What would turn out as an EPIC day of motorcycle touring began early in Big Spring, where I awoke early wondering how I’d have woken up here about a hundred and fifty years ago. I think I can guess: the worse for wear…
Here’s the itinerary:
It was nippy in the morning, but by the time I reached Colorado City, seat of Mitchell County, it had warmed up. Somehow I had never thought much of Colorado City, but I learned that it was, due to a brief moment of glory, once known as “the Mother City of West Texas”. It was at that time the largest town between Fort Worth and El Paso. It was believed to have more saloons than any town in the West, and more millionaires than any place in Texas. The first sermon preached in Colorado City was in a saloon, and the “jail” was a length of chain attached to a mesquite stump. (The thought of running afoul of that chain might have made a better boy out of me.)
The old glory (inglory) may have been lost, but it’s still a very interesting little town. Beginning with the courthouse…
From Colorado City, due north to Snyder, seat of Scurry County. Snyder is the birthplace of the late Powers Boothe who, among other things, played the scrofulous Curly Bill Brocius in “Tombstone”, challenging Doc Holliday and the Earps. For me, Boothe’s voice is the quintessential Texas male accent.
Never having been to Snyder before, I was surprised by several things:
First, it has the strangest courthouse I’ve ever imagined. It is totally windowless and is in an architectural style called “brutalism, characterized by repetitive angular geometries”. It looks like a pseudo-Buddhist mausoleum (who needs windows if you’re dead) or a bomb shelter of some sort. Here’s a couple of pics:
The second surprising thing was that it was another Grand Central of the buffalo hunting trade. It’s most famous citizen of that era was a transplated Vermonter named J. Wright Mooar, who in addition to personally killing upwards of 22,000 bison, also killed (to Hell with Native American sensibilities) one of the two albino (white) buffalo in that region. Now we have a statue to it:
Then there’s this at the corner of the courthouse, just in front of the white buffalo:
Third and finally, I have wondered my entire life where to get good crap. Now I know it is available in Snyder…
I reluctantly left curious Snyder, headed due west for the place that is farther “out there” than any “out there” I’ve been to on this trip – Gail, seat of Borden County. (Note to self: This isn’t the only Gail I know that’s “out there”…)
Long before you get to Gail, it becomes evident that you are heading into Terra Incognita (except that there’s a town and courthouse there, but let’ not split hairs). Here’s what it looks like:
Here’s how you know you are coming to civilization:
If you stand on the porch of the courthouse, you are looking due north into what looks like wilderness. Beautiful wilderness.
More scenes from Gail (there don’t seen to be any operating businesses, except for one…)
Interestingly, and keep this in mind before we get to the next surprise, Borden County is named for inventor Gail Borden (male), who was the founder of Borden’s milk, including inventing the condensing process.
From Gail, you launch due north into the wild, bound for the town of Post, seat of Garza County. Some scenes along the way:
The road is only 30 miles long – you wish it would go on forever, but then you arrive in the little burg of Post. Named for…yet another surprise…Charles W. Post, founder of Post cereals. He established this prosperous little self-contained model community out in the middle of nowhere, not for profit, but to give reality to his vision of how community living should be. I’ll be damned. I never knew this place existed…
Not all of Post’s experiments worked out. Between 1910 and 1910, he tried his hand at rainmaking by setting of explosives in the atmosphere. Hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained…
Now northeastish to Crosby County, of which Crosbyton is the seat.
Nice courthouse, but after the thrill of Post and Borden, a slight deflation. No, it’s not named for David Crosby (I checked). Cosbyton’s predecessor was established by a colony of Quakers, so I guess if I’d had to choose between Crosbyton or Colorado City in the day, I’d have been taking my chances with that length of chain fastened to the mesquite stump.
