Chapter 3

One of the potential farmers pulled me aside and asked if I would consider joining in on shares to buy into a large section of land. While I had some money, it was not near enough to buy more than a few acres outright. We all realized that the land we would be buying would be unimproved scrubland. While the fields in production looked great neither of us could afford to buy any of it.

It might be a risky investment, but I’d heard some talk of the Texas coastal plains being a potential source of Oil and Natural Gas. There was even some talk of petroleum drilling going on around Beaumont and New Orleans, further up the coast of the Gulf. There were no wells in evidence around here, but I figured that buying land ought to include more than just the surface and water rights.

All the current developments around here were within a few miles of the railway right of way. The further away we looked, the cheaper the land seemed to become. But roads being as primitive as they were, a few miles were a long way away. Going south towards the river sounded good until you realized that the Rio Grande River flooded each spring, so I lobbied for going the other way. I figured that with the land being as flat as it appeared, pumping water into the tower guarantees that it flowed outward smoothly and evenly. A few canals in the area carried surface water away from the river by gravity, under no pressure. It was the quantity that mattered anyhow. It took a lot of water to cover an acre of ground, when you consider how fast it soaks into the soil.

Four families joined with us to purchase shares of a section of scrubland four miles north of the railway near Swallow. My insistence on purchasing the mineral and quarry rights along with the land was almost a deal breaker. The railroads had been granted great swaths of land to encourage their expansion, but they only sold water and surface rights on their lands. The prospect of coal mining on their land grants drove their initial mineral strategy. The land spectators couldn’t care less about minerals. They were selling farmland. The depth of a plow at the furthest beneath the soil was all that they were concerned with.

Finally, a section of land was found by another spectator that promised all the mineral rights being granted to the buyer. Our group purchased the whole section, a square mile, thus each side was a mile long, and only cost us a few dozen dollars an acre. It still amounted to a tidy sum when you figured it was six hundred and forty acres. My share brought about a tenth of the entire acreage.

Not bad for having spent a year of my life earning it. Now I had to build a home for myself. The four families agreed to pitch in together and build each other’s houses, families with kids first then us bachelors last. I didn’t need much neither did Patrick Owens, the other single farmer who had been brought into the deal. Clearing each home site took a week using mules and horses to twist mesquite stumps out of the ground. The kids started to cultivate a garden spot while us men built a board and batten- sided, wood framed house with a cedar shake roof. Clearing brushes was just the beginning of our toils. Root plowing was slow and exhaustive work for men and animals alike. We didn’t see any progress for several months. Lessons learned were at the expense of sore muscles, exhausted animals and chronic shortages of everything that couldn’t be produced locally.