Texas Bad Girls by J. Lee Butts

Author:J. Lee Butts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: GPP, More Than Petticoats series, women, history, remarkable, pioneer, pioneering, biography, life stories
Publisher: Lone Star Books
Published: 2016-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Neighbors from Hell

Allen Hill, Dusky, Nance, and Family

On a hot, dusty afternoon in August 1873, gunfire on the boardwalk in front of Donathan, Culton & Tarkington’s dry goods store in Littleton’s Springs ignited the fuse of an explosion that resulted in the single greatest mass lynching of women in the history of North Texas. The shooting culminated ten years of sordid gossip, heated arguments, call-­out gunfights, and terroristic behavior by a family of yellow dog, “Yankee sympathizers” and their outlaw friends.

The frontier community, located about thirty miles northwest of Fort Worth, had—since its founding in 1856—been a quiet, friendly, off-­the-­beaten-­path setting where everyone knew everyone else and their business. Men helped their neighbors and worked closely with one another for the general well-­being of their village of between two and three hundred people. Women raised the kids, slaved like pack animals on the farms and ranches, and prayed on Sunday for the safety of their husbands.

Written descriptions of the town—by the descendants of pioneer settlers—would have the reader believe that Littleton’s Springs (its name changed to Springtown in 1875 two years after the bloody end to this story) was the closest thing to the Garden of Eden since the glory of creation as described in Genesis. God-­fearing farmers and their wives from the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee had fled the ravages of the Civil War and established themselves to work a rich, sandy soil easily irrigated by twenty-­five artesian wells located in the area. These refugee settlers attended church together, drank shoulder to shoulder in one of the town’s three saloons, shopped at Tarkington’s, got their hair cut at the only barber shop, and traded stories while having their animals tended by the sole blacksmith. Then, in 1863, Allen C. Hill and his family arrived. In less time than it takes a bull to get to a hole in the fence, all hell broke loose.

Hill, his wife Dusky, sons Jack and Allen Jr., and daughters Nancy (sometimes called Nance), Martha, Katherine, Adeline, Eliza, and Belle rolled into town in a dilapidated wagon held together with rawhide straps. They pitched camp outside the tiny community near the wooden bridge over Walnut Creek and immediately gained a reputation for contentious behavior. Both men and women of the noisy pack tended to be reckless in their conduct and vulgar in their language. Initially, the local population greeted the clan’s arrival with a degree of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, their efforts at befriending Hill and his crude family were rejected in every instance.

The tight-­knit group’s belligerent, standoffish behavior did nothing in the way of ingratiating them with established residents. Local gossips didn’t miss a beat either. They quickly began whispering behind their hands about the seriously pregnant Nancy and where the child’s father might be. After Hill bought property across Walnut Creek and two miles southwest of town, those same meddlers wondered aloud about her child’s fate when it failed to make its naturally expected chubby-­faced, rosy-­cheeked appearance.

From the moment of their

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