![]() ![]() “It’s not like a smoker that you’d find at a Texas barbecue joint or anything,” he says. This is 10,000 pounds of beef that they cook year in and year out.”Ībout 750 pounds of seasoning are used in the preparation of the meat, according to Vaughn, and the meat is cooked underground, barbacoa style. The group that runs the XIT Rodeo and Reunion does fundraising all year to raise money to put on the “feed”, as it’s known colloquially. The next year, it moved home, to Dalhart, and that’s where it’s remained ever since, eventually transforming into the barbecue feast and rodeo it is today. The first reunion was in Fort Worth, Vaughn says, and there wasn’t a barbecue component to it. Twenty years or so later, the former XIT ranchers decided to have a reunion. The ranch operated for a few decades, according to Vaughn, before going defunct. “The State of Texas traded the land of the XIT Ranch for the capitol building that we see now,” Vaughn says. The government of Texas in the 1880s traded three million acres of land in the panhandle to a collective which underwrote the construction of the Texas State Capitol, or so the story goes, according to Vaughn. ![]() “The folks who were building the Texas Capitol here in Austin, they needed a whole lot of money to do it, and the only thing they really had was land.” The larger-than-life story of this very large event begins in Austin, actually, where Vaughn is based. This annual event’s got a reputation as the “World’s Largest Free Barbecue, ” so it should come as no surprise that BBQ Texas Monthly BBQ editor Daniel Vaughn has partaken. And the barbecue seasoning? It’s mixed in horse troughs, there’s so much of it. Each year at the XIT Ranch in Dalhart, the fire gets so big that it takes a crane to haul that measuring stick into place. Today the event, which triples the size of the town, is one of the most exciting western celebrations in the world.įrom “Accent West” August 1997 issue – written by Liz Cantrell and used with permission of Don Cantrell.Sometimes when you’re cooking a lot of barbecue, you might put something like a big stick in the center of the pit to gauge how high the fire’s getting. Since 1937, these reunions have been held in Dalhart, where the addition of a rodeo and a free barbeque have been opened to the public. Since 1936, cowboys and their families who worked the XIT Ranch have been gathering at an annual reunions to reminisce about life on the ranch. Now only a few of the original buildings exist. The XIT Ranch became one of the first ranches to adopt scientific practices and raised various agricultural crops annually in addition to raising cattle.ĭuring the 1920s the XIT Ranch was broken up, sold, and thus was divided into smaller ranches. The Farwells operated one of the largest wholesale dry goods firms in Chicago and operated the XIT Ranch in strict accordance with the business methods of the period. They agreed to build a $3,000,000 Capitol and accept the three million Panhandle ares in payment. At that point, a bargain was struck with two brothers, Charles B. Roberts to call a special legislative session. Action was slow until finally a fire in 1881 destroyed the old biulding which forced Gov. In 1875, the Lone Star government was getting cramped in its old Capitol and the Texas Constitutional Convention set aside three million Panhandle acres with which to get a new Capitol. Actually, the Texas Capitol at Austin is even bigger that the U.S. Besides being the largest ranch in the world under fence, Texas (then the biggest state) used it to pay for its red granite Capitol which is still the largest state Capitol on the North American continent today. It was a ranch that had a history of superlatives. 1 division Buffalo Springs headquarters (32 miles north of Dalhart), the two men, according to the story, squatted on their boot heels were able to outsmart Blocker and Campbell, but they did learn to make ‘XIT’ into a Star Cross if the T was crossed crooked. (Barbeque) Campbell, first general manager of the ranch, who apparently once ordered a carload of brown cigarette papers. ![]() However the brand was designed to thwart rustlers by Ab Blocker, a South Texas trail driver, and B.H. As a result, some believed the the brand ‘XIT’ stood for “Ten in Texas”. The ranch was so large it covered portions of ten counties: Dallam, Hartley, Oldham, Deaf Smith, Parmer, Castro, Bailey, Lamb, Cochran, and Hockley. At one time, the ranch ran over 150,000 cattle. In the 1880s, it was the largest ranch in the world under the fence, and it sprawled across the Texas Panhandle up from the old Yellow House headquarters near what is now Lubbock, northward to the Oklahoma Panhandle in a crazy strip that was toughly thirty miles wide. There was nothing in the history of the West quite like the XIT Ranch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |