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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 |
"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 Springs. 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." |
| | 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
See Snyder,
Texas | |
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