To West Texans, It’s ‘God’s Country’ : Frontier: The region is dry, dusty and virtually deserted. Early explorers compared it to hell. But the hardy few who live there feel differently.

A century and a half ago, an Army explorer stumbled onto a hauntingly remote and desolate chunk of Texas prairie and was not much impressed.

W. B. Parker branded the hills and plains “inhospitable” and declared:

“Destitute of soil, timber, water, game and everything else that can sustain or make life tolerable, they must remain as they are, uninhabited and uninhabitable.” He vowed never to return.

Well, that relentlessly raw land was eventually settled, if sparsely. But major highways bypassed it, other Texans ignored it, and it remains today a region with little population or prosperity and no name or identity of its own beyond a few hardscrabble farms and ranches and small and struggling towns.

Apparently, though, the land holds a wonderful secret that touches the native soul.

Joy Cave, a Guthrie schoolteacher, put it this way: “We don’t belong to anybody. We belong to ourselves.” Then she added:

“Guthrie is the geographical center of nowhere . . . but something has kept me here. I just love it.”

Said Micky Parker, the librarian in Jayton, population 638, “We’re really kind of stepchildren here.”

So where is “here?”

It is an ill-defined territory, well west of Ft. Worth, where the West purportedly begins. It lies north of Interstate 20 within a triangle connecting Wichita Falls, Abilene and Lubbock.

A true map of “here” probably would include all or large parts of nine West Texas counties and bits and pieces of five others. That’s roughly 8,500 square miles, an area larger than the whole of Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut.

Fewer than 25,000 people live in this phantom state within a state, many on small farms and larger ranches where the earth yields few crops and a relative trickle of Texas crude oil.

There are no tourist attractions, no daily newspapers, no television stations. Jobs are scarce, health care erratic, the population aging and declining. Many schools have closed. Other high schools, unable to field 11 players, play six-man football, sometimes in front of an audience of pickup trucks.

What does the citizenry say of this geographic dead zone?

They boast that drugs and crime are pretty much nil, that the people are close and caring and, most of all, that it’s a great place to rear children.

“It’s God’s Country,” said Janelle Barry of Spur, which is about as close as any to being this region’s quasi-capital.

“The Big Empty,” native son Jim Corder joked.

“I’m always looking for West Texas or my part of it, and not finding it,” Corder wrote in “Lost in West Texas,” a whimsical and charming book that deals largely with his nameless homeland.

“My part of West Texas doesn’t show up much in books,” thus leaving a “hole” in Texas, he grumbled. Outsiders, he said, “miss the strange and lonesome beauty: the view one sees of the Double Mountains down the Salt Fork from the highway bridge between Swenson and Jayton; the first dramatic drop into the deep of the Croton Breaks. . . .”

Corder, an English professor at Texas Christian University, was born near Jayton, but even he cannot pinpoint the boundaries of his province. “It just doesn’t have any identity, except in the minds of the people who live there,” he said.

Corder figures W. B. Parker and his expedition leader, U.S. Army Capt. Randolph Marcy, flirted with his province when they ventured into what is now King County many years ago.

As quoted by Corder, Marcy was even less impressed with the region than Parker. “It is, in almost every respect, the most uninteresting and forbidding land I have ever visited,” the commander grumped, and spoke harshly of its “barren parsimonious soil.”

Still true. This place is too dry, too dusty and hammered too often by winds from hell. The prevailing south winds were lashing gnarled mesquite trees as a visitor arrived in Rule, population 783, on the southeastern edge of Jim Corder’s cosmos.

The playground at Slim Sorrells Park is as empty as the Western Winds Motel and the Rule Memorial Museum, which is “Open by Appointment” only. The Rule drive-in picture show is open weekends from April “until it gets cold.”

Across the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos is a German settlement once named Brandenburg but, for patriotic purposes, became Old Glory in 1918. An American flag still flutters in the center of what is now little more than a shell of a town. Its school shut down eight years ago, the grocery-service station more recently.

“Right now, I’m the only fella here,” drawled Lisbon Letz, the Old Glory postmaster for 36 years. “Time’s starting to pass pretty quick now.”

Then there is the town of Swenson, named for the once-great Swenson ranching empire. Fat cattle wearing the famous SMS brand once roamed ranches in central, west and northwest Texas.

Now Swenson is a ghost town, its most forlorn remnant a red brick bank founded in 1911. The hot Texas sun peers through holes in the roof. Over the doorway an awning of metal and wood hangs like something dead.

Few natives know the country better than Gene Swenson of Stamford.

“There’s a lot of this damn land that the only thing you can do is run a cow on it,” he said, and even then it sometimes requires 35 acres per cow. “Basically, this is ranch country. In my opinion, some of it was plowed up that shouldn’t have been.”

