The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 57
672 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Notes and Documents
derous. By i86o, the situation became so serious that the col-
onists had to turn all their efforts to the problem of keeping alive.
Growth was halted by Indian raids and by the War Between the
States and the reconstruction period which followed, so that
there was a gain in population of less than three hundred in all
of Comanche County in the 186o's. In 1870, the county was
given a shot in the arm when Texas was readmitted to the Union
and immigrants began pouring into the state from war-ravaged
states east of the Mississippi. In 1874, Comanche received another
shot in the arm when the Indians of Northwest Texas were
rounded up and put on reservations in the Indian Territory by
General R. S. Mackenzie of the United States Army. For with
the peril of Indian raids removed, West Texas was open for
settlement, and Comanche was so situated as to be the gateway
to that vast and little-known region.
Settlers came into the town in increasing numbers. Some stayed
only long enough for their teams to rest, then pushed on farther
west "where the old woman an' the kids can grow up with the
country." Others came--a few Yankees among them-with the in-
tention of making their home in the town or county, and re-
mained to become valuable citizens. Some came who had shown
no regard for the law or the lives or property of men in other
places and would show no more in Comanche. Soon little
Comanche, which a few years earlier had struggled to keep alive,
took on a vitality that changed it into the "bristling, bustling,
swaggering frontier town" that it remained through the rest
of the i87o's.
In October, 1873, the editor of the newly-established weekly
newspaper, the Comanche Chief, gave some statistics about the
town. The town had 700 inhabitants, twenty places of business,
one church, several organized branches of the church, a Masonic
Lodge, an Odd Fellows Lodge and Encampment, and an organ-
ization known as the Friends of Temperance.
Unless the editor padded the population a bit, some of the
citizens of the town must have been hiding in the bushes when
the census was taken in 1880, the population at that time being
only 704.
The railroads of Texas, which did little building during the
war and the reconstruction period, began to build again in 1871.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964, periodical, 1964; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101197/m1/77/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.