Aunt Annie, Clay McGonagill and the Old Sweet Home Cattlemen and Trail Drivers
Bernard Pyron
Clay McGonagill (1879-1921) was a well known roper and steer rider of
the early rodeo.
He was so well known that Elmer Kelton threw him in as a
character in his Western novel set in the first years of the 20th
century in the Midland, Texas area. Its called The Good Old Boys. I saw
the movie version but in it Clay McGonagill makes only a brief
appearance in a rodeo in San Angelo. I read the novel and Clay
interacts more with the two main characters.
Clay McGonagill appears as a character in Frank O"Rourke's High
Vengeance, 1954. O'Rourke spells his name McGonigal, and Clay
appears in a rodeo in this western novel.
McGonigill is in the Cowboy Hall of
Fame in Oklahoma City, and they published an article
on him. That article is by Eve Ball, "Clay McGonagill: A Colorful
Cowboy," Persimmon Hill 9 (Winter 1979).
Other stuff on Clay McGonagill include: Bill Modisett, "Clay
McGonagill: The Wildest Cowboy, The Greatest Steer Roper," in Cowboys
Who Rode Proudly: Carrying Cattle...And the Methods of Handling Them ,
comp. and ed. Evetts Haley, Jr. (Midland, Texas: Nita Stewart Haley
Memorial Library, 1992). Willard H. Porter, Who's Who in Rodeo
(Oklahoma City: Powder River, 1982). Guy Weadick, Clay McGonagil: A
Fast Man with a Rope ( Clarendon, Texas: Clarendon Press, 1962).
There are many stories
of Clay's exploits, some of which are in the Hall of Fame article - about
his rooster fighting, living in West Texas as a working cowboy,
supposed friendship with W.C.. Fields and Will Rogers, supposedly
being a member once of the Wild Bunch with Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid.
Here is more on Clay from the Online Handbook of Texas: "Any chance
for formal education was cut short in 1897 when Clay and a friend, Joe
Gardner, threatened to kill the school principal and a grade school
teacher after a fight with the school superintendent. In 1907 he was
charged with horse theft, though the charges were later dropped and
Clay won a "malicious prosecution" suit. In March 1912 charges were
filed in the district court of Gaines County against him for "robbery
with firearms" of a bank in Seminole. Allegedly, Clay and notorious
outlaw Tom Ross perpetrated the offense, but charges were later
dropped against Clay, apparently for lack of evidence. "
An article on Clay appeared in Old West, Winter 1971, Vol 8, No 2,
called "Arizona's Great Horse Gather," by Dan Woods.
But who was Clay McGonagill's mother?
The Online Handbook of Texas does not agree with Lovington cemetary
records in
Lea county, New Mexico,on the name of Clay McGonagill's mother, and
neither give his mother's full maiden name.
In the mid nineties I exchanged letters with a first cousin of mine,
Billy Pyron Kinney, through his daughter Patricia. Billy says that
before Clay McGonagill was killed he was in San Antonio for a rodeo
and stayed with our grandparents A.M. and Virginia Pyron who lived
just south of the city. At the rodeo Clay found someone had cut his
horse's cinch. Clay's so called "Billy" horses were a vital part of
his champion peformances.
Billy Kinney thought that our grandfather was Clay's uncle. Billy
was born around 1903 or so. Since we knew who the two other sisters of
grandfather Pyron married and didn't know who aunt Annie married, she
was the suspect for being the possible mother of the cowboy Clay
McGonagill.
Lets see what the answer is to these questions about the mother of
Clay McGonagill:
A lady in McCulloch county, Texas, Ann Hoft, supplied me with
information on the mother of
Clay McGonagill and the name of the other McGonagill that my great
aunt Annie Pyron married. Information she dug up from
www.ancestry. com shows that great aunt Annie Pyron married William
Washington McGonagill in Lavaca county, Texas in 1870. They later
moved to the northern part of the Texas hill county. She is buried in
McCulloch county.
The father of Clay McGonagill was George Monroe McGonagill, the uncle
of William Washington McGonagill that great aunt Annie married.
Clay McGonagill was born in the Sweet Home area of Lavaca county to
George M. McGonagill and Narcissa J. Payne McGonagill in 1879. The article on Clay
by Eve Ball, "Clay McGonagill: A Colorful Cowboy," Persimmon Hill 9
(Winter 1979) says "Clay McGonagill was born at old Sweet Home,
Texas, September 24,1879. In 1883 his father, George, moved his
family to West Texas, where he was sheriff of Ector county while
running cattle on his homestead a few miles out of Odessa, the county
seat."
