The year of 1906 was a good crop year on the South Plains. I was looking for somewhere to move to, having moved from Texas to Oklahoma one month after I was married, while it still was Indian Territory. I always felt like I was there on a visit, though I lived there eighteen years, so I decided it was time for me to come back to Texas and to the Plains. I came and located the fort I wanted to buy land in, went back home and rented out my farm in Oklahoma, and moved to Estacado, where there was at that time the best school south of Canyon City. I bought land, built a house and prepared to go to farming in the spring of 1907. Then is when life on the Plains started. When we were building the house, I hired a man to help me. One afternoon his wife came back with him when he went to work. We were living in a tent. We had a cook stove and we were about out of coal and would have to go to Plainview after a load, but the lady who came with her husband to visit us showed what she could do. She got my wife and children to hitch up the wagon and get the tubs and some sacks and they went out on the prairie to get wood. They got the wagon half full of cow ships, which burned readily.That evening when I came down off the house and went into the tent my wife said, "Look at that stove," It was red hot all over the top. I said, "Our fuel troubles are solved." And they were. For six years we burned cow chips, with a load of coal when it came handy to bring it from the railroad. In those days we had the best time. It was common for us at Estacado to attend big meetings, at Farmer and Cone, though it was twelve miles. We drove a team hitched to a big hack.
There was hardly any sickness here then. When we had been here nine years, I wrote my mother in Oklahoma that we had not had a doctor in the house in that length of time, but the Devil must have heard me say that, for in six months after that we had our first appendicitis operation in Lubbock, and we have had our part of sickness ever since
The first seven bales of cotton I raised on the Plains, I hauled to Plainview to get it ginned. I got nine cents a pound for it. That was the nearest gin that year. I have been in Ralls thirteen years and I guess I will be buried in Ralls Cemetery, where we have three grown children sleeping.
(And Now Mr. Page sleeps near his beloved children. Mrs. Page lives in Ralls and still keeps up the hospitality of their early Estacado home. They became members of the Methodist Church and gave much devotion and help to the churches in the communities in which they lived.)
Source: "Through the Years, A History of Crosby County, Texas" by Nellie Witt Spikes and Temple Ann Ellis ©1951; The Naylor Company, San Antonio, Texas
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