Hidalgo County Grows Up
From the "Hidago County Centennial Official Historical Program"
Pages 7 - 19 (see Photos - "Hidalgo County -- then and now")
"Hidalgo County Grows Up" By Frank H. Dugan who taught American History in Edingurg High School back in the 1950s.
December 7-13, 1952
Author’s note:
This is a brief summary of highlights in the history of Hidalgo County and makes no pretense of covering all its history or all of its important historical personages.
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When Hidalgo County was but a child in years no one knew exactly how big it was. It stretched some ninety miles north from the Rio Grande to the lower line of Nueces County, which they knew was its northern border. Its southern border was a real object of speculation, for the Rio Grande twisted and turned so that folks reckoned it at anywhere from eighty to one hundred twenty miles. Later, when the county passed its twenty-seventh birthday (1879) and was old enough to be measured, Jim Dougherty was sent out by the County Commissioners to survey the Cameron or east county line, and the west or Starr County line. When he returned from his tasks most people were satisfied, except that some noticed the west line ran northeast and figured that Jim had been doing a little private drinking out in the chaparral. But Jim knowing full well that the Texas law said to run the line north and twenty-five degrees east said, as his eyes twinkled, “thar’s lodestones in them hills and they turned my compass needle.”
In 1892 when Hidalgo County was four decades old, the International Boundary Commission attempted to determine the Mexican Border. In forty years (1852-1892) the rampaging river had cut off some twenty pieces (bancos, they are called) of Hidalgo land and added them to Mexico and then put another twenty bancos of Mexican land over on the Texas or Hidalgo side. It was a fair trade but the unruly giant also built some new alluvial acres of its own. All this added to the confusion. Smuggler and rustler gangs had hideouts in the bancos but sheriffs could not arrest them. This was because the County Commissioners did not know which of the bancos were Texas and which Mexico. They scratched their heads and waited for the International Boundary Commission to tackle this Arabian puzzle. It did and after many hearings finally decided the ownership of the bancos.
When the county was created in 1852, there were doubts about its size, but most people were too busy taming wild mustangs (for three dollars each) or skinning longhorns to bother about that question. When John Young and Charles Stillman offered one dollar apiece for hides, there was such a stampede of skinners out onto the prairies that the little river villages were depopulated each day. Unclaimed longhorns roamed Hidalgo County by the thousands in those days, and anyone could go into a butcher’s stall in “Old Edinburgh,” Reynosa, Brownsville or Matamoras, give the butcher a picayune or a half-penny, for which he would hand them a knife and say, “help yourself.”
THE SPANISH PERIOD
Beginning in 1767, officers of the King of Spain began granting portions of lands now in Hidalgo County to favored captains and soldiers. Each portion was a domain in itself being several miles wide, always fronting on the Rio Grande, and stretching northward fifteen miles. These portions contained over a league of land (4,428 acres). They were measured with a rawhide rope a hundred varas long (about 300 feet) which was unrolled and re-rolled on a wooden wheel as surveyors marched over the vast campos. Juan Jose Balli measured his San Salvador del Tule grant in 1794, from the back of a pony as he rode around his vast acres throwing out the rope behind him. Some grantees lived on their land but such was a dangerous existence. They built stone towers near the river for defense against the roving bands of Campacuas, Karankaways and Lipans that came almost every harvest season to loot them of their crops and herds. Because of such raids and long dry spells which came in cycles, the first settlers often had little to eat. After the gringos came in the 1850’s, many of the old families sold their lands to them for a few cents an acre, lands that today sell for four or five hundred dollars an acre.
There was one piece of property that everyone wanted in those days, a gleaming white lake of salt known as Sal del Rey (the King’s salt) located in northeast Hidalgo County. This the King of Spain reserved for himself and each year of his control (1792-1820) ox carts loaded with the precious mineral lumbered slowly down the old salt road past La Nora, Leguna Seca, Retama and Granjeno to Reynosa, or over the western route past La Sierreta to Las Cuevas, crossing at Carmargo. From there the salt went to all the towns of Northern Mexico. By ship in the Gulf, it was sent to the islands in the Caribbean and to South America. Later (1848-1860) Texans fought each other in the courts over the question of possession of Sal del Rey. Sam Houston, in a speech in the United States Senate in 1858, said the property should belong to the state and accused Judge Watrous of Texas of trying to steal the title!
A lot of courage, hard work and dreaming went into the making of Hidalgo County, before it cut more than senderos in the chaparral, laid out its roads, built its towns and irrigated its lands, shipped its vegetables, cotton and citrus. Hidalgo County molded people with vision and courage, born out of stubborn persistence in the face of droughts, floods, savage Indians, poor markets, impassable roads and outlaw bands. These were real Americans, the primeros pabladores, the trail blazers, steamboat men, traders, rancheros, politicians, rangers, trail drivers, mail drivers, land surveyors, peace officers, irrigation and railroad engineers, and land salesmen.
In the beginning the primeros pabladores or first settlers did the hard work of the frontier. Beginning about 1800 they began to settle in little villages at the river. They lived in grass or tule thatched houses (jacales) whose walls were of pole framework with mud or adobe plaster. They raised small plots of beans, corn and cane which they sold as indispensable food to the ranches, dug the salt at Sal del Rey, cut the wood for the steamboats of the Rio Grande, loaded the boats, with hoe and ax cleared the brush for cultivation, cut roads in the chaparral, herded the sheep, horses, goats and cattle, and did all this with a song in their hearts.
THE STEAMBOAT ERA
After the primeros pabladores came the steamboat men. The Rio Bravo del Norte or the Rio Grande as it is now called came rolling right by the front door of Hidalgo. It was a big river in those days, dyed with the earth of 1600 miles of Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Prior to 1840 the jealousies of wagon and mule train drivers kept boats of the river, but after General Taylor ordered steamboats up the river, side wheelers and stern wheelers attempted to stem the wild mustang river. The files of the American Flag for 1847-48 show that over two hundred boats cleared the Barra del Bravo at its mouth in those days. The river current, in 1846, was faster than the Mississippi and so pushed many a boat downstream, or threw it against the bank breaking its rudder. But the Corvette, the Ranchero, the J. E. Roberts, Major Brown, Hatchee Eagle and others made the trip to Carmargo and Rio Grande City. In spite of sandbars and explosions of boilers, floods and attacks of river pirates, the boats continued to puff and blow their way up the river. Every 20 or 30 miles they took on wood, as they hitched their way up the river at the slow speed of two to four miles an hour. Yet this was a sure way of transportation which brought prosperity to Hidalgo County. People could not afford the prohibitive rates of land transportation over rough trails infested by robbers. The boats came to Old Edinburgh with hardware, cloth, medicines, seeds, gunpowder and all the other materials necessary to develop a frontier. Hidalgo County could not have operated without the work of men like Captain Richard King of the Ranchero, Captain Miflin Kenedy of the Corvette, Captain Reid of the J. E. Roberts, or Captain Hickey of the Hatchee Eagle. As the boats brought trade to the country up river, little steamboat towns sprang up at Rio Grande City, Everittville, Edinburgh, Mansfield, Nealeville, and Brownsville. The Valley had its first small land boom as soldiers of Zachary Taylor’s army looked on sugar cane and corn fields more beautiful than any they had known, and wrote home to the folks saying, “Never were seen such fields of cane and corn as these!”
THE ORIGINS OF HIDALGO COUNTY
By 1850, there were many settlers living on ranches along the Rio Grande and they felt keenly the inconvenience of traveling 70 or 80 miles to Brownsville to transact land business or pay taxes. Judge Israel Bigelow, an old stage coach operator who knew about frontier travel, introduced a bill into the State legislature (1851) to form a new county of Hidalgo out of Cameron County. This new county would administer all the old land grants of the former jurisdiction of Reynosa. When a private of Taylor’s army on March 28, 1846, hung Old Glory on a mesquite on the north bank of the Rio Grande, a new era dawned. Americans moved in, settling on ranches by the old river road on the Texas side. There was John Young and John McAllen of Santa Anita and Edinburgh, E. D. Smith of San Luis, Thad M. Rhodes of Relampago, Eli T. Merriman of Santa Ana, M. M. Stevens of San Luis, John Jackson of the Jackson Ranch, John Webber of the Webber Ranch. These gringos mingled and transacted business with families of descendants of the first settlers, some of whom were Yndalico Dominguez of Rosario, Sixto Dominguez of Ojo de Agua, Antonio Vela of Leguna Seca, Salvador Cardenas of La Noria Cardeneno, Rene Guyard of La Lomita, General J. M. Carvajal of Tabasco, Esteban Davila of Capote, Manuel Flores of Las Cuevas, Miguel Zamora of Las Piedras. These men had faith in this country and in its future. On December 8, 1849, E. D. Smith, under orders of the Cameron County Court, began laying out a road along the north bank of the river from Brownsville to Rio Grande City, while Charles Stillman and Edward Dougherty began improving the old salt road that ran from Sal del Rey past La Jara and Llano Grande to the river. On March 11, 1851, John Young of Edinburgh, Scotland, secured a license to operate a ferry on the Rio Grande opposite Reynosa. Here Young started a town, sold lots, ran a general store and a hide yard, while on his plantation, La Hacienda, his servants prepared hundreds of barrels of brown sugar for shipment. Young owned ocean-going boats, which regularly picked up his steamboat cargoes of hides and sugar at Brazos and carried them to England. Young bought many lands, and like the other newcomers, was much interested in forming a new county. His lawyer was E. D. Smith who is said to have brought the first cotton gin to the Valley (at Reynosa) in 1841. Smith suggested that the new town of Young’s be called Edinburgh, after Young’s hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland. This would please the gringos. Then Smith suggested that the county be called “Hidalgo” after Miguel Hidalgo, the famous liberator of Mexico. This would please the first settlers.
On September 2, 1852, the first county court convened. The first judge was Madison M. Stevens, a tavern keeper and wood-yarder of San Luis. Commissioners were Sixto Dominguez, rancher of Ojo de Agua, Yndelico Dominguez, rancher of Rosario, Mariano Munguilla of Granjeno, and Dr. Eli T. Merriman of Santa Ana. John Wood was sheriff, and Francisco Tagle, Smith’s bookkeeper, was treasurer. On this first day the court licensed four ferries at Edinburgh, San Luis, Penitas and Las Cuevas at five dollars per month each, and set ferry rates for wagon and driver, oxen, mule, horse and cow. So Hidalgo county was organized with an income of twenty dollars a month plus fees. Then the tax collector of Cameron County, J. Campbell, disappeared into north Texas with the Cameron-Hidalgo tax rolls. While a search for this rascal went on, Hidalgo County operated for about a year without property taxes. No one objected.
