Owen Wister

The cultured gentleman from Philadelphia generally credited with inventing the Western novel, a genre that evolved into film and eventually television, spent some time in West Texas on his way to becoming a nationally-known writer.

Born to a well-to-do Pennsylvania family in 1860, Owen Wister graduated from Harvard in 1882. He wanted to be a composer, even though his father stood dead set against it. Still, Wister traveled to Paris for a year of musical study before giving up his dream and returning to the U.S. for a clerical job with a Philadelphia law firm.

Planning on entering Harvard Law School, Wister suffered an attack of symptoms that read like the description of a nervous breakdown. A doctor said going out West might be good for whatever ailed him.

Wister did as told, in 1885 visiting and becoming enchanted with Wyoming. For the next 15 years, during which time he took up writing, he traveled to various Western states. He drew inspiration and stories from each place he visited, one of which was Brownwood.

The purpose of his trip was to visit Fitzhugh Savage, a fellow Philadelphian who owned a ranch called the Seven Springs. Savage raised and trained polo ponies, which he sold back East. Two of Wister’s former school chums, Frank and Dick Conover, had ranches near Seven Springs.

Traveling with friend Harry Groome, Wister stepped off the train at Brownwood on Feb. 20, 1893.

“Brownwood is a fair specimen of these board towns,” Wister wrote, apparently referring to other Western communities he had visited. But while Brownwood’s architecture did not particularly stand out in Wister’s mind, its moral standards and civic tidiness caught the young Philadelphian by surprise.

“The municipal authorities are all church members, and professional ladies are run out!” Wister continued in his journal. “Also I read a regulation forbidding anyone to throw paper or refuse in the streets or alleys, except in the barrels or boxes placed for the purpose. This is not much like…Casper [Wyoming], or Buffalo [New York]!”

The visitors left Brownwood the next morning and spent most of the day traveling the 40 miles to Savage’s ranch, bouncing along through the live oaks and leafless mesquite in a wagon pulled by a four-horse team. Though it already seemed like spring, no wildflowers had bloomed yet.

Less than a decade before, Brownwood had been the epicenter of what came to be known as the Fence Cutter War, a bloody feud between those opposed to the end of the old free range days and those who enclosed their acreage with barbed wire.

The worst of the violence occurred in the mid to late 1880s, but as recently as three years prior to his arrival, Wister wrote, “this part of the country was in a high state of disorder…In 18 months there were 34 murders.”

Those suspected of fence cutting and or cattle rustling often received a letter giving them 10 days to vacate the area, he noted.

“The results that followed upon neglecting the hint were so uniform that a man upon being given 10 days…was heard to exclaim, ‘I’ll let ‘em have nine days back.’”

Some of those involving in issuing the warnings, Wister hinted darkly, later purchased land vacated by those who heeded the dreaded notification.

Wister collected stories, noted peculiarities of Texas speak and partied with his friends, noting one occasional when “we unexpectedly caroused to such a note that next day I was nearly obliterated, and poor Frank [Conover] was entirely so.”

After more than a month in Texas, the two visitors left Brownwood on March 25. Wister wrote his next diary entry three days later in New Orleans.

Searching the digital vastness of the World Wide Web, a plane of knowledge far more vast that the plains of Texas, sheds no light on the ranch or its present owners. There’s a Seven Springs Ranch in San Saba County, but that’s 77 miles from Brownwood. There’s also a farm with that name near Jacksonville, but that’s in East Texas.

Wherever the Seven Springs Ranch is, it helped shape Wister’s view of the West. Who knows? Wister might have rustled his “When you say that, smile” line from some Texas cowboy. That’s enough to make any Texan grin.

© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" January 15, 2009 column
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