In Jayton, the walls of the shuttered Barfoot Hotel are cracked and the paint has peeled. The weekly Jayton Chronicle is moribund, too, even though the town has fared better than most. Mobil Oil and the highway department are active employers, and there is a Chevrolet dealership.

A downtown historical marker reveals that the Double Mountain Salt Works was located along the Brazos River on the “Indian-infested frontier” and was the northernmost business in Confederate Texas.

Jayton also is the county seat--but that was not always so.

According to one juicy tale, cattle trucks whisked the county records from the original courthouse in Clairemont, a mysterious fire destroyed the building and the records emerged in Jayton. So would a new courthouse.

“That makes a good story,” said librarian Micky Parker, but no such raid occurred. Furthermore, it was an electrical fire during a sandstorm in the drought-ridden ‘50s that demolished the Clairemont courthouse.

There is no mystery about the Jayton school system, which is first-class. Jim Corder, who attended the old school, marveled at the grass-covered football field, lights and closed-in press box.

“When my brother played football at Jayton,” he wrote, “I remember watching the principal draw off the yard markers in the dirt with a hoe.”

Jayton High’s Jaybirds once played eight-man, then 11-man, and now six-man football.

Don Richards, a Lubbock attorney, played on Jaybird teams three decades ago and planned to return for this year’s homecoming game and his 30th class reunion.

“It was a great place to grow up,” he said.

He remembers having to travel to Aspermont for the movies and to Spur to shoot pool. And mischief in those days was faking late-night accidents to stop truck drivers on U.S. 380, or driving a car across the train trestle at the Brazos River.

Ironically, Jayton’s superb educational system is now threatened by the state’s so-called Robin Hood school finance plan, which funnels tax money from rich to poor districts.

As a school official once explained: “Our people are very poor. We just happen to have a pool of oil in the center of the county.”

Knox City, population 1,440 and the county seat of nearby Knox County, is also something of a paradox. Debbie’s is a friendly catfish and chicken fried steak place, but the Oil Patch Cafe is closed and abandoned.

On Ranch Road 222 to Guthrie, home of the famous Four Sixes ranch, the terrain turns hilly and rocky. But an oasis, the Chaparral, appears out of nowhere to offer wine, beer and liquor.

It is one of few such outposts in a steadfastly dry region.

Purple wildflowers, defying all odds, sprout along the road, a lonely cow is wedged under a shade tree in a faraway field, and civilization is not much in evidence.

The road feeds into U.S. 82 and, after crossing the South Wichita River, which is bone dry, leads into Guthrie past the King County Courthouse and up to the headquarters of the 6666.

The Texas Almanac puts the county population at 367, not quite half of it in Guthrie.

Although Guthrie is little more than a ranch supply center, there is a library next to the courthouse, and “Lost in West Texas” was afforded lofty display this summer.

“You’ve found a good place to get lost,” declared part-time librarian Karen Pettiet, who has lived here almost all of her 40 years. “It’s true, there’s not really much to see out here.

“But there’s something you can’t identify. This is a fantastic place.”

Along the highway from Guthrie to Dickens temperatures hover near 100 degrees and wind kicks up distant dust devils. This is truly the wide-open spaces. An occasional windmill interrupts the monotony.

Only 322 people call Dickens home, but they have the essentials of all West Texas towns: a Church of Christ, a Baptist church and a cemetery.

The drive-in is history, so Dickens has a youth-oriented video business operating out of a house. They bring quilts, pillows, candy and soft drinks along with 50 cents admission and flop down in front of a TV screen equipped with a VCR.

“We’ve got 25 kids in town and we’ve been having about 30 show up,” chuckled proprietor Mike Porter. “So we think it’s a success.”

Up the highway, the Double H Motel has rooms with refrigerated air, electric heat, phones and truck parking. A gourmet jelly store is long gone but the nearby Ponderosa cafe advertises the “world’s largest” barbecue sandwich.

In neighboring Spur, a garbage company once announced in the weekly paper that trash would not be picked up as scheduled because of a holiday. It added:

“The whole town will be picked up on Tuesday.”

Jim Corder returned to his homeland in the ‘80s and wrote wistfully of the Croton Breaks, Golden Pond and other special places in his childhood “cosmos.”

“When you get to Aspermont, you’re there,” he wrote.

There?

“There,” he said, “is just around a curve on the other side of town. There, off to the left in the blue distance, blue above the broken plain surrounding them--the Double Mountains.”

God lives atop the Double Mountains, Corder insists.

“The Double Mountains are not only the dwelling place of God, but also, as the markers of my province, they are the first boundary of the cosmos,” he wrote.

Stopped by fences, ravines or a gate marked “Posted,” Corder’s approach to the Double Mountains was stymied.

A more recent visitor circled the mountains for three days. Like Corder, he never reached them, so could not confirm that God lives there.

But Sammy Baugh does. The former TCU football great and pro Hall of Famer owns a ranch that backs up to the southern edge.