ROBERT E. LEE IN HIDALGO COUNTY
The soldier, too, played his part in the making of Hidalgo County. On April 9, 1860, just five years to the day that he surrendered to Grant at Appomatox Courthouse, Colonel Robert E. Lee rode into “Old Edinburgh” on the river. Here Lee conferred with Major John S. (Rip) Ford as to how to stop Juan Cortina and his raiders. In 1859 smoldering fires of hatred caused by mistreatment of Latin-Americans and a lack of justice in settling their land claims, broke into flame. Cortina led the dissatisfied rebels, raided Brownsville, then burned ranch homes all along the river, eighty miles to Rio Grande City. In December, 1859, his men swept into Hidalgo County and burned Relampago, Rosario Customs House and Edinburgh. Major Rip Ford and his Ranger company met Cortina at Rio Grande City and drove him and his raisers over the border. Cortina then set up headquarters at La Bolsa opposite Relampago, where his gang tried unsuccessfully (February 4, 1860) to capture the treasure boat “Ranchero.” Ford’s Rangers invaded Mexico then and drove Cortina out of La Bolsa. However, by April, armed bands of Texans and Mexicans exchanged shots across the river and, the very day that Lee rode into Edinburgh, a United States sentry was shot while on patrol duty in front of “Old Edinburgh.” Lee had foreseen that trouble was brewing and, as he rode down the old Military Road from Fort Ringgold he sent riders off with notes to all responsible Mexican authorities, notes that were courteous but firm. After Lee left Edinburgh the fighting died down; Mexican officers sent Cortina on a mission away from the border. What Lee said in his notes to Mexican military leaders is not known. Perhaps he made it known that he had orders to invade Mexico if necessary. At any rate, he became the first peacemaker of Hidalgo County.
THE CATTLE WAR
In 1872-1875 there was “real Hell” on the border and Hidalgo County, as usual, was in the center of it. In 1869, there were about 200,000 longhorns grazing the Nueces-Lower Rio Grande plains. Hidalgo County ranchers drove cattle to Rockport to the “tallow and hide factories,” or drove them over the Hidalgo-East Texas trail to Abilene, Kansas. The Velas of Laguna Seca, John and Jim McAllen of San Juanito, John and L. H. Box of the Box Ranch, John Young of Santa Anita, Thad Rhodes of Relampago, Salvador Cardenas, Sr. of La Noria Cardenene and Captain Kenedy of La Parra drove thousands of cattle northward. Cattlemen brought back sacks of silver coin and sometimes buried these under marked fence posts, there being no banks in the frontier state of Hidalgo.
By 1869, the 200,000 longhorns, most of them branded, attracted the attention of Mexican rustler bands. Nowhere were there more ideal spots for hiding cattle or places of refuge; dense “mottes” of ebony and mesquite, “dry runs” resacas, bancos offering quick escape to Mexico, Confederate and Union army deserters, outlaws, and Cortina partisans joined the rustler bands. International bandits like Neil Milstead of the Zacatal Ranch stole cattle in both Mexico and Texas using a dry run banco in which to escape when pursued. Below Matamoros on the coast was Bagdad, an Eden for thieves, where stolen Texas cattle could be sold. Cortina partisans rode into Hidalgo County, stealing choice herds, which practice they laughingly said was collecting “las vacas de tata,” or getting back grandfather’s cattle.
“All Hell” did break loose in 1872 as rustlers swarmed over the border in small bands, all heavily armed. The brush popped at San Juanito, where McAllen lost 2,000 cattle, at La Florida where the Champions lost 950, at Relampago where Rhodes lost 1100. As early as 1869, the Kings, after their Spring roundup, figured they were 30,000 head missing. Ranchers who attempted pursuit or gave information about cattle thieves were forced to leave their ranches and move into town. Anyone, Latin-American or Americano who gave information was a marked man to be killed “within a week.” There was no law in Hidalgo County, “the deadline of sheriffs.” Sheriff Alex J. Leo, in 1872-1875, sent wire after wire to Washington, pleading for troops. When County Judge Thaddeus M. Rhodes got together a posse and recovered some cattle, the rustlers in retaliation sacked his ranch. Rhodes slept in the brush nights, as he was marked for assassination. When the United States Cavalry arrived it proved useless, being too slow to catch the thieves. So terror reigned in Hidalgo County.
THE RANGERS
On April 2, 1875, thirty rangers of McNelly’s Company rode up to the Edinburgh Corral by the Rio Grande. Each carried a rifle slung on his saddle, two six shooters, a short knife and a rawhide riata. At the head of these men rode Captain L. H. McNelly, a tall, soft-spoken man, a tireless worker, with an iron will. In ten weeks McNelly’s men had searched relentlessly over every trail and outlying ranch from Las Cuevas in the southwest corner of Hidalgo County to Relampago in the southeast corner. Searching in the brush was the hardest kind of work but they were equal to the challenge. In June they held a rendezvous at Rosario and on the 12th ran a band of cattle thieves into a motte in Palo Alto north of Brownsville, shot 16, with only one getting away. The Rangers stacked the 16 corpses like cordwood in Brownsville’s market square. On July 5, they were at Loma Blanca on the west Hidalgo County line. Here the cattle thieves escaped but McNelly recovered a heard of longhorns. All the Ranger searches pointed to one conclusion, namely that Las Cuevas was headquarters for the biggest gang on the border and the refuge or escape route for most rustlers. Las Cuevas and its counterpart ranch across the river in Mexico could muster 300 men, all killers and thieves, men who had run about 50,000 cattle over the border at Las Cuevas crossing.
On November 19, 1875, Captain McNelly determined to invade Mexico, break up the Las Cuevas gang, and get back a herd of Richard King’s cattle in their possession. With 29 men he went over the river at night and at dawn shot up Las Curchas, then stood off a determined attack of the 300 rancheros of Las Cuevas. The United States Consul in Matamoras, the United States Secretary of War, Belnap, and Major General Ord, commanding in Texas, all ordered him out of Mexico but he ignored them saying, “I came over here to recover stolen cattle, and will stay here till I do.” In a magnificent bluff he threatened to commence hostilities from his natural fort behind the banks of the river unless the cattle were returned. The cattle were returned. The Las Cuevas gang considered this an easy way out of their troubles as each ranger would have killed many before being killed himself. In this bold manner the Texas Rangers brought peace to Hidalgo County.
THE REPUBLIC OF HIDALGO
When Hidalgo County was growing up it was on its own; as far as the United States and Texas were concerned it did not exist. The only exceptions were in 1852, during the Carvajal Revolution, in 1859-60 when Cortina raided the border, and in 1872-75 during the Cattle War. Hidalgo’s citizens called their county the “Republic of Hidalgo” and looked to the court to send out posses to stop bands of international cattle thieves, to end feuding between Mexican and Hidalgo ferryboat operations, to warn the Mexican Government in regard to smuggling (after the free zone was established in 1858), to build roads in the dense brush and solve critical transportation problems, give bounties to rid the county of coyotes, bobcats and lions, check the erosion of the Rio Grande, inspect the cattle, register the brands, survey the public domain, take care of four leagues of school lands (17,712 acres), build schools, secure teachers for a bilingual society, make Spanish land laws and American laws fit together, figure out who owned the bancos, and donate food when severe droughts (1888-1892 and 1900-1903) brought widespread suffering. Naturally, then, the county judges and commissioners did many things that independent states do. It is typical of Hidalgo County that its first court interpreter was General Jose M. Carvajal, who, while he was serving the county, was under indictment in the United States Court in Brownsville (1852-1853) for treason. Carvajal led four expeditions into Mexico using Hidalgo County as a springboard, in a vain attempt to make Tamaulipas into a free state.
In 1882 the Valley was cut off from communication with the outside world. “el vomito” or yellow fever came stalking across the border. A Mexican prisoner died of the disease in the Hidalgo jail. Quickly the court acted. They ordered all boats taken out of the river, all communication with Mexico stopped. Guards patrolled every mile of the river bank to enforce this quarantine. The Cameron mail driver was ordered to hang the mail on a mesquite by the east county line. Here it was picked up by the mail driver of the Republic of Hidalgo. The County Judge, in 1882 was Thaddeus M. Rhodes, and the Commissioners were Florenzio Saenz, John McAllen, Cornelo Ochoa and Theodosio Munguia.
REDS AND BLUES
Frontier politicians in Hidalgo County divided into Reds (Democrats) and Blues (Republicans). The pattern of party politics since followed in the county originated before 1860. Martin “Big Drunk” Norgraves, County Clerk in 1853-1857, organized block voting, and straight party loyalty became the rule. During election times enthusiasm of the Reds and Blues for their colors was whipped into frenzy by the all-night bailes or dances held by party bosses. Thad Rhodes, Ben Kidder, Pete Champion, W. P. and Jim Dougherty were Red leaders, while the Blues listened to John McAllen, Jesse Dennett, and Dr. Alexander M. Headley. Everyone was in dead earnest about county elections and anyone who stepped out of line, that is, deserted his colors, ran the risk of being shot. There were eleven such “traitors” shot in 1882 during a hot campaign. During the Cattle War (1869-1876) the county had scarcely any government worth mentioning and there is a blank in the Commissioner’s Court records for this period. In 1876-1889, the Reds ruled the county under Judge Thaddeus M. Rhodes, and continued their control under Judge W. P. Dougherty in 1890-1893. Dr. Alexander M. Headley and his Blues became frantic after they lost seven successive elections, and in August, 1890, set up their own polls and judges, while the Reds held separate elections. This, said the Blues, was to stop the Reds’ practice of voting aliens. When the Reds installed their own slate of officers, Dr. Headley or “El Canosa” as he was called, charged into Hidalgo at the head of 150 Blues, shooting at anything in sight. A Red defender of the courthouse shot off his own toe in the excitement, while the other Red officials jumped into boats and fled over the river to Reynosa. Dr. Headley then installed the candidates of the Blues, who he claimed had been elected, and they ruled the county for a few days. This government was known as the “Independent Republic of Hidalgo.” However, when Headley tried to collect duties at the border, the United States took a hand in the affair. A Brownsville marshal came up the river with a posse and Headley fled. This ended the Independent Republic.
JOHN CLOSNER, PEACE OFFICER
During the first three decades of Hidalgo County (1852-1882) there was no sheriff who could enforce more than a semblance of order. Sheriffs served but a short time. In 1869-1876, there were eight men who held this position briefly, then resigned. Threats of assassination may have helped create this situation. When John Closner took over as Deputy Sheriff, in 1882-1889, and as Sheriff in 1891-1912, he changed all this. Never did a peace officer on the border create a revolution from lawlessness to peace as completely as he did in 1891-1895. Closner had received his education in the two-fisted school of frontier railroad construction gangs, having served as foreman of gangs, building the Santa Fe and the tough Pecos stretch of the Southern Pacific.