George Monroe McGonagill, father of Henry Clay McGonagill, was a
cattleman in both Lavaca county and in Ector county in West Texas. He
is not in the online Trail Drivers of Texas. Probably his nephew
William Washington McGonagill was also a cattleman.
In a history of Lavaca county "On the Headwaters of the Lavaca and the
Navidad", by Paul C. Boethel, there is a chapter called "Cattlemen on
the
Headwaters," mostly about George West, his brothers and Henry B.
Shiner who ranched in the Sweet Home area on or near Mustang Creek,
but it also includes Gideon Blackburn. George West later moved down
south of San Antonio and founded the town of George West in the brush
country. In fact, almost all the cattlemen on Mustang Creek near Sweet
Home
moved to less settled parts of Texas. The chapter on the cattlemen on
the headwaters also mentions L. B. Allen, Willis McCutcheon and J. T.
Woods as being cattlemen in the Mustang Creek and Sweet Home area of
Lavaca county.
George West, his brothers, Henry B. Shiner and several other Sweet
Home cattlemen ranched in that same area were
trail drivers. George West and Henry B. Shiner became founders of
Texas towns(George West south of San Antonio and Shiner in central
western Lavaca
county. My grandfather, A. M. Pyron, with a neighbor Carl Kurz founded
the town of
Somerset in southwest Bexar county in about 1910.
Another trail driver of the Sweet Home area, William Ward Allen, made
several trail drives to Kansas
before establishing a cattle ranch in 1898 in the Texas Hill Country
about 15 miles south of Junction, in what are now Kimble, Kerr
and Edwards counties. Allen bought 20,000 acres for $1.05 per acre in
that part of the Texas Hill Country. His cowboys operated much like
they did in the trail driving era. They lived out of chuck wagons on
the large unfenced range and had to herd cattle who were free to roam.
Sometime before 1900 George West bought a huge tract of land in the
brush country south of San Antonio
in what was or became Live Oak county. At least when I was in college
in Kingsville,ranch land that once belonged to him surrounded the town
of George
West. Many of the Sweet Home area cattlemen must have made money from
trail driving their herds to Kansas, for otherwise they would not have
been able to buy such huge tracts of land.
The huge book, Trail Drivers of Texas is online and has a place to
search for names.
Great Grandfather Gideon B. Blackburn is in the book, but the online
version does not say where he is mentioned. Gideon B. Blackburn was
born in 1817 and died
in Lavaca county in 1881, and so he belongs to an older generation
than the West brothers, George Monroe McGonagill, and most of the
other Sweet Home cattlemen.
In his closing paragraphs for his chapter, "The Cattlemen on the
Headwaters," Paul C. Boethel says "The inroads of the European
immigrants in the '80s to the sector was heavy; their farms closed the
range and fenced in the cattlemen." He says George West was the first
to move from the Sweet Home area, moving to Live Oak county where
Boethel says he bought 200,000 acres of land. Moore and Allen moved
to Uvalde and Kinney counties while John W. Bennet, Solomon and Isaac
West went to Jackson and Victoria counties on 50,000 acres. Willis
McCutcheon with Beau McCutcheon in 1883 went to the Davis Mountain
area of West Texas. Walsh West, a brother of George, stayed in the
Sweet Home area, and died there in 1889.
There is a Confederate connection for the cattlemen on the
Mustang after the end of the war of 1861-65. Many Texas trail Drivers
were former Confederate soldiers, and that included the Sweet Home
area cattlemen. Clay McGonagill's father, George Monroe McGonagill,
was a Confederate, and so was a relative D.A. McGonagill. With my
third cousin James K. P. Blackburn, D.A. McGonagill was in Company F
of the 8th Texas Cavalry, the celebrated cavalry regiment that is
honored by life size bronzes on the lawn of the Texas state capital.
Many in Company F were from Lavaca and Fayette counties.
I found a report that D.A. McGonagill was severely wounded in 1862,
but don't know if he survived to get back to Lavaca county.
