Chapter 3

The

Ranch
I was interested in the article about the big ranch. I got to thinking how things
had changed. Of course, where I was raised, it was much smaller. However, if we
started out horseback, we went all the way horseback. I wonder how many miles I
have ridden to check windmills, fences, and etc. It wasn’t unusual to ride seven
miles to check on water and then ride seven miles back. We had some thirty miles
of fence to check.

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We tried to check one pasture at a time. Once in a while, I would have to ride it all
the same day. I would check the south end in the morning, go by the house at noon,
change, and make the north end.

I wore the soles off a pair of boots one year just where the stirrups fit. That was
the last year I rode six miles to school and six miles back each day. I rode all of
Saturday and usually part of Sundays and every day all three months of summer.
That was after Granddaddy Knox got to where he couldn’t ride much so I had to
take up the slack. So you see why going horseback riding holds no thrills for me?

Hope I am not boring you with my memories.

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When you moved cattle it wasn’t like on T.V.—in a long run. You moved them as easy
as possible. If they run they lost a lot of pounds and, after all, that was the point
in the whole thing. The only time I can recall much trouble, they were getting
ready to ship cattle to market. We were moving cattle from the “north pasture”
which was farthest from the home pasture where they were all to be held. We
drove them over a bumblebee nest underground. Several steers got stung, they
ran, and so did all the rest. We had our hands full for a while. That was the only
time I remember anything like a stampede.

When I was going to High School I come home for Christmas week. I hadn’t been
on a horse since school started. Knox sent me to help two others bring some 142
head of young steers out of the cedar breaks from the Brazos River close to Glen
Rose. It was cold and light rain the whole time. Even some ice. The cattle didn’t
want to leave the good, warm windbreaks in the bottoms. By the time we got them
out, I was one sore boy. We finally got them on the road and one would ride ahead
to hold them down and two would bring up the rear.

Down south of Cresson the fences were no good, and three of them got in a guy’s
field. I kicked down the one wire and stood on it, led the mare I was using across,
and got the steers back in the road. I stood on the wire again and led my mount
across. She hung a shoe on the wire, broke it, got scared, and whirled around me,
wrapping the wire around me. I fell under her, but she settled down and stood still.
I had on two pair of pants and Knox’s saddle slicker. When it was over, I had on one
pair of pants and a waist-length slicker. All Knox said was, “You ruined my good
slicker”.

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To give you some background:
Knox went up the trail to Montana when he was 16 years old – W.H. Eddleman was
owner of the herd. Jim Pickard, known as “Little Jim”, was Trail Boss. (see Family)

Bill Burney, Fred’s and Mary’s daddy, also made some drives. He was my actual
uncle, as he later married Ida Pickard, Dad’s half-sister.

Knox went to work for sometime on the XIT and Millionaire Ranches.

(NOTE: The XIT Ranch was the largest ranch which ever existed in the
world. It covered three million acres and ten counties. XIT stood for “Ten
in Texas”. It was owned by a corporation in England and was only in
existence for ten years.. To fence it and all of its pastures took 6,000 miles
of fence.)

He later come back and went to work for W.H. Eddleman. The place where I was
raised was known as the Eddleman Ranch. At one time, five families lived and
worked there. Knox was Foreman. He moved the family there in 1920 and stayed
until 1936. It had changed leases several times but was still owned by the
Eddleman Estate.

They took me when I was six months old in 1918.

When I first remember the ranch, J.L. Furneaux from Dallas had it leased, but only
come around about one time per month. So Knox run the place for him with two or
three hands. Johnny Pickard (Knox’s brother), for one, worked there for years, but
Johnny could handle a horse about like I could handle an airplane.

Furneaux would buy a trainload of two-year-old steers each year (500-750 head)
and ship them up there. They were fed out for about nine months and shipped to
market each year from some big ranch in west Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.
When he bought that many, they gave him his pick of the horse herd.
Unfortunately, he knew nothing about horses. In with a train load of cattle would
be one of the damndest horses you could imagine. Once in a while, he would
accidentally get a good one.

