This is a tale of two towns that were established just a few years apart along the Texas-New Mexico border, on the western side of the Panhandle.
They were separated by a line as thin as a goal line.
Texico, on the New Mexico side, sprung up first as a boom town along the new railroad line in the late 1800’s. It had a reputation of being one of the wildest towns in the West. Its gambling halls, bars and brothels were built on an untitled strip of property called “the unsurveyed strip.”
Then, a few years later, came Farwell, Texas, just a few feet away across the border, which was better built on titled lands and far more conservative. “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”
The lore of the period claimed that Farwell stole the town of Texico, almost overnight. It is a large claim, but not without merit. Here is how it happened.
Texico was a boom town of squatters. Shacks of wood sprung up quickly and haphazardly on land they claimed just by building on it. The shacks were not big, about the size of your average she-shed you find in backyards around Texas today. They had dirt floors and could be moved easily with just a few people to pick them up and walk them down the dusty street to a better location, and a better view.
It was said that squatters could go to sleep happy with their new home, thinking of the garden they would plant, and the next morning they’d wake up to greet a new neighbor whose shack was sitting where their dreamed-of garden was supposed to go in. But with no surveyed lots and no titles, it was difficult to claim ownership of anything.
A writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, Eleanor Gates, came to visit these most-uncosmopolitan twin towns at the turn of the last century. She listed the businesses along one side of the street in Texico like so: “gambling hell, restaurant, saloon, billiard-parlor, jewelry shop, livery stable, saloon;” on the other side were three gambling hells, as she described them, two saloons, a bank and an ice-cream shop.
The buildings were unattractive, made of poor wood, showed their rafters inside, and had roofs of rusting corrugated iron. These businesses were full of unsavory characters and poor souls looking for good pay working on the railroad.
In contrast to this rootless world sprung up Farwell, Texas, a planned community of sorts, named for the Farwell brothers of the XIT ranch fame.
There was money behind Farwell. Well-built buildings of fine brick rose above the prairie – a bank, two churches, a school, a laundry, a drug store, a lumber yard, an ice house. Little white markers that identified titled lots could be plainly seen by the squatters over in Texico.
There was a permanence to the town, and no gambling halls, dance halls, saloons or such – a much better place for a future, a place for raising a family.
It wasn’t long until the men of Texico started getting their buddies to help them walk their shacks over to set them down on newly-acquired titled lots in Farwell. A grand exodus happened quickly with Texico citizens moving to Farwell, a land of promise. The Cosmo writer concluded that the lack of land titles in Texico “had rendered her stealable.”
Farwell’s town manager increased the pressure on Texico by publicizing plans for a courthouse, with grass and trees, and a $30,000 hotel to be built next door to it. The locals were seeing shades of Chicago in what was happening in Farwell, while feeling that Texico would soon be dust in the wind.
Even though Texico shrank substantially, it did not die. People in Farwell did not forget the good times they once enjoyed in Texico. Some of them stepped across the border often when they wished to cut loose and enjoy drinking, dancing and gambling.
Perhaps there was even a saying back then: “What happens in Texico stays in Texico.”