In hidalgo County, when Closner took over as deputy, he was considered just another weak officer to be taunted or cursed at will. The Sheriff was, as John Closner said, “afraid to go out” after lawbreakers, and turned the job of law enforcement over to Closner. The first week he was in charge, a baile was held and John Franz barged through the crowd shouting that he could lick “any damn man in this crowd.” Closner knocked him down three times and carried him to jail. When Jesse Dennett, loyal Blue, rode into Hidalgo one night, “full of booze, shrieking like a Comanche, all the while abusing the Dougherty administration,” Closner disarmed him and, over the objection of the Blues, put him in jail.
In 1891, When Closner took over as sheriff, he learned why peace officers rarely lasted long in Hidalgo County. Closner seized sixteen head of smuggled stock belonging to a friend of the boss of the Reds. The boss warned the peace officer to go slowly but, as the new sheriff continued his clean-up, the boss hired Marcos de Luna, a Mexican bandit, to shoot Closner. When de Luna failed, political foes of Closner hired the famous Pancho Garza to kill Closner and Andres E. Chavez, the Customs Officer and another famous law enforcer. They were tipped off and Closner’s deputies surrounded the shack in which Garza was hiding and shot him after a wild gun battle on the moonlit banks of the Rio Grande. After the episode, Sheriff Closner confronted the leader of the Reds and told him if there were any more plots he (Closner) would not go after the assassin but would shoot the Red down “on the street like a dog.” This ended the plotting. Closner, for all his sincerity, never used his six-gun, never killed a man. “I saw my way around it,” said Hidalgo County’s first real peace officer.”
THE BIG CLEAN-UP
Closner was elected Sheriff by a big majority in November 1890. By 1894, the county was ready for a clean-up, having elected these efficient officers who would support the Sheriff, via Judge Juan de la Vina, Commissioners Pete Champion, Charles Schunior, John Lipscomb and W. F. Sprague. Closner had fine deputies: George Dillars Billy Brewster, Jose Guajardo, Victoriano Reyna, Anicete Munoz, and Marcellus Dougherty. By 1900, really bad men like Marcos de Luna, Pancho Garza, Camillo Lerna or Casimira Livas were a thing of the past. In 1888, Closner and company rounded up the Marks gang, in 1890 broke the power of the Headley gang, and in 1900 caught sixteen of the Santa Cruz rustler gang red-handed while in a poker game.
In 1890 the man who did not wear a six-gun was “not stylishly attired,” but before Closner retired in 1912, he enforced the “six shooter law” in Hidalgo County. This was the first county on the border to enforce such a law. Before 1894, when a criminal escaped to Mexico he was out of danger. Closner developed a strong friendship with Colonel Antonio Mainero of the Mexican Rurales. Working as a team, they returned to each other many escaped criminals. Mainero seldom failed to secure and return the criminals Closner asked for. Then in 1895, with “Old Baldy” Judge Russell, J. I. Kleiber, the District Attorney, and Sheriff Closner working together, justice came to Hidalgo County. During the March term of the District Court, cases 512-523 (District Court Record “B”) were all sent to jail for theft of cattle; after that six more felony cases were convicted. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Hidalgo County. In 1896, the clean-up was complete; there was no spring term of court because there were no cases on the docket. The County was no longer “the dead line of sheriffs.”
HIDALGO COUNTY’S GREAT DREAM
The great dream of folks in Hidalgo County during the last century was to secure a railroad and a system of practical irrigation. It was an old worthwhile dream and such dreams never die. It was back of all the planning of Judge Edward Dougherty of Ruddyville and Rosario, who in the 1860’s became the Valley’s first author and booster. In his book “An Agricultural Prospectus of the Counties of Cameron and Hidalgo in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas” (1867), the Judge presented a scholarly review of reasons why the valley had not prospered in spite of having the finest soil and climate in the United States. He dreamed of a railroad and irrigation and so did W. H. Chatfield. In the latter’s “Twin Cities of the Border” (1893) he proposed an elaborate system of gravity canals and storage lakes from La Lomita to Palo Alto. He set people thinking. Then in 1888-1892 came the great dry spell when mesquites lost their leaves and cattle, staggering and lean, were sold for their hides. Many ranchers and settlers left this barren area. The drought caused others to turn again to the old dream.
In 1894 John Closner began clearing 800 acres east of Hidalgo on the river, known as the San Juan Plantation. In 1898 Ed Ruthven, his foreman, using mules, rolled a steam boiler over “the sands” from Hebbronville to the river, whence it was floated down the Rio Grande to San Juan Plantation. Here a steam driven pump was installed and soon the waters of the river were flooding many acres of sugar cane and alfalfa. The results were amazing. The cane produced (1900-1906) an average of 35 tons per acre from which 6,500 pounds of sugar per acre of cane were refined. John Young of La Hacienda had produced 280 hogsheads of crude brown sugar in 1858, and George Brulay had successfully grown cane in the 1870’s, but nothing like Closner’s experiment had been seen before. When in 1904 Closner exhibited cane from San Juan Plantation at the St. Louis World’s Fair and was awarded a Gold Medal for the finest cane over competition from Hawaii and Cuba, the country’s future in agriculture was begun. Hidalgo County maps, or any map showing the location of the county, were eagerly sought for in the north. This was the beginning of the first land boom. Others followed the ideas of San Juan Plantation; T. J. Hooks and A. F. Hester came in 1902 from Port Isabel with oxen hauling their household goods and dragging an old wood-burning boiler for the pumping plant they installed at Runn.
THE RAILROAD – 1904
For fifty years the main handicap of Hidalgo County was lack of good transportation. Its so-called roads were merely rough traces menaced by dense chaparral. In 1894, San Juan Plantation potatoes and onions spoiled in heaps, for there was no economical way to send them out of the Valley. Mrs. Andrew Champion recalled 100 acres of fine quality tobacco which was never cut because “the road (to Brownsville) was so narrow that big wagons (necessary to transport the crop) could not have been used if they had had them.” W. F. Sprague of La Coma Ranch, Hidalgo County’s pioneer cotton growers, ginned over 1000 bales of cotton in 1900 and sent it in mule wagons to the railroad at Hebbronville 85 miles away! Sprague with 130,000 acres of land, and Closner with 50,000 determined to bring in a railroad and pay for it with land. With this in mind, they began, in March 1903, the publication of Hidalgo County’s first newspaper, a weekly called the “Hidalgo Advance.” Its goal was to bring a railroad to the county. Judge Richard Alvin Marsh, an old “newspaper boomer” and James H. Edwards were editors of this sheet. The “Advance” was never short on praise, saying, “No country on earth equals Hidalgo County in production of alfalfa.” This went for other crops, too. On March 31, it described “as fine a field of cotton as the writer has seen in the State of Texas at the Cenizal Ranch.” “There is,” wrote Marsh, “but one practicing physician (probably this was Dr. Benton Lathrop, famous on the Border as “El Lombris”) in Hidalgo County, and he can’t make a decent living.”
May 31, 1903, was for the “Hidalgo Advance” and its backers a red letter day. They announced proudly that the railroad dream was now a definite possibility. The people of Hidalgo County whooped with joy as the “Advance” reprinted the wire of Uriah Lott, pioneer Texas railroad builder, --- “Have definite proposition from Johnson Brothers to begin work on railroad to Brownsville and Hidalgo branch within 30 days.” All of the county officers in 1904 were strong railroad boosters. These were County Judge Richard Alvin Marsh, Commissioners Florenzio Saenz, Wash Burton, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague, Sheriff John Closner, and Clerk A. E. Chavez.
On July 4, 1904, the Valley threw off a century and a half of isolation and ox team slowness as the first train ran into Brownsville over the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico line. Never had Elizabeth Street seen such a celebration as occurred with people swarming in from miles around to stare and shoot at the train. Then, in the late fateful summer of 1905, the Sam Fordyce branch line was built across the Cameron-Hidalgo line, then westward. As the peon laborers spiked in the rails and set the mileposts, a score of mushroom towns sprang up along that ribbon of steel in the chaparral. Lonsboro, Mercedes, Llano Grande, Beatrice (East Donna), Donna, Alamo, San Juan, Pharr, East McAllen, West McAllen, Mission and Mamie were born, then succeeded or faded away. Irrigation companies formed quickly in 1904-1906,, while land companies took over the settlement in each area. Hidalgo County was growing up.
THE LAND COMPANIES
The Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company promoted the new town of Mercedes. This company set the pattern for those which followed. It boasted of having “the largest, most comprehensive and costly private irrigation system in the United States.” As regards Mercedes, the company advertised in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” for July, 1908, “Like the canal, Mercedes is different from and better than any town in the Valley.” Hidalgo County was having growing pains by this time (1908). The company claimed that “no intoxicating liquors can be sold on this land for 15 years.” Also that “two hundred thousand acres of land are to be irrigated by the silt laden waters of the Rio Grande.” “Sugar cane, alfalfa, pecan trees, oranges and garden truck out specialty.” “Every month of the year a crop may be planted.”
As the land boom of 1904-1910 got into full swing, lands worth twenty-five cents to one dollar per acre before the railroad came jumped to ten to fifty dollars in 1906, and by 1910 had gone to one hundred to three hundred dollars per acre. Irrigation companies played a tremendous part in the boom. T. W. Carter of St. Louis was President of the American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company, Hidalgo County’s first large irrigation project, which was completed in 1905. County Judge, S. P. Silver of Mercedes, S. W. Fordyce and Edwards Whitaker of St. Louis, B. F. Yoakum, the railroad magnate of New York, and Duval West were the other backers of this project and the town of Mercedes. In 1907, these men originated the practice of scheduling land seekers’ (popularly called “Snowdiggers”) parties by train from Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis. Wm. Doherty, traffic manager of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railroad, advertised “Homeseekers’ Rates” in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” for March, 1908; a round-trip ticket from Chicago to Brownsville was twenty-five dollars, from Kansas City or St. Louis, twenty dollars. Salesmen took the “Snowdiggers” on tours over the lands to be sold, transporting them in wagons drawn by mules.
T. J. Hooks, A. F. Hester and associates, in 1902, began improvement of 23,000 acres of land of the La Blanca Tract located between Donna and Run on the military Road. Here they installed a steam irrigation pump, the first devoted to community use in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Out of the Hooks-Hester development came the La Donna Land Syndicate, which advertised in 1908 “Do you want a home (Donna) where the roses bloom every month?” “......where the choicest vegetables are shipped in mid-winter.” Also “water is the magician’s wand that converts the dust of the Rio Grande Valley into golden eagles.” There was more truth than poetry in this advertising.
