbed up on the windmill
and t ied it off good and it was soon turning off in t.he wind.
And I got a knife and broke the ice on the water so the sheep
could drink and I turned them in and let them have all the
Parker 42 .
BP : kaffir corn they wanted. I remember that I went in and
I never enjoyed eating so much in my life because they had
qU i te a bit of food there and I had learned to be a pretty
good cook. I also learned to eat about four or five times a
day beoause I had an enormous appetite. Did my own cooking .
In other words, in a few days , my stepfather expected
that someth ing might have happened to me; he and anot her fel -
low set out to find me . In the wake of where I ' d come , they
found over 150 head of sheep that had laid down in the s now and
died . I couldn 't make ' em get up because when they laid daVin
that was just the end of it . They just tend to freeze to
death . Also, t hey fo und me there with the rest of the sheep in
this position and so t hey got to scouring a round t he neighbor­hood
to find who the place belonged to and they found out that
a young couple lived t here . And th a t they had sold out their
cattle, stacked up their fee~ and they were going into the sheep
business when it come spring time. So they ' d gone over to her
mother's ranch to ride out this terrible storm . Didn ' t want to
be out there by themselves . That ' s why they'd taken their
horses with them . Had no chickens or anything else to take
care of . That ' s why I had everything to my self.
They made arrangements to pay all the damages, to pay for
the feed and all , and after it was over, we drove ' em to
Slayton , Texas , which was over, I believe, about 10 or 12 miles .
I know we made it in a day ' s time. And we shipped ' em back to
Lorenzo on the railroad and then drove ' em out 8 miles to
Brown Brothers Ranch . Approximately another 100 of the sheep
had had their feet frozen; some of them lost t heir feet . Well ,
Parker 43 .
BP : they went to a butcher in Lubbock and he said they would
butcher the sheep but he could use the meat . So they butchered
the sheep but we had the pelts, you know . They sold the
carcasses and after all didn ' t lose too much . But about 100
head, I think, they butchered out; sold them . I don't know
\-Jhether the peop l e that bought the meat realized that it came
from crippled sheep or not. In that day and time there weren't
any in spectors to tell ' em whether or not that was the truth .
Getting on here with the story , a little f aster , probably ,
I should be here . In the summertime , whenever the sheep started
lambing out again , I decided I ' d like to get back in the horse
business. A man by the name of Bledsoe came along and wanted
to know if I ' d like to break horses fo r h im . So I went up to
Bledsoe--that ' s the name of the town--named after him ; just a
little community store and a school, and I broke horses to work
and also , to ride . He was so surprised that out of 28 horses
I broke for him, I never let a single one of them pitch . I
head l earned how to train horses without permitting them to
pi tch . .!>"nd so they never learned how. So I didn't even let
' em learn how. He was very pleased and \-Janted me to s tay on
with him, but I decided I ' d better go back and stay with my
stepfather .
And so he decided he would branch out and do a little more
farming. He sent me over to Lorenzo, that ' s about 7 miles away
from Estacada, and I was to pick up 300 # of feed . And so to
give the fellows a treat up there , I took old Mabel over
there, my pack mule , and a pack saddle. And I put 300 # of
feed on old Mabel and I got up close to the loading dock there
Parker 44.
BP : in Lorenzo; had to stack the feed on there because I could
put it down better than I could raise it up . When I tied it
on the pack saddle, she really had a load . I started out and
I went in to pay the man . When I came back to get on old Mabel
and to head for home , oh , 5 or 6 miles across there I suppose,
they were standing behind a wagon to which a team of mules were
hitched. Some farmer had come i n there for a load of feed or
something , and the mules wanted to stretch . That ' s an essen­tial
thing for them to do. But the lines were so tight they
couldn ' t go forward and so they just leaned backward and when
they did, they pushed the wagon into old Mabel and crushed
her to death . And when I saw her there under that pile of
feed, you can imagine how sad I was. That had brough t many,
many happy days to an end .