Knox was grounded from riding for several years before 1936 because riding caused
his ulcers to start bleeding. That is, they told him he couldn’t ride but he still did a
lot of it. As I got older and he was not supposed to, I inherited the job of riding
any rough horses we might have. If I do say so myself, I was considered a good
rider (bragging a little).

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If you are still interested, I will give you a rundown on some of the horses I knew
back then. Knox always had some personal horses and with the ones belonging to
the Ranch, we always had several.

I am sort of getting a kick out of telling you some of this. If I get to boring you I
will quit. Just let me know.

Dad’s Brand: HLP (Harold L. Pickard)

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Pictures taken of the ranch on a trip back home in the 80’s:

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Dad writes of the pictures:

“We appreciated the pictures. The old home place looks natural to me. The one you
took from where Parsons station was located especially.

It doesn’t look like there were huge shipping pens at Parson’s Station now. At one
time there was two feed warehouses, a house, barns, windmill, and feed troughs.
Before my time they said there was a store, post office and saloon located there.
Even in my time, feed was shipped in and unloaded for several ranches in the area.

Several miles east was the Winslow place. A man by the name of Earl Foster ran a
still there and made bootleg whiskey for years before he was finally convicted and
served time in the penitentiary. I wasn’t very old one time when Knox sent me
there to check on some cattle. I rode upon them excavating a hole for their still.
The barn set against a hill and they dug a tunnel from it. The whole horse lot
covered the still and horses walked over it. The man’s father-in-law was a rock
mason. The walls were rock and the top braced with railroad rails had about three
feet of dirt over it. They had a motor to pump in fresh air and gravity drained the
residue though pipes into a creek a long way away.

I knew how the whole thing worked but I sure kept my mouth shut. The local law
searched the place a number of times but didn’t find the still. Once they deputized
Knox and took him along on a raid. I had told him where it was but he played dumb.
They were neighbors and were good people in a way (also a little mean). He was
wholesaling it and not letting anybody around. He finally got to selling so much that
the federal officers raided him. Actually he was buying off the local law.

I also knew where his mash vats were. Several hundred yards away was a chicken
house. Under it were the vats and gravity-fed mash trough underground pipes to
the still. I had also rode up on it while checking for strayed cattle. The local law
could have caught him if they hadn’t been paid off. He was getting all of his
supplies out of Dallas. I saw a truckload of sugar unloading there once and all the
whiskey he made was hauled to Dallas. He sold nothing locally.

Actually, I knew quite a bit about bootleggers, having ridden up on them while
prowling around horseback. That was during Prohibition and a lot of people were
running stills between Cresson and Fort Worth. It was on the big Scott Ranch.
Some of it was rough terrain. Uncle Willis McCracken lived on it. An oil pipeline run
across it from one end to the other. Uncle Willis had a deal to take a man across it
by horseback. They called a man a “pipeline walker” and he covered it ever few days
to check for leaks and etc.

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Floyd McCracken, my cousin, was about fifteen at the time and he went with the
man and brought the horses back. I would visit them in the summer and made a
number of trips with Floyd. He showed me where three stills had been operating. I
was always interested, but as I said before, I kept my mouth shut. At one time I
knew that whole country, having ridden horseback over all of it.

Back to the pictures, you got a good one of Comanche Peak in the distance. This,
you knew, was a lookout and hideout for Indians in the early days. They say there
are all kinds of artifacts up there. Also a number of caves and etc. I always
wanted to go up on top of it but never got to. A road now goes up through the
notch you can see close to one end. It has been a private place for years and no
visitors. I got some of my information from Knox. He had been up on it. There is
pasture and a field on top now and they keep cattle up there. I have been to the
bottom where the steep part starts but that is as close as I ever got.

Hey! Thinking back I probably had told you most of this before--sorry-- I will shut
up.

Love, Dad.

The following paintings were done of the ranch by my Aunt Kathleen, Wilson’s wife.

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