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Serial #0302

Prairie Sentinels

Price

Spotting the young Ode Price on the street in Canadian, Texas in 1930, Davy Wright told him that there was a job waiting for him at home anytime Ode needed work. That home was May and Davy Wrights’ Glazier, Texas ranch and it had provided the most stability Ode had known in his growing-up years. His mother died when he was ten years old. He lived for short periods of time in the homes of his older brothers and managed to stay in school until age fourteen, when his father came to town and announced that Ode was big enough to work and support his father. Ode had different ideas; he took off on his own.

By age sixteen, Ode began dayworking for Davy Wright. But Ode decided to check out the promise of better wages and adventure in oil boomtown Borger, Texas. After working there for a while it became apparent that the wages weren’t much better than cowboying, and the expenses greater, so it was back to Canadian where Davy told him to come on home. When he turned eighteen, Ode went to work for Davy full-time. It would turn out to be the job he kept for the rest of his life. Never having had children of their own, Davy and May wanted to adopt Ode; after all, they had practically raised him. Ode, however, would not hear of it. He was too old for that.

Davy Wright moved large numbers of cattle. At one time Davy owned and lease-operated a total of sixty sections and had a bull herd of 300 head. In order to keep up with the widely dispersed herds of cattle, from the sand hill pastures of the Wright ranch to the wheat pasture country of the northern Texas Panhandle, Ode spent a lot of days and nights on horseback. During the winters he carried newspapers that he could layer in his pant legs to ward off frostbite. And if he had to make a cattle trail his nighttime bed, he could cover up with newspaper, his saddle blanket, and sometimes the saddle.

Ode married Ruth Ballew Bradney in 1954. Daughter of a Nazarene preacher, Ruth, like Ode, was a natural storyteller. When the two of them, sitting around the dinner table, really got going on a storytelling session, those listening had a hard time catching their breath from laughing so hard. This was especially true after one of Ruth’s famous mealtime spreads. Their daughter, Arlene Price Walker, inherited this amazing storytelling talent. Through her, all those rollicking good tales are remembered and passed on.

Davy Wright died in 1952. Ode, in partnership with May, continued to manage the ranch. He and Ruth looked after May until her death in 1987. The next year, Ode died. Ruth is gone now too, but Arlene and Ronnie Walker keep the ranch up and running. And they keep the stories coming.

Turner

May Moore Wright and Leora Barton Turner were childhood friends, attending school together in Lipscomb, Texas. A photograph circa 1913 shows Leora and May teamed up with the Cessna sisters, Hazel and Grace. Leora, part of the extended Barton clan that settled in Lipscomb County after trailing cattle north, married Bill Turner in January, 1920. Born 1897 in Missouri, Bill came to the Texas Panhandle as a child with his family. The year before he and Leora married, Bill helped drive the last herd of cattle up the Tuttle Trail that ran from Boggy Creek, near Canadian, Texas north to Dodge City, Kansas.

After May settled her mother’s estate in early fall 1920, Bill and Leora Turner rented the Moore place. Their first child Beatrice (Appie) was born in the house November 15, 1920. Four more children: Mona, Margie, Kenzy, and Kay came along in following years. The Turners made several moves in the time between 1920 and 1940, but they returned to the Moore place each time. Even after Bill and Leora moved to Lipscomb to run a grocery store and gas station, Bill continued to keep livestock on the Moore section. Granddaughter LaVaun Kraft remembers that when the hogs would get out and come all the way to Lipscomb, the kids had to “drive those blasted huge hogs back on foot” the two-and-a-half miles to the Moore place. 

Moore 

Of all the letters and documents saved by May Moore Wright, only about four give any information about the life of her father, Able B. Moore. According to his tombstone, he was born in 1843. Pennsylvania was probably his home state based on May’s letters to cousins and an aunt, and A.B. Moore’s Civil War record. He served with the Pennsylvania Sixteenth Cavalry, mustered in as a sergeant when the regiment was organized in the fall of 1862 and mustered out at the end of fighting in August, 1865. The regimental history shows that the Sixteenth Cavalry had 105 men killed or mortally wounded, and 194 men died of disease and accidents.

A tattered and pencil-smudged daybook with date entries of 1876-77 indicates that A.B. may have settled near Owensboro, Kentucky for a time after the war. A freight waybill shows destinations of Washington Territory, Omaha, Laramie City, Ogdon, Sacramento City, San Francisco, and Portland. Labor records for the freighters working for A.B. alternate with pages of recipes for colic and liniment.

According to May, her parents met in Missouri where both were members of the Lonely Hearts Club. Hattie’s background is even more of a mystery than A.B.’s. She did have relatives in Columbia City, Indiana. A young widow with two toddlers, she elected to leave her son to be raised by a brother-in-law when she and A.B. married. Hattie and A.B. Moore homesteaded along Wolf Creek in the Texas Panhandle in 1887. It is unclear whether Hattie’s daughter Lura made the initial trip to Texas or if she remained in Missouri for a time before rejoining the family. May was born in 1897. 

Wright

Cecelia Augusta Jones, mother of David Wright, was born in Monmouthshire, Wales, 1865. When Cecelia was four her father died, leaving her mother with eight children. In 1870, the family sailed for America, eventually settling on a farm near Topeka, Kansas. Losing their mother when Cecelia was fourteen, the Jones children stayed in Topeka until 1883, when Cecelia and her five brothers traveled by covered wagon to Mobeetie in the Texas Panhandle where they settled on Jones Creek. Oldest brother Jenkin stayed on their newly settled land while Cecelia, Tom, Dave, Joe, and John moved into town, where the boys sold meat to the soldiers of Fort Elliott and the few remaining bands of Indians.

Cecelia married John R. Wright in 1885. Born in London, England in 1854, John Wright came to the Panhandle around 1880, first working as headquarters cook and bookkeeper for the sprawling Bar CC Ranch. When he and Cecelia married, John was partners with Charlie Rath in the Rath and Wright Mercantile of Mobeetie and he also kept books for the H-Y Ranch and the J Buckle Ranch. The Wrights went into the cattle business in 1888 and settled on Corral Creek.

To take advantage of the railroad boom and attendant business opportunities, Cecelia and John moved in 1896 with their six children to Canadian, Texas. Their seventh child was born after the move. John purchased half interest in the J.F. Johnson Mercantile Company, as well as the Gerlach Brothers Mercantile. He created a lumber company by combining the two mercantile companies’ lumber divisions. He also became a partner in the Bussell and Wright livery stable. This business had 93 stalls and could accommodate 200 horses. But, after several months of ill health, in 1898 John passed away, leaving 33-year-old Cecelia with seven children.

Cecelia sold her husband’s businesses and invested in cattle, eventually filing on a section of land northwest of Canadian in a canyon along the Canadian River breaks. The family worked here during the summers, using a small one-room house for cooking and eating and two dugouts for bedrooms. Winters were spent in town so the children could attend school and church.

Cecelia was president of the Presbyterian Ladies’ Aid Society and a charter member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the group responsible for reversing the wet/dry balance in Canadian. The saying goes: Canadian started with 13 saloons and one church; after the WCTU cleaned up the town there were 13 churches and no saloons.

Cecelia Augusta Jones Wright died on May 22, 1928.