The Cowboy Minister

The Cowboy Minister - By Christina Cole

One of the things I most enjoy about writing western historical romance is the information I accidentally find as I’m researching different topics. Recently I stumbled across a website that told the story of Ralph J. Hall, better known in his day as “The Cowboy Minister.”

“…To a great many people, ‘Go ye into all the world’ means only going to China, Japan, Africa, or to some distant place across the sea; but to the Sunday school missionary it means going into the most isolated and neglected parts of his field…It often means dim and rugged trails over the mountains or across the parched sands of the desert. It means visiting that lonely and isolated home or community, for the Sunday school missionary must ever be primarily a trailblazer, a pioneer in the work of the Kingdom…”

—Ralph J. Hall, in The Main Trail, 1973

I was intrigued at once and wanted to learn more. Now, I’m pleased to share with you the story of this remarkable man and his ministry.

Born in 1891, Ralph Hall grew up in a remote area in west Texas. One day a traveling minister knocked on the family’s door, and the boy knew then what his mission in life would be. At the age of eighteen, and with only a fifth-grade education, he left home to be a lay missionary for the Presbyterian faith. His first official assignment was with the cowboys and ranchers of Texas and New Mexico.

At that time, Hall wasn’t ordained to offer communion services, nor could he baptize, so he was accompanied by Dr. Houston Lowery, a minister from Carlsbad, New Mexico. Dr. Lowery soon found himself a bit disoriented with no pulpit, no choir, no pews. He quickly realized, however, that young Ralph Hall was a gifted speaker, one who knew the people and understood their hearts.

In 1916, after only two days of instruction and examination, Ralph Hall was ordained. Throughout his life in the ministry, he gained respect from the people he served because of his willingness to work alongside of them, helping with the roping and ranching.

He traveled extensively throughout the southwest, and under his supervision, many conference grounds, camps, church schools and chapels were constructed. Whenever he arrived in a new town, his first job was to figure out how to build rapport with the cowboys and ranchers in the area. Many of them, he said, “had a scowl rather than a welcome for the preacher when he came around,” so Hall wouldn’t let on that he was a minister until the men had accepted him as a “real cowboy”.

Folks said Hall could “rope a steer in record time” and “read trail signs like an Indian”, skills that quickly won over the men he worked with.

Later, having gained acceptance and trust, he would open up to the cowboys about his faith, usually late at night as they sat near a roaring fire. Even the most skeptical of the men would listen.

As the story of his missionary work with the cowboys made its way back East, many curious folks wanted to join him for a taste of the “cowboy experience.” Those who did accompany Hall on his journeys found out that the cowboy’s life was not an easy one. Most were unprepared for the grueling 18-hour work days, the roping, the riding, and the difficulties of tending to cattle over treacherous terrain and erratic weather.

Hall was comfortable riding long distances and preferred to sleep out under the stars. His eastern-born friends often found themselves jettisoning their over-packed bags at the side of the trail and leaving their bedrolls behind while they scurried off to find shelter on cold desert nights.

According to the Presbyterian Historical Society, Ralph Hall went on to supervise all Sunday School missionary work west of the Mississippi River, traveling hundreds of miles to remote ranches to perform baptisms and marriages. He brought church to the homes of many pioneer families who were hundreds of miles from the nearest towns. He was also instrumental in developing the idea of “camp meetings” in order to find ways to bring people together for worship. Although he relied on word of mouth to promote the first Ranchman’s Camp Meeting, hundreds of people came together at Nogal Mesa – a beautiful pine-covered mountain near Carrizozo, new Mexico – to hear the word from guest preachers, to read and study scriptures, to pray together, and to partake of meals cooked over a fire. The Ranchman’s Camp Meeting still meets annually at Nogal Mesa.

In addition to becoming the subject of several documentaries filmed between 1920 and 1950, he shared the story of his life and his mission in The Main Trail, published in 1973.

