A few years back, I was working on a story about modern day cowboys in Texas. I had a chance to watch an old school roundup out in Hamilton County, where they had 20 or so riders on horseback who rounded up a herd of cattle for branding the traditional way. What impressed me the most about the experience was actually the sounds of the whole thing. The first rumblings of hooves, like the sound of distant thunder, high-pitched calls of ‘yip, yip’ from the riders, and the bawling of the cattle themselves. These are sounds many of us don’t hear any longer, but that were once an integral part of daily life for nearly every early adventurer in Brown County. One of these traditional cowboys, a fellow by the name of McLeskey, settled in Brownwood after his adventures taking cattle up the great trails of Texas. He ran a shoe store in his retirement, and told stories about the old days.
“Memories of the old trail days when large herds of cattle were driven thousands of miles over the plains of Texas to northern and eastern markets, or to stock other western ranges, when the cattle rustlers lurked in the path of the herds and Indians rode the plains of Texas and Indian Territory are vividly recalled by J.F. McLeskey, old time trail rider, who now operates a shoe shop at the corner of Brown and West Anderson Streets and has operated a shoe shop in Brownwood for the past thirty-one years, read a June 12, 1930, issue of the Brownwood Bulletin.
“Mr. McLeskey sits at this work bench and mends shoes, but his memories take him back to the times when he, at nineteen years of age, ‘bossed’ a certain outfit that took thirty-five hundred head of cattle hundreds of miles across Texas and into Colorado. He remembers the days when wild game was plentiful and there were very few fences to bar travel across the plains, and when Brownwood was only a few houses and several dug-outs.”
McLeskey was born in Arkansas in 1860, and first came to Brownwood in 1876, at the age of sixteen. McLeskey and his brother were in town in order to pursue the possibility of obtaining government land. Several years later, he returned to the area. McLeskey recalled making six or seven trips through the Brownwood area driving herds of cattle to market. “The cattle were driven through this county between Brownwood and what is now the town of Owens,” he said. “This was not a regular cattle trail, but was sometimes used as water could be gotten for the cattle from the creeks in the section. The cattle trails were always mapped out so as to pass as much water as possible en route so that the cattle would not die from thirst.” When McLeskey was nineteen, he came through this county as trail foreman over ten men. They were driving a herd of 3,500 cattle from Lavaca County to Trinidad, Colorado, to sell them to ranchers there.
From his shoe shop in Brownwood, McLeskey told tales of his days riding the range. He told of his adventures in Dodge City back when it was the wildest town in the west, to harrowing yarns about clashes between cowboys and rustlers, floods and droughts, and confrontations with Apache scouts. He was apparently something of a local character, holding court at his shop with mythical stories about the last wild buffalo he saw, up along the Pease River, and describing the trainloads of hides he watched being transported away in a huge line of train cars. Jefferson Franklin McLeskey, according to his tombstone, died in Brownwood in 1934, and is buried in Greenleaf Cemetery.
The country was open when McLeskey first came here. If you stand outside the address where his shop was located, you will probably hear the sounds of cars, or an occasional siren. It’s hard to believe that at one time, the rushing sounds of pounding hooves, the sharp calls of cowboys keeping a herd in line, and the echoes of a pistol shot were once common here, right where the city stands today.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to [email protected].