I went home and told my stepfather about it . He came
back; he brought the wagon and took old Mabel home and we
buried her. We gave her a funeral. A nice funeral.
At this time we were poisoning prairie dogs . They had a
poi.son feed they put down the holes. Well old Poker got rest­less
and he did something he'd never done before. He got the
barn door open and helped himself to the prairie dog poison.
He died and so we buried him . That left me, seeming, without
a friend on the plain and so I sailed out to West Texas again .
I went out to San Angelo country and I drifted down into
Big Lake and the Barnhart and the Ozona areas. I got a job
as a windmill man on the NH ranch. In other words, they had 16
windmills and I greased all those windmills. I greased 'em
once a week . By the time you ' d traveled over 26 sections of
Parker 45.
BP: land, you climb a 30 foot tower to grease a windmi ll. ar,d
down and go and find another and go home and report what you've
done , you ' ve done a p r e tty good day ' s work. But they didn ' t
seem to think that was enough for me to do and they put me to
ridin ' fences .
So I rode all the fences around, would have to stop and
cut the pos t and put it in wherever it was needed . I had to
c arry the t ools along t o dig with on the pack mule or a pack
horse. Not likin ' that too we ll , I hired out as a workcrew man .
By that I mean if you had a ranch and your neighbor was
working cattl e, you ' d have to s end somebody over t hat would
work for h im . He would pay you to go over and work. Ride
hi s horse s ; you ' d eat thei r food ; but he ' d pay your salary .
And ,,,hen t he roundup was over , you ' d bring the cattle in the
pastur e that was yours , back to you . And he'd do t he same
thing for you when you had a workcrew. So consequently, I
got a job with 10 or 15 different people around t here and made
pretty good money .
So I decided , of all things, that I would leave the r e a nd
go to college. And so I took all the money that I' d earned
and I went out and I bought 8 horses. And that time I didn't
live off the land . I went home high , wide , a nd handsome .
When I got home with the 8 horses, my stepfather could see
again t hat h e had another chance o f getting out of debt . I
beat him to it . I sold t he hor ses and I took the money and
went off to Clarendon College .
When I got to Clarendon College , I decided that probably
I cou l d work my way through s choo l. I didn ' t toll ' em that I
Parker 46 .
BP : had a ny money . And so the guy asked me what I ' d been
doing and I told him . And he said, "Maybe you ' re just the
man we wan t." He sa i d, "We b utcher o ur own cattle here. "
And I said , "We ll , I 'm the guy to do it . I butchered cattle
for myself and for other people ." I didn ' t tell him that I
also butchered--about the old man who charged for watering
the cattle . ( laughter) And so I butchered the cattle . They
bought ' em and put ' em in a feed pen . I butchered them . I
got a man to come out from the local butcher shop there and
he showed me how to cut 'em up properly . And so I got through
school pre tty good. Worked my way through school .
At the end of that year, I had won the ora t o rical con-test
and I also was on the debating team. We had won in the
debating t.eam.
A plus grades .
Tape II , Side I
And not only that, but I ' d made absolutely
END OF TAPE I, Side 2
BP : So a man came along from San Antonio , Texas after I ' d-­well,
in the meantime, I'd gone up to Phillips University
and I took 1 year and got a Master ' s degree . I also had a
student church there . And then I returned to San Antonio,
Texas , because my wife had studied radio and she ' d become an
engineer . We got back to San Antonio, Texas , and I got a
smal l church in the city of San Antonio out on Harriman
Place there in San An tonio. I t' s sti l l in exis t ence , by the
way. My wife worked for Elliot Roosevelt on old KABC as
an engineer. And I traded out the time and I got on the
Parker 47 .
BP: radio; that ' s what I wanted to do . And so instead of
having a church , I just got on the radio and started a
radio ministry . I was on there for 4 years .
