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Perhaps
H.M. Fletcher grew as tired of buying feed for the horses that pulled his wagon
as future generations of Texans wearied of high gasoline prices.
Could
be he figured he might make some money. Or maybe he just decided to have a little
fun.
Whatever his inspiration, the Plainview
man took action on an idea he believed would put Old Dobbin to pasture for good
-- a wagon that did not require four-legged energy. He was not alone in thinking
about other ways to get around, of course. Already, horseless carriages powered
by gasoline engines competed with buggies and wagons on the nation’s streets and
unpaved roadways.
But Fletcher envisioned a different sort of horseless
carriage, one that did not rely on fossil fuel. His invention would harness as
its power source one of nature’s elemental forces: the wind.
Some time
in 1910, Fletcher pulled a wagon into his barn, laid out his tools and went to
work. What emerged definitely got the attention of his Hale County neighbors.
In fact, folks were still talking about it 70 years later.
Using the
wind as a means of locomotion was not a new idea. Man had been plying the seas
and rivers in sailing vessels for centuries. Even using the wind to propel a wagon
was not an original concept.
In 1853, entrepreneur William Thomas demonstrated
a wind-powered prairie schooner to the U.S. Army at Fort Leavenworth in what was
then the Kansas Territory. Thomas’ invention extended 25 feet in length. It had
12-foot wheels and a single sail on a 7-foot mast.
Thomas envisioned
a fleet of sailing wagons rolling along the Santa Fe Trail, moving people and
goods across the plains. But as one historian later put it, when the prototype
wind wagon crashed, Thomas’ potential financial backers became Doubting Thomases
and pulled their support. The would-be CEO of the Overland Navigation Co. blew
out of Kansas sans windfall.
Samuel Peppard of Jefferson County, Kan.
was the next creative thinker to build a wind wagon. What became of his 1860 effort
is best summarized by what folks soon called it -- Peppard’s Folly.
A
half century later in the Texas Panhandle,
Fletcher concluded that hoisting a sail on a wagon was the wrong approach. If
windmills could suck water out of the earth, he reasoned, they could power a wagon.
So Fletcher raised a windmill in the back of a wagon. If he made any drawings
of his invention, they are not known today. This much is surmised: Gears connected
to the sucker rod somehow turned the wheels. He also developed a steering system.
As late as the 1970s, a few old-timers in the Panhandle
remembered having heard about the wind wagon. They said Fletcher’s big moment
came when he climbed in his windmill wagon and tried to ride his invention from
Plainview to Amarillo.
He made it as far as Canyon,
about 30 miles south of Amarillo.
North of town, a hill proved insurmountable.
L.L. Roser, eight years
old in 1910, told a correspondent for the Amarillo Globe-News in 1981 that he
had seen the wind wagon.
“It was just a regular windmill on an ordinary
wagon,” Rosser said. “The wagon didn’t have any specially built bed, and the windmill
wasn’t the biggest there was, although it did make the wagon move.”
Another
old-timer, Harold Hamilton, told the Amarillo newspaper he also remembered seeing
Fletcher’s contraption. “Mr. Fletcher also was going to plow with it if it developed
properly,” he said.
Fletcher’s invention did not require grain or gas
to roll across the High Plains, but it did need wind. A strong breeze is common
enough in the Panhandle, but still days do occur. And on those days, the owner
of a wind wagon would be as becalmed as any clipper ship with sagging sail.
Not only did Fletcher’s idea never catch on, his out-of-the-box but in-the-wagon-bed
thinking never got the attention accorded his predecessors in the wind wagon field.
The misadventures of Thomas and Peppard, the original High Plains drifters, fueled
folklore (Walt Disney did a short animated feature called Windwagon Smith in 1961),
fiction and non-fiction, but Fletcher and his windmill wagon have been forgotten.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" July
22, 2004 Column | |
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