Day 9: Ozona, TX to Wichita Falls, TX
North, cowboy church, why things seem bigger in Texas, Albanies, longhorns, zoological sprawl, Red Draw, World's Littlest Skyscraper
Some brief housekeeping. First, I am trying to decide to what extent to continue this series. If you have feedback on how things are going, please email me at: 1endlessamericanroadtrip@gmail.com. The extent to which readership continues to grow will influence this decision, so please do share the newsletter with people who might enjoy. Second, please expect a lighter posting schedule through December. Thank you for reading! - BRL.
The word orientation comes from the Latin oriens, meaning east, the dawn, daybreak. For early mapmakers east was the primal direction. What, after all, could be more important than the daily emergence of the sun? The great Hereford mappamundi, the largest surviving medieval map, is arranged so that up equals east - the east is on top. North, on the other hand, was disdained in Christian Europe. It was the direction of cold, darkness, evil. The unbaptized were buried facing north; it was Satan’s quarter of the map (the devil had yet to be crowned the Southern Lord). The Hereford cartographer labeled their map’s northern edge Septemtrio, after a collection of seven stars (part of Ursa Major, and forming what we now call the Big Dipper) traditionally used to navigate northwards; our modern word north is a name literally given offhandedly - its root is in the Indo-European ner, meaning left, as north is to the left when facing the rising sun. Yet somehow, and no one knows quite how, over the centuries this underdog direction has struggled to the upper reaches of the map, attaining cartographical supremacy, so that now we speak respectfully of true north, and seek out some great driving goal or ethical principle that can serve as our north star.
And so, pondering the contingent nature of the world, we start our day driving north along the TX-163. At Barnhart, where the Oil Can Sports Bar and Grill offers on its menu the B.A.B. (Big Ass Burger), we take the US-67 up (which is to say leftwards, were we in medieval times) through Mertzon and into San Angelo. San Angelo is large! After two days of hamlets and villages and charming isolatos, here are buildings that one could genuinely call tall (the Cactus Hotel, built in in the 1920s, is fourteen stories and visible from fifteen miles away - which, yes it is tall but this part of Texas is also very flat).
After the city and now on the US-277 we hit a literary stretch of highway, passing first the town of Tennyson and then Bronte - named after Charlotte Brontë, but these days pronounced “brahnt”. In Bronte the old Texas Theatre - angular and whitewashed, marked with a lone red star - has been converted into a cowboy church. There are cowboy churches throughout Texas - the movement is now several decades old. These churches are not particularly denominational. What sets them apart is both their explicit appeal to the rugged (often male) individualist, and their aesthetic:
On Sunday morning at the old theater, the congregation sings modern worship songs and bluegrass standards. [The pastor] and other church leaders use Western language to describe the trappings of a traditional church. The new youth center is called the Feedlot. The list of prayer requests is called the Prayer Rope. New members are invited “to sign up and ride with us.”
Past Bronte we encounter the Callahan Divide, a long, low collection of hills that stretches for 150 miles across the midsection of western Texas. Here is author A.C. Greene on their modest charms:
People living near them call these hills “the mountains” though they do not qualify in the least for the title, seldom standing more than five-hundred feet above the surrounding country. But they furnish an experience for the eye and a pretty purple, gray, or green backdrop to that part of the country, depending on what time of day or which season you view them.
While at one point an inconvenience to wagoneers and cattle drivers,
Now they represent only a slight barrier to movement or passage… The highways that weave their way through at various points scarcely cause the foot of the automobile driver to increase its pressure by a toe’s weight.
This is from A Personal Country, Greene’s encomium to West Texas. He grew up in Abilene, just beyond the divide,
…a town with a certain bracing beauty in its prairie openness, but particularly when approach at night from the highway, for it can be glimpsed from miles away, its lights dancing a thin line from north to south, making it seem to be an enormous city, much larger than it really is.
Hills called mountains and small cities posing as grand metropolises - which raises the question, is everything really bigger in Texas, or do things just look that way because there’s not much else to compare them to? Perhaps the size of the state contributes to the perceived size of its contents. From the plains of Abilene we slightly ascend into another minor mountain range, bumping along through views of endless mesquite until we reach the shallow bowl where rests the town of Albany, Texas - which is named after Albany, Georgia, which is named after Albany, New York, which is named after the Duke of Albany. This particular Albany has an enormous courthouse, built in 1883 in the Second Empire style, both hulking and pretty. A plaque there notes with charming fastidiousness that construction was budgeted “at $27,000.00; final cost was $49,433.75. Clock tower was added at public’s request.”
