In The Beginning

Alice, Bill, and MEK 1945

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following is Part I of an ongoing series about the life and times of Marshall E. Kuykendall. The Kuykendall 101 Ranch was the largest in Hays County, Texas. (With the phenomenal popularity of the series, “Yellowstone,” about the fictitious Dutton family, it occurred to me that we Texans have our very own real life, better than fiction, historical families who were among the first colonists in Texas. Many, many stories have been told…..but not like this! Hold on to your hats because Kuykendall tells the historical truth in all its humorous and sometimes shocking and irreverent glory! It might just be the best read of your summer!

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BIO

My name is Marshall Early Kuykendall. I was born on the largest ranch in Hays County, Texas long before the lights got turned on.  I have never said, “Old Times,” were better.  They weren’t.  But, they sure were different. Things and events weren’t so hectic. Instant knowledge hadn’t been invented, yet.  And if you lived in Texas, a little rain falling on your life was never a bad thing.

Want more Marshall?  Go to www.campfiresandsippingwhiskey.com

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Meet The Parents

By Marshall E. Kuykendall

Broker, Author, Rancher, Texan

My father, Bill Kuykendall, 1899-1976, whose real name was Wylie Moore, was born in Matagorda County from a long line of Texas ranchers.   My mother, Alice Hamlett, 1910-1993, was born in Temple Texas, to a long line of Baptist ministers.

To which Kipling said: “East is East, and West is West—AND, never the Twain shall meet.”

My father was a wild and woolly, 27-year-old,  whiskey drinking, womanizing cowboy, who had been married before. My mother, who we all called Alice, was the 15-year-old daughter of a prominent Baptist Minister’s family, from Austin.

It has been said that when Alice’s hard- shelled Baptist family found out that their precious younger daughter had run off and married some ruffian cowboy from Hays County, their reaction was about the same as when the Great New Madrid earthquake struck SE Missouri in 1810 and the Mississippi River was said to have run “backards” for two full days.

Alice’s mother, Faye Early Hamlett, rushed out to the ranch in Hays County, and coaxed Alice into her car.   With the help of Alice’s older sister, Corrinne, along with her Army husband, Captain John M. Ferguson, who was stationed in Panama at the time, they whisked Alice off to Panama on the next Banana boat out of New Orleans……and hid her down there.

When my father realized what had happened, he got Central, in Buda (Miss Montague),  to ring up the Texas Rangers in Austin and when he got the Rangers on the party line, commenced to report his wife kidnapped. At which point the “shite,” done hit the fan, as the saying goes.

“AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN: HEAR YE-HEAR YE—PROMINENT HAYS COUNTY RANCHER REPORTS HIS WIFE OF 30 MINUTES HAS BEEN KIDNAPP’D BY HER OWN FAMILY.”

Or something like that.

Well, cutting to the chase, literally. When Wild Bill figured out what happened and where his precious, little sweet patootie, as they say in Buda, was at, durn if he didn’t jump on the very same Banana boat to Panama.  He went down there and kidnapped her back!!

GRANDMOTHER KUYKENDALL AND AUNT DOROTHY

If dad thought he had created a problem by stealing Alice from her mother, when word got out among the Kuykendall family, things went further downhill.

“I mean what in the Sam Hill do you think you WERE doing, Wylie—You have lost your ever living mind bringing a 15-year-old girl home with you. She is underage and I don’t care what the Judge said, you did not have her parents consent to marry her.” Maggie Kuykendall (His mother)

Dad ate Sunday dinner with his mother and sister at the headquarters, which we all called “The Other House.” One can imagine the looks of disdain on their faces when he introduced them to Alice the first time. I remember, Alice told me when she was first hauled down to “The Other House,”  that the family ate in one room and made her eat in the kitchen. She never forgave them for that her entire life.

Alice and her mother lived in Austin, on the edge of Shoal Creek. Mona, as we called grandmother, worked in the Capital at the time and Alice had just finished up going to Pease Elementary which was in easy walking distance to their home.

Alice had met some friends from Lockhart who invited her down for a weekend to stay at their home and attend a fun school party. By age 15, Alice was about 5’ 8” and quite pretty, so she had the local boys looking her over and she enjoyed the attention. On top of that, being able to get away from her prying mother was a tremendous relief.

Well, fate was about to strike because it just so happened that a wild cowboy had heard from his Buda friends that a bunch of good-looking high school girls from both Lockhart and Austin were going to throw a wing-ding down there, so one, Wylie M. Kuykendall cranked up his 1918 “Floozy” automobile with no top and drove down there to see if he could cut “something from the herd!”

Well, he did! It just happened to be 15 year old Alice Hamlett. Tall, pretty and vivacious ….I mean what else does a 25 year old cowboy need on a cold night?

So, by the end of an evening of partying in Lockhart, Texas, Alice Hamlett was in love.

I won’t go into any possible particulars but my father had no scruples nor morals when it came to young pretty girls. I will leave it to the readers to decide.

All I know is Dad met her several more times in Austin by sneaking her out of Mona’s house and then in June of 1926, they secretly met, and dad drove straight to the Hays County Courthouse in San Marcos, got a judge to marry them, with no one’s consent nor did the Judge ask.