“Bible in his bedroll, a dedicated young missionary hit the trail for New Mexico's far-flung cow camps and isolated homesteads. Now, nearly sixty years later, he writes about a rich and rewarding life in which hilarious roundup anecdotes and amusing frontier experiences are counterpoint to situations of high drama and deep pathos. He says that cowboys and lonely young people, deprived as they were of Christian fellowship and any opportunity for Christian worship, were his two dominant concerns. As a circuit rider in his early years he would join a cattle outfit as an extra hand, prove his ability to ride any mean horses and win recognition as a bonafide cowboy. Then, after a few days, he would hold a meeting around the evening campfire. For the young people, he instituted youth camps - a program which has extended into Arizona, Colorado and northward almost to the Canadian border. He tells how he dramatized the importance of his missionary work to supporting churches by organizing traveling seminars - a project for taking seminary students and church members by caravan on a tour of missionary fields in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. And he tells it all with so much humor that the most casual reader will find his accounts as interesting as any tale of roughing it in the West.” --- Excerpt from publisher's notes

I’m glad I got to know Ralph Hall’s story. His devotion is inspiring. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about this “cowboy missionary” and his dedication to serve others. 

The Denver of Oregon

By Shanna Hatfield

Anyone driving on I-84 through Eastern Oregon will go right past the small town of Baker City. From the freeway, travelers might notice a few restaurants, hotels, and gas stations.

Few visitors realize that Baker City was referred to as the "Denver of Oregon" back in the 1800s, when gold mining drew people to the area and the town boasted any number of luxuries.

Baker City's history goes back to the mid-1800s. The Oregon Trail went through the area (The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center located just a few miles east of town provides a rich and colorful look at life on the trail) and many settlers decided to make Baker County their home.

The city (now the county seat) and Baker County were named in honor of U.S. Senator Edward D. Baker, the only sitting senator to be killed in a military engagement. He died in 1861 while leading a charge of Union Army soldiers up a ridge at Ball's Bluff, Virginia, during the American Civil War.


Gold drew settlers to the area. Auburn,  a gold mining boom town located five miles southwest of present Baker City, served as the seat of Baker County in 1862.

In 1864, only three cabins stood within the urban boundaries of present day Baker City.  A portion of what would become downtown was platted and by 1865, the main street offered a saloon, a few hotels, a livery stable, a variety store that housed the post office, a blacksmith shop, and a handful of other buildings.


By 1868, as placer mines played out, Baker City became both the county seat and commercial center. Auburn soon became little more than a memory.

In 1874, the legislature approved Baker City’s first charter, which set up a board of five trustees. In 1887, Baker City elected blacksmith and farm implement dealer Syrenus B. McCord as the city’s first mayor along with five councilmen.

 
Beginning in its earliest days, Baker City had a Chinatown that included several businesses, a Chinese temple, private dwellings, opium dens, and prostitution cribs. Today, visitors can see the Chinese cemetery just off the freeway.

Baker City’s buildings were constructed of wood until 1873, when former Sheriff James W. Virtue, who had established the county’s first bank in 1870, built a stone “fire proof” business structure on the southwest corner of Main and Court. Despite his claims, the building burned down in the 1880s.

Several fires ravaged Main Street buildings over the years. The most disastrous was the 1887 fire that destroyed all structures on the east side of the 1700 block of Main. Before the year was out, all those frame buildings were replaced by brick buildings, and some made of native volcanic tuff stone quarried at Pleasant Valley, south of Baker City.

One of the most impressive brick buildings still standing today is the Geiser Grand Hotel, located on Main Street. The Warshauer brothers, Jake and Harry, constructed the hotel 1889. It went by the name Hotel Warshauer until purchased by the Geiser family about 1900.

You can read a little about the hotel and life in 1890 Baker City in my latest sweet western romance - Crumpets and Cowpies, the first book in the new Baker City Brides series.

In the story, Rancher Thane Jordan reluctantly travels to England to settle his brother’s estate only to find he’s inherited much more than he could possibly have imagined.  Lady Jemma Bryan has no desire to spend a single minute in Thane Jordan’s insufferable presence much less live under the same roof with the handsome, arrogant American. Forced to choose between poverty or marriage to the man, she finds herself traveling across an ocean and America to reach his ranch in Oregon.