Then I decided I should go a little bit higher and do
somethincr else . l\nd a man came to me and he said , "Listen ,
we have a GI bill and boys are going to school now on the
GI bill. I have a college here in San Antonio , a chiropractor
college, and I know you ' re not a chiropractor but I notice you
have some college degrees that I need . And I ' ll give you a
really good job, in fact I ' ll give you $1 , 000 a month."
Well, that seemed like a lot of money to me in that day and
time. Having been work ing for 050 a Sunday, things like
that.
So I told him I ' d take it providing I didn ' t have to do
any teaching. And he said I wouldn ' t ; wouldn ' t have to do
any teaChing. I t ook that (money?) home and we bought a farm
here in Atascosa County .
between here and Poteet.
It ' s an irrigated farm out here
And it was, by the way, the old
headquarters r anch for the San Jos~Mission . I didn ' t know
that , of course, when I bought it ; found it o u t since.
That enabled me to make enough money to build my own
radio station. Add after 5 years , we moved to Pleasanton,
located on the farm, and built our fi rst radio station t here
in 1951. Not only did that give me an opportunity but gave
me an opportunity to give othersc: an opportuni'ty.
At that time in San Antonio they ' d begun to kick all the
ministers off of the radio . So I just used it and I let
everyone that could, come on early in the morning or anytime
Parker 48 .
BP ; on Sunday, you could have t ime on my station . And i n
fact , it wasn ' t for me to tell him what to say or what not to
say because I thought he had a right to express himself any-way
he wanted to . I wasn ' t interested in the c ontents except
that I wanted him to be decent about it . Not run people
down and things like that . Carryon a decent program . And
all of ' em did . And so consequently , I had most a ll t he
churches in San Antonio on this station. And they paid good
money . Didn ' t even have to have an announcer .
In 1956, I built another staion in Falfurr i as , same
t hing . In 1958 ,
the same thing.
I built another in Carri zo Springs and did
And consequently I owed a lot to those peopl e .
To show you how profitable it wa s .. at the same time I
took care of all the commercial advertising they needed to
help . A lot of time they don ' t do anything with it anyway
except waste i t. And so I had plenty of time and if one wou l d
turn you off , 20 would turn you on. That ' s the way I figured
it and consequently those people made me the money that I have
today . And I d id something for them. I gave t hem an opportunity
that t hey would not ever have had . I thought t hat was the b e st
way in the world to enlarge my u sefulness was to do it through
other people. And that ' s exactly what I did .
In 1976 , I decided to retire so I sold out my stations .
I wondered what I might do to pay back this town for what they
had done for me . So I went t o them and asked them, if they
could see to do so , to elect me the president of the Chamber
of Commerce .. I wanted to show ' em what could be done. Well,
they did. And I held office 3 years and i t ' s only a one year
term. But they put me back in for 3 different years.
Parker 49.
BP: And in that time , I organized an annual event . We had
to have something , something here to put the town on the map .
The motto at that time was "Live Oaks and Friendly Folks ."
So I got to doing some research and I realized that this was
the heart of the cattle country.
Frank Dobie , in 1953, had written The Mustangs. In 1951
Dr. Walter Pre scott Webb had written The Great Plains . They
had said that there is an area south of San Antonio , Texas,
it's a diamond shape, i t stretches from San Antonio to the
Rio Grande, from the Rio Grande to Indianola, and from Indian­ola
back to San Antoni o . In the diamond shaped area is where
the cattle industry of south Texas had its beginning . So I
get to doing some research and the first thing I got on to
was a book by Charles Russell e ntitled Trails Plowed Under,
and he threw a monkey wrench in my idea because he sa i d tha t
it started in Cal ifornl.a . Well, I was a little bit disturbed
about i t so I called a friend o f mine who lived in Albuquerque
at the time, by name of Howard and h e told me that
that book was published i n 1928 . The catt l e industry had not
started in California until 1 769 . So I questioned Dr . Webb
and J . Frank Dobie and they made the same asses s ment of i t.
And so I had overcome that.
