The Lost Road to California

The Lost Road to California?
The Future of America
By Jeff Clark

Sometimes stories are bigger than you can grab hold of. This one's like that. I met eighty-four-year-old Luther Fambro on his place last Friday. A nice man, wise, gracious.
We talked enough for several stories, spent most of the afternoon riding around. The one tale still rolling around in my head is about the abandoned wagon road he showed me. Let me back up a step.

When I was working on the Alameda story, I ran across a diary that RIP (“Rest in Peace”) Ford wrote as he rode through this part of Texas around 1835. He turned his reins north, then all of the sudden took off west. Went up a valley to avoid high mountains, arrived at level land on top, then continued toward the sunset.

I've always suspected he went up Bear Creek Canyon, south of I-20's Ranger Hill (aka Thurber Hill, if you’re old enough). Any breadcrumbs Ford’s party left behind marking their route are gone. Land in this part of Eastland County more closely mirrors Palo Pinto County, giant cattle ranches on wide open, rougher-than-a-cob land. There were tough Allens in this country, Woods, McDowells, Stuards, Hinksons, and more.

The mystery wagon road leading up the canyon has long since been abandoned. A series of massive bridge headwalls of stacked native stone, save one of reinforced concrete. Huge eight by eight timbers, preserved like they were cut yesterday, like those used during Hogtown’s oil boom lie in the brush. Smaller boards I take to be the old deck of each bridge hide here and there. This old road crosses Bear Creek seven times in three miles.

Back before water wells, stock tanks, oil exploration and other man-driven alterations to area groundwater, the streams and springs often flowed year-round. The erosion from now-dry springs and rivulets is still carved into the sides of this beautiful valley.

As we ascended the valley shadowing this old road, I was struck by the gentleness of its grade, far less steep than modern-day I-20. A wagon and team could have made it up this valley. There would have been places to camp, small pastures to graze tired teams, forests (then) of oaks, now crowded by cedar and mesquite. Abundant cover and water would have fed dinnertime game.

We pass where remnants of a whiskey still were broken apart, probably by “revenuers” (revenue agents), I presume during Prohibition. Copper tubing and sundry components were strewn all over the ground, now long-since vanished. The still was hidden about twenty yards off this road.

My 1917 Soil Study map for Eastland County betrays this road, though there was no indication that it was a county, or regional thoroughfare. It intersected the north-south road that ran through eighteen gates connecting Strawn to Desdemona before Highway 16 was built, not far from Mr. Fambro's house. It appears to come from a much larger road from Thurber. It trails west, toward the Crossroads and Russell Creek Communities.

As we ascended this lost wagon trail, I couldn't help but wonder if my Russell Creek Community friends from the 1870s had ridden their horses, had driven their teams up this route. Russell Creek’s ghost town front doorsteps sleep only another five miles distant. I couldn't help but feel a tug, knowing I was seeing country they saw, at least in broad outline. Knowing their wagon wheels creaked up the same ruts our modern day rubber-tired pickup truck now climbed.

After returning home, I checked with some friends who I thought might remember the wagon road, might be able to tell me if this was the road to California. Highway 80 was commissioned in 1926. It surely replaced this road. Folks around Ranger told me that a traveler would have taken a northern route to Caddo, then east toward Fort Worth. The hardier could have gone down the more exciting narrow path along the T & P rail bed, descending (like a rock in some places) the perilous wilds of Wiles Canyon toward Strawn.

This land could have been made "off limits" by some long-ago six-shooter-toting landowner, arresting public use of this road. Ornery first and second generation ranchers ran cattle up and around this stretch of country back then.

I would’ve written the road off as a neglected old wagon trail, common in this part of Texas, but for the "established", engineered look of these bridge headwalls, some wider than twenty feet. A lot of trouble went into building this road. The path had to have been a major east-to-west-route, at some time, for some major reason.

I've included a couple of photos, in case anyone remembers. I suspect my storytellers from that time have passed on. Why does any of this matter? Old wagon roads knitted this country's west-moving settlement into a young nation. This dusty road undoubtedly carried daily trips up to Russell Creek's Church of Christ, or to the new Ranger oil fields, or from Thurber's never-quite-opened mine at its base.

The T & P had laid the train spur’s track for the next coal mine here, had built the lake, built fourteen houses, according to 1917’s map. But as they were about to sink a shaft, Ranger's star-crossed oil boom hit. The coal mine never got dug.

Could this have been one road to California? Could this now-abandoned path have carried the dreams of a much-braver nation to its far coast, birthing settlement along the way? What picturesque characters might have slid up the road slicing these two mountains, from 1835 to as late as the 1920s?

Topography would have almost forced one to take this route. Did the Caddo peoples, the Comanches, the earlier wandering Natives whose tribe names have been lost walk this path? Surrounded for miles by steep mountains and cliffs, it is almost certain.

Mr. Fambro's dad was Truman Conner ("T.C.") Fambro, who lived for a time up around Wayland, north of Ranger in Stephens County. He had family in the Acker Community, across the big mountain, where my great-grandparents lived, and suffered, before coming to Cheaney. Around WWII Luther's dad started buying tracts down here around Bear Mountain. The communities of Marston and Mountain had vanished by then. Gourdneck and Tanner were sinking fast.

Some thought his land purchases ($16 - $22/acre) were outrageously over-priced, ill-advised. That was before Highway 16, or I-20. Before land was bought for "leisure”. Ranch land had to cash flow, back then.

Luther Fambro moved back on the family place about 35 years ago. While in high school he worked for Mr. McKerrin in Breckenridge, at a men's clothing store. McKerrin was good to him. Young Luther'd work at the store first period, then after school and on Saturdays (after a tough Friday night football game).

He played "end", there being no tight ends or wide receivers back then. World War II called him away for three years, going here and there as some commanding officer thought fit. When he returned, he ended up at North Texas in Denton on a full scholarship, aided also by the GI bill. Fambro's loyalties to the school are evident, a bright green North Texas flag greeting you as you enter his spread.

Remember, I grew up in the city. Still, some parts of rural economics don't make sense to me. I asked Mr. Fambro how a person could make modern $2,000 per acre land prices work, running cattle or maybe farming. I can't even almost make the math work. If a deep-pocketed person buys land for recreation, pays cash as an investment, then the numbers can work, after a tax-code-twisted fashion. Tax-free exchanges, deferred loss and well, all that wealth's got to go somewhere.

This tough land can prudently support one cow every twenty acres. $40,000 of land, for one cow. Doesn't paying more than a few-hundred-dollars per acre doom one's ranching enterprise? How do couples starting out, wanting to farm or ranch get going? They'd have to inherit an operation, earn a great income from some paycheck job, or borrow the mother-of-all land loans. Even then it might not be enough.

Mr. Fambro has worked hard his whole life. Shared that he wasn't always what he called "well off". He had a stroke in 1992, making it tough to work his land, and the thousands of ranching acres he'd leased to add to the mix. Still, his hard work seems to have paid off.

His place doesn't boast one of the gleaming monster homes springing up in this part of rural Texas, perhaps, but he's living on ancestral land, some family nearby, happy, secure in the strong beliefs that brought him here. We drove though gates, passed different breeds of cattle. He counted them, “took them in” through his front windshield. He's still working this land. The man helps out some groups he's fond of, attached to, out in the world. He's "seeing to" the places he came from, as my granddad would’ve said.

Turns out Fambro lived in Richardson once, north of Dallas, a couple of blocks from the high school I graduated from. He coached at powerhouse Highland Park, who my Richardson School attempted to play each season. We felt like we really stomped Highland Park, if we lost by 14 points or less.

I'm staring in frustration at my notes from Mr. Fambro's kind visit. There are ten more stories in there, easy. I will share more, as this tale continues to unspool. That old road has gotten under my skin. Like our country, too many have forgotten where this wagon road came from, and most don’t have a clue where it’s going. But we know by looking at this old road, that once, whatever rolled along its path was significant.

I hope things are good with you.