Further west on the railroad, Jim McAllen and associates secured a depot and laid out West McAllen along the old “Depot Road.” William Briggs and John Closner started East McAllen on Tenth Street Road, built their own depot and brought in B. F. Swift to promote the sale of town lots. They formed the Hidalgo Canal Company and ran the canal from the river to East McAllen. West McAllen faded out when the canal came in. As always, the Rio Grande was king of Hidalgo County.
In 1907 John Conway and James W. Hoit bought the vast La Lomita Ranch, constructed a canal system and advertised widely in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” and northern journals. After 1909, they sold out their “first lift” lands like hotcakes to home seekers from Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Among the hundreds of settlers Conway brought in was William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner.” In the center of La Lomita lands, Mission, “The Home of the Grapefruit,” began to grow.
The county had other great colonizers, too, in the early days. S. K. Hallam of the Hallam Colonization Company, W. E. Stewart, one of the founders of Weslaco, George S. Freeman of Mercedes, C. H. Swallow of the Alamo Land and Sugar Company, Dave Kirgan of the Gulf Coast Securities Company, A. J. McCall and Willard Ferguson of the Starr Land Company, John Shary of the Southwestern Land Company, J. C. Engelman, Lamar Gill and W. A. Harding of Delta Orchards, John C. Kelly and H. N. Pharr of the Louisiana and Rio Grande Canal Company, Marvin Goodwin and Nick Doffing.
Nineteen Hundred and Seven was a great year in the history of Hidalgo County. Captain Fitch in that year set out the first grove of grapefruit near Mercedes, while Charles Volz of Mission also planted a grove. This was fortunate, for the bottom fell out of the sugar market in 1910. Farmers turned to citrus and vegetables. Cotton attracted some of them and a Mercedes farmer produced the nation’s first bale of cotton in 1910, a performance that has been repeated by Hidalgo County farmers many times since then. Colorful accounts of amazing yields of onions, celery, cucumbers and beans by such well known farmers as John L. Box, Charles Volz, O. M. Wakeman, B. H. Hooks, A. F. Hester and John Closner were spread across the pages of the “Gulf Coast Magazine” in 1907-1910, thus exciting the pioneer spirit of the northern farmers who moved here in increasing numbers. Some farmers bought their land on time and paid for it with the money received from their first crop. This was amazing, but true.
THE MOVING OF THE RECORDS
Nineteen hundred and seven was also a great turning point in the history of Hidalgo County. The land and irrigation companies and the railroad by 1907 had laid the foundations of agricultural prosperity. Vast old ranches in the brush were being cleared for farming. The old Steamboat, Bessie, which carried the supplies of ranchers and county court made her last trip in 1902, thus ending 56 years of steamboat transportation. In 1907, D. B. Chapin was Judge, J. L. Hooks, R. L. Savage, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague were commissioners. John Closner was Sheriff, J. R. Alamia, Collector, and A. E. Chavez, Clerk. These men began searching for a new site for a county seat. Old Edinburgh on the river, the first county seat (1852-1886) was washed away by severe floods and Hidalgo became the second county seat (1886-1908). Another series of floods, beginning in 1904, at times covered the entire river lands from Hidalgo to McAllen with overflow water and hastened the removal of the county seat. In 1907 John Closner and W. F. Sprague offered to the county four square blocks in the brush, ten miles northeast of McAllen. Here there was nothing more than a cow trail in the chaparral meandering eastward to the old Brewster Ranch. This site was called Chapin. In 1909 Sprague and Closner financed the building of a railroad spur to Chapin. This job was engineered by E. M. Card and Henry Griffin.
On October 12, 1908, the question of moving the county seat was put to a popular referendum. Those voting “For removal to Chapin” numbered 422. Those voting “For remaining in Hidalgo” numbered 90. Acting under Texas law, Judge S. P. Silver declared Chapin the new county seat. Opponents of the removal then asked the District Court for an injunction. Proponents of the move acted fast and moved the county records and fixtures on October 13. Mule wagons pulled up to the courthouse in Hidalgo in the morning; by evening the caravan had reached the San Juan Plantation. After traveling all night, the caravan approached Chapin in the early morning of the 14th; there, E. M. Card, Tom Lovett, and assistant engineers were camped in tents with a gang of Mexican laborers. As they approached the workers’ tents in the brush, the leaders of the caravan, John Closner, D. B. Chapin, A. Y. Baker, Marcellus Dougherty, W. L. Lipscomb, T. S. Mayfield, A. N. Vela, Andres Chavez and J. R. Alamia gave the Ranger yell, fired off six-shooters and celebrated in the manner of the old Spanish custom of arrivals. The tent town scrambled out of bed to greet the procession. Later in the morning county officers transacted business from tents, thus completing what was probably the fastest transfer of a capital in Texas history. E. M. Card’s gang laid out the county square and cleared the brush, while Tom Lovett and a crew of laborers graded the senderos stopping now and then to kill rattlesnakes. Soon a barn-like structure was erected (on the site of the Edinburg Hotel) as a temporary courthouse.
The first meeting of the county commissioners court in Chapin was held on November 9, 1908. On December 12, 1908, voters approved 159 to 6 a proposition to build a new $75,000 court house. This was completed in June 1910. At that time the county officers were W. M. Doughty, Judge; Alex Champion, W. L. Lipscomb, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague, Commissioners; A. Y. Baker, Treasurer; A. E. Chavez, Clerk; and John Closner, Sheriff. In 1911, the name of the new county seat was changed to Edinburg, named from the old steamboat town, Hidalgo County’s first capital. In 1951 bonds were again approved for a new million dollar court house; county officers originating this needed improvement were Judge Milton Richardson and Commissioners Beto Reyna, Charles Green, Tom Hester and George Callis.
Transcription note: The original county seat on the river was Edinburgh. The “h” was dropped when Chapin was renamed Edinburg.
JOHN SHARY
During the years 1910-1920, the tide of northern settlers from middle western states increased. Fabulous yields of vegetables, colorful accounts of new agricultural experiments, especially in citrus, and an abundance of water and sunshine in the irrigated areas attracted thousands. Men like George Freeman, John Conway, A. J. McColl and John Shary directed the colonization of the new settlers, organizing land and irrigation companies, corps of salesmen, and special land seeker excursions by special trains, with carefully planned tours over land to be sold. Many of the colonists were not blind to the hazards of living on the last agricultural frontier of the states, and if the trains sometimes carried preachers to inculcate a crusading spirit, this was also taken in stride.
John Shary was the king of early colonizers. “At the peak of his activity, he had as many as 1300 men in the field” selling Hidalgo County lands, and for years he operated special trains weekly to the Valley. In 1912 he began developing the Judge Brooks lands of twelve thousand acres around Pharr and San Juan; the following year he subdivided and sold the Briggs’ estate of six thousand acres, lands which today surround the city of McAllen. In 1917 Shary promoted the sale of thirty thousand acres acquired from the Oblate Fathers and the Swift Estate in the McAllen-Mission area. By this time John Shary had another attractive point to make about these lands, namely that they were ideal for raising citrus. People had long known the Valley could raise fine oranges; in 1846 officers of General Taylor had lauded the flavor of those they ate from a grove on the site of modern Brownsville. In Hidalgo County, a small grove planted by Carlota Vela at Laguna Seca in 1878 had attracted colorful advertising. After Captain Fitch and Charles Volz began plantings of citrus in 1907, W. L. Hart of McAllen got in the game and in 1915 shipped four carloads of luscious Duncan and Marsh grapefruit to Houston. With this, the first commercial shipment out of the Valley, the citrus boom was on. Hidalgo County had seen a “sugar cane craze,” an “onion craze,” and a “broom corn craze” in 1908-1917, but never such a boom as this. After 1922 thousands of acres were planted to oranges and grapefruit. Later nature added another push to the boom with her famous “million dollar mistake,” the so-called Ruby Red Grapefruit. In 1915, Mr. Shary planted the first large commercial citrus grove, and in 1922 sold his first crop. The first crops were hand-cleaned and hand-sized, so in 1923 he built at Sharyland the first modern packing plant and also organized the first co-operative, the Texas Citrus Fruit Growers Exchange.
THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
It was a natural development of the 1925-1950 period that the dreams and plans sketched above should continue to build a prosperous Hidalgo County. Hard, all-weather roads were built; the Southern Pacific Lines were extended here in 1927; towns grew and prospered with fine churches, schools and business houses. In agriculture, an early season green-wrap tomato industry began. Fred Vahlsing promoted America’s largest vegetable farms at Edinburg and Elsa-Edcouch. Lloyd and Elmer Bentsen became the premier colonizers and developers of Hidalgo County, which led all counties of the United States in cotton production, and raised a good part of the Valley’s 1948 one hundred million dollar citrus and vegetable crops.
These are just a few of the many striking developments of recent years. At the end of its first century Hidalgo County is approaching a new era in which allied industries will play a new role with agriculture in the irrigated areas and progressive ranching in the dry lands.
During the last quarter of a century, Hidalgo County people became aware of the fact that the county was located over one of the finest natural gas fields in America, and soon a big inch line was running north from the Mercedes area to Yankee Land. In 1934 Hidalgo County saw its first oil boom. On September 10, 1934, Otto Woods of Mission, a veteran oil man, brought in Hidalgo County’s first oil well, a 4800 barrel wildcatter. In the face of many discouragements he had succeeded, thus adding another chapter to the great Texas-Lucas-Spindletop tradition.
Hidalgo County has grown up, beating down all barriers, dreaming vast dreams and building from those dreams. A writer in the “Houston Chronicle” of July 12, 1908, said (referring to the Valley’s past) “The hoodoo of the longhorn was upon the minds of men.” Pioneer builders beat down this false belief, cleared out the brush, began a courageous fight on the age-old water problem, and when markets failed turned ever anew to other fields of endeavor. To all those courageous pioneers who having “lost their shirts” still persevered and went on to greater fields of glory, this mere sketch is dedicated. To all the trail drivers of the longhorn era, the ranchers of vision and their cowhands, to the land salesmen and irrigation engineers, the old traders and steamboat men, the county politicians, the Rangers and peace officers, and last but not least, the Mexican peons or wetbacks who cleared away the cactus and mesquite, it is also dedicated. They all played a vital part in the building of Hidalgo County.
Transcription notes:
This article was written for the official historical program booklet of the Hidalgo County Centennial celebration held in Edinburg, Hidalgo County, Texas,
December 7-13, 1952.
There appear to be numerous type-setting errors in this article as printed. Attempt has been made to correct blatant errors while retyping the article.
Transcribed from the original by Sara Hunter Skaggs, 2004.
