Sterling County is a county located on the Edwards Plateau in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 1,372, making it the ninth-least populous county in Texas. Its county seat is Sterling City. The county is named for W. S. Sterling, an early settler in the area. Sterling County was one of 30 prohibition, or entirely dry, counties in the state of Texas, but is now a moist county.
History
Native Americans
Original native Plains Indians included Comanche, Lipan Apache, Kiowa, and Kickapoo.
The region had a number of violent encounters between the Comanche, local ranchmen, and Texas Rangers. A deadly skirmish occurred in the 1870s between area ranchmen and the Comanche on the Lacy Creek on the present day Campstool Ranch. “The Fight at Live Oak Mott” is an account of the events as written by W.K. Kellis, in the Sterling City News-Record, and later published in Frontier Times by J. Marvin Hunter. In 1879, the last significant battle between the Texas Rangers and the Comanche occurred on the "U" Ranch, at the time the ranch was owned by Earnest and Holland. The Comanches, led by the Quahada chief named Black Horse, left Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on May 29 with a group of 19 braves in a search for buffalo, and by June 29, they had yet to find any buffalo, so they killed a horse on the "U" Ranch, near the headwaters of the Concho River in Howard County, and an ensuing battle with the Texas Rangers soon followed. (I claim that this entire "raid" was probably not by Comanches—possibly by Apaches—but most likely non-Indian horse thieves. It was a cover-up of the mysterious killing of a Texas Ranger. And for the first time in Ranger history several of them were fired for cowardice. --Doyle Phillips)Phillips, Doyle, “The Comanches’ Last Raid Inquiry”, Published by FotoGrafica, Apartado Postal 251, Guanajuato, Guanajuato CP 36000, México. 2006.
Early settlements
Although the county was part of the 1842 Fisher–Miller Land Grant, no resulting settlement happened in the area. Fur traders, Texas Rangers, and federal troops passed through the area between 1800 and 1860. Settlers began arriving after the American Civil War, after the demise of the buffalo herds and the departure of Indian tribes. Indian fighter and buffalo hunter W. S. Sterling settled in the area around 1858. Two decades later, Sterling became a U.S. Marshal in Arizona and was killed in an Apache ambush near Fort Apache. Fellow buffalo hunter S. J. Wiley also settled in the county about the same time as Sterling. According to legend, Frank and Jesse James hid out on Sterling Creek in the 1870s to raise horses and hunt buffalo. Camp Elizabeth began as a Texas Ranger camp circa 1853. It became an outpost hospital facility of Fort Concho in 1874–1886.
Open rangeland
During the era of the open range, the acreage owned by the large land and cattle outfits did not adjoin other pasturelands that were already owned, creating a checkered pattern of land ownership. This pattern was attributed to the system that allocated land between the railway companies and the State of Texas. The railway companies were given the odd-numbered sections (surveys), contingent upon surveying the entire block of land (townships), and the state retained ownership of the even-numbered sections. Thus, for each section it received, a railroad company had to survey an adjoining 640 acres for the state, and the railway companies were required to sell the land within 12 years of the initial survey. As a result, the large cattle ranches, often having the earliest presence in the area, initially consisted only of the odd-numbered sections within each block until adjoining acreage was acquired from the State of Texas, such as those lands sold by the Common School Fund.
The checkered pattern of land ownership did not create many problems during the time of the open range, as the large cattle outfits “controlled” vast amounts of open rangeland for grazing and could move cattle from pasture to pasture without having to compensate any other land owner or even the State.
However, after the large influx of settlers, the building of fences, and the restricted access to surface waters during drought, tensions escalated between the settlers and established cattle outfits and eventually lead to the Fence Cutting Wars.
Ranching
In the 1870s, the area was dominated by large land and cattle outfits such as the Half Circle S, established by the Peacock brothers; the MS, set up by Schuster, Henry, and Company; and the "U" Ranch, established by J.D. Earnest and W.J. Holland.
In 1879, Colonel William Randolph McEntire purchased the 80,000-acre (325-km2) "U" Ranch from M.B. Stephenson. Established in 1876 by J.D. Earnest and W.J. Holland, and later sold to M.B. Stephenson in 1879, the "U" Ranch was the first ranch established west of San Angelo in Tom Green County, Texas. The ranch was located about six miles northwest of Sterling City on the North Concho River extending northwestward through Glasscock County to the headwaters of the river in Howard County, the Sterling Creek (headwaters to the mouth of the river) in the east/southeast, the Renderbrook Spade Ranch in Mitchell County in the northeast and J.B. Slaughter's ranch in the northwest.Cox, James, “Historical and Biographical Record of the Cattle Industry and the Cattlemen of Texas and Adjacent Territory”, Published by Woodward & Tiernan printing Company, 1895, p 401.McEntire Family Papers, 1821-2000 and undated, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas The ranch itself consisted of three headquarters - one on the Concho, one at the mouth of Sterling Creek and one at the headwaters of Sterling Creek - and were twelve to twenty-five miles apart.
