by Mike Cox
More accurate than the cave story is Wier’s passed-along recollection that the prisoners used a water trough fifteen feet long, four feet wide and six feet deep both for bathing and washing their black-striped cotton prison clothes once a week. “The prisoners would go in on one end and they would be handed a bar of lye soap and they would take a bath and wash their clothes at the same time, before coming out on the other end,” he said. “At the end, they would put their clothes back on.”
While their guards apparently figured the prisoners could get by with only one bath a week whether they wanted it or not, the convicts did get three meals a day. But they did not have to waste time trying to decide what they would like to eat. Their menu of salt pork, cornbread and coffee did not vary. McCullough said that due to an economic recession at the time, those convicts ate better than some local families did.
Wier, friends with one of the landowners, got to spend some time poking around atop Convict Hill as work began on the residential development that covers the hill today. “Digging around through the rocks, rubble and all,” he recalled, “we found [various] things.” Among artifacts likely associated with the capitol project were several old oil-burning lanterns or parts, empty twenty-five-pound black powder cans and part of a metal wheelbarrow wheel.
What remains of Convict Hill as seen from an abandoned roadside park on US 290 in Oak Hill. Photo by the author.
But by then, most evidence of the large-scale operation was long gone. As the Oak Hill Gazette put it, “Nature and looters reclaimed whatever was left after operations finally shut down.…All that remains now is a sinkhole and two iron bars driven into the ground, where prisoners were tied up at night.” (The bars served some industrial purpose, not to restrain convicts.)
In 1971, when Oak Hill still lay outside the city limits, longtime Austin businessman Ralph Moreland opened a restaurant on the north side of US 290 he named Convict Hill. The eatery was built around an ancient oak tree, beneath which was a section of railroad tracks and an old cart, presumably dating from the days of the capitol construction. Framed blowups of old photographs showing the quarry in operation, along with assorted rusty artifacts found on the hill, decorated the interior walls. A popular venue offering steaks and seafood, Convict Hill Restaurant stayed in business until 1992, when it was torn down to make way for future highway expansion.
9
LAST ROUNDUP AT THE XIT
The story of the legendary XIT Ranch, its long-abandoned first headquarters at Buffalo Springs some six hundred miles northwest of Austin, is entirely different from that of the capitol except for one thing: neither the ranch nor the capitol would have been possible without the other, at least not in the period that each came into being.
In 1885, when the newly organized Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company (created by the Capitol Syndicate to allow for a much-needed infusion of cash from British investors) began its effort to make money off the three million acres the state had agreed to exchange for building Texas a new statehouse, the ranching industry and the far-from-finished capitol had yet to acquire their romanticized images. The new ranch in the Panhandle, though notable for its size, simply amounted to a business operation. Downstate, the capitol was just a large government building still under construction.
Cowboys employed by the largely offshore-funded Chicago businessmen building the capitol took more interest in their wages, the availability of good grub and the ranch’s relative proximity to the saloons, gambling dens and easy women in the wide-open little town of Tascosa than in the fact they were working on land the state had leveraged to pay for its new statehouse. All the complicated legislative and contractual legalese (not to mention the wheeling and dealing that scholars are still struggling to untangle) that made the ranch and the capitol possible was beyond the easy understanding of most of the ranch’s boots-in-the-saddle workforce—assuming they even cared. In fact, from the time the first cattle went to pasture on the ranch, a half century would pass before any sense of connection to the capitol began to develop on the part of the XIT’s aging former hands.12 The occasion was what amounted to the XIT’s last roundup, an annual reunion of former hands first held in 1936.
When the Dallham and Hartley County town of Dalhart hosted the third annual XIT reunion in the summer of 1938, scores of men who had worked on the ranch before its owners broke it up and started selling it off in 1912 came by train and automobile to talk about the good old days. Only then, treated as VIPs and eagerly sought out by reporters for stories about the by then fabled ranch, did it begin to sink in for most of the old-timers that they had been a part of something much bigger than the world’s largest ranch. Now they realized that they had worked on the ranch that essentially paid for that giant red granite building that Texans liked to brag about so much. The old cowboys didn’t always agree with the laws that came out of that capitol, but by golly, they could tell their grandkids that they’d had a hand, however indirectly, in putting it up.