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Table of Contents: https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/6813612681836200616/3382423676443906063?hl=en
Pages 7 - 19 (see Photos - "Hidalgo County -- then and now")
"Hidalgo County Grows Up" By Frank H. Dugan who taught American History in Edingurg High School back in the 1950s.
December 7-13, 1952
Author’s note:
This is a brief summary of highlights in the history of Hidalgo County and makes no pretense of covering all its history or all of its important historical personages.
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When Hidalgo County was but a child in years no one knew exactly how big it was. It stretched some ninety miles north from the Rio Grande to the lower line of Nueces County, which they knew was its northern border. Its southern border was a real object of speculation, for the Rio Grande twisted and turned so that folks reckoned it at anywhere from eighty to one hundred twenty miles. Later, when the county passed its twenty-seventh birthday (1879) and was old enough to be measured, Jim Dougherty was sent out by the County Commissioners to survey the Cameron or east county line, and the west or Starr County line. When he returned from his tasks most people were satisfied, except that some noticed the west line ran northeast and figured that Jim had been doing a little private drinking out in the chaparral. But Jim knowing full well that the Texas law said to run the line north and twenty-five degrees east said, as his eyes twinkled, “thar’s lodestones in them hills and they turned my compass needle.”
In 1892 when Hidalgo County was four decades old, the International Boundary Commission attempted to determine the Mexican Border. In forty years (1852-1892) the rampaging river had cut off some twenty pieces (bancos, they are called) of Hidalgo land and added them to Mexico and then put another twenty bancos of Mexican land over on the Texas or Hidalgo side. It was a fair trade but the unruly giant also built some new alluvial acres of its own. All this added to the confusion. Smuggler and rustler gangs had hideouts in the bancos but sheriffs could not arrest them. This was because the County Commissioners did not know which of the bancos were Texas and which Mexico. They scratched their heads and waited for the International Boundary Commission to tackle this Arabian puzzle. It did and after many hearings finally decided the ownership of the bancos.
When the county was created in 1852, there were doubts about its size, but most people were too busy taming wild mustangs (for three dollars each) or skinning longhorns to bother about that question. When John Young and Charles Stillman offered one dollar apiece for hides, there was such a stampede of skinners out onto the prairies that the little river villages were depopulated each day. Unclaimed longhorns roamed Hidalgo County by the thousands in those days, and anyone could go into a butcher’s stall in “Old Edinburgh,” Reynosa, Brownsville or Matamoras, give the butcher a picayune or a half-penny, for which he would hand them a knife and say, “help yourself.”
THE SPANISH PERIOD
Beginning in 1767, officers of the King of Spain began granting portions of lands now in Hidalgo County to favored captains and soldiers. Each portion was a domain in itself being several miles wide, always fronting on the Rio Grande, and stretching northward fifteen miles. These portions contained over a league of land (4,428 acres). They were measured with a rawhide rope a hundred varas long (about 300 feet) which was unrolled and re-rolled on a wooden wheel as surveyors marched over the vast campos. Juan Jose Balli measured his San Salvador del Tule grant in 1794, from the back of a pony as he rode around his vast acres throwing out the rope behind him. Some grantees lived on their land but such was a dangerous existence. They built stone towers near the river for defense against the roving bands of Campacuas, Karankaways and Lipans that came almost every harvest season to loot them of their crops and herds. Because of such raids and long dry spells which came in cycles, the first settlers often had little to eat. After the gringos came in the 1850’s, many of the old families sold their lands to them for a few cents an acre, lands that today sell for four or five hundred dollars an acre.
There was one piece of property that everyone wanted in those days, a gleaming white lake of salt known as Sal del Rey (the King’s salt) located in northeast Hidalgo County. This the King of Spain reserved for himself and each year of his control (1792-1820) ox carts loaded with the precious mineral lumbered slowly down the old salt road past La Nora, Leguna Seca, Retama and Granjeno to Reynosa, or over the western route past La Sierreta to Las Cuevas, crossing at Carmargo. From there the salt went to all the towns of Northern Mexico. By ship in the Gulf, it was sent to the islands in the Caribbean and to South America. Later (1848-1860) Texans fought each other in the courts over the question of possession of Sal del Rey. Sam Houston, in a speech in the United States Senate in 1858, said the property should belong to the state and accused Judge Watrous of Texas of trying to steal the title!
A lot of courage, hard work and dreaming went into the making of Hidalgo County, before it cut more than senderos in the chaparral, laid out its roads, built its towns and irrigated its lands, shipped its vegetables, cotton and citrus. Hidalgo County molded people with vision and courage, born out of stubborn persistence in the face of droughts, floods, savage Indians, poor markets, impassable roads and outlaw bands. These were real Americans, the primeros pabladores, the trail blazers, steamboat men, traders, rancheros, politicians, rangers, trail drivers, mail drivers, land surveyors, peace officers, irrigation and railroad engineers, and land salesmen.
In the beginning the primeros pabladores or first settlers did the hard work of the frontier. Beginning about 1800 they began to settle in little villages at the river. They lived in grass or tule thatched houses (jacales) whose walls were of pole framework with mud or adobe plaster. They raised small plots of beans, corn and cane which they sold as indispensable food to the ranches, dug the salt at Sal del Rey, cut the wood for the steamboats of the Rio Grande, loaded the boats, with hoe and ax cleared the brush for cultivation, cut roads in the chaparral, herded the sheep, horses, goats and cattle, and did all this with a song in their hearts.
THE STEAMBOAT ERA
After the primeros pabladores came the steamboat men. The Rio Bravo del Norte or the Rio Grande as it is now called came rolling right by the front door of Hidalgo. It was a big river in those days, dyed with the earth of 1600 miles of Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Prior to 1840 the jealousies of wagon and mule train drivers kept boats of the river, but after General Taylor ordered steamboats up the river, side wheelers and stern wheelers attempted to stem the wild mustang river. The files of the American Flag for 1847-48 show that over two hundred boats cleared the Barra del Bravo at its mouth in those days. The river current, in 1846, was faster than the Mississippi and so pushed many a boat downstream, or threw it against the bank breaking its rudder. But the Corvette, the Ranchero, the J. E. Roberts, Major Brown, Hatchee Eagle and others made the trip to Carmargo and Rio Grande City. In spite of sandbars and explosions of boilers, floods and attacks of river pirates, the boats continued to puff and blow their way up the river. Every 20 or 30 miles they took on wood, as they hitched their way up the river at the slow speed of two to four miles an hour. Yet this was a sure way of transportation which brought prosperity to Hidalgo County. People could not afford the prohibitive rates of land transportation over rough trails infested by robbers. The boats came to Old Edinburgh with hardware, cloth, medicines, seeds, gunpowder and all the other materials necessary to develop a frontier. Hidalgo County could not have operated without the work of men like Captain Richard King of the Ranchero, Captain Miflin Kenedy of the Corvette, Captain Reid of the J. E. Roberts, or Captain Hickey of the Hatchee Eagle. As the boats brought trade to the country up river, little steamboat towns sprang up at Rio Grande City, Everittville, Edinburgh, Mansfield, Nealeville, and Brownsville. The Valley had its first small land boom as soldiers of Zachary Taylor’s army looked on sugar cane and corn fields more beautiful than any they had known, and wrote home to the folks saying, “Never were seen such fields of cane and corn as these!”
THE ORIGINS OF HIDALGO COUNTY
By 1850, there were many settlers living on ranches along the Rio Grande and they felt keenly the inconvenience of traveling 70 or 80 miles to Brownsville to transact land business or pay taxes. Judge Israel Bigelow, an old stage coach operator who knew about frontier travel, introduced a bill into the State legislature (1851) to form a new county of Hidalgo out of Cameron County. This new county would administer all the old land grants of the former jurisdiction of Reynosa. When a private of Taylor’s army on March 28, 1846, hung Old Glory on a mesquite on the north bank of the Rio Grande, a new era dawned. Americans moved in, settling on ranches by the old river road on the Texas side. There was John Young and John McAllen of Santa Anita and Edinburgh, E. D. Smith of San Luis, Thad M. Rhodes of Relampago, Eli T. Merriman of Santa Ana, M. M. Stevens of San Luis, John Jackson of the Jackson Ranch, John Webber of the Webber Ranch. These gringos mingled and transacted business with families of descendants of the first settlers, some of whom were Yndalico Dominguez of Rosario, Sixto Dominguez of Ojo de Agua, Antonio Vela of Leguna Seca, Salvador Cardenas of La Noria Cardeneno, Rene Guyard of La Lomita, General J. M. Carvajal of Tabasco, Esteban Davila of Capote, Manuel Flores of Las Cuevas, Miguel Zamora of Las Piedras. These men had faith in this country and in its future. On December 8, 1849, E. D. Smith, under orders of the Cameron County Court, began laying out a road along the north bank of the river from Brownsville to Rio Grande City, while Charles Stillman and Edward Dougherty began improving the old salt road that ran from Sal del Rey past La Jara and Llano Grande to the river. On March 11, 1851, John Young of Edinburgh, Scotland, secured a license to operate a ferry on the Rio Grande opposite Reynosa. Here Young started a town, sold lots, ran a general store and a hide yard, while on his plantation, La Hacienda, his servants prepared hundreds of barrels of brown sugar for shipment. Young owned ocean-going boats, which regularly picked up his steamboat cargoes of hides and sugar at Brazos and carried them to England. Young bought many lands, and like the other newcomers, was much interested in forming a new county. His lawyer was E. D. Smith who is said to have brought the first cotton gin to the Valley (at Reynosa) in 1841. Smith suggested that the new town of Young’s be called Edinburgh, after Young’s hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland. This would please the gringos. Then Smith suggested that the county be called “Hidalgo” after Miguel Hidalgo, the famous liberator of Mexico. This would please the first settlers.
On September 2, 1852, the first county court convened. The first judge was Madison M. Stevens, a tavern keeper and wood-yarder of San Luis. Commissioners were Sixto Dominguez, rancher of Ojo de Agua, Yndelico Dominguez, rancher of Rosario, Mariano Munguilla of Granjeno, and Dr. Eli T. Merriman of Santa Ana. John Wood was sheriff, and Francisco Tagle, Smith’s bookkeeper, was treasurer. On this first day the court licensed four ferries at Edinburgh, San Luis, Penitas and Las Cuevas at five dollars per month each, and set ferry rates for wagon and driver, oxen, mule, horse and cow. So Hidalgo county was organized with an income of twenty dollars a month plus fees. Then the tax collector of Cameron County, J. Campbell, disappeared into north Texas with the Cameron-Hidalgo tax rolls. While a search for this rascal went on, Hidalgo County operated for about a year without property taxes. No one objected.
