Let me share with you a Texas Ranch Woman I “almost” knew.
Her name is Christine DeVitt and she was once labeled “the richest woman in
Lubbock”, Texas, my hometown. Miss Christine was a formidable ranching woman. Those
who she crossed called her “nuts” but those who wanted her donations called her
“eccentric”.
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| Christine DeVitt |
Christine DeVitt was born in September 1885 on a sheep ranch
in West Texas to Florence and David DeVitt. Her father had been a newspaper
reporter in New York who came to Texas in 1880. Soon the family moved to the
Mallett Ranch. The main ranchhouse, windmill, several bunkhouses, sheds, barns,
and corrals were located near Levelland, Texas and Sundown, Texas six miles
north of modern-day Whiteface, Texas (named for the white-faced Hereford cattle).
In 1897, David DeVitt’s partner sold out to him for the land and six thousand
head of cattle. At one time, the ranch included 100,000 acres.
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| Mallett Brand |
The Mallet Ranch was named for its peculiar brand, which
resembles a croquet mallet. The brand was first used in the early 1880s by D.
P. Atwood on his ranch, which straddled the Texas-New Mexico line. In 1885, as
the Atwood interests were preparing to dispose of their land and cattle, David
M. DeVitt and John Scharbauer purchased the brand and formed the Mallet Cattle
Company, with home and business offices in Midland and later in Fort Worth. At
first they ranched near Midland and Big Spring but soon established
headquarters in southwestern Hockley County, where the brand was registered.
Over the next several years the Mallet Company expanded its ranges into
portions of Hockley, Terry, Cochran, and Yoakum counties. Much of this land was
obtained from small homesteaders.
The Mallet Ranch was divided into four pastures, each of which
was watered by windmills and tanks. During the winter months only a handful of
cowboys, usually around six, were kept at the headquarters. These, along with
the foreman, a windmill man, and his wife manned the five-room ranchhouse, at
which the employees ate their meals. The windmill man's wife cooked. The
headquarters also had several bunkhouses, sheds, barns, and corrals. At the
start of the spring roundup, the foreman often went to the nearest towns to
seek extra help. Dipping vats to prevent scabs were built in a pasture about
six miles north of the headquarters, near the site of present Whiteface. The
cowboys usually took six weeks in the spring to dip all the cattle designated
to be sold. Pat Ross, George W. Green, and Wadkie Fowler served successively as
foremen.
The Mallet's chief competitor was Christopher C. Slaughter's
Lazy S Ranch. The rivalry nearly came to blows in the early 1900s as a result
of a land dispute following Slaughter's purchase of 34,000 acres in Hockley
County. Some of this acreage was being leased for grazing by DeVitt and his
partner, Charles H. Flato. To curtail the Lazy S purchases, DeVitt and Flato
filed lawsuits against the Slaughter interests for some of the county school
lands. Slaughter sought a momentary compromise by suggesting that both ranches
share the leased tracts, but in 1903 the Lazy S took possession of one of