Ground Worth Fighting Over
Surveyors under fire, a feud that waited eighteen years, and a gunfighter who taught school.
On the record: documented. As told: an account we can credit to a person or a publication, not confirmed by the record.
Every fence line in this country began as a surveyor's line, and the first of those lines were drawn at a cost.
In October 1838, about 25 surveyors were working west of here, near present-day Dawson, mapping land grants promised to veterans of the Texas Revolution, in country the tribes still hunted. A force of roughly 300 Kickapoo, Waco, Tehuacana and Caddo men warned them off, then attacked. About 18 surveyors and some 30 of the Native fighters died; seven surveyors survived. It is remembered as the Battle Creek Fight, or the Surveyors' Fight, and a state marker stands at the common grave.
The surveys that followed did not always agree. Claims overlapped, and lawsuits over them ran until 1866. Near Pisgah Ridge, overlapping surveys and friction between old settlers and newcomers set the Love family against Dr. William Nicks Anderson, agent for the Mercer Colony.
On 9 February 1855, on a stretch of the Old Springfield Road called Nubbin Lane, William M. Love shot Anderson. Before he died, Anderson gave a statement that cleared Love of first-degree murder. His widow, who was expecting a child, vowed revenge.
Eighteen years passed. On 19 May 1873, William Love was killed near the same spot. Ham Anderson, the widow's son, and Alec Barekman were charged. A Texas Historical Commission marker placed near Richland in 2011 tells the story.
Between those two killings, by his own account, the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin taught school on the ridge. He wrote that he spent three months of 1869 teaching about 25 children at "the old Word school house" near "Pisga." He called the local Andersons and Dixons his cousins. He also wrote that he and his cousin Simp Dixon each killed a Union soldier in the Richland bottom. All of this comes from Hardin's autobiography, published in 1896, and we pass it on as he told it. We have not been able to find where the schoolhouse stood.
Annie Carpenter Love, the county's first historian, wrote in 1933 that the ridge had "some of Navarro's best citizens and for many years, some very rough citizens." Both kinds left their mark.
People fought over this ground because they wanted it badly. Standing on it, that part is easy to understand.
Sources
- Handbook of Texas Online (TSHA), "Battle Creek Fight"
- Texas Historical Commission markers: "Love–Anderson Feud" (2011); "Pisgah Ridge" (2006); the Battle Creek Fight marker
- John Wesley Hardin, The Life of John Wesley Hardin, as Written by Himself (1896)
- Annie Carpenter Love, History of Navarro County (1933)
Corrections: if something here is wrong, or you know more, write to [email protected].