![]() Williams of a nearby ranch claimed to be the owner of a cow that had been butchered by Armstrong and an associate. There may have been more incidents but the one documented murder involved XIT Ranch manager John Armstrong who got into a disagreement over the ownership of a cow. The many miles of fencing what was formerly open range initially led to conflicts. The ranch reportedly hired cowboys as well as gunmen to help combat the issue. The paper reported that the first trainload left Farwell Park in Channing for Chicago and that the ranch planned to ship another 200 cars of beeves on the 28th for the the Chicago market.Ĭattle rustling was a recurring problem over the years. According to the Fort Worth Daily Gazette of August 18, 1891, the first “beeves” were shipped the day before. By the mid 1880s, the operation was underway and they began adding Hereford, Durham and Angus to the herd. to fund infrastructure (windmills and structures) and other improvements to the ranch and bought a herd of mostly Texas longhorn cattle. John Farwell created the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Co. The cedar post and barbed wire project cost $181,000. The owners fenced the entire area, roughly 260 to 275 miles long and 40 miles wide. The original concept of the syndicate was to profit by subdividing and selling off smaller portions as ranches, a concept that might have worked, but early on it began to operate as one large enterprise. The accepted story however, is that rancher Abner Blocker scratched the brand in the dirt with the heel of his boot in order to illustrate a brand that would be hard for rustlers to change. ![]() It is only a popular legend that “Ten in Texas” inspired the famous brand, XIT. The ranch included parts of 10 counties at its peak: Dallam, Hartley, Oldham, Deaf Smith, Parmer, Castro, Bailey, Lamb Cochran and Hockley. The original cost of the Capitol building was projected to be $1,500,000 but wound up costing about $3.7 million with the syndicate funding all but about $500,000 that the state picked up. The Texas Legislature appropriated the remote Panhandle acreage to a syndicate led by Illinois natives John and Charles Farwell in exchange for an agreement to build the Austin structure. In 1879, the State of Texas was looking for funds with which to build the Capitol building. The XIT was once one of the largest ranches in Texas, comprising 3 million acres along the Texas-New Mexico border in the Panhandle area of the state. View texas-newmexico-history’s profile on Tumblr.View TexasHistoryNotebook’s profile on Twitter. ![]()
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