Available on Amazon

CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS AND A RECIPE

Howdy, friends.  How are your plans for Christmas coming along? Do you plan to host a passle of people?

At Charles Goodnight’s JA Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, Christmas dinner was huge. The Goodnights entertained all their neighbors with a holiday party. An evergreen from Palo Duro Canyon was decorated with frosted raisins and strings of popcorn and cranberries. Dinner consisted of beef, turkey, antelope, cakes, pies, and other assorted dishes. Each guest received a gift and guests danced until daybreak.

At our house, we’re planning a much more modest celebration. Our two daughters will join us to share tamales and other TexMex foods on Christmas Eve. That gives us time to hear my husband read the Christmas story from the Book of Luke before we open our gifts. 

On Christmas Day, we’ve sometimes had ham or lasagna for dinner. This year, we’ll share a pot roast about one o’clock. By the time we've emptied our stockings on Christmas morning and nibbled on the candy that's always part of their bounty, no one is very hungry. Yes, even though we're all adults, we each have a stocking, We're big on some traditions. Seeing the food prepared for dinner and the Christmas china bedecking the table always whets our appetites.  

My hero and I haven't made candy yet, but we’ll probably cook fudge on Tuesday.  My mom was well known for her luscious pies at family dinners. At Christmas, though, she always made batch after batch of fudge and divinity. I thought for this special time, I’d share her divinity recipe with you.

Mamaw’s Divinity

2 cups sugar

½ cup white Karo syrup

2 large egg whites, stiffly beaten

½ cup water

Dash of salt

½ Tablespoon vanilla

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

1/c cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Beat egg whites until stiff and set aside. Cook sugar, Karo, water, salt, and cream of tartar until it forms a hard ball in cold water. Pour over beaten egg whites, stirring as you pour. Add  vanilla and nuts. Beat until it starts to harden. Pour into a lightly buttered 8” x 8” casserole to harden. 

Mom usually made one batch colored with food coloring. As a child, I thought the pink divinity tasted better than the plain white candy. 

Merry Christmas to each of you.

Caroline Clemmons is the award winning and Amazon bestselling author whose Christmas novella is STONE MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS, available from Amazon at http://amzn.com/B00OQUTDXA 

Cowboy Kisses for Santa from Mrs. Claus

COOL, CLEAR WATER - HOW WINDMILLS CHANGED THE WEST

When I began watercolor lessons, the first scene I painted was of a windmill at sunset. Not original nor very good, but I love both windmills and sunsets. Although they’re difficult to find now, I love the old wooden frame style windmill best. I also miss the song a windmill sings during a breezy day or evening. With the windows open, the sound is a lullaby at bedtime. Don’t get me wrong, I love modern conveniences, but they’re a trade-off. We lose something with each part of our past that disappears.

Due to my love for the life-giving machines, I included them in two of my books. BRAZOS BRIDE has been released in 2012 and re-released as part of a boxed set: MEN OF STONE MOUNTAIN: MICAH, ZACH, JOEL. And TEXAS LIGHTNING, a time travel in progress, in which the heroine loves the sound of windmills. These books led to research about windmills which involved more than just loving to look at and listen to them.

Over 80,000 working windmills are estimated to be working now in Texas. You can’t drive on any road without seeing them in the distance. They are of particular service to ranchers in the arid regions. Land that once was almost useless to ranchers became valuable once windmills were erected. The windmill has come to be one of the symbols of ranching and cowboys. Once I started researching them, I was surprised the type I have come to love was not as old as I’d suspected.

Range windmill
purchased from Kozzi

Before the introduction of windmills to Texas and the West, inhabitable land was confined to areas where a constant water supply was available. There was no way for vast areas to be settled without a life-giving supply of water. The coming of the windmill made it possible to pump water from beneath the ground, and soon whole new areas were opened up to settlers. The first windmills were of the European style, built by Dutch and German immigrants for grinding meal and powering light industry. What settlers needed most, however, was a windmill that pumped water.