ROBERT E. LEE IN HIDALGO COUNTY
The soldier, too, played his part in the making of Hidalgo County. On April 9, 1860, just five years to the day that he surrendered to Grant at Appomatox Courthouse, Colonel Robert E. Lee rode into “Old Edinburgh” on the river. Here Lee conferred with Major John S. (Rip) Ford as to how to stop Juan Cortina and his raiders. In 1859 smoldering fires of hatred caused by mistreatment of Latin-Americans and a lack of justice in settling their land claims, broke into flame. Cortina led the dissatisfied rebels, raided Brownsville, then burned ranch homes all along the river, eighty miles to Rio Grande City. In December, 1859, his men swept into Hidalgo County and burned Relampago, Rosario Customs House and Edinburgh. Major Rip Ford and his Ranger company met Cortina at Rio Grande City and drove him and his raisers over the border. Cortina then set up headquarters at La Bolsa opposite Relampago, where his gang tried unsuccessfully (February 4, 1860) to capture the treasure boat “Ranchero.” Ford’s Rangers invaded Mexico then and drove Cortina out of La Bolsa. However, by April, armed bands of Texans and Mexicans exchanged shots across the river and, the very day that Lee rode into Edinburgh, a United States sentry was shot while on patrol duty in front of “Old Edinburgh.” Lee had foreseen that trouble was brewing and, as he rode down the old Military Road from Fort Ringgold he sent riders off with notes to all responsible Mexican authorities, notes that were courteous but firm. After Lee left Edinburgh the fighting died down; Mexican officers sent Cortina on a mission away from the border. What Lee said in his notes to Mexican military leaders is not known. Perhaps he made it known that he had orders to invade Mexico if necessary. At any rate, he became the first peacemaker of Hidalgo County.
THE CATTLE WAR
In 1872-1875 there was “real Hell” on the border and Hidalgo County, as usual, was in the center of it. In 1869, there were about 200,000 longhorns grazing the Nueces-Lower Rio Grande plains. Hidalgo County ranchers drove cattle to Rockport to the “tallow and hide factories,” or drove them over the Hidalgo-East Texas trail to Abilene, Kansas. The Velas of Laguna Seca, John and Jim McAllen of San Juanito, John and L. H. Box of the Box Ranch, John Young of Santa Anita, Thad Rhodes of Relampago, Salvador Cardenas, Sr. of La Noria Cardenene and Captain Kenedy of La Parra drove thousands of cattle northward. Cattlemen brought back sacks of silver coin and sometimes buried these under marked fence posts, there being no banks in the frontier state of Hidalgo.
By 1869, the 200,000 longhorns, most of them branded, attracted the attention of Mexican rustler bands. Nowhere were there more ideal spots for hiding cattle or places of refuge; dense “mottes” of ebony and mesquite, “dry runs” resacas, bancos offering quick escape to Mexico, Confederate and Union army deserters, outlaws, and Cortina partisans joined the rustler bands. International bandits like Neil Milstead of the Zacatal Ranch stole cattle in both Mexico and Texas using a dry run banco in which to escape when pursued. Below Matamoros on the coast was Bagdad, an Eden for thieves, where stolen Texas cattle could be sold. Cortina partisans rode into Hidalgo County, stealing choice herds, which practice they laughingly said was collecting “las vacas de tata,” or getting back grandfather’s cattle.
“All Hell” did break loose in 1872 as rustlers swarmed over the border in small bands, all heavily armed. The brush popped at San Juanito, where McAllen lost 2,000 cattle, at La Florida where the Champions lost 950, at Relampago where Rhodes lost 1100. As early as 1869, the Kings, after their Spring roundup, figured they were 30,000 head missing. Ranchers who attempted pursuit or gave information about cattle thieves were forced to leave their ranches and move into town. Anyone, Latin-American or Americano who gave information was a marked man to be killed “within a week.” There was no law in Hidalgo County, “the deadline of sheriffs.” Sheriff Alex J. Leo, in 1872-1875, sent wire after wire to Washington, pleading for troops. When County Judge Thaddeus M. Rhodes got together a posse and recovered some cattle, the rustlers in retaliation sacked his ranch. Rhodes slept in the brush nights, as he was marked for assassination. When the United States Cavalry arrived it proved useless, being too slow to catch the thieves. So terror reigned in Hidalgo County.
THE RANGERS
On April 2, 1875, thirty rangers of McNelly’s Company rode up to the Edinburgh Corral by the Rio Grande. Each carried a rifle slung on his saddle, two six shooters, a short knife and a rawhide riata. At the head of these men rode Captain L. H. McNelly, a tall, soft-spoken man, a tireless worker, with an iron will. In ten weeks McNelly’s men had searched relentlessly over every trail and outlying ranch from Las Cuevas in the southwest corner of Hidalgo County to Relampago in the southeast corner. Searching in the brush was the hardest kind of work but they were equal to the challenge. In June they held a rendezvous at Rosario and on the 12th ran a band of cattle thieves into a motte in Palo Alto north of Brownsville, shot 16, with only one getting away. The Rangers stacked the 16 corpses like cordwood in Brownsville’s market square. On July 5, they were at Loma Blanca on the west Hidalgo County line. Here the cattle thieves escaped but McNelly recovered a heard of longhorns. All the Ranger searches pointed to one conclusion, namely that Las Cuevas was headquarters for the biggest gang on the border and the refuge or escape route for most rustlers. Las Cuevas and its counterpart ranch across the river in Mexico could muster 300 men, all killers and thieves, men who had run about 50,000 cattle over the border at Las Cuevas crossing.
On November 19, 1875, Captain McNelly determined to invade Mexico, break up the Las Cuevas gang, and get back a herd of Richard King’s cattle in their possession. With 29 men he went over the river at night and at dawn shot up Las Curchas, then stood off a determined attack of the 300 rancheros of Las Cuevas. The United States Consul in Matamoras, the United States Secretary of War, Belnap, and Major General Ord, commanding in Texas, all ordered him out of Mexico but he ignored them saying, “I came over here to recover stolen cattle, and will stay here till I do.” In a magnificent bluff he threatened to commence hostilities from his natural fort behind the banks of the river unless the cattle were returned. The cattle were returned. The Las Cuevas gang considered this an easy way out of their troubles as each ranger would have killed many before being killed himself. In this bold manner the Texas Rangers brought peace to Hidalgo County.
THE REPUBLIC OF HIDALGO
When Hidalgo County was growing up it was on its own; as far as the United States and Texas were concerned it did not exist. The only exceptions were in 1852, during the Carvajal Revolution, in 1859-60 when Cortina raided the border, and in 1872-75 during the Cattle War. Hidalgo’s citizens called their county the “Republic of Hidalgo” and looked to the court to send out posses to stop bands of international cattle thieves, to end feuding between Mexican and Hidalgo ferryboat operations, to warn the Mexican Government in regard to smuggling (after the free zone was established in 1858), to build roads in the dense brush and solve critical transportation problems, give bounties to rid the county of coyotes, bobcats and lions, check the erosion of the Rio Grande, inspect the cattle, register the brands, survey the public domain, take care of four leagues of school lands (17,712 acres), build schools, secure teachers for a bilingual society, make Spanish land laws and American laws fit together, figure out who owned the bancos, and donate food when severe droughts (1888-1892 and 1900-1903) brought widespread suffering. Naturally, then, the county judges and commissioners did many things that independent states do. It is typical of Hidalgo County that its first court interpreter was General Jose M. Carvajal, who, while he was serving the county, was under indictment in the United States Court in Brownsville (1852-1853) for treason. Carvajal led four expeditions into Mexico using Hidalgo County as a springboard, in a vain attempt to make Tamaulipas into a free state.
In 1882 the Valley was cut off from communication with the outside world. “el vomito” or yellow fever came stalking across the border. A Mexican prisoner died of the disease in the Hidalgo jail. Quickly the court acted. They ordered all boats taken out of the river, all communication with Mexico stopped. Guards patrolled every mile of the river bank to enforce this quarantine. The Cameron mail driver was ordered to hang the mail on a mesquite by the east county line. Here it was picked up by the mail driver of the Republic of Hidalgo. The County Judge, in 1882 was Thaddeus M. Rhodes, and the Commissioners were Florenzio Saenz, John McAllen, Cornelo Ochoa and Theodosio Munguia.
REDS AND BLUES
Frontier politicians in Hidalgo County divided into Reds (Democrats) and Blues (Republicans). The pattern of party politics since followed in the county originated before 1860. Martin “Big Drunk” Norgraves, County Clerk in 1853-1857, organized block voting, and straight party loyalty became the rule. During election times enthusiasm of the Reds and Blues for their colors was whipped into frenzy by the all-night bailes or dances held by party bosses. Thad Rhodes, Ben Kidder, Pete Champion, W. P. and Jim Dougherty were Red leaders, while the Blues listened to John McAllen, Jesse Dennett, and Dr. Alexander M. Headley. Everyone was in dead earnest about county elections and anyone who stepped out of line, that is, deserted his colors, ran the risk of being shot. There were eleven such “traitors” shot in 1882 during a hot campaign. During the Cattle War (1869-1876) the county had scarcely any government worth mentioning and there is a blank in the Commissioner’s Court records for this period. In 1876-1889, the Reds ruled the county under Judge Thaddeus M. Rhodes, and continued their control under Judge W. P. Dougherty in 1890-1893. Dr. Alexander M. Headley and his Blues became frantic after they lost seven successive elections, and in August, 1890, set up their own polls and judges, while the Reds held separate elections. This, said the Blues, was to stop the Reds’ practice of voting aliens. When the Reds installed their own slate of officers, Dr. Headley or “El Canosa” as he was called, charged into Hidalgo at the head of 150 Blues, shooting at anything in sight. A Red defender of the courthouse shot off his own toe in the excitement, while the other Red officials jumped into boats and fled over the river to Reynosa. Dr. Headley then installed the candidates of the Blues, who he claimed had been elected, and they ruled the county for a few days. This government was known as the “Independent Republic of Hidalgo.” However, when Headley tried to collect duties at the border, the United States took a hand in the affair. A Brownsville marshal came up the river with a posse and Headley fled. This ended the Independent Republic.
JOHN CLOSNER, PEACE OFFICER
During the first three decades of Hidalgo County (1852-1882) there was no sheriff who could enforce more than a semblance of order. Sheriffs served but a short time. In 1869-1876, there were eight men who held this position briefly, then resigned. Threats of assassination may have helped create this situation. When John Closner took over as Deputy Sheriff, in 1882-1889, and as Sheriff in 1891-1912, he changed all this. Never did a peace officer on the border create a revolution from lawlessness to peace as completely as he did in 1891-1895. Closner had received his education in the two-fisted school of frontier railroad construction gangs, having served as foreman of gangs, building the Santa Fe and the tough Pecos stretch of the Southern Pacific.
