AN AMERICAN WANDERING STOPPED IN DALHART, TEXAS

AN AMERICAN WANDERING STOPPED IN DALHART, TEXAS, a photo by roberthuffstutter on Flickr.

On my way to California in the summer of 1959, the train stopped in Dalhart, Texas. I got off to take the above snapshot with a Brownie Hawkeye.

I recalled stories about my dad's father, my grandfather, who had hopped a train shortly after the Civil War and headed for Texas. He lived in Dalhart for a year or so, according to family legend. It just happened that during his trip he decided to change cars and began crawling over the tops of the cars. When he found himself, so the story goes, atop an open car of Texas longhorns on a very narrow cat walk, he was so mortified he didn't move for several hours and rode the rails looking down at the critters looking up at him.

Evidently, he made it okay, the family name continues. My Grandfather, Robert Levi Huffstutter, born in 1856, was my dad's father. He died in 1938 so I never met him, but he has become a kind of family icon due to his birthdate and because he started an entire second family when his first wife and family refused to move overland with him from Indiana to Missouri. Some might say he was a scoundrel, but he was a man on the move and wanted to leave the Hoosier State for the Show-Me State.

He simply told his first wife that he was leaving, asked her to please accompany him with the children and then gave her a second notice that he was leaving and headed out. Two of his Indian-born children left with him.

My grandfather met a young women named Sarah Jane Rooks, twenty years his junior and together they begat three daughters and three sons, my father being the youngest, born in 1912. It was a sad story in that my grandmother passed away shortly after giving birth to my father. Grandfather never remarried.

He passed away while resting after mowing his yard in Laredo, Missouri in 1938.

Thus began the family unit from my paternal side of the family. The thought of my grandfather being only 9 years old when President Lincoln was assassinated sometimes makes me stop and think how close I am to the reality of Civil War history.