Anyway, there must be folks in Crosbyton with a sense of humor:
I guess in case people were having too much fun in the Crosbyton of the 50’s, the lingering memory of the Quaker founders must have been there to provide an antidote:
It doesn’t look like either camp fared very well…
From Crosbyton we now head eastward, as the temperature heats up, for Dickens County, county seat of Dickens. I assumed that it might be named either for Charles Dickens, or the phrase, which I heard a lot in my early days, “I’ll beat the dickens out of you!” (I decline to identify whose mouth that came out of the most…) Instead both were named after one of the men who died in the Alamo – a worthy cause, at least compared to the Confederacy.
The Dickens County courthouse is a solid little lump of rock, suggestive of a Sumo approach to courthouse design. Certainly it could hold its own against the legal profession, who was opposite the courthouse in this:
Here’s the grand design:
And some of the neighbors on the same square:
And headed out of Dickens, bound for Guthrie, seat of King County:
No time to stop for groceries…
And the damned motel is closed too…
Oh well, there’s some fine road between Dickens and Guthrie…
Jack Kerouac drove through Guthrie, as mentioned in “On the Road”.
Guthrie is basically a corporate-owned town – evidence of the giant 6666 Ranch and Pitchfork ranch are everywhere (hmm..if they had called them the Pitchfork and THREE Six ranch…). This is also horse country – you ask how I know that? A keen eye for observation, even at supersonic speeds:
So, umm, saddling up the Beemer, we head toward our easternmost point on this trip, the town of Benjamin, Knox County. Weird fact – the country was named for Washington’s (George, yes) Secretary of War, Henry Knox, while the county seat of Benjamin was named by some guy in honor of his kid who got killed by lightning. Doesn’t augur well for the future of your town – he might’ve taken a page from Trump’s book, and named the town for a kid who’d managed to live…
Anyway…the road to Benjamin…
…yielded this sad spectacle. I saw the cow and the three buzzards first and could not figure out why they were so close to her. Then I saw the little black lump in front of her and understood what I was seeing. The cow kept looking over at me as if she expected me to do something. But I guess she and I both knew that the “doing” would be done by the buzzards when she got tired of watching.
Arrived in Benjamin, the courthouse was a nice, chunky, tidy affair…
…but what was more interesting was the jail, just opposite me, that had apparently been tastefully converted into some kind of cottage or B&B. Take a look:
Very cool! As was the abandoned gas station on the other corner of the square:
Starting to watch the sun and the clock, I head back southwest now toward Stonewall County, Aspermont the county seat. I had never heard of Aspermont before, so the whole way there I’m thinking “Aspergum”, a favorite remedy of my grandmother.
Passing through the town of Rule on the way…another mural.
Then welcome to Aspermont…
West from Aspermont to Jayton, seat of Kent County. Beautiful views along the way, going back to farming country:
By the time I got to Jayton I had run the BMW plumb down to the last drops of fuel. Jayton does not have a filling station, but it had a pump for agricultural implements where, with a credit card, you could pump low-grade ag fuel into your vehicle. The BMW normally prefers Premium, but we were able to stock up on ag-grade fuel, then off to the courthouse… Sorry I failed to photograph that pumping station, I know it would have added interest to this tale…
By now I’ve decided that I’ll overnight in Sweetwater, but to get there I have a long, circuitous route to traverse. First stop, Roby, seat of Fisher County.
Unfortunately, the main shopping center in Roby had closed before I got there in late afternoon…they did not advertise it as “high quality crap”, but I knew that it was. (I’m my daddy’s boy…)
Roby is much better equipped for modern life than poor Jayton – it has a Sheriff’s office and a gas station.
Last run of the day, south to Sweetwater, seat of Nolan County, and home of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, which my herp-friendly youngest child has persuaded me is a bad thing. It did not take too much persuasion – roaming the countryside with cans of gasoline to dump down wintering snake holes is a fairly grotesque form of entertainment, and I’m not hostile to snakes to begin with.
That said, Sweetwater is an attractive little hub city for cotton, oil and cattle.
Also, Willie Nelson’s film “Red Headed Stranger”, after the album of the same name, was filmed here. It is the center of the Western Hemisphere’s leading wind power generation region. The Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce says:
“If you’re bored here, it’s your own fault.”
Time for bed, tomorrow back to Wimberley.