The Coming West - True Stories of Trails Grown Dim

Not much has been written about the history of the Scurry County area. Scurry County and its neighboring counties were among the fifty-four counties created from the Bexar territory in West Texas by the Texas legislature in 1876. The federal census taken in June of 1880 shows one hundred two people living in Scurry County. Other area counties were just as sparsely populated. It was 1884 before there were enough settlers to organize Scurry County and elect its first officials. Snyder was named the county seat.

Life was not easy for these people who faced such hardships as the droughts which plague West Texas and illnesses for which there was almost no medical help. Travel was slow and trips to town might be no more than annual events. But when the early settlers were interviewed about those pioneering days in later years, they did not complain. They took pride in the fact that they had stayed through the bad times and remembered instead the happiness that came with the good times.

"All of us need to be reminded that the settlers of this West Texas of ours are fast passing from the stage of a new generation. We need to revere them for their hardihood and their courage in the face of conditions that modem West Texans could not and would not endure..." wrote the editor of The Scurry County Times in an editorial in 1935. The same newspaper carried the obituary of Uncle Billie Nelson, one of Scurry County's pioneer settlers who had served as the county's first sheriff, and it was his passing which had called to mind the fact that those pioneers would be deeply missed by the people who had known and appreciated them.