The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, July 1981 - April, 1982 Page: 474

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

perceptive presidential leader like Woodrow Wilson allow House to
fool him for so long?
University of Texas at Austin LEWIs L. GOULD
C. C. Slaughter: Rancher, Banker, Baptist. By David J. Murrah. (Aus-
tin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Pp. x+ 173. Preface, notes,
appendix, illustrations. $14.95.)
A Dallas journalist labeled Christopher Columbus Slaughter "the
Cattle King of Texas," but biographer David J. Murrah, university
archivist and head of the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech, exam-
ines the frontiersman's interest in banking, religious activities, ranch-
ing, and community work.
From the time his family settled on 2,9oo acres of land in the heart
of the North Texas frontier until he controlled more than a million
acres of grass and cattle spread from the South Plains into Indian
Territory, Slaughter was a cattleman. Early in the 187os he began im-
porting Shorthorn Durham bulls from Kentucky to improve his herds.
He paid $2,900 for Sir Ancient Briton, winner of the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair and Columbia Exposition, to introduce the Hereford to
the West Texas Plains. Slaughter's successful bid of $5,000 for Sir
Bredwell made his Lazy S Ranch one of the most publicized in the
nation, and he was elected president of the Northwest Texas Cattle
Raisers Association.
Slaughter's banking interests, beginning with a cache of coins under
a boulder near his Palo Pinto ranch, developed when he and two part-
ners moved $42,000 in gold and silver by buckboard from Weather-
ford to establish the City Bank of Dallas. Later, Slaughter and two
associates chartered the American National Bank of Dallas.
His donations to Baylor Hospital, Baylor University, the Baptist
Education Commission, and the First Baptist Church of Dallas were
generous. He purchased half interest in the Baptist Standard, stipu-
lating that headquarters be relocated in Dallas. He served as first vice-
president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1898.
As association president, Slaughter staged the Confederate Veterans
reunion in Dallas in 1902.
Murrah's brief biography focuses on the career of this "legendary
man," whose insurance policy for his wife and nine children was a
spread "undivided and indivisible until the death of the last one of my
family " (p. 86); little attention goes to examining the personality of

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