Then we come to Forth Griffith, and at Fort Griffith graze the Official Texas Longhorn Herd. Longhorns have a long and intimate relationship with Texas; in 1995 they were designated the state’s official large mammal - which might seem overly precise, except that we are long past the point at which a state as large and mighty as Texas would deign to represent itself with only a single item of fauna. In 1927 the northern mockingbird was adopted as the official state bird; since then the rolls have been expanded to accommodate an official small mammal (nine-banded armadillo), flying mammal (Mexican free-tailed bat), and dog (Blue Lacy). Nor is Texas exceptional in its zoological sprawl. Several states have official fish in both the fresh and salt water divisions. North Carolina has an official marsupial (Virginia opossum), Washington has an official oyster (Olympia oyster), and Maine has an official crustacean (I’m going to blow your mind here and tell you it’s the lobster) - and this only scratches the surface. There are scads of official amphibians, and swarms of official insects. There are state animals as mundane as the brown bear and white-tailed deer, and as recondite as the hellbender, the paddlefish, and the Catahoula leopard dog.
And then there is Connecticut, whose official state animal was, briefly, homo sapiens - us. We were quickly replaced by the sperm whale.
Coming back to our Texas longhorns - they are strange, exceptional beasts, and one of the very few cases we have of an animal being re-domesticated. All cattle descend from their larger, mightier progenitor, the aurochs (Bos primigenius). Wild itself, the aurochs was domesticated twice during the Neolithic Age, once in India (Bos indica) and once in the Near East (Bos taurus). It lived on however until much more recently than you might suppose. Herds of aurochs, shaggy and supporting absurdly massive horns, were living in Eastern Europe during the time of Shakespeare; Poland managed to maintain a small herd for the Polish nobility to hunt well into the 1600s - and even engaged in a bit of proto-bovine diplomacy by offering gifts of aurochs meat to foreign leaders.
Once domesticated the cow has tended to stay domesticated. While isolated instances of feral cows have been noted, they have not, as have say pigs and Burmese pythons, gone wild and run amok across entire ecosystems. With one exception. Beginning in 1521 the Spanish, as part of their colonization efforts, brought cattle from Europe into what is now Mexico. Some cows escaped and, as writes J. Frank Dobie in his authoritative account of the longhorn,
The English sparrow that came to the United States centuries later and the boll weevil of the Mexican tropics… did not find conditions for propagation more favorable than those the domestic animals of Spain found in America.
Having propagated, the wild cows slowly worked their way north, and by the time English-speaking settlers began to straggle into the future state of Texas, a new breed of cattle was waiting there to greet them. The longhorns (the term wouldn’t be widely used until the mid-1800s, but we’ll adopt it here for convenience) had been transformed by their time in the wild. They were skinnier, long-legged, with tough hides and those trademark long, slender horns - used to defend against bears and wolves. They had evolved to drink less water, and to eat a wide variety of shrubs and grasses. Few diseases could faze them (in fact they acted as disease reservoirs, and were a menace to other breeds). Their personalities had also changed. No longer docile, they were wary, quick, and aggressive, so much so that in the early years of settlement they were hunted like game animals. Dobie wrote,
Ask any old time range man of the south country to name the quickest animal he has ever known. He won’t say a cutting horse, a polo pony, a wild cat, a striking rattlesnake… He will say a Longhorn bull.
Longhorn meat was tough and lean and at first not much appreciated outside of Texas. Then came the Civil War. The War decimated the Texas economy, even as the northern cities boomed. It also sucked all of the men out of Texas, leaving wild herds of longhorns to propagate unmolested. When the men came back they found themselves without farms or cattle or cash, but with millions of longhorns wandering at liberty. In the meantime the booming north demanded beef - lean, tough beef, if that’s all they could get. For anyone who could gather up a large herd of longhorns and drive them to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri, the potential profits were enormous. Longhorns, hardy and willing to eat anything, required not the slightest amount of care. It cost about a dollar per head to drive them north, and they could sell for up to five times that. The pull from the beef vacuum up north, and the pressure of the endless supply of virtually free cattle in the south, created an immense flow of ungulates. During the latter half of the 1800s around 10 million longhorns were driven out of Texas - the largest man-made migration in history.
