Wild, Wild West Texas

BROWNWOOD, Texas —  Diners at the Brownwood Country Club glanced up from their salad and sirloin one Saturday night to see gun-toting strangers descending on the kitchen.

Moments later, a waitress emerged, looking a mite sheepish.

“I don’t think we’re going to serve you all anything else,” she whispered. “Everybody in the kitchen has his hands up.”

Invading drug agents soon left with their target, the chef, in tow.

And so it goes in West Texas, zany and unpredictable, often maligned and misunderstood.

It is a place where folks considered bootlegging not a crime but a public service. Where a guy could lose $1 million and laugh about it. Where a rookie roughneck might find himself welcomed to the oil business with a rattlesnake on the floorboard of his truck.

More than a state of mind, West Texas is a world unto itself--and proud of it.

There is a monument to a horned toad in Eastland and a statue of a jack rabbit in Odessa. In Monahans, there is a museum in an oil storage tank.

A guy near Abilene rolls his Lincoln out of the garage and into an approaching hailstorm every other year or so. Why? An insurance scam. A rancher convicted of smuggling drugs arrived as ordered at the federal prison in Big Spring. In his private jet.

A modern-day poker game in Odessa ended in gunfire. The lone survivor ran to a nearby house for help and was shot to death by the frightened occupant.

The little Panhandle town of Lefors once tried to give itself away, offering 14 free residential lots in a drawing. Only four winners came forward.

Worse, confessed city secretary Virginia Maples, “I haven’t heard from those people in quite some time.”

In the Panhandle, the town of Happy is known as “The Little Town Without a Frown.” San Angelo’s civic charms include Miss Hattie’s Museum, a bright red, richly restored bordello.

During a football game at Lubbock, host Texas Tech was penalized because zealous fans insisted on throwing tortillas on the field.

In 1856, writing in “Expedition Through Unexplored Texas,” W.B. Parker assessed West Texas thusly: “For all purposes of human habitation--except it might be for a penal colony--these wilds are totally unfit.”

A Vast Mix of Contradictions

Today, author A.C. Greene insists West Texas is “A Personal Country,” a vast mix of contradictions scattered throughout large, small and remote cities, mountains, prairies, deserts, ranch lands and farmlands.

Its people are tough, earthy, proud and fiercely independent.

The region’s most enduring treasure, Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, has been around for 90 million years. There, a blazing sunset reflecting off the reddish and rocky walls and pinnacles is nothing less than a spiritual event.

Less fetching is a chunk of land about halfway between Dallas and Lubbock christened “The Big Empty” by native writer Jim Corder. Larger than a couple of New England states, it has fewer than 25,000 people, many living on small farms and ranches.

Outsiders, Corder said, miss the strange and lonesome beauty of the mesquite, cactus, tumbleweeds, red and rocky terrain and purple and gray stunted hills.

They also miss the rural majesty of Old Glory fluttering above the tiny post office in Old Glory and the small-town rivalry of six-man football games between such teams as the Rochester Steers and Jayton Jaybirds.

When the discovery of oil brought new folks and mounds of money, much of West Texas was a wide, sparsely populated expanse of cattle lands. It was ripe for cattle rustlers familiar with the long, strung-out herds that moved over the winding trails to market.

Of course, Hollywood loves West Texas, portraying it as wild, warped and woolly, an untamed land of cowboys, Indians, crooks, killers, con men, oilmen, boozers, crazies, rowdies and rattlesnakes.

That’s distorted, of course, but not altogether wrong.

In 1920, a Texas Ranger submitted his report on a cattle thief: “Mean as hell. Had to kill him.”

West Texas is home to a group called the Republic of Texas, whose members consider Texas an independent nation. They got everyone’s attention during a weeklong armed standoff last year with 300 state troopers and Texas Rangers in the rugged Davis Mountains.

The pioneer spirit and relentless solitude of West Texas are reflected in West Texans such as Judge Roy Bean of Langtry, “the Law West of the Pecos.”

The judge, with his beer-drinking bear at his side, once fined a dead man all the money he had on him. Got him for loitering.

Famous Con Man Still Wheels, Deals

It could have been a similar instinct that motivated con man Billie Sol Estes.

