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Their Own Land

The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas (1982) High-stepping, fast-talking, side-cracking, rib-tickling musical-comedy with Burt Reynolds as the sheriff pressured to force the closing of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel headed by feisty madam Dolly Parton.

The historic American West calls to mind lonesome cowboys, sun-roughened pioneers traversing inhospitable country, deadly poker games in seedy saloons, gunfights at sundown across dusty streets. A difficult life, to be sure. What could have drawn so many for years? “Number one is the openness of the area, that there are actually spaces that are unfettered with human population, where there is a little bit of breathing room,” says Michael Duchemin, senior curator at the Autry National Center, Museum of the American West, in Los Angeles. “The second thing that’s associated with the West is opportunity. Because there are wide open spaces and fewer people, there is opportunity there, and that’s what historically directed migrant and immigrant populations to move to those areas.” The argument could be made that these very things continue to draw legions westward even today, and that the unsurpassed scale and variety of nature’s beauty here elicits the same emotions it always has: a sense of unlimited possibility and a standing invitation to test your mettle against the elements.

The word ranch is derived from Mexican-Spanish rancho, which denotes the home (headquarters) of the ranchero. From the beginning, ranching often included raising cattle, sheep and goats, and horses. Cattle ranching has been a major industry for nearly three centuries. As early as the 1690s the Spaniards brought in stock with their entradas.

Individual citizens, until crowded out by settlement, had access to vast areas of public land for grazing. American colonists flooding into the west during the 1830s were primarily farmers and not ranchers, but they quickly saw the significance of lush pastures where cattle could thrive with minimum care. In the 1840s and 1850s a few hardy souls headed to feeder areas in Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, where they could fatten their cattle and ship them to markets in Philadelphia and New York.

Early Anglo-American ranches generally consisted of a primitive headquarters surrounded by open range. Ranchers owned the land on which their improvements were built, but as the frontier advanced, stockmen set up quarters without benefit of title or surveyor's lines. When the real owner appeared, the squatter moved farther into the unsettled domain. Before the advent of barbed wire in 1874, few stockmen acquired land on which to graze cattle. Their primary need was a favorable site from which to work cattle and to control the water, which in turn controlled the range. Even foreign capitalists who invaded the range country in the cattle boom of the early 1880s bought only enough watered land to hold the range.

While sending mature steers to slaughter markets, they moved breeding stock into New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, Colorado, the Cherokee Outlet, and western Kansas and Nebraska to start new herds. Methods of handling cattle, range terminology, and range practices developed and spread with the herds across the western part of the United States. The Panic of 1873 momentarily crippled the cattle industry, but beef recovered rapidly and zoomed into an unprecedented boom that peaked ten years later. Pamphlets describing the "Beef Bonanza" flooded Great Britain, and English and Scottish money competed with eastern capital in acquiring herds and range rights. The industry had grown up as individual enterprise, usually managed by the owner; now the corporation entered the field with all the advantages of mobilized capital but with the disadvantages of nonresidence and hired managers. In the late 1880s the change from open range to fenced pastures brought conflict between large and small ranchers, ranchers and farmers, and employers and employees.

By the end of the nineteenth century the transformation of ranching to the closed range was practically complete. Open-range drift fences were superseded by a complete enclosure of the ranch holdings. Railroads invaded ranch country, and corporations subdivided their holdings into smaller pastures for better range utilization, improved livestock management, and sale. Panic and drought in 1893 brought hard times, but the men who owned their grass and were free of debt were doing business when the upward tide returned.