In hidalgo County, when Closner took over as deputy, he was considered just another weak officer to be taunted or cursed at will. The Sheriff was, as John Closner said, “afraid to go out” after lawbreakers, and turned the job of law enforcement over to Closner. The first week he was in charge, a baile was held and John Franz barged through the crowd shouting that he could lick “any damn man in this crowd.” Closner knocked him down three times and carried him to jail. When Jesse Dennett, loyal Blue, rode into Hidalgo one night, “full of booze, shrieking like a Comanche, all the while abusing the Dougherty administration,” Closner disarmed him and, over the objection of the Blues, put him in jail.
In 1891, When Closner took over as sheriff, he learned why peace officers rarely lasted long in Hidalgo County. Closner seized sixteen head of smuggled stock belonging to a friend of the boss of the Reds. The boss warned the peace officer to go slowly but, as the new sheriff continued his clean-up, the boss hired Marcos de Luna, a Mexican bandit, to shoot Closner. When de Luna failed, political foes of Closner hired the famous Pancho Garza to kill Closner and Andres E. Chavez, the Customs Officer and another famous law enforcer. They were tipped off and Closner’s deputies surrounded the shack in which Garza was hiding and shot him after a wild gun battle on the moonlit banks of the Rio Grande. After the episode, Sheriff Closner confronted the leader of the Reds and told him if there were any more plots he (Closner) would not go after the assassin but would shoot the Red down “on the street like a dog.” This ended the plotting. Closner, for all his sincerity, never used his six-gun, never killed a man. “I saw my way around it,” said Hidalgo County’s first real peace officer.”
THE BIG CLEAN-UP
Closner was elected Sheriff by a big majority in November 1890. By 1894, the county was ready for a clean-up, having elected these efficient officers who would support the Sheriff, via Judge Juan de la Vina, Commissioners Pete Champion, Charles Schunior, John Lipscomb and W. F. Sprague. Closner had fine deputies: George Dillars Billy Brewster, Jose Guajardo, Victoriano Reyna, Anicete Munoz, and Marcellus Dougherty. By 1900, really bad men like Marcos de Luna, Pancho Garza, Camillo Lerna or Casimira Livas were a thing of the past. In 1888, Closner and company rounded up the Marks gang, in 1890 broke the power of the Headley gang, and in 1900 caught sixteen of the Santa Cruz rustler gang red-handed while in a poker game.
In 1890 the man who did not wear a six-gun was “not stylishly attired,” but before Closner retired in 1912, he enforced the “six shooter law” in Hidalgo County. This was the first county on the border to enforce such a law. Before 1894, when a criminal escaped to Mexico he was out of danger. Closner developed a strong friendship with Colonel Antonio Mainero of the Mexican Rurales. Working as a team, they returned to each other many escaped criminals. Mainero seldom failed to secure and return the criminals Closner asked for. Then in 1895, with “Old Baldy” Judge Russell, J. I. Kleiber, the District Attorney, and Sheriff Closner working together, justice came to Hidalgo County. During the March term of the District Court, cases 512-523 (District Court Record “B”) were all sent to jail for theft of cattle; after that six more felony cases were convicted. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Hidalgo County. In 1896, the clean-up was complete; there was no spring term of court because there were no cases on the docket. The County was no longer “the dead line of sheriffs.”
HIDALGO COUNTY’S GREAT DREAM
The great dream of folks in Hidalgo County during the last century was to secure a railroad and a system of practical irrigation. It was an old worthwhile dream and such dreams never die. It was back of all the planning of Judge Edward Dougherty of Ruddyville and Rosario, who in the 1860’s became the Valley’s first author and booster. In his book “An Agricultural Prospectus of the Counties of Cameron and Hidalgo in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas” (1867), the Judge presented a scholarly review of reasons why the valley had not prospered in spite of having the finest soil and climate in the United States. He dreamed of a railroad and irrigation and so did W. H. Chatfield. In the latter’s “Twin Cities of the Border” (1893) he proposed an elaborate system of gravity canals and storage lakes from La Lomita to Palo Alto. He set people thinking. Then in 1888-1892 came the great dry spell when mesquites lost their leaves and cattle, staggering and lean, were sold for their hides. Many ranchers and settlers left this barren area. The drought caused others to turn again to the old dream.
In 1894 John Closner began clearing 800 acres east of Hidalgo on the river, known as the San Juan Plantation. In 1898 Ed Ruthven, his foreman, using mules, rolled a steam boiler over “the sands” from Hebbronville to the river, whence it was floated down the Rio Grande to San Juan Plantation. Here a steam driven pump was installed and soon the waters of the river were flooding many acres of sugar cane and alfalfa. The results were amazing. The cane produced (1900-1906) an average of 35 tons per acre from which 6,500 pounds of sugar per acre of cane were refined. John Young of La Hacienda had produced 280 hogsheads of crude brown sugar in 1858, and George Brulay had successfully grown cane in the 1870’s, but nothing like Closner’s experiment had been seen before. When in 1904 Closner exhibited cane from San Juan Plantation at the St. Louis World’s Fair and was awarded a Gold Medal for the finest cane over competition from Hawaii and Cuba, the country’s future in agriculture was begun. Hidalgo County maps, or any map showing the location of the county, were eagerly sought for in the north. This was the beginning of the first land boom. Others followed the ideas of San Juan Plantation; T. J. Hooks and A. F. Hester came in 1902 from Port Isabel with oxen hauling their household goods and dragging an old wood-burning boiler for the pumping plant they installed at Runn.
THE RAILROAD – 1904
For fifty years the main handicap of Hidalgo County was lack of good transportation. Its so-called roads were merely rough traces menaced by dense chaparral. In 1894, San Juan Plantation potatoes and onions spoiled in heaps, for there was no economical way to send them out of the Valley. Mrs. Andrew Champion recalled 100 acres of fine quality tobacco which was never cut because “the road (to Brownsville) was so narrow that big wagons (necessary to transport the crop) could not have been used if they had had them.” W. F. Sprague of La Coma Ranch, Hidalgo County’s pioneer cotton growers, ginned over 1000 bales of cotton in 1900 and sent it in mule wagons to the railroad at Hebbronville 85 miles away! Sprague with 130,000 acres of land, and Closner with 50,000 determined to bring in a railroad and pay for it with land. With this in mind, they began, in March 1903, the publication of Hidalgo County’s first newspaper, a weekly called the “Hidalgo Advance.” Its goal was to bring a railroad to the county. Judge Richard Alvin Marsh, an old “newspaper boomer” and James H. Edwards were editors of this sheet. The “Advance” was never short on praise, saying, “No country on earth equals Hidalgo County in production of alfalfa.” This went for other crops, too. On March 31, it described “as fine a field of cotton as the writer has seen in the State of Texas at the Cenizal Ranch.” “There is,” wrote Marsh, “but one practicing physician (probably this was Dr. Benton Lathrop, famous on the Border as “El Lombris”) in Hidalgo County, and he can’t make a decent living.”
May 31, 1903, was for the “Hidalgo Advance” and its backers a red letter day. They announced proudly that the railroad dream was now a definite possibility. The people of Hidalgo County whooped with joy as the “Advance” reprinted the wire of Uriah Lott, pioneer Texas railroad builder, --- “Have definite proposition from Johnson Brothers to begin work on railroad to Brownsville and Hidalgo branch within 30 days.” All of the county officers in 1904 were strong railroad boosters. These were County Judge Richard Alvin Marsh, Commissioners Florenzio Saenz, Wash Burton, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague, Sheriff John Closner, and Clerk A. E. Chavez.
On July 4, 1904, the Valley threw off a century and a half of isolation and ox team slowness as the first train ran into Brownsville over the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico line. Never had Elizabeth Street seen such a celebration as occurred with people swarming in from miles around to stare and shoot at the train. Then, in the late fateful summer of 1905, the Sam Fordyce branch line was built across the Cameron-Hidalgo line, then westward. As the peon laborers spiked in the rails and set the mileposts, a score of mushroom towns sprang up along that ribbon of steel in the chaparral. Lonsboro, Mercedes, Llano Grande, Beatrice (East Donna), Donna, Alamo, San Juan, Pharr, East McAllen, West McAllen, Mission and Mamie were born, then succeeded or faded away. Irrigation companies formed quickly in 1904-1906,, while land companies took over the settlement in each area. Hidalgo County was growing up.
THE LAND COMPANIES
The Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company promoted the new town of Mercedes. This company set the pattern for those which followed. It boasted of having “the largest, most comprehensive and costly private irrigation system in the United States.” As regards Mercedes, the company advertised in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” for July, 1908, “Like the canal, Mercedes is different from and better than any town in the Valley.” Hidalgo County was having growing pains by this time (1908). The company claimed that “no intoxicating liquors can be sold on this land for 15 years.” Also that “two hundred thousand acres of land are to be irrigated by the silt laden waters of the Rio Grande.” “Sugar cane, alfalfa, pecan trees, oranges and garden truck out specialty.” “Every month of the year a crop may be planted.”
As the land boom of 1904-1910 got into full swing, lands worth twenty-five cents to one dollar per acre before the railroad came jumped to ten to fifty dollars in 1906, and by 1910 had gone to one hundred to three hundred dollars per acre. Irrigation companies played a tremendous part in the boom. T. W. Carter of St. Louis was President of the American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company, Hidalgo County’s first large irrigation project, which was completed in 1905. County Judge, S. P. Silver of Mercedes, S. W. Fordyce and Edwards Whitaker of St. Louis, B. F. Yoakum, the railroad magnate of New York, and Duval West were the other backers of this project and the town of Mercedes. In 1907, these men originated the practice of scheduling land seekers’ (popularly called “Snowdiggers”) parties by train from Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis. Wm. Doherty, traffic manager of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railroad, advertised “Homeseekers’ Rates” in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” for March, 1908; a round-trip ticket from Chicago to Brownsville was twenty-five dollars, from Kansas City or St. Louis, twenty dollars. Salesmen took the “Snowdiggers” on tours over the lands to be sold, transporting them in wagons drawn by mules.
T. J. Hooks, A. F. Hester and associates, in 1902, began improvement of 23,000 acres of land of the La Blanca Tract located between Donna and Run on the military Road. Here they installed a steam irrigation pump, the first devoted to community use in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Out of the Hooks-Hester development came the La Donna Land Syndicate, which advertised in 1908 “Do you want a home (Donna) where the roses bloom every month?” “......where the choicest vegetables are shipped in mid-winter.” Also “water is the magician’s wand that converts the dust of the Rio Grande Valley into golden eagles.” There was more truth than poetry in this advertising.