Once a Pecos entrepreneur and Democratic confidant of Lyndon Johnson, Estes, 73, now resides in Brady. The best-known fertilizer salesman in Texas history still is wheeling and dealing despite two federal prison stints and several other brushes with the law.

Then there was “The Wizard of the West,” the late Tom “Pinkie” Roden. Pinkie was a shy, gentle, stuttering, freckle-faced hulk who grew up dirt poor, made a fortune on illegal whiskey and then founded the most far-flung legal liquor store chain in all of Texas.

During his earlier days, investigators quietly bought his souped-up used cars for a better chance to catch his drivers.

“He drove us crazy,” the late Coke Stevenson Jr., once the state liquor board administrator and an improbable admirer, had said. “But I couldn’t help but like him.”

Fifty or 60 years ago, golfer Hoolie White made a hole-in-one at the No. 6 hole on the Anson municipal course. Did it again last year, at age 91.

“The women in town have been all over him since the news came out,” fellow golfer Jeep Spurgin said.

For West Texans, there is no need to travel to Florida to find Miami or to Tennessee to visit Memphis. There’s also an Eden and a Nazareth. Levelland is in fact level, and the view from Plainview is indeed plain. Trees do grow in Notrees, and although there is no real lake in Big Lake, there once was a giant pool--of oil.

The University of Texas owned much of the arid grazing land around Big Lake when the Santa Rita No. 1 gushed on May 28, 1923, making the university one of the richest schools in America.

If Fort Worth is truly the “City Where the West Begins,” then most of the state somehow lies in West Texas. And not to pick on Brownwood, but its residents proclaim their West Texas heritage while living right smack in the state’s geographic center.

The historic Chisholm Trail lives on, much of it as the Cholesterol Trail. There’s no escaping MonA Wild, Western State of Mindkey’s brisket in Borger, Bar-L’s ribs in Wichita Falls, Sarah’s enchiladas in Fort Stockton or Allen’s family-style fried chicken in Sweetwater.

On Interstate 40 in Amarillo, there’s the Big Texan Steak Ranch, which ballyhoos a 72-ounce chunk of beef on the house for anyone who can eat it in an hour. Ben Heiple of Pampa showed up recently with Taboo the tiger, who wolfed down the monster in 90 seconds.

“For dessert, they gave him a second one,” Heiple said, grinning. “They were really nice people.”

Although West Texans rarely hang horse thieves anymore, justice sometimes is iffy.

Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, the noted defense attorney, figured in a West Texas case in which police brutality was rivaled only by police stupidity. Several of Borger’s finest chased a fugitive onto the famous Four Sixes Ranch, and in the darkness and confusion gunned down not the fugitive but the ranch foreman.

They even handcuffed the mortally wounded rancher and jerked him around before he died. Thanks to Racehorse, that cost the city of Borger a bundle.

Almost as bizarre was the case of Ralph Erdmann, who was West Texas’ main forensic pathologist in the 1980s, handling bodies for 48 counties.

Make that mishandling bodies.

Among his more gruesome errors were a misplaced head and parts from two corpses packed as one. Erdmann once ruled a woman’s death was accidental, but it was determined later that she had been smothered by her former lover.

Strange things happen in West Texas.

Foremost, perhaps, is the weather: droughts, floods, tornadoes, dust storms, hailstorms, searing heat, blue northers.

Blackie Sherrod, the Dallas sports scribe, says there once was a West Texas county so dry that “rainwater was wet only on one side.”

It’s a fact that West Texans shielded their dinner tables during the Dust Bowl days by eating under sheets.

Years ago, someone staged a rock concert outside Lubbock. It attracted as many state troopers and reporters as ticket-holders and was memorable only because of the hot weather followed by blowing dirt, rain, cold and finally an ice storm.

All within hours.

Just last June 1, decades-old high-temperature records fell in Lubbock, where it was 105; Amarillo, 103; Midland, 106; and San Angelo, 105. Temperatures soared to 109 in Wichita Falls and 110 in Childress.

A freak hailstorm near Dalhart once dumped waist-deep volumes of pellets, closing farm roads.

A wordsmith named George Autry says God was working on West Texas when darkness fell, delaying his plans to include such wonders as lakes and trees. By daybreak, the ground had hardened “like concrete.”

God’s solution, says Autry: “I’ll just make some people who like it this way.”