Of all the old cowboys who came to Dalhart for the reunion every year they could, none better personified the tie between Austin and the XIT than Ab Blocker. As a youngster, he had seen the old limestone capitol many times. He knew it had burned in 1881, and when family or business necessitated that he come to town, he noted the slow progress on the new capitol. Now, decades later, he had come to understand the effect Austin had on the sprawling Panhandle ranch and vice versa.13 In at least a symbolic way, he had been the one who brought the two together.
Abner Pickens Blocker was born “of cultured parents” (as talespinner J. Frank Dobie later described them) on his family’s ranch three miles south of Austin on January 30, 1856. He later related to an all-ears young reporter the family story that a herd of cattle had been milling around their ranch house the day he came into the world and his older brother John Rufus had been “toddling around the place playing cowboy” as the family grew by one.
Blocker worked on his family’s place until he was twenty, when he joined elder brothers John and William on a ranch they had started in Blanco County. A year later, in 1877, he made his first trail drive, herding three thousand steers from Central Texas to a ranch in Wyoming. Soon the Blockers moved farther west, with the 1880 federal census showing Blocker and his four brothers living in Runnels County. As for their occupation, the enumerator wrote by each name, “works with cattle.”
Sticking with that occupation for most of the rest of his life, Blocker got pretty good at it. He later claimed, and no one questioned it, that he had “looked down the backs of more cows” and “drunk water out of more cow tracks” than any other fellow who “ever pointed a herd towards the North Star.”
Reporters in Dalhart corralled the eighty-two-year-old Blocker when he hit town for that year’s reunion on August 5, 1938. “Straight and sturdy with his twinkling eyes undimmed by the years,” the Dalhart Texan said, “Blocker chuckled as he recalled his first entrance into this territory 53 years ago.”
In the early summer of 1885, only three months after the laying of the capitol’s cornerstone in Austin, the new ranching operation—so far only known as the Capitol Reservation—began buying livestock to be herded from South and West Texas to the vast Panhandle holdings. Among the sellers was John Blocker. Little brother Ab gathered 2,500 head of cows and calves from his brother’s ranch in Tom Green County and drove them north toward the grass-covered high plains. By July, Blocker and his hands had the cattle up on the Caprock and moving toward the ranch’s new headquarters at Buffalo Springs, thirty-five miles north of what would later become Dalhart.
Less than a day away, Blocker and his men bedded the cattle down for their last night on the trail. At some point, Blocker learned that another herd headed for the new ranch was ahead of him. He knew who the trail boss was.
“Boys,” he said, “Joe Collins is ahead of us with his herd. We’re going to drive tonight.”
Intent on being the drover to deliver the first herd to the new ranch, Blocker waited unti
l the moon came up and started moving his cattle. By losing some sleep, he gained the distinction he wanted. They arrived shortly after sunup. B.H. “Barbecue” Campbell, a Kansas cattleman imported by the Syndicate to manage the new ranch, rode out to meet the herd.
“I’m Ab Blocker,” the trail boss said. “Here’s your cows.”
Blocker’s arrival caught Campbell by surprise. He had been expecting Collins’s herd, coming up from George West in South Texas, to arrive before the cattle the company had ordered from Tom Green County. No matter the order in which the herds got there, the next piece of business was getting the cattle branded. But the ranch did not yet have a brand.
Years later, Blocker told a reporter with the Pampa News what happened next:
“Barbecue wanted to use three letters and he wanted a brand a rustler couldn’t blot. He had drawn a lot of designs with his boot in the dust. I started drawing in the dust with my boot heel. For some reason I happened to draw XIT.
