| My
father, Roy Cowser, spent two consecutive harvest seasons in the cotton
fields of West Texas just after he turned twenty. He told us of some of his experiences
there as one of hundreds of cotton pickers.
In 1911 he boarded the Cotton Belt train (St. Louis Southwestern Railway), at
Saltillo bound for Fort
Worth. From Fort Worth he
took a train to Stamford
and then boarded a train bound for Spur.
The railroad from Stamford
to Spur had just
been constructed two years before.
Swante Maagnus Swenson, an immigrant
from Sweden, owned many acres of land in West Texas and micro-managed the affairs
on the ranches located on his property. He organized the Stamford Northwestern
Railway Company. In l908 workers began to construct a railroad from Stamford
to Spur, a site on
one of Swenson’s ranches. On November 9, 1909, immediately prior to the completion
of the Stamford and Northwestern Railroad’s tracks, Swenson began to sell town
lots. According to Jim Corder in his memoir Lost in West Texas, thirty
days later the town of Spur
had 50 businesses and 60 residences. It also had a telephone system and water
works.
Spur
and the towns nearby were begun by entrepreneurs, many of whom had advertised
in Eastern newspapers the opportunities for enterprising business people in the
developing towns of West Texas. Lawrence Shames wrote about these developers,
some of whom paid people to live in the town until after a census was taken so
that exaggerated population figures could be included in advertisements. These
developers also paid drovers to harness their mules to cabins and drag the buildings
to the new town before a count was taken of houses and business establishments.
My
father picked cotton for a farmer of Swedish
descent who had homesteaded acreage near the town of Spur.
The Swede may have been encouraged to emigrate to Texas by S. M. Swenson. Emigrating
to Texas in the 1830s, Swenson was the first Swede
to move into that state. As he acquired more and more land, he encouraged other
Swedes to emigrate. During the decade between 1880 and 1890 one-fourth of the
population of Sweden left the country, many of them coming to the United States.
As a worker hired by the Swedish family, Cowser shared a bunkhouse with
several other Anglo pickers, most of whom came from East
Texas. The owner provided a cot for each of the workers assigned to the room,
which had an earthen floor. The Mexican pickers lived in tents on the property,
thirty or forty of them sleeping inside each tent.
From his employers,
Cowser learned some expressions in Swedish; years later he taught me and my brother
to count to ten in the language. Once he tried to help us translate a couple of
recipes written in Swedish that we found in our mother’s cook book.
Recreation
opportunities were few for transient farm workers in the small towns of Afton,
McAdoo, and Spur,
all in Dickens County. My father mentioned that on Sunday afternoons some of the
other workers played dominoes in the back rooms of general stores in these towns.
Two partners opposed two others in a game of Forty-two, also popular among the
pickers. Instead of joining the other workers on the excursion into town on Sundays,
my father usually continued picking cotton. At the end of the harvest season he
returned to his parents’ farm four miles south of Saltillo.
In
the early fall of 1912 my father again took the St. Louis Southwestern train from
Saltillo to Fort
Worth; then he rode the Fort Worth and Rio Grande tracks to Brady,
which at that time was the end of the line. The railroad reached Brady
in 1904. He seldom talked about the time he spent picking cotton
near Brady.
With some
of the cash my father earned as a cotton picker,
he leased a corner of the general store in Greenwood,
a crossroads community in Hopkins County approximately three miles from his father’s
farm. He bought a press and cleaning fluid and began to operate a dry cleaning
business.
In 1940 my father took the family to Lubbock
to visit relatives. When we drove through Dickens,
he reminisced about the time he spent in the county twenty-nine years before.
© Robert
G. Cowser December
30 , 2011
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