Then I decided , to be more specific about i t , that I
would just say t hat th is was the area of the cowboy. And so
I got them to accept the name of "The Cowboy Homecoming" as
an annual event. A three-day event and held in the last Thurs­day,
Friday and Saturday of August each year. And so we
called it "Cowboy Homecoming" so the cowboys could come home .
My wife and myself furnished the money . We built the bronze
Parker 50 .
BP : statue down on the city squar e . We gave it to the city
there. And dedicated it to the cowboy , not a par t icular cowboy ,
but the cowboy , who was the on l y common l aborer ever to be re­cognized
as a hero . Because what a cowboy is , is he ' s really
a common laborer . He ' s worshiped as a hero in spite o f that .
There was quite a few people who objected t o the fact that
we called this the birthplace of the cowboy. Jack Maguire was
one. Paul Horgan out at Hobbs , New Mexico who wrote The Great
River , published in 1952 , he was another .
Wel l , in 1976 , W. S . Weddle, a professor at Austin and a
fellow by the name of Robert Thornhoff , co- authored a book titled
Drama and Con flic t, The Saga of 1776 . And they went to Austin
and researched the archives and found those old pieces written
by school teachers 50 , 60 , 70, and 100 years ago and outlined
the very thing we ' re talking about here . And they definitely
pointed to this area here and specifically this Atascosa County
as being the origin of the cattle industry .
Then in 1980 , Robert Thornhoff published his book on the
Texas connection . And he was more specific about it. Then i n
1976, a Catholic priest by name of Habig , San Antonio , he went
to The Vatican and did some research work and came back and he
wrote the story of the cattle industry of south Texas and said
that it began with the San Jos~mission ranch . That was estab­lished
in 1 72 0 . They received a grant of land from the Mexican
government which consisted o f practically all of this county;
Atascosa county . And they named the ranch Rancho del Atascosa .
Now how that all started was when the Spanish r uled here,
Parker 51.
BP: 1521 ' til 1821, and during this t ime , they tried to s tart
the r anching business in several countries . That ' s why they
thought they started in California, but they never got t here
until 1769. Now the records are accurate on it. They also
thought that it started in New Mexico because Albuquerque was
discovered , colonized , in 1608 . But the catt le th at were taken
there, were simply used for t ransportation . They were used
for meat and for milk and they were never able, on a ccount of
the ferocious Indians in that area, to s t art the ranch i ng
industry until many, many years later .
They came south of El Paso in 1630 on the Texas side of
the Rio Grande and started another set tlement with the same
suc cess. And as proof of that , a book called A Br~ef History
of New Mexico , pub l ished by the University of New Mexico Press ,
publ i shed in 1974 , came out and tells these things that I 'm
telling to you right now. That the cattle industry was not a
success at that time; it was absolutely a failure . And so
when Habig came out with his book, t he Mission of 1776 , and
/ the Atascosa County ranch was identified as the San Jose ranch,
-.vhy then we changed it that this "'as the birth place of the
cowboy . Now we're not stingy and say it d idn' t belong to the
a rea because it was an area out fit but another town makes
that claim .
But the cattle were brought up in 1720 , when the ranch
was established . They had 4 , 000 head of cattle and 5 ,0 00
head of horses . It was successful because they had been run
out of east Texas in 1690. That ' s where Nachi toches is now .
Parker 52 .
BP: Louisiana at that time . They tried a g ain i n 17 12 and
fa i l ed and t hey built the Presidio de Bexar in San An t onio.
That wa s their fi rst fort. They built Mission San Antonio de
Valero and they changed it to the Alamo when the cottonwoods
gre\-l up there--named after trees . And that \-las their firs t
mi ss i on s tation .
And the second , of course, \-las the San Jos ~miss io n .