The XIT brand designed by Ab Blocker became a Texas icon. Author’s collection.
“‘How’s that, Barbecue?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Get to branding them cows.’”
Which is what Blocker did.
“I had one of the hands to open the corral gate and let a cow loose,” he recalled. “I roped her and dragged [her] to the fire we had built. Then I socked on the brand. After I branded about twenty head Barbecue stopped me and told me he didn’t like my work, that I couldn’t brand cows for him. That suited me. We left.”
As for the soon-to-be-famous brand, Blocker continued: “There was absolutely no reason for my drawing an XIT.…It was just a brand that could be put on with an iron that had only one bar. The brand could be blotted out, of course. So could any brand that was ever created.”
Since the ranch, which extended more than two hundred miles north to south and roughly thirty miles wide, covered parts of ten Panhandle counties, the legend arose that XIT stood for “Ten in Texas.” But Blocker scoffed at that. “It didn’t mean ten counties in Texas or anything else,” he told the reporter for the Pampa newspaper.
While working on the XIT was just a job for its cowboys, anytime the ranch’s general manager or any of his division foremen got a letter from the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company’s Chicago or London offices—which was not infrequently given the firm’s hands-on management style—they got a visual reminder of the enterprise’s unique purpose: the firm’s imposing letterhead prominently featured an engraving of what the capitol would look like when completed. To the lower left beneath the image was the short declaration: “Owners of X.I.T. RANCH, Panhandle, Texas.”
At its peak, enclosed by six thousand miles of fence, the giant ranch had 150,000 head of cattle, 1,500 horses and 150 cowboys. But the XIT was never financially successful, and the Chicagoans only began to profit from their investment when they sold off the ranch in parcels. Still, the XIT had a tremendous effect on the Texas Panhandle.
In January 1888, the new statehouse nearly complete, a reporter for the Waco Examiner interviewed a “Mr. Calhoun, a traveling representative of the Fort Worth Gazette” shortly after he returned from a trip to the High Plains. He declared: “I consider the exchange of that 3,000,000 million acres of land for the magnificent capitol building now going up in Austin the best piece of legislation ever enacted in Texas, in that it has advanced the development of that country [the Panhandle] at least a quarter of a century.”
As for Blocker, he would push multiple thousands of Texas longhorns to buyers in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma before making his last trail drive in 1893 to Deadwood, South Dakota. While trains and trucks eventually changed the way cattlemen moved livestock to market, Blocker continued to work cattle on his family’s South Texas ranch until he could no longer sit a horse. Never interested in owning land or livestock, his life revolved around cattle and horses. He never drove a car or went up in an airplane and had no desire to. He did enjoy regaling people with stories of the old days, especially when sipping a little good bourbon.
The sprawling XIT never made its owners any significant money until they broke it up and sold it off. Library of Congress.
The old trail driver died at a relative’s house in San Antonio on August 9, 1943, at the age of eighty-seven. Honoring his wishes, his family buried him with his old high-topped boots on, his favorite silver spurs still strapped on the heels.
10
THE CAPITOL THEY NEVER BUILT
The capitol, magnificent as it turned out, stands as a literally rock-solid example of the often vast difference between what we envision and what we eventually end up with.
One notable for-instance is that the original plan for the capitol called for the building to be topped by a square Baroque tower with a mansard roof. Fortunately for aesthetics, on the recommendation of the consultant who reviewed all the proposed plans, Detroit architect Elijah E. Myers agreed to alter his design and crown the building with a round dome more like the one atop the U.S. Capitol. It would be slightly taller, of course.
