The sheep and wool era
in South Texas
The
shepherd was at home in South Texas like the cowboy and vaquero was.
Flocks of
sheep grazed the range from Corpus Christi to Laredo, making this one
of the
top wool-producing places. Carretas loaded
with wool,
from as far away as Mexico, rolled into Corpus Christi, one of the
world’s
great wool markets.
The sheep
era began about 1850 when W. W. Chapman, an Army officer, was
transferred to
Corpus Christi to head the Army’s new 8th Military District
depot. Chapman
realized that the area’s rich grasslands made ideal sheep
country. He set up a
sheep camp on Santa Gertrudis Creek and
brought in
purebred Merinos from Pennsylvania.
The Merino,
unmatched for the quality of its wool, was too delicate for this
climate. While
Mexican sheep could take the heat, they had a
coarse
wool. Chapman figured that fine-wooled
Merinos bred
with tough Mexican sheep would produce a hardy breed with a fine
fleece. Merino
cross-breeds became the golden fleece of South Texas.
James Bryden, a sheepman from Scotland,
was among immigrants attracted here by Henry Kinney’s land
promotion efforts.
Chapman hired Bryden to handle his sheep.
In payment
for watching the flock, Bryden was given
part of the
natural increase and a share in the wool profits. Bryden
grazed the sheep along Santa Gertrudis
Creek.
The
following year, in 1853, Richard King bought 15,000 acres to begin his
ranch
near the Chapman sheep camp. King purchased 10 Merino bucks and 42
Mexican
ewes; within a decade, he had some 40,000 sheep. His main sheep camp
was called
Borregas.
Other sheepmen
besides Bryden were
among immigrants attracted by Kinney’s land-selling promotion in
the 1850s —
Joseph Almond of Newcastle-on-Tyne, the Adams’ family, George
Reynolds, the
Wrights, these became sheep ranchers in the Nueces Valley. Corpus
Christi in
1856 suffered a blow when the city’s top employer, the Army,
moved its depot
headquarters to San Antonio. Kinney’s immigrants were forced to
find new jobs.
George Reynolds worked cutting hay for the Army; when the Army left, he
went to
work on King Ranch, then began his own
sheep ranch.
Other
immigrants turned to raising sheep, something they knew from England
and
Scotland. This was the beginning of the sheep era. The cattle kingdom
began
about the same time, and in almost the same place, along Santa Gertrudis Creek and in the well-watered Nueces
Valley, and
for the same reason: necessity. For decades, Corpus Christi’s
economy depended
on Merino cross-breeds and longhorn steers. The wealth of South Texas
walked on
four legs.
Maria von
Blucher wrote in a letter to her parents in Germany (“Maria von
Blucher’s
Corpus Christi”) — “Sheep are the best business here,
better than cattle. Mrs.
Chapman (her friend and the widow of the late W.W. Chapman) has grown
rich by
keeping sheep, going halves with somebody.”
By the end
of the 1850s, quality wool was shipped from Corpus Christi to world
markets.
When the Civil War began in 1861, the Confederacy bought Texas wool to
make
uniforms for Confederate soldiers. When Texas ports were bottled up by
the
blockade, wool was moved down the Cotton Road to ships waiting at
Baghdad.
Word spread
that South Texas was sheep country; sheepherders came here from all
over to
make their fortunes by tending sheep on shares. John Buckley came to
Duval
County from Ontario, Canada, to raise sheep. He became the patriarch of
the
William F. Buckley family. Oscar Edgerly
came here
from New York to tend sheep for William Headen,
one
of Corpus Christi’s wealthy wool merchants.
Edgerly
recorded
the routines of a sheepherder in his diary. He stayed busy moving the
sheep and
setting up new camps. When the sheep ate all the grass near watering
places,
they were driven out in search of greener pastures, then
brought back for water. He once moved the flock to San Fernando Creek
and
Richard King rode up and told him to move. Oscar moved up the creek;
King told
him to move again.
“As I
thought I was not on his lands, I did not move,” Edgerly
wrote. “I stayed there until the grass gave out, then
took them up on the Aqua Dulce.”
Edgerly’s daily
tasks were taking the sheep to water or grass, cooking meals, watching
for
coyotes and other predators. It was said that sheep, unlike cattle, had
to be “lived
with.”
It was a
lonely life. Robert Adams went to work when he was 16 in 1863 tending
sheep
near Casa Blanca. He wrote that — “I never saw a house for
a year, and was not
inside a house for over two years. I did most of my own cooking for
four years,
and had nothing to eat but meat. I had no bread and didn’t know
what a
vegetable looked like. I didn’t see people sometimes for two or
three months.”
After the
war, there were 1.2 million sheep in Nueces County. It had more “fleecies” than any other county in the
country. Tax rolls
for Laredo’s Webb County in 1878 recorded that that county had
8,000 cattle and
239,000 sheep, so many sheep that one cowman said he was afraid to ride
through
the place wearing a wool shirt.
In shearing
season (April-June and August-September), big two-wheeled ox-carts
loaded with
bags of wool came to Corpus Christi to sell to the wool merchants on
Chaparral.
Sheepmen came all the way from Mexico to
sell their
wool here.
Chaparral
would be crowded with ox-carts at the wool-buying emporiums: David
Hirsch, Ed
Buckley, Perry Doddrige, William Headen,
John Woessner, and Uriah Lott, before he
began
building railroads.
Norwick
Gussett, the town’s richest wool
merchant, was a former
muleskinner in the Mexican War. In 1873, he purchased three million
pounds of
wool. Gussett’s store, topped with a
rooster
weathervane, was called “la tienda
del gallo.” Doddridge’s place
had the symbol of a ram, hence
“la tienda del borrego.”
The Weekly
Democratic Statesman in Austin reported on May 24, 1877 —
“Corpus Christi is
controlling a large wool trade. It is thought that four to five million
pounds
will be handled this year.”
Sheepmen
returning
to Mexico after selling their wool clip in Corpus Christi carried back
merchandise for sell, so they made a profit coming and going.
These
returning sheepmen were often targeted by
bandits.
One strategem of the sheepmen,
it was said, was to drill holes in the wooden axles of their ox-carts.
The
holes were packed with silver dollars, then
sealed
with wooden pegs.
Three
things happening almost at the same time brought the colorful and
lucrative
sheep era to an end. A parasite decimated the flocks. In 1884, Grover
Cleveland
was elected president and he lowered the tariff on cheap Australian
wool, a
devastating blow to Texas sheepmen. The
other was the
end of the open range; sheepmen needed
free grass and
when cattle ranchers began to fence their pastures, the days of the sheepmen were numbered. The convergence of all
three
factors brought the sheep era to a close. Sheepmen
became cattlemen almost overnight.
During
World War II Corpus Christi, this once-great wool market, received
millions of
pounds of Australian wool, stored here for the duration of the war. For
unknown
reasons, perhaps there was an old sheepman still alive, who remembered how the
cheap
Australian wool imports had done so much to bring the sheep and wool
era to an
end in South Texas.