Further west on the railroad, Jim McAllen and associates secured a depot and laid out West McAllen along the old “Depot Road.” William Briggs and John Closner started East McAllen on Tenth Street Road, built their own depot and brought in B. F. Swift to promote the sale of town lots. They formed the Hidalgo Canal Company and ran the canal from the river to East McAllen. West McAllen faded out when the canal came in. As always, the Rio Grande was king of Hidalgo County.
In 1907 John Conway and James W. Hoit bought the vast La Lomita Ranch, constructed a canal system and advertised widely in the “Gulf Coast Magazine” and northern journals. After 1909, they sold out their “first lift” lands like hotcakes to home seekers from Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Among the hundreds of settlers Conway brought in was William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner.” In the center of La Lomita lands, Mission, “The Home of the Grapefruit,” began to grow.
The county had other great colonizers, too, in the early days. S. K. Hallam of the Hallam Colonization Company, W. E. Stewart, one of the founders of Weslaco, George S. Freeman of Mercedes, C. H. Swallow of the Alamo Land and Sugar Company, Dave Kirgan of the Gulf Coast Securities Company, A. J. McCall and Willard Ferguson of the Starr Land Company, John Shary of the Southwestern Land Company, J. C. Engelman, Lamar Gill and W. A. Harding of Delta Orchards, John C. Kelly and H. N. Pharr of the Louisiana and Rio Grande Canal Company, Marvin Goodwin and Nick Doffing.
Nineteen Hundred and Seven was a great year in the history of Hidalgo County. Captain Fitch in that year set out the first grove of grapefruit near Mercedes, while Charles Volz of Mission also planted a grove. This was fortunate, for the bottom fell out of the sugar market in 1910. Farmers turned to citrus and vegetables. Cotton attracted some of them and a Mercedes farmer produced the nation’s first bale of cotton in 1910, a performance that has been repeated by Hidalgo County farmers many times since then. Colorful accounts of amazing yields of onions, celery, cucumbers and beans by such well known farmers as John L. Box, Charles Volz, O. M. Wakeman, B. H. Hooks, A. F. Hester and John Closner were spread across the pages of the “Gulf Coast Magazine” in 1907-1910, thus exciting the pioneer spirit of the northern farmers who moved here in increasing numbers. Some farmers bought their land on time and paid for it with the money received from their first crop. This was amazing, but true.
THE MOVING OF THE RECORDS
Nineteen hundred and seven was also a great turning point in the history of Hidalgo County. The land and irrigation companies and the railroad by 1907 had laid the foundations of agricultural prosperity. Vast old ranches in the brush were being cleared for farming. The old Steamboat, Bessie, which carried the supplies of ranchers and county court made her last trip in 1902, thus ending 56 years of steamboat transportation. In 1907, D. B. Chapin was Judge, J. L. Hooks, R. L. Savage, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague were commissioners. John Closner was Sheriff, J. R. Alamia, Collector, and A. E. Chavez, Clerk. These men began searching for a new site for a county seat. Old Edinburgh on the river, the first county seat (1852-1886) was washed away by severe floods and Hidalgo became the second county seat (1886-1908). Another series of floods, beginning in 1904, at times covered the entire river lands from Hidalgo to McAllen with overflow water and hastened the removal of the county seat. In 1907 John Closner and W. F. Sprague offered to the county four square blocks in the brush, ten miles northeast of McAllen. Here there was nothing more than a cow trail in the chaparral meandering eastward to the old Brewster Ranch. This site was called Chapin. In 1909 Sprague and Closner financed the building of a railroad spur to Chapin. This job was engineered by E. M. Card and Henry Griffin.
On October 12, 1908, the question of moving the county seat was put to a popular referendum. Those voting “For removal to Chapin” numbered 422. Those voting “For remaining in Hidalgo” numbered 90. Acting under Texas law, Judge S. P. Silver declared Chapin the new county seat. Opponents of the removal then asked the District Court for an injunction. Proponents of the move acted fast and moved the county records and fixtures on October 13. Mule wagons pulled up to the courthouse in Hidalgo in the morning; by evening the caravan had reached the San Juan Plantation. After traveling all night, the caravan approached Chapin in the early morning of the 14th; there, E. M. Card, Tom Lovett, and assistant engineers were camped in tents with a gang of Mexican laborers. As they approached the workers’ tents in the brush, the leaders of the caravan, John Closner, D. B. Chapin, A. Y. Baker, Marcellus Dougherty, W. L. Lipscomb, T. S. Mayfield, A. N. Vela, Andres Chavez and J. R. Alamia gave the Ranger yell, fired off six-shooters and celebrated in the manner of the old Spanish custom of arrivals. The tent town scrambled out of bed to greet the procession. Later in the morning county officers transacted business from tents, thus completing what was probably the fastest transfer of a capital in Texas history. E. M. Card’s gang laid out the county square and cleared the brush, while Tom Lovett and a crew of laborers graded the senderos stopping now and then to kill rattlesnakes. Soon a barn-like structure was erected (on the site of the Edinburg Hotel) as a temporary courthouse.
The first meeting of the county commissioners court in Chapin was held on November 9, 1908. On December 12, 1908, voters approved 159 to 6 a proposition to build a new $75,000 court house. This was completed in June 1910. At that time the county officers were W. M. Doughty, Judge; Alex Champion, W. L. Lipscomb, Charles Schunior and W. F. Sprague, Commissioners; A. Y. Baker, Treasurer; A. E. Chavez, Clerk; and John Closner, Sheriff. In 1911, the name of the new county seat was changed to Edinburg, named from the old steamboat town, Hidalgo County’s first capital. In 1951 bonds were again approved for a new million dollar court house; county officers originating this needed improvement were Judge Milton Richardson and Commissioners Beto Reyna, Charles Green, Tom Hester and George Callis.
Transcription note: The original county seat on the river was Edinburgh. The “h” was dropped when Chapin was renamed Edinburg.
JOHN SHARY
During the years 1910-1920, the tide of northern settlers from middle western states increased. Fabulous yields of vegetables, colorful accounts of new agricultural experiments, especially in citrus, and an abundance of water and sunshine in the irrigated areas attracted thousands. Men like George Freeman, John Conway, A. J. McColl and John Shary directed the colonization of the new settlers, organizing land and irrigation companies, corps of salesmen, and special land seeker excursions by special trains, with carefully planned tours over land to be sold. Many of the colonists were not blind to the hazards of living on the last agricultural frontier of the states, and if the trains sometimes carried preachers to inculcate a crusading spirit, this was also taken in stride.
John Shary was the king of early colonizers. “At the peak of his activity, he had as many as 1300 men in the field” selling Hidalgo County lands, and for years he operated special trains weekly to the Valley. In 1912 he began developing the Judge Brooks lands of twelve thousand acres around Pharr and San Juan; the following year he subdivided and sold the Briggs’ estate of six thousand acres, lands which today surround the city of McAllen. In 1917 Shary promoted the sale of thirty thousand acres acquired from the Oblate Fathers and the Swift Estate in the McAllen-Mission area. By this time John Shary had another attractive point to make about these lands, namely that they were ideal for raising citrus. People had long known the Valley could raise fine oranges; in 1846 officers of General Taylor had lauded the flavor of those they ate from a grove on the site of modern Brownsville. In Hidalgo County, a small grove planted by Carlota Vela at Laguna Seca in 1878 had attracted colorful advertising. After Captain Fitch and Charles Volz began plantings of citrus in 1907, W. L. Hart of McAllen got in the game and in 1915 shipped four carloads of luscious Duncan and Marsh grapefruit to Houston. With this, the first commercial shipment out of the Valley, the citrus boom was on. Hidalgo County had seen a “sugar cane craze,” an “onion craze,” and a “broom corn craze” in 1908-1917, but never such a boom as this. After 1922 thousands of acres were planted to oranges and grapefruit. Later nature added another push to the boom with her famous “million dollar mistake,” the so-called Ruby Red Grapefruit. In 1915, Mr. Shary planted the first large commercial citrus grove, and in 1922 sold his first crop. The first crops were hand-cleaned and hand-sized, so in 1923 he built at Sharyland the first modern packing plant and also organized the first co-operative, the Texas Citrus Fruit Growers Exchange.
THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
It was a natural development of the 1925-1950 period that the dreams and plans sketched above should continue to build a prosperous Hidalgo County. Hard, all-weather roads were built; the Southern Pacific Lines were extended here in 1927; towns grew and prospered with fine churches, schools and business houses. In agriculture, an early season green-wrap tomato industry began. Fred Vahlsing promoted America’s largest vegetable farms at Edinburg and Elsa-Edcouch. Lloyd and Elmer Bentsen became the premier colonizers and developers of Hidalgo County, which led all counties of the United States in cotton production, and raised a good part of the Valley’s 1948 one hundred million dollar citrus and vegetable crops.
These are just a few of the many striking developments of recent years. At the end of its first century Hidalgo County is approaching a new era in which allied industries will play a new role with agriculture in the irrigated areas and progressive ranching in the dry lands.
During the last quarter of a century, Hidalgo County people became aware of the fact that the county was located over one of the finest natural gas fields in America, and soon a big inch line was running north from the Mercedes area to Yankee Land. In 1934 Hidalgo County saw its first oil boom. On September 10, 1934, Otto Woods of Mission, a veteran oil man, brought in Hidalgo County’s first oil well, a 4800 barrel wildcatter. In the face of many discouragements he had succeeded, thus adding another chapter to the great Texas-Lucas-Spindletop tradition.
Hidalgo County has grown up, beating down all barriers, dreaming vast dreams and building from those dreams. A writer in the “Houston Chronicle” of July 12, 1908, said (referring to the Valley’s past) “The hoodoo of the longhorn was upon the minds of men.” Pioneer builders beat down this false belief, cleared out the brush, began a courageous fight on the age-old water problem, and when markets failed turned ever anew to other fields of endeavor. To all those courageous pioneers who having “lost their shirts” still persevered and went on to greater fields of glory, this mere sketch is dedicated. To all the trail drivers of the longhorn era, the ranchers of vision and their cowhands, to the land salesmen and irrigation engineers, the old traders and steamboat men, the county politicians, the Rangers and peace officers, and last but not least, the Mexican peons or wetbacks who cleared away the cactus and mesquite, it is also dedicated. They all played a vital part in the building of Hidalgo County.
Transcription notes:
This article was written for the official historical program booklet of the Hidalgo County Centennial celebration held in Edinburg, Hidalgo County, Texas,
December 7-13, 1952.
There appear to be numerous type-setting errors in this article as printed. Attempt has been made to correct blatant errors while retyping the article.
Transcribed from the original by Sara Hunter Skaggs, 2004.
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