But the age of the longhorn was short. Texas recovered from the war and became more densely settled; the vast grazing ranges of the longhorns were snipped away plot by plot, becoming farmland and fenced-in pasture. As Americans became more prosperous the economics of the cattle industry changed. It was no longer so important for cattle to be cheap and low-maintenance. What you wanted instead were cows that were, in a word, beefy. By the 1920s the tough, bony longhorn was nearly extinct. Only the efforts of a few dedicated preservationists kept it alive, no longer freely roaming the wilderness, but grazing sedately in a few private farms and designated state parks - back firmly in the fold of Man.
And so the longhorns here at Fort Griffith are carefully bred in order to keep them as wild as possible.
From here we continue on the US-283 until we reach Throckmorton, where we take the US-79 North through Olney and Archer City and up to our day’s destination of Wichita Falls - whose regional specialties include the Red Draw, which is beer mixed with tomato juice.
Before turning in for the evening we first drink a big frosted mug of Red Draw, and then we have an important landmark to make pilgrimage to. At the corner of 7th and LaSalle stands the Newby-McMahon Building, also known as the World’s Littlest Skyscraper. It comprises four stories, stands forty feet tall, and is so narrow that it has the floorspace of a Manhattan efficiency, 430 square feet.
The story behind this building having this name is: in 1919 Wichita Falls was caught up in an oil boom. Speculation was rampant. Enter JD McMahon, engineer. A man from the big city (Philadelphia), he proposed a big city plan: build a genuine skyscraper, 480 feet tall, right here in Wichita Falls. Put the city on the map. Sweeping views. People seemed to like the cut of his gib, and he raised $200,000, which is around $3 million in today money. Construction began - and very quickly ended. Rather than a skyscraper McMahon had produced the nubbin that stands before us today. He had not even budgeted space for a staircase - a ladder led to the upper floors. Appalled, his investors rushed to the courthouse.
Here is the place to note that the symbol for “in feet” is a single small vertical dash at the upper right hand of the number so designated, while the symbol for “in inches” is two small vertical dashes at the upper right hand of the number so designated. The fact that these symbols are both very similar in appearance and very different in meaning had not escaped JD McMahon.
The courthouse: the investors, in a confused mob, pour into the judge’s chambers. There is shouting and handwaving. McMahon’s blueprints are produced and unrolled across the judge’s desk. A skyscraper, insists the mob, we were promised a skyscraper, not a nubbin! The judge puts on his bifocals, squints down carefully at the plans, and calmly remarks that wherever those vertical dashes appear at the upper right hand of a given figure, they do so in pairs. McMahon had scaled his entire project in inches, not feet, and his investors, swept up in their excitement, had never noticed. He had delivered exactly what he promised: a building 480 inches tall. Case dismissed. And McMahon left town with the balance of his investors’ investment in his wallet.
Versions of this story (without my dramatic embellishments) have appeared in many reputable venues - newspapers, magazines, and Wikipedia. Certain elements are fact: there was a man named JD McMahon, and he did construct this particular building. However all of the richness of the narrative, and especially that wonderful detail about the swapping of inches for feet, is unverifiable. Even the building’s nickname, The Littlest Skyscraper, is meant to have been bestowed by a mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not - but no one has of yet been able to locate the relevant strip (much of the original early Ripley’s strips were lost in a fire). This doesn’t mean that the story is untrue, it’s just… mysterious. Where did it come from? Was it passed along, mouth to ear across the decades, so that it still contains a good measure of truth? Or is it a pure urban legend? Did the building - which eventually fell into deep disrepair, until its half-mythical status caused it to be purchased and restored by the Wichita County Heritage Society, and which currently houses an upscale consignment shop - did the building, weird and noncontextual as it is, simply demand a story, and this story is the best we could come up with?
It’s a pretty good story.
Wichita Falls also lends its name to a very beautiful jazz album by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays.
Special Thanks
Dick Bundy, architect and former owner of the Littlest Skyscraper, for his generous help providing research materials on the Newby-McMahon Building
Sources
A History of the World in 12 Maps, by Jerry Brotton
“From the North so Dear to Southern Climes”, by Anatoly Liberman
Cowboy church in West Texas town of Bronte welcomes all, by Charles Scudder
A Personal Country, by A.C. Greene
The Texas Longhorn Genome Decoded, UT News
Europe’s Changing Woods and Forests, by K.J. Kirby
The Longhorns, by J. Frank Dobie
Cattle Kingdom, by Christopher Knowlton
The World’s Smallest Skyscraper Complex, Original manuscript by Dolores Matthews, updated and rewritten by Ruth E. Reuther