Grandfather A.M. Pyron who owned land near Sweet Home before he and
grandmother moved to Bexar county in 1882 was a minor
cattlemen. He was a Confederate too. I would not be surprised if one
or more of the three West brothers, who were Trail Drivers, were
Confederates. J. Frank Dobie, known as "Mr Texas" wrote about the
Texas Trail drivers and knew some of them. He said that many had been
in the Confederate army. As old men some of them, he said, drew the
Confederate pension Texas paid to them. In the late thirties my
father took me as a young boy into the lobby of the Menger Hotel near
the Alamo to see the grey headed old trail drivers sitting around
telling yarns of the old days on the trail.
Here is what I found on a few of the Cattlemen and Trail Drivers from
the Sweet Home and Mustang Creek area of Lavaca county, Texas:
http://www.lib. utexas.edu: 8080/search/ txclassics/ search.jsp? collections= txclassics& maxDocCount= 500&docsCount= 10&query= James+Blackburn
Results for The Trail Drivers of Texas
Your search for the word(s) James Blackburn found 1 entries
1. Trail drivers of Texas : interesting sketches of early cowboys and
their exper... (Size 2,641k)
http://www.lib. utexas.edu: 8080/search/ txclassics/ search.jsp? collections= txclassics& maxDocCount= 500&docsCount= 10&query= Gideon+Blackburn
Results for The Trail Drivers of Texas
Your search for the word(s) Gideon Blackburn found 1 entries
There does not seem to be a link to the pages that mention Gideon
Blackburn and his son, my Great Uncle, James Blackburn, born 1859..
But for the more famous Sweet Home area cattlemen, like L. B. Allen,
there are links which lead you to the stories about him and others he
was associated with.
http://www.lib. utexas.edu/ books/texasclass ics/traildrivers /txu-oclc- 12198638- c-0524.html
"L. B. Allen, better known among his friends as Lew Allen, was born in
Mississippi on February 14th, 1848, and came with his father, W. W.
Allen to Texas and settled at Sweet Home, in Lavaca county, when he
was about four years of age. His father was engaged in farming and
stock raising. At an early age he became interested in the stock
business, and is rightly classified as a pioneer L. B. ALLEN of the
cattle business in Texas.
He entered the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy at a very
early age and in about 1866 returned to Lavaca county and from that
time up to the time of his, death, which occurred December 2nd, 1911,
he was continuously in the cattle business.
In about 1873 L. B. Allen, W. J. Moore and Sam Moore formed a
partnership which continued until the death of Sam Moore, and was
continued with W. J. Moore up to the time of the death of L. B. Allen.
They first had their ranch in Lavaca county and later moved their
ranch to Uvalde and Kinney counties. Mr. Allen made many trips up the
trail, driving cattle to Dakota and Nebraska. At one time Moore &
Allen opened up a ranch in the Black Hills. L. B. Allen, W. J. Moore,
Sam Moore, J. M. Bennett, Sol West, Ike West, George West and Mr.
McCutcheon were all stockmen in the early days in Lavaca county at
Sweet Home, all of them became large cattle owners and were successful
in business.
One of the best evidences of the integrity of Mr. Allen and his
associates and neighbors is that they all, since their early
settlement at Sweet Home, have remained intimate friends.
L. B. Allen was the brother of W. W. Allen, who was also engaged in
the stock business, also of R. B. Allen, who was an attorney and also
engaged in the stock business.
The above early settlers of Sweet Home, Texas, were all large men of
stature, and also large in character, and in their dealings with each
other no other obligation was required in any contract except their
word."
This is getting long. On
http://www.lib. utexas.edu/ books/texasclass ics/traildrivers /txu-oclc- 12198638- c-0128.html
there is a story about about Sol West and Willis McCutcheon,
both of Lavaca county.
Sol West was one of the brothers of George West, a pioneering trail
driver also from the Sweet Home area. On this drive they left Lavaca county early
in the year, February 27th, 1874, with their herd. After they crossed into
Indian Territory - Oklahoma.- in March they ran into a severe blizzard. Their herd began drifting south.
and some of the horses they were riding froze.
Great Aunt Annie Pyron McGonagill (1850-1936),
with her son William King McGonagill and his wife.
Photo apparently taken sometime in the thirties when
Annie was past 80. Her descendants say there is a strory
about her running from Indians when both her eyes were
punctured by mesquite thorns, resulting in blindness in both
eyes. She might be considered a pioneer of McCulloch
county, Texas. Thanks to Gwen McGonagill for this photo.
Bernard
