DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the T Anchor Ranch out in Randall County. Now settle in, because this one's got the full sweep of the Texas Panhandle written all over it. Fall of 1877.
Leigh and Walter Dyer and Samuel Coleman drove about four hundred cattle to a place called Spring Draw and built themselves a two-room log cabin. Two rooms. That's it.
That's where this story starts. You can picture it — wide sky, nothing but grass to the horizon, and three men figuring they'd stake a claim on a piece of that emptiness. And that claim caught somebody's eye, because the firm of Gunter, Munson and Summerfield bought it right out from under them.
Now things started movin'. By 1880 and into 1881, cowboys were building line camps and corrals and fencing — and here's the part worth pausin' on — two hundred and forty thousand acres. That was the first use of barbed wire in the area.
First. In 1882, sixteen cowboys and a hundred and twenty-five horses herded more than ten thousand six hundred cattle in what the marker calls the largest drive on record. Sixteen men.
A hundred and twenty-five horses. Over ten thousand cattle. You do the math on what kind of day that was from sunup to sundown.
But the T Anchor wasn't just ridin' high. It weathered things too — a cowboy strike in 1883, drought in 1885, and a blizzard in 1886. Three hard hits in four years.
That same year the drought came, 1885, the British-based Cedar Valley Land and Cattle Company bought the ranch. The Panhandle had gone international. Then in 1889, when Randall County organized itself into a proper county, six of the first officers were T Anchor employees.
Six out of however many there were — that ranch had its fingerprints all over the birth of this county. Foreman Lee John Hutson operated the remaining lands until 1902, and then, like so many of the great ranches of that era, the T Anchor was divided. Broken into smaller ranches and farms.
Two rooms and four hundred cattle in 1877. Two hundred and forty thousand fenced acres, the biggest cattle drive on record, a cowboy strike, a drought, a blizzard, a foreign buyer, and half a county's first officers later — and then, quiet. That's the T Anchor Ranch.
Big while it lasted, and it lasted long enough to matter.
What the marker says
In fall 1877, Leigh and Walter Dyer and Samuel Coleman drove about 400 cattle to Spring Draw and built a two-room log cabin. The firm of Gunter, Munson & Summerfield bought their claim, and in 1880-81, cowboys built line camps and corrals and fenced 240,000 acres -- the area’s first use of barbed wire. In 1882, sixteen cowboys and 125 horses herded more than 10,600 cattle in the largest drive on record. The T Anchor weathered a cowboy strike (1883), drought (1885) and blizzard (1886). British-based Cedar Valley Land and Cattle Co. bought the ranch in 1885. When Randall County organized in 1889, six of the first officers were T Anchor employees. Foreman Lee John Hutson operated remaining lands until 1902, when the land was divided into smaller ranches and farms. 175 years of Texas Independence * 1836-2011