CHAPTER 7
DRY YEARS ON THE TEXAS PLAINS
Papa had two rancher brothers, Joe and Simpson, who had remained in the cattle business when all the rest of the Johnsons went to farming. And Papa preferred cattle ranching over cotton farming. So he got the urge to get back to growing more cattle and not so much cotton.
This was not just a far-out dream as if he didn't know what he was doing. After all, he had been in the cattle business with his father until the time they all moved back to Texas from Oklahoma. At that time he went to farming because it required far less capital to be a farmer than to be a rancher. And he was a young man just starting out on his own.
But now he had accumulated a little of this world's goods and he thought it was time to step up to a larger place that would grow enough cows and calves to afford a better future for him and his family. This was not just a wild adventure. He knew it was easier to grow a dollar's worth of calves than it was to grow a dollar's worth of cotton.
We had prospered greatly during our six years on the Exum farm. But our chances for expanding in Jones County were limited. Most of the good pasture land had been cleared and put into cultivation. But on the West Texas plains there was ample room to expand. The soil was rich for farming and yet not too expensive for pasture land.
So in 1916 Papa went to that land of promise and bought a section of unimproved land ten miles southwest of Lamesa. It was a half- mile wide and two miles long. It was part of the old Higginbotham Ranch. The ranch was being sold piece-by-piece for farms. And it seemed to be a very good place to grow feed and cattle.
Now Papa knew he would have to have a place to live. He knew he couldn't move onto unimproved land and start making a living on it. So he also bought another smaller farm about five miles from the large one. It was fairly well improved. His plan was to live on the small farm while he sent us kids to school, built five miles of wolf proof fence around the new land, had a well drilled, put up a windmill and a water tank and built an eight- room, two-story house to live in. He did all this on the new land.
With that much completed, we moved onto the new farm and started building a small barn, chicken house, car shed, tool house, storm cellar, wash house, an out house, a yard fence, field fences and cross fences. This all took quite a spell but by this time the place was fairly well improved.
But wait—before we did anything to either farm we moved into the house on the small farm in the dead of winter. Dode and Susie moved in with us—or rather, we moved in with them. The plan was for them to farm the small place and we would farm and ranch the large place. We would live with Dode and Susie until we made the other place livable.