Hey, this is Wylie Kuykendall who lives on the biggest ranch in Hays County and “one” doesn’t ask stupid questions. So, there you have it.

I will leave all with this final thought. Once a young thing was “be smirched” by my father to be, she seemed to stay “be smirched” for life.

My cousin Hokey Phillips was lunching with a polo friend at the Argyle in San Antonio many long years ago and the friend said, You know, a funny thing happened last night. My wife had a nightmare and began to thrash about and then holler-WYYYYLIE—When I asked her about it over the breakfast table, she couldn’t remember a thing.

I was outside of Cleveland, Ohio in the mid 50’s at the Gates Mills Hunt Club where dad played polo and was introduced to two different women, all dressed in their finest mink coats and fox stole, who, when they realized who I was, asked very sweetly—

“How is your father?”

THE 101 RANCH

In those early years of my life all the Kuykendall family lived on different parts of the 11,000 acres which was located just west of Buda, Texas. My grandfather, Robert Gill Kuykendall, originally from Matagorda County Texas, had purchased the Hays County ranch in 1901, and from that point in time it would be known as the Kuykendall 101 Ranch in Hays County.

The 101 brand was a gift to my grandfather on his wedding day in 1890 by Col. George Miller, of the Miller Brothers Ranch near Ponca City, Oklahoma Territory. Under Texas law, a rancher may register his own brand in any Texas county if there are no others. Col. Miller and my great grandfather, Wiley Moore Kuykendall, had been friends since the Civil War. Wiley had been the Trail Boss for Shanghai Pierce of the Rancho Grande in Matagorda County after the war and had made eight trips up the Chisholm Trail which cut through a part of the Miller Brothers country on the northern boundary of Oklahoma Territory and the Kansas state line in route to Caldwell, Kansas and points beyond.

Interestingly and sad, my uncle, Isaac Green Kuykendall, known as “Ikey”, Gill’s younger brother, was sent up to the Miller Bros. ranch in the summer of 1895 with 1000 steers from the Matagorda ranch and as the weather turned wet and cold that October and November, Ikey contracted pneumonia and died.

My grandfather, Gill, also died of pneumonia on the Hays County ranch in 1905 at the age of 35.

This left my grandmother, Maggie Moore Kuykendall, alone with four unruly children, to wit: Marion, Dorothy, Wylie (Bill) and Ike. As they matured each sibling would build their own home on different parts of the ranch, and in 1933, grandmother, Maggie, divided the 11,000 acres among the four of them. My grandmother lived at the headquarters and so did her daughter Dorothy.

Dad got the portion over on the west side of the ranch with about 4 miles of Onion Creek through that part. He had built a home over there in 1918 and that is where we lived. Our part was way down in the middle of the ranch.

GIL AND I GO TO SCHOOL

My brother Gil was born in 1929.  I was born in ’32.   We began school in Buda in the 30’s, it was a hell of a long way out to the gravel road between Buda and Driftwood.   When it rained, the ranch roads were a mess. Didn’t take Dad long to figure that one out—he sent Gil into Austin to live with Alice’s mother, who we called Mona, and that was hunky-dory until I popped up, then, back on the muddy road we went again.

Same story, second verse!

Dad drove me out to meet Sid Hall, the Buda school bus driver about three times in the wee hours “of a morning” when he said screw this and hauled my skinny little butt into Buda and left me to live with the Armbruster family during the week and I was a very unhappy little 8-year-old. AND, I wasn’t even British!

At first the Armbrusters lived on a farm about a mile west of Buda, then the next fall, they had moved into town and lived just across the railroad tracks from the stores on main street. It was probably good that they had moved cause Mr. Armbruster had grown a bunch of grain on the farm and had them all bundled into shocks or stacks. When I discovered them, it immediately came to my mind that even though I didn’t have Inky, my dog, to help guard, I burrowed into about 11teen of them for my forts and in so doing, caused the shocks or stacks to fall down and Mr. Armbruster was not a happy camper.

The Armbruster house, which is still standing, was about 20 feet on the other side of the railroad tracks and I never will forget the first night I spent there when at 3:31 AM, on the dot, the Katy Flyer came thundering through Buda and the house shook like a tin can on a string. I thought I will never, ever be able to get any sleep in that house. But, you know what, after about 3 days, I never heard the train

WAR TIME PANCAKES

I forget how many boys they had, but a bunch. We all slept out on the back porch and when it came time for breakfast, Mrs. Armbruster would holler at us to get up and come in the kitchen. She had already boiled a pot of coffee for her husband, when he took the cup, he immediately poured it in his saucer and began to blow on it to cool it down.

This was in the middle of the Great War and there was no butter, so Mrs. Armbruster heated up her old iron skillet on her wood stove, cut off a piece of Margarine and dropped it in the skillet to fry. Then she peeled off several slices of Mrs. Baird’s white bread and dropped them in the hot Margarine, whacked them a couple of times with her spatula, turned ‘em over once, and “Voila!”—PANCAKES ala Mrs. Armbruster. There was a gallon of karo syrup on the table which we poured amply over the whole creation, and man, I thought I was in the Waldorf Astoria. I never remember any eggs nor bacon, just fried white bread and karo syrup. It’s a durn wonder all my teeth didn’t fall out.

(Part II to be featured in the next issue of TEXAN MAGAZINE)