Because of its bulk and need for constant attention, the European windmill was impractical for this purpose. The solution to this problem came in 1854, when Daniel Halladay (Halady or Halliday) built the first American windmill in Ellington, Connecticut. He added to his mill a vane, or "tail," as it was called by cowhands, that functioned to direct the wheel into the wind. The wheel was a circle of wood slats radiating from a horizontal shaft and set at angles to the wind, designed so that centrifugal force would slow it in high winds; thus, the machine was self-regulating and operated unattended. Its simple direct-stroke energy converter consisted of only a shaft and a small fly wheel to which the sucker rod was pinned. This compact mechanism was mounted on a four-legged wood tower that could be constructed over a well in one day.

Triple windmills
purchased from Kozzi

Railroad companies immediately recognized windmills as an inexpensive means of providing water for steam engines and for attracting settlers to semi-arid regions through which they planned to lay track. By 1873 the windmill had become an important supplier of water for railways, small towns where there were no public water systems, and small farms. Many of the very early mills were crude, inefficient, homemade contraptions. One of the popular makeshift mills was a wagon wheel with slats nailed around it to catch the wind, mounted on half an axle. The axle was fastened securely to a post erected beside the well. A sucker rod was pinned to the edge of the hub. It was stationary and worked only when the wind blew in the right direction. The windmills used later on the big ranches were the more dependable factory-made windmills.

Windmills moved to the ranches with the use of barbed wire in the late 1870s. At first the water holes, springs, creeks, and rivers were fenced, so that the back lands had no access to water. In the midst of the fence cutting and fighting, some ranchers began drilling wells and experimenting with windmills. Most of these experiments were unsuccessful, however, due to lack of knowledge concerning the proper size of the windmill in relation to the depth and diameter of the well. One of the earliest successful experiments was made eight miles north of Eldorado, in Schleicher County, Texas by Christopher C. Doty, a nomadic sheepman. Doty moved his flock into that area and found abundant water in shallow wells. By 1882, however, a drought had dried his wells; he ordered a drilling rig from Fort Scott, Arkansas, bored a fifty-two-foot well, and erected a Star windmill, which successfully supplied water for his 4,000 head of stock.

Lone windmill at sunset
Purchased from Kozzi

Watering stock with windmills spread rapidly. Eastern land speculators began buying, fencing, and running stock on the land until it became ripe for colonization. Among the first of these speculators to indirectly bring windmills to North Texas was the Magnolia Cattle and Land Company, organized by Maj. Willa V. Johnson, In 1884 the company bought two-thirds of the state-owned land in Borden County, land which had natural water resources and had long been unofficially claimed for grazing by Christopher Columbus Slaughter. Once Johnson fenced the land, Slaughter was forced into the use of windmills to supply water for his cattle. By 1886 the Matador Land and Cattle Company (where years later my husband’s uncle worked) began using windmills to water stock.

The largest of the Eastern land speculators, the Capitol Syndicate, began using windmills on its XIT in 1887. One of their windmills was believed to be the world's tallest; it was made of wood and was a total height of 132 feet. A Texas historical marker at Littlefield marks the site of a replica of the world's tallest windmill built on the XIT Ranch. The original windmill blew over in 1926. By 1900 the XIT had 335 windmills in operation.

Not until the King Ranch began extensive use of the windmill in 1890 did that the practice began to spread rapidly over that area. By 1900 windmills were a common sight in the Texas and the West. Inhabitable land was no longer limited to regions with a natural water supply. The windmill made the most remote areas habitable.

The use of windmills brought about two of the most colorful characters of the West, the driller and the windmiller, and altered the lifestyle of another, the range rider. The driller was usually a loner and seldom seen by anyone except the range rider and windmiller. He followed the fence crews and guessed at where he might find water, then bored wells with his horse-powered drilling rig. When the driller was successful the windmiller followed and set up a mill. Owners of the larger ranches usually employed several windmillers to make continuous rounds, checking and repairing windmills. The windmillers lived in covered wagons and only saw headquarters once or twice a month. The early mills had to be greased twice a week, and this was the range rider's job. He kept a can (or beer bottle) containing grease tied to his saddle. When he rode up to a mill that was squeaking, he would climb it, hold the wheel with a pole until he could mount the platform, and then let the wheel turn while he poured grease over it.

