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| Editor's Note:
Mr.
Hudspeth claims to have been born in 1860 and to have traveled
the entire state of Texas before being abducted by aliens at the Texas
State Fair of 1948. He has no memory of events (on Earth anyway) for
the years 1948 to 2001. That was when he "awakened" in a motel room
outside of Sanderson. His "histories" cannot be verified, so we publish
them for amusement only. Mr. Hudspeth goes into a trance when relating
his stories and what follows is a transcript of his answers after
asking him what he remembers of Snyder. |
The Naming
of Deep Creek,
The Truth about the White Buffalo Legend
and
The Two-Day Oil Boom
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"Well, Snyder
was a pretty bad place before I got there.
Yeah, I knew Pete Snyder. He wasn't a bad guy - for a Yankee.
What the history don't tell you is that Pete had a partner. I forget
his name - it was Ralph somebody - they named Deep Creek after him
- sort of.
Ralph and Pete were talking while crossing what they had been calling
Shallow Creek. Ralph was tellin' Pete a joke about Franklin Pierce
and just when he got to the punch line - he disappeared.
Pete turned around to see Ralph's hat floating on the water and that
was all. They thought of naming it "Not-as-shallow-as-we-thought Creek"
but that was too long to put on a map - so they settled on Deep Creek.
They never did find Ralph's body. He owed me ten bucks, too! |
The Truth about
the White Buffalo Legend
Pete was also the
one to come up with that White
Buffalo legend. I know they say it was the Indians, but I was
there.
It was an idea to bring business to his trading post. He had ordered
a big pine pole from East
Texas and it had been shipped on a flatcar near the end of the
train. But they hit the brakes before they got it here and the darn
thing went through the express car, two passenger cars and impaled
the engineer and two conductors. The fireman got some bad splinters
but they swabbed him with tequilla and he lived.
Anyway, after paying for that log, Pete had a buffalo taxidermied,
painted it white and put it up on that old pine tree. Boy, Howdy!
You could see it from Big
Spring. He took it down when the city passed their sign ordinance
in '79, but whenever he was having a sale on irregular buffalo robes
he'd wheel it out on the sidewalk. The Indians liked it - they'd had
the photographer make daguerreotypes of their kids riding on it."
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Scurry
County's legendary White Buffalo
Photo Courtesy Charlene Beatty Beauchamp |
The Two-Day
Oil Boom
"Most of the other
facts you got are right on the money, except you didn't mention the
2 day oil boom. Yep, only 2 days. Ol' Jimmy Black was on his way to
Gail when he found a drum of motor oil that had fallen off a truck.
He drove back to Snyder to see if Buddy at the gas station would buy
it. He was tellin' Buddy about it while a Greyhound bus was gassing
up and I guess somebody on the bus heard him say he found oil.
Well the bus headed west and when the next east-bound train pulled
into Snyder there was about 500 men in suits and straw hats wantin'
to buy land.
The population swelled to about 10,000 in 2 days and most of the regular
population of Snyder was suffocated. Check
the cemetery if you don't believe me.
They all left town when they found out it was just 32 gallons. I got
to sell my place though - that was the year I moved to El
Paso. No, wait. It was Corsicana…."
© John
Troesser |
| Texas
Escapes, in its purpose to preserve historic, endangered and vanishing
Texas, asks that anyone wishing to share their local history, stories,
landmarks and recent or vintage photos, please contact
us. |
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