BUTTERFIELD STAGE
ARRIVED IN
JACK COUNTY IN 1858
It was just a year after Jack County was organized and the same
year that it was created that the first Butterfield stages arrived on their long
trips from Saint Louis to San Francisco.
The contract was awarded John Butterfield for such semi-weekly service on
September 16, 1857 and the first run from that eastern station to the Golden
State September 15, 1858. Just when they really arrived in Jack County is not
known.
Remnants of the history that those aid Concord stages wrote across these
dusty plains are still visible on Los Creek just south of the business
district of Jacksboro.
As the local
story goes, the first stage line missed Jacksboro by some three or four miles to
the south. It was far several weeks and months that local citizens tried to get
the line to make its regular stops in Jacksboro.
Finally, it was decided to build a good road east of town to intersect
the Butterfield trail. This was done but still the stages followed their old
routes toward Fort Belknap in the west.
On a dark night, several Jacksboro and Jack County men banded together
and went down south of Jacksboro to a place on the stage trail where it went
through a narrow place in a cliff. Here, they piled huge boulders much too big
far a single man to move. They completely filled the trail so that the stage
could not get through. It was several days before the stage was due here.
It was much surprised citizenship that saw the Butterfield stage coach
drive into Jacksboro an its next run. Few of them knew of the rock-piling
incident. However, a change station was located just under the bluff on Los
Creek near where Highway 199 and 281 cross the creek on South Main Street in
Jacksboro. It was there that the stage stopped an its eastern and western route
across this Indian-infested area of Texas.
According to the best authorities, this line entered Jack County
somewhere south of Crafton in Northeastern Jack County and followed a west and
south route to the change station here. After leaving here, the route lay then
west and north by Berwick passing a few miles south of where Jermyn now is and
then straight west out of Jack County on the Loving Ranch north of the Golf,
Texas and Western Railway same two miles south and west of Jermyn. The deep-cut
trail of the iron wheels is still evident across some of the hills.
The next stop for the stage line was Fort Belknap south of Newcastle
then on to Fort Griffin and to the west.
The fare from St. Louis to San Francisco was $100 and it took ten cents
to mail a letter weighing half on ounce. It took 1,000 horses and 3000 mules
along with a personnel of 750 men including the drivers to operate the line
pulling 100 Concord stages.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, this line was abandoned as a regular
stage line but the trail continued to be the regular route of travelers going
east or west until the railroad was built several years later.
One of the quick changes of the stage during that history-making race
between the Butterfield Stage and the Great Eastern steamship was made at the
local station. It was through Jacksboro that that fleeing coach and four mules
hurled itself in a mad dash across 2795 miles of Indian-infested post oak clad
hills and cacti grown desert land to beat a great steamship that was toiling
around Cape Good Hope to win a wager of $100,000. The stage won, by a matter of
thirty hours.
It is needless to say that the traveler who chose the stage coaches as a
means of transportation had to brave the possibility of facing a band of hostile
Indians or some natural hazard offered by this great uninhabited plains. Swollen
streams in the east and dust storms and the lack of rain in the west gave
drivers and passengers alike a problem worth the best ingenuity of any of the
modern travelers.
Modern highways now traverse Jack County almost parallel to the
Butterfield line and the modern automobile covers the some distance in many
times less dangers arid practically one tenth of the traveling time.
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