The lonely windmiller

The range rider was always in danger of attacks from swarms of wasps, which hung their clustered cells beneath the windmill's platform; there was the added danger of falling from the tower when such attacks occurred. The windmill industry's shift in 1888 to the backgeared, all-steel mill caused heated debates in Texas livestock and farming circles. Most ranchers and farmers welcomed the new steel windmill because its galvanized wheel and tower held up better in harsh weather; also, its gear system was better able to take advantage of the wind, thus enabling the windmill to run more hours per day. The backgeared mill could also pump deeper and larger-diameter wells. Those who favored the old wood mill argued that the steel mill was more likely to break because of its high speed, that it was not as easily repaired as the wood mill, and that when parts had to be ordered the steel mill might be inoperative for days. Though sales of wood mills continued, they declined steadily, so that by 1912 few were being sold.

The last major development in the windmill came in 1915. A housing that needed to be filled with oil only once a year was built around the mill's gears. This relieved the range rider of his biweekly greasing chores and somewhat diminished the windmiller's job. Because of the dependability of this improved windmill, worries over water shortages were eased for the rancher, farmer, and rural dweller. This mill was the prime supplier of water in rural Texas until 1930, when electric and gasoline pumps began to be widely used.

Though Texas became the largest user of windmills in the United States, there were never more than three active manufacturers of windmills in Texas at one time. Windmills remain an important supplier of water for Texas cattlemen. The King Ranch in the late 1960s kept 262 mills running continuously and 100 complete spares in stock. Stocking spare mills is a common practice among ranchers who depend on the windmill to supply water for cattle in remote pastures. One important ranch worker is the man who rides—or drives—from windmill to windmill lubricating the gears and making repairs.

Because the windmill has been confined for the most part to remote areas, it has become a symbol of a lonely and primitive life, fitting for the pioneer Texans it first served and the cowboys about whom we love to read. Let me leave you with one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite groups: Sons of the Pioneers with “Cool, Clear Water.”

Homesteaders by Lauri Robinson

While driving through Wyoming last year my husband and I talked about what it must have been like to migrate west with little more than a wagon and a dream and what visionaries those pioneers must have been...

The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed a person to claim as much as 160 acres, with the condition that they would improve the property, live on it for five years and pay a fee of approximately $30. Within a few short years over 20,000 pioneers had gone west to stake their claim, and within the next four decades a million more traveled westward to carve a life out of the vast lands. Over two million more purchased land from the railroads, land companies, and/or state governments. What some soon discovered was, though the land was cheap, everything else was expensive. At average, to start a homestead took a minimum of $1,000, translated into 2012 dollars, that would be about $25,000. This was mainly for livestock, equipment, and seed, not building materials for a home or food, etc. 

The influx of people brought new inventions such as special plows and equipment needed, but along with them came new costs, and on average, less than half of the homesteaders actually succeeded. 

Just as the railroad provided ways for cattle ranches to transport their animals, it gave the farmer a way to transport grain. Soon farmers discovered it was more profitable to grow one ‘cash’ crop, and a lot like the cattle barons, they started accumulating large tracts of land to increase profits, especially when John S. Pillsbury of Minneapolis perfected his flour-milling process and the demand for grain increased.   

This wave of homesteaders included women, who worked side by side the men to pursue their dreams, and that, along with the fact in some places there were 100 men for every 1 woman, women of the west were ‘granted’ more ‘privileges’ than those in the east. Land ownership, business ownership, and bringing charges against people or business who wronged them, were a few of the rights women sought and ultimately received in the west, which prompted more eastern women to move west. 

In 1890 the U.S. Census director officially proclaimed there was no more ‘frontier’ in America. 

I wish you all a blessed and happy Thanksgiving. 

www.laurirobinson.blogspot.com