They started their ranch. Others \-len t into the ranching
business at the same time . In 1831 San Francisco de la
Espada, San Juan Bautista , Mission Concepcion , all \-lere
brought out o f eas t Texas to San Antonio . And they also went
in the ranching business . This \-las the first one h ere . And
so that' s \-lhy we make \-lhat seems to be an absurd claim but
really it is n ' t. We mee t \-lith that on ever y corner but I 'm
really ready to defend it . I've been trying to get somebody
to debate \-lith me . When I talk to them a l i ttle while, I
haven ' t had anybody accept the challenge . Hope some day
that th ey will.
But in other \-lords , I thought we ' d see what one person
could do . And so my wife and myself , we got together and we
decided \-lhat \-le were going to do . We organized the Cowboy
Homecoming . We built the CO\-lboy statue. Then we decided
that \-le \-lould promote the other t hings in th e community and
at the same time , build a museum . So \-le bought the oldest
building in town, \~hich this year is 107 years old . T\-lO­story
Odd Fello\-ls Hall, they call i t . And we opened it at our
own expense and we put about $ 20 , 000 of our own money in i t ,
buying artifacts. People began to give us things. We've run
Parker 53 .
BP: it now for seven years .
In the meantime, through subscriptions and through the '
appearance of Willie Nelson , we have gathered up enough
money to bui ld a new bUilding and we'll move in it the first
of March . Not comp letely installed, but in March. And we
will have a building there worth $70,000 . The artifacts are
already valued at $100 , 000 . And we do not have the veh ic les
evaluated as yet . Three wagons , a stage coach, a buckboard
and a passenger auto buggy . And we have a lot of othe r th i ng s
not in that evaluation . Bu t all that will be bought and paid
for.
In the meantime , we sponsored a c ou ntry club. fmc'! to
keep the cowboy flavor in the country club , we namert it the
Atascosa County Cowboy Recreation Association. It 's the only
country club I know of that has a gol f cours and a rodeo
arena combined with swimming pool and club house. So we 1re
really trying to keep it western.
The museum depicts the history of the cattle industry
and the origin o f the cowboy . We know it ' s not the finished
item because there's no millionaires behind it . The town has
not been too eager to push it but they ' ve been very eager for
me to push it . They haven 't been too eager to put much money
into i t but they 've been after me to put mine in it and I
haven't regretted i t at all . I owe ' em a lot and I hoped to
be able to pay ' em back.
I think t hat 's just about the end of my story here . And
I thank you very much for allowin ' me the opportunity to tell
it. I hope that somehow , somewhere, someone , gets some good
out of it .
..
.;,
.~
! '.
!
,I
~
f
!l
r
i r
i
,~
I·
,I.
(
I
I
I
!
I
I
1
I !
j
Parker 54.
JS: Ben, that ' s very interesting . I appreciate it . Could
you give me the new address of the new museum?
BP : The new museum wil l be located on Highway 97 East at
the Pleasanton city limits. Highway 97 is the road that con-nects
281 and Highway 37 .
JS : One o the r thing . You were bragging a bit about your
spelling abilities . Can you sti l l spel l-- I can ' t even say
it!
BP: Her men e uti c s . Hermeneutics . That's the art
of scientific explanations . Homiletics , hermeneutics.
JS : A final ques tion. I sea teat my wife had here: what
are you going to name the new museum?
BP , It ' s going to remain the same it is now , The Longhorn
Museum . It will be non- pro f it . The city will take it over- -
has agreed to take it over as soon as we finish it . And they
will carryon the expense of operating it . We're supposed to
operate it a year but I think they are going to relieve us
of that because we've put so much in it. It ' s going to be
paid for ; they won 't owe one sing l e dime . The only thing
that is not theirs--we have leased the 3 oak- studded acres
on which it is located from the county for 100 years for a
dollar . I don ' t know whether they can afford that do l lar
lease or not (laughter) but I think maybe they can. I'm
sure at the end of 100 years , the county will forget about
it and l et 'em keep the museum there, if it is . Of course ,
the museum is something that is built to last .
Unless somebody tells these things and get these stories
I:
U
,
!
i t
I
I
I I
I ;
Parker 55 .
BP: such as yo u' re gathering here , they 're going down t he
drain and nobody will ever hear about ' em and they ' re lost
f orever .
JS: Thank you Ben Parker, Dr. Ben Pa rker , for your most
interesting and informati ve interview . I ' m s ure that one
day I ' ll be back to ask you more question s .
BP : Thank you . And let me make one correction . The word
Dr .--that is correct--I was striving for a PHD degree. I
didn't have t h e money t o attend college at the time and so
I thought about going back but when I was working for the
school I was t el l in ' you about, as the Dean , I was ins tr u-mental
in incugurating the basic science law in the s tate of
Texas, requi r ing all the healing arts t o take t he same exam-inat
ion. On account of that, the Sou thern States College
gave me an honorary Doctor of Laws degree and that ' s why
I'm known as the doctor . A lot of people thought I was a
ch iropractor because I worked for the Chiropractor COllege .
But I did go around over the state for this Chiroprac t or
College in order to--what they wanted me for was to set up
the course that would enable these boys to pass the examina-tion
in the states where they went.
Now I remember on one occasion that I went up to Mich i gan
and took the examination, and some t imes you have to take the
same examination t he medical doctors take . And I went to
New Mexico and they were having it in t he uni vers i ty . It
was not an examination period but it was a time whe n the
teachers there were rehe arsing their students on what t o l ook
for in the examinat ions . I was in the dormitory there because
I
~
:: i ,
i
~
I r
~
,
i !
i
i
. ,~
I
I
i
I p
Parker 56 .
BP : they had a vacant room , and heard some boys talking in
the next room and said, "There was some idiot here from Texas
come up here to take the examination and that he ' s not a
chiropractor and he thinks he ' s smart enough"to take it.
And he's going to go back and teach it to the students at
the Chiropractor College. Said I got a hold of Simmons awhi l e
ago, that 'las Dr . Simmons who "as a PhD there in school , and
so he's going to give us the little finger to the big toe
question . He said, now remember that . He don ' t expect us
to answer it but he want s to show that guy he cannot pass
that examination." I got on the phone, I phoned I guess 25
people to find out what that was. I knew there was an answer
to it somewhere . I got aholt of a feller in Stanford, Texas,
a friend of mine. He was great for sending students d O'1n
there to the school and he told me that i t was a question
that they often pulled on a fellow . They \Vould ask you to
define the circula tion of the blood, from the little fing e r
of the left hand of the unborn baby to the right toe of the
mother and back again . So I ,,,ent back to my room and I made
me a set of charts and I circulated that blood. So I \Vent
back the next day and s aid, "I ' d l i ke to answer that orally,
if you don ' t mind . Tha t's an abs urd q uestion ; I r e alize that.
I ' d l i ke to tell you what I think about it . Now what I 'm
going to do , I 'm going to tip off to the boys here what it
is and if you don't mind my tellin ' ." So I got up and I ' d
rehearsed it just accurately . He was so flabbergasted he
didn't know what t o do about it . He said, "We tried to put
something by you . I want to apologize . You won ' t have to
~
f;
1\
!
~
~
~
~
t,
L"'j r
'tI,
ij
~ I
I
r
,I:
[
l \
I
I
I
r
i
~ ~
~
Parker 57 .
BP : stay for it. I ' ll give yo u a lis t of the questi ons and
you just take ' em home with you . " I said , " I appreciate
tha t very much."
J S : Well again, thank you Dr . Ben Parker. You des erve the
title, "doctor, " with your many accompli shments. We appre-ciate
the informat ion .
END OF INTERVIE,./
* p . 30 . I Corinth i ans 8:13: "Wherefor e , if meat make my
brothe r to o ffend , I will eat no flesh while t he world
standeth , les t I make my brother to offend ."
I
!
!
i
I
I
,I
I I
I
I
I I·
t
f:
~