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This is Page 11 See some past weeks' photos
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August 13, 2007
Texas poet and writer Linda Kirkpatrick shared photos and a story about the wild hogs of Frio Canyon in Texas Hill Country:
Walter Large, Luke Large, Drew Large, Jeff Thompson, Callie Bell, Fred Large, Holmes FergusonWild, feral hogs have always been in abundance in the Frio Canyon. In the late 1880’s, those daring enough, would gather up herds of these hogs and drive them to the market in Kerrville, Texas. There was a great demand for the meat, hide and tallow from these ugly creatures.
Gathering and driving these wild hogs was not that simple. The terrain here is quite rugged so “hog dogs” were used to flush the pigs from their hiding spots. These hogs would attack dogs, horses and the drovers. They are not afraid of a thing! The sows will have and raise most of three litters per year so the chance of them becoming extinct is nigh on to impossible.
As times passed this business of driving hogs died out but the hogs did not. As the mid-nineteen hundreds approached the Frio Canyon was the ideal place to raise Angora goats, sheep and cattle. Nothing tasted better to these hogs than an Angora goat. They devoured everything with the exception of a few locks of mohair.
My dad and uncle worked hard on the ranch where we lived. So keeping hog numbers down was a constant battle. One day, when my Uncle Joe D. was out in the pasture, he had just dismounted, when an old sow with babies came by. Sensing danger for her young she immediately “treed” my uncle. He sat there in the tree until she mozied on her merry way. Another time my dad and uncle rode in with sacks tied to their saddle horns. They emptied the sacks and baby pigs went running everywhere. We generally fed out pigs each year for meat but this was the first time I had seen so many little ones at one time.
This next photo is of one of our ranch neighbors who hunted hogs all the time. He rode a mule on his hunts and trailed the hogs with his dogs. When he had a good hunt as the photo depicts, he would load them in his truck and drive to town to show them off.
Joe Moffett
Hunters in the area today are delighted to kill trophy boars. Festivals sport wild hog catching contests and I understand that roping pigs is still a sport in some northern states. [See Andy Nelson's poem here.]
Read more about Linda Kirkpatrick and some of her poetry here.
Photo by Jeri L. Dobrowski; see her gallery of western performers and others here.
August 6, 2007
Award-winning singer and songwriter Juni Fisher shared photos of her great grandfather from 1888 and 1914, and her of her grandmother Florence Marie Overstreet, from 1916. Her great grandfather, born in 1866 in Kirkville, Missouri, set out at age 14, wanting to be a cowboy. She told us about the photos:
My Great Grandfather's full name was John Edgar Overstreet. In the picture above, taken in 1888, he was 22, just one year before he married the widow of Alphonse Jarre, a Sedalia settler, and about two years before he built the barn. She died three years later, and then he married my great grandmother.
He would purchase a Farmer's Almanac yearly and read it cover to cover, learning all he could about everything he could. This picture above was taken at his ranch in Sedalia, Colorado, taken around 1914 in Wagon Mound, New Mexico. He first settled down in Sedalia, Colorado (Douglas County, about 25 miles south of Denver), where he had a ranch, and where my mother's mother was born. They sold the Colorado Ranch, and then had ranched in Fort Sumner and Wagon Mound, New Mexico.
The Sedalia ranch is still there, is now a lovely, well manicured horse ranch. I have visited the ranch, and walked through the barn he built in 1897. There is much about him in the Douglas County archives, as he was well liked and did a lot to help the community by way of building a new school on his property to service the families with children that were too far from town for the kids to walk or ride in the winter months, and serving on the grange board, and so on.
Above is my Grandmother, Florence Marie Overstreet, daughter of John E. Overstreet. The photo shows her at 15 years of age, and the date places her at the family's ranch in Wagon Mound, New Mexico.
She was a remarkable woman, as a young widow in the mid 1930's, with the Depression going full bore, she raised two children, both went to college, and she taught herself to type by night, changing hotel beds by day, until she could get a secretarial job. From there, she learned to do the secretarial work for a real estate agency in central California, and became one of the area's first successful real estate agents. She worked well into her seventies, until her fragile bones began to keep her closer to home.
She spoke kindly of everyone, and saw the good in people...a trait I think she learned from her father.
Read more about Juni Fisher, including some of her poetry in our feature here.
photo by Janet Hopson
We need your photos!
If you enjoy this feature, help keep it going! Share your photos.
We're looking for images that give a glimpse of the ranching, cowboy, and rural and working life of the West of today and yesterday. We welcome vintage and contemporary photos: family photos, images of where you live and work, and the area around you.
If you have a photo to share, email us.
July 30, 2007
South Dakota poet Yvonne Hollenbeck shared these photos, courtesy of Billie Snyder Thornburg. Yvonne told us about Billie Snyder Thornburg, her sister Nellie Snyder Yost, and their family:
Billie Snyder Thornburg grew up on a Nebraska Sandhills ranch between 1912 and 1927. She now lives with her husband, Bob, and Goffens’ cockatoo, Charlie, in North Platte, Nebraska, where she owns and operates the “101 Press.” Billie, age 95, is a prolific writer and is the younger sister of Nellie Snyder Yost, now deceased.
Billie Snyder Thornburg
Billie and Nellie were two of the four children of Albert Benton Snyder, an early-day cowboy, and Grace McCance Snyder, a world renowned quilt maker. Albert was more commonly known as “Pinnacle Jake” or “Jack Snyder,” a named given by fellow cowboys on the old 101 Ranch when he was a horse breaker for Buffalo Bill.
At the line camp on the Snyder Ranch.
How the mail came in the early days in the Sandhills, at the Snyder Ranch
Billie’s sister, Nellie, was a noted author. Some of her more noted books were Call of the Ranch, the popular Nebraska history book; Pinnacle Jake, about her father; Boss Cowman, The Recollections of Ed Lemmon, 1857-1946; Buffalo Bill, His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures and Fortunes; and No Time On My Hands, the story of her mother's homesteading in Nebraska, from her mother's 1898 diary. Nellie Snyder Yost also edited the biography of John Leakey, The West That Was, From Texas to Montana (Leakey, Texas, hometown of poet and writer Linda Kirkpatrick is named for John Leakey).
Nellie Snyder Yost
Books written by Nellie Snyder Yost and Billie Snyder Thornburg give the reader a true account of life in the early ranching frontier of America and the photographs provided by Billie provide a glimpse into that life.
There is more information about Nellie Snyder Yost on the web, here, which includes more photos and more about each of her books.
Read more about Yvonne Hollenbeck, including some of her poetry in our feature here.
We need your photos!
If you enjoy this feature, help keep it going! Share your photos.
We're looking for images that give a glimpse of the ranching, cowboy, and rural and working life of the West of today and yesterday. We welcome vintage and contemporary photos: family photos, images of where you live and work, and the area around you.
If you have a photo to share, email us.
If you have a photo to share, email us.
See an index of all past weeks' photos here.
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