Chicken Ranch The "Chicken Ranch" in La Grange, Fayette County, made famous by the Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, was perhaps the oldest continuously running brothel in the nation. Institutionalized prostitution in La Grange can be traced back to 1844, when a widow, "Mrs. Swine," brought three young women from New Orleans and settled in a small hotel near the saloon. Mrs. Swine became the first madam and began a tradition of interaction with the community and local lawmen that lasted almost 130 years. She and the girls and women who worked for her carried on a lucrative business, using the hotel lobby for entertaining and a room upstairs for services, until the Civil War, when she and a faithful prostitute named Tillie were run out of town as Yankees and traitors. After the war prostitution continued to operate in conjunction with the saloons in La Grange, but no official records were kept. By the end of the nineteenth century, prostitution had moved out of the hotels and into a red-light district on the banks of the Colorado River. There Miss Jessie Williams (born Faye Stewart) bought a small house soon after her arrival from Waco in 1905. She continued the custom set by her predecessor of good relations with the law and ran the only respectable house on the banks of the Colorado River; she admitted politicians and lawmen but excluded drunkards. Through her connections she learned of an impending crusade against the red-light district, sold the house she owned in Waco, and bought two dwellings and eleven acres outside of the city limits of La Grange and two blocks from the Houston-Galveston highway. This became the location of the Chicken Ranch. As the Great Depression hit and the economy fell, Miss Jessie was forced to lower her prices. Though initially she still had plenty of clients, as times grew harder, customers were not so plentiful and the girls grew hungry. Miss Jessie therefore began the "poultry standard" of charging "one chicken for one screw." Soon chickens were everywhere, and the establishment became known as the Chicken Ranch. As World War II ended, Miss Jessie was confined to a wheelchair by arthritis but still ruled the house with her iron rod. She did so into the 1950s, when she was confined to her bed and cared for by her longtime nurse. She spent her last few years with her wealthy sister in San Antonio and died in 1961 at the age of eighty. Edna Milton had arrived at the Chicken Ranch from Oklahoma in 1952 at the age of twenty-three. She soon took over for Miss Jessie and proved just as capable and entrepreneurial. When she bought the ranch from Miss Jessie's heirs for $30,000 - much more than the property value - she already had established herself as a competent madam. Edna also continued Jessie's custom of giving money to local civic causes and became one of the town's largest philanthropists. The generosity of her donations points to the success of the ranch. During the 1950s the ranch reached its sixteen-girl maximum. On some weekends there was a line at the door, made of students and soldiers from the nearby military bases. One base even supplied transportation via helicopter to the ranch. A visit to the Chicken Ranch also became part of freshman initiation at Texas A&M. On August 1, 1973, the ranch was closed and the women left. Most of the ranch's employees had headed for Austin or Houston; only Edna and a few maids were left. Edna attempted to buy a house in La Grange, but her downpayment was returned. She subsequently got married and moved to an East Texas town where her husband owned several restaurants.

Dan Waggoner was born in Tennessee on July 7, 1828. He was brought to Texas in the middle 1840's when his family settled in Hopkins County. His father died in 1848, and about 2 years later, tall blue-eyed Dan Waggoner bought 6 horses and 242 head of Longhorns and located on Denton Creek, in Wise County, near the frontier town of Decatur. In 1851, he increased his herd and bought 15,000 acres near Cactus Hill, about 18 miles west of Decatur. Waggoner prospered and kept adding to his pastures and to his herds. In 1870, with his son Tom and a few picked hands, he trailed a herd from the Little Wichita to Kansas and came home with $55,000 in his saddlebags. This enabled him to buy more Longhorns at $8.00 a head and to add to his land. Soon he had pastures in Wilbarger, Foard, Wichita, Baylor, Archer and Knox Counties. Dan Waggoner died in Colorado in 1903.

W.T. Waggoner was born in Hopkins County, Texas. He formed the W.T. Waggoner Estate in 1923. He had three children, Electra, Guy and E. Paul. At 14, W.T. had said, "I want to run the most cattle, breed the best horses and work harder than anyone." When he was 17, his Dad made him a full partner. By the time he was 27, Tom had full reins of the Waggoner Cattle Empire. To W.T. "Tom" Waggoner, whose ranch sprawled across more than 500,000 acres in north Texas, the salt water & traces of oil found in repeated wells he had sunk in the early 1900s added up to frustration. He had failed in his attempt to get artesian water for his cattle, suffering through droughts that dried up the tanks and ponds on his ranch. Texaco was an early entry into the plans. Waggoner may have been disgusted with the oil, but he was a practical man and leased approximately 250,000 acres to Texaco in 1909 near Beaver Switch. Texas boasts thousands of cattle operations, but none, not even King Ranch, can match the Waggoner's brag: "the nation's largest ranch under one fence."

The Four Sixes (6666) brand was established by Samuel Burk Burnett in the early 1870s. Although legend persists that Burnett's brand was devised to honor a winning poker hand of four sixes that he once held, sources indicate that Burnett, after successfully completing his first drive to Kansas as trail boss for his father's herd in 1867, saved his earnings and in 1871 used them to buy 100 cattle bearing the Four Sixes brand from Frank Crowley in Denton County. Burnett's brother Bruce used the brand in reverse (9999) for his ranching operation, which he moved to Knox County in 1889. In 1874 Burnett moved his cattle to the region of the Wichita River, bought land, and established his ranch headquarters near the site of present Wichita Falls. Due to the drought of 1881 Burnett was forced to drive his cattle to the Red River to survive. He subsequently leased 300,000 acres of Comanche-Kiowa reservation land. In 1893 he began the process of purchasing the Old Eight Ranch, 140,000 acres and 1,500 head of stock, from the Louisville Land and Cattle Company of Kentucky. The purchase was finalized in 1900, and Burnett moved his 6666 Ranch headquarters to King County.

The Pitchfork Ranch, in King and Dickens counties, is owned by the Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company of St. Louis. The headquarters of the 168,000-acre ranch is thirteen miles west of Guthrie on U.S. Highway 82. D. B. Gardner and J. S. Godwin bought the brand (three-pronged like a pitchfork) and range in 1881; in 1882 Godwin sold his interest to Eugene F. Williams of St. Louis. The Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company was organized in 1883 with Gardner as general manager. After Gardner's death in 1928, O. A. Lambert managed the ranch until 1930. Virgil V. Parr managed it from 1930 to 1940. Rudolph Swenson supervised it briefly from 1940 to 1942 when D. Burnet took over the job. In the 1990s the manager was Bob Moorhouse. Fencing of the ranch was begun in 1887, and oil drilling began in the early 1900s. In the 1990s the ranch raised commercial cross-breed cattle and championship quarter horses, nominated in 1993 to the American Quarterhorse Remuda. The Williams family still owned controlling interest in the Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company. Any cowboy worth his salt will tell you that a gray horse with a black mane and black tail is a Pitchfork Gray.

Parker Ranch is among the largest ranches in the United States, spanning thousands of acres across Hawaii’s Big Island. It is also one of the country’s oldest ranches, with more than 160 years of history. The story begins in 1809, a single generation after Captain James Cook first encounters these tropic isles. A nineteen year old sailor named John Parker jumps ship and hides in a thicket as the ship that brought him to Hawaii drops below the horizon. Due mostly to John’s efforts, salt beef eventually replaces the increasingly scarce sandalwood as the island’s chief export. As the need for beef increases, so does John’s fortune and influence. A year after he returned to Hawaii in 1815, he married Kipikane, the daughter of a high-ranking chief, who took the Christian name Rachel. Rachel Parker bears John a daughter and two sons, and the Parker dynasty begins, figuring prominently in the next two centuries of Hawaiian history.

The Hitch Ranch was established by James Kerrick Hitch (1855-1921), a native Tennessean. In company with his father-in-law, Henry Westmoreland, Hitch had been involved in the cattle business in southwestern Kansas from 1876. In 1884 or 1885 he pastured a herd on Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Beaver or North Canadian River, in present Texas County. He soon moved his ranching enterprise to that area of unoccupied, open-range grassland in unorganized No Man's Land, or the Public Land Strip. When in 1890 the Strip became open for settlement, Hitch and his family claimed land. By 1900 they were running ten thousand head on forty to fifty thousand acres. However, open range began to disappear under settlers' plows, and when a "herd law" in 1902 required cattlemen to fence their land, the nature of ranching changed.

The Stuart Ranch begins in Bryan and Atoka counties and extends 120 miles west to the open mixed grass prairie of Jefferson and Stephens County. It is the oldest ranch in the state of Oklahoma under continuous family ownership. In late 1868 Robert Clay Freeny moved his family west of Caddo for a short time before locating northeast of town on what was known as the Redlands. Although no deeds were of record at that period, Clay Freeny told his daughter of a transaction between them and a man named Johnson when he acquired the original part of land later known as Freeny Valley. In 1930 Colonel Stuart met Ida Freeny and in 1931 they married. It was the wish of Judge Freeny that his only daughter to have the family homestead. In 1933 Bob Stuart was born to Ida and Colonel Stuart. Bob Stuart continued building the ranch and its legacy until his death in 2001. Today the fifth and sixth generations are operating the ranch.

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