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  • Texas | Columns | "Letters from Central Texas"

    Turkeys and Tenderfeet

    by Clay Coppedge

    Frontier journalist Don Hampton Biggers covered about everything he could get to just as the last of the plains buffalo were being killed and some of the first ranches in West Texas were being established. He came of age during the time and worked as a journalist and editor in many a rugged outpost, compiling stories told by the old buffalo hunters and the pioneer cowmen.

    This wasn’t always easy because both groups of people can tell some pretty tall tales, and sometimes the stories don’t always get repeated the way they were told the first time around. Biggers talked to a lot of the old buffalo hunters and put together their stories as best he could, considering the sources.

    Here’s what he wrote about the rigors compiling an oral history of the old buffalo hunters: “I have never yet approached an old hunter for a narrative and failed to obtain this bit of valuable (?) information: ‘I don’t remember much about it. You ought to see Jim Somebody.’ If I ever found Jim Somebody he generally recommended Somebody Else as the man to see. I therefore feel justified in using, though without permission, that which has been surreptitiously obtained, names generally being omitted as a courtesy.” Biggers’ writings are collected in the book “Buffalo Guns and Barbed Wire,” published by Texas Tech University Press.

    Biggers would hear from one hunter about West Texas when it was a wilderness and the hunter would remark that the disappearance of turkeys from the rolling plains always puzzled him. Biggers would ask another old hunter what happened to the turkeys and be told: “You say an old hunter told you he didn’t know what became of the turkeys? Well, I’ll tell you. The hogs got ‘em. There were two breeds of these hogs, one of them was called razorbacks and the others palmed themselves off on society as humans.”

    Turkeys, the hunter continued, were the buffalo hunter’s pests. They ate the horses’ feed and generally roosted not far from the camps. Fisher County, where this hunter worked, was especially thick with turkeys. The first group of people to come into the country once the buffalo and their attendant hostile tribes had departed were what the old hunter contemptuously described as “sportsmen” who slaughtered the turkeys while they roosted and then congratulate each other on what good hunters they were.

    “A bunch of friendly, harmless Tonkawa Indians unintentionally stampeded a crowd of these dime novel sports, and the Tonks nearly killed their horses trying to overtake them and explain matters, but had to abandon the chase,” the hunter noted.

    Another species of tenderfoot was not so wanton and destructive as the “sporting” crowd but members of this group annoyed the old hunter almost as much as the barbarians at the gates of the wilderness. These were what might be called the “Golly! Gee!” crowd of travelers. One such group that he took from Fort Griffin to a buffalo camp kept talking among themselves about the “magnificent scenery” and “beautiful landscapes,” which amused the old hunter. “It was all new and wonderful to them, but old and common place to me,” he said.

    This group of innocents begged the old hunter to shoot some turkeys for them and he said he would but only if they promised to eat all the meat from all the turkeys he killed; they agreed. The hunter had no trouble finding turkeys. He wandered a few yards from camp and killed five. The tenderfeet had a much harder time fulfilling their part of the bargain as they had nothing to eat but turkey for the next five days; they were sick of it by the end of the second meal. By the end of five days, they had some serious gastrointestinal issues.

    “They soon yielded their sentiments to the stern realities confronting them and tore down their air castles and preempted a lot of practical ideas which they improved with experience,” the old hunter noted.

    As for the turkeys, which is where the story began, the old hunter finally added that a couple of fellows named John Goff and Doak Good turned loose some hogs along the water courses between the Canadian and Colorado Rivers in 1876 and the hogs developed a ravenous taste for turkey eggs. “These hogs would scour the country in quest of the delectable food, and there is no question but their work of interfering with the raising was a material factor in the process of extermination.”

    And that, according to one old buffalo hunter, is what happened to the wild turkeys in Fisher County in the latter part of the 19th Century.


    © Clay Coppedge
    July 8, 2011 Column
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