After subsequent land acquisitions, the "U" Ranch was enlarged to include over and eventually bordered the Seven-D Ranch in Pecos County in the south/southwest. During the era of the open range, the alternating "odd-numbered" sections of land retained by the State of Texas were freely accessible to the large cattle outfits that owned the "even-numbered" sections of land; therefore, the "U" Ranch controlled an additional of rangeland, bringing the total amount of land owned or controlled by W.R. McEntire's "U" Ranch to roughly . During this time, the "U" Ranch grazed upwards of 50,000 head of cattle across five counties, with the cattle being driven to pasturage outside of Texas or to cattle feedlots to increase the animals' weight prior to the final drive to cattle markets in Fort Worth, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis.
Large cattle drives to Colorado City and Fort Worth routinely occurred between 1875 and the mid-1880s, at a time the region was still open rangeland. The "U" Ranch drove the cattle northward to Colorado City, the nearest railroad, and shipped the cattle to Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Marlow Indian Territory. In 1882, W.R. McEntire, J.B. Wilson, and C.C. Slaughter drove 89 carloads of cattle, mostly overland, to rangeland in Orin Junction, Wyoming that was controlled by the Driskill brothers, who also owned a hotel in Austin, Texas. The cattle weighed 600 to 800 pounds upon arrival and within two years, they weighed almost 1,400 pounds each. By 1888, W.R. McEntire's eldest son, R. Billie McEntire, and his crew were responsible for driving the "U" Ranch cattle to new pasturage outside the state, or often experimenting with various feed types at the feedlots, and subsequently bringing those cattle to the markets as soon as certain market prices were attained. During his last cattle drive in 1893, they began experiencing inclement weather as soon as they left the "U" Ranch towards Colorado City and as they neared the Renderbrook Spade Ranch, a snowy blizzard moved in from the north. R. Billie, knowing the owners, the Snyder brothers, cut the perimeter fence and drove over 1,000 head of cattle southward into the main horse pasture of the Renderbrook Spade Ranch while the McEntire crew weathered the storm at ranch headquarters over several days. With minimal losses after the blizzard, the McEntire crew continued the drive towards Colorado City and the feedlots in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. R. Billie kept the cattle at the feedlots for 10 months waiting for ideal market conditions in Fort Worth. In Arkansas, he married Eudora Fowler and subsequently moved to Dallas to work at American National Bank, which his father, W.R. McEntire, founded and controlled with C.C. Slaughter, the owner of the Lazy S Ranch. R.B. McEntire's younger brother, George, also followed the same path, learning finance at American National Bank in Dallas prior to returning to Sterling County and subsequently either assuming ownership or control of the ranch.
Between 1880 and 1900, W.R. McEntire acquired additional rangeland throughout Glasscock, Howard, Mitchell, Nolan, Sterling, Tom Green, and Reagan Counties, enlarging the "U" Ranch operations to include over with approximately located in Glasscock and Reagan Counties. The "U" Ranch now extended from 12 miles west of Garden City to Grierson's Spring in Reagan County, included the section of the Goodnight-Loving Trail between the Concho and Pecos Rivers and bordered the Seven-D Ranch in the southwest. Grierson's Spring is located between the head of the Concho River and the Pecos River, about 15 miles southwest of Big Lake in Reagan County and 30 miles east of the Pecos River, while the Seven-D Ranch headquarters was located on Comanche Creek four miles east of Fort Stockton in central Pecos County.
Under the new Homestead Law, settlers began purchasing the “even-numbered” sections from the state for the benefit of the Common School Fund in 1883. In conjunction with the introduction of the fence, these settlers began owning land that was previously controlled by the large cattle outfits, and this eventually led to the Fence Cutting Wars. This acreage was sold by the state on a first-come, first-served basis with the county advertising the availability of land, which resulted in extremely long lines at the county clerks' offices and increased the likelihood that the desired acreage would not be available. As a result of the Common School Fund process, W.R. McEntire, while in Dallas, sent representatives from Tom Green County to acquire as much land as possible and to keep others out of the line until the desired acreage was obtained. North Carolinian James Jefferson Lafayott Glass came to the county in 1883 and signed on with the Sterling Brothers’ Half Circle S outfit. He later homesteaded acreage along the Lacy Creek.
As the era of the open range began to conclude, W.R. McEntire realized that contiguous acreage would be increasingly important to the success of any cattle outfit, and he began quickly purchasing any available acreage with the prospect of establishing a buffer around the "U" Ranch, or selling or bartering that acquisition for adjoining acreage to his primary operation, either under a single operation and single fence line, or perhaps having access to large, disparate ranches that could provide the ability to easily move livestock between operations. As a reaction to the continued encroachment of squatters and homesteaders from the growing settlement of Sterling City, W.R. McEntire purchased 10,000 acres west of Sterling City in 1884, near the intersection of the Lacy Creek and Concho River.