When the state advertised for design proposals in 1880, Myers had been one of eight architects (including one woman) submitting eleven architectural drawings. (Some of the architects presented more than one drawing.) Of the contenders, Myers had the most experience and landed the $12,000 contract to draw the plans for the Texas Capitol. He had designed a roughly similar, if somewhat smaller, capitol for Michigan and would later draw plans for a domed capitol for Colorado.14
Wisely, as it turned out, the state hired New York architect Napoleon LeBrun to travel to Austin, select the best plan from those submitted and suggest any needed changes. After recommending Myers’s proposal, in addition to urging that the envisioned square tower be nixed, LeBrun suggested changes to the rotunda, thickening interior walls and tweaking the building’s proportions. He also proposed adding two water-powered hydraulic elevators. Myers agreed to the changes, though only one elevator ended up being installed.
An engraving of original architectural rendering of the capitol by Detroit architect Elijah E. Myers. Author’s collection.
“Architecture is an index of the civilization of all ages,” the capitol board declared in its January 1, 1883 report. “The design which has been secured for the Texas State Capitol, combining as it does, all the essential elements of proportion, dignity, size, adaptability, and modern improvement, is believed to be a fair reflex of the enlightenment of our age.”
As it developed, the biggest difference between the capitol as planned by Myers versus the one Texas ended up with had to do with its exterior. Original specifications called for the building to be constructed with limestone, not granite. Following a statewide search, the capitol board and the contractor had decided to quarry limestone near Oatmanville in Travis County since it was close, plentiful and seemed of good quality.
But when the first load of stone arrived at the construction site, newly hired capitol board building superintendent R.K. Walker (the third person to hold the job) rejected it for use on the building’s exterior. It would be fine for the basement and interior walls, but the huge white blocks of stone contained pyrite, which over time rusts and causes unsightly stains. Virtually indestructible granite seemed the obvious better choice. That marked the beginning of a complicated period of option-weighing, negotiation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering on the part of state officials and contractor Abner Taylor.
For a time, however, it looked like a better grade of limestone from Bedford, Indiana, would be selected. When word of that got out, Texans didn’t like it. “We ought to have the very best of material in the capitol,” the Fort Worth Gazette opined, “but it looks strange that out of an area of 374,000 square miles we cannot find stone enough without going to Indiana for it.”
Burnet County rancher George Washington Lacy proposed another remedy: he would gladly donate as much granite off his land as the contractor needed. While few would disagree that granite looked better than limestone, Taylor estimated t
hat using the stronger igneous rock would cost an additional $613,865, primarily in transportation and labor. Of course, he had also said that limestone from Indiana would end up costing more than his syndicate had planned to spend.
Lacy’s offer, however, was not as out of the blue as some tellers of the capitol story have suggested. Subcontractor Gus Wilke had already received granite from Lacy and his partners for use in laying the structure’s water table. The term “water table” looks strange to the modern eye, but it’s how the builders referred to the granite base Wilke’s workers had set down to prevent water seepage into the limestone foundation that would rise on top of it.
Meanwhile, as the Chicago Inter Ocean noted on June 26, 1885: “Indiana feels as independent as a boy with his pocket full of rocks during the blackbird season. She proposes to furnish the stone for the State Capitol of Texas. The job in itself is not a small one, but the big feather in the Hoosier cap is that her stone quarries are pronounced equal to the best in the land.”
While the capitol board, eager to see the construction project get off high center, favored the out-of-state limestone, newly sworn governor John Ireland did not. Besides, the existing contract stipulated the use of Texas stone. On top of that, the granite had been offered to the state for free. The governor, the public and the press did not seem at all bothered by the fact that Nimrod L. Norton of Salado, one of the capitol commissioners, had an interest in the Marble Falls property that had the granite on it. While the granite would not cost the state anything, Norton and Lacy realized that the area would benefit enormously from the construction of a rail line from the county seat of Burnet to the quarry. Also, a stonework shop would be set up at Burnet if the deal went through.
“If the press of Texas is a mirror of popular sentiment,” the Galveston News observed as the debate continued, “Indiana stone will not receive a generous welcome for use in the state capitol. There is a good deal of sentiment in Texas, and sentiment, by the way, even when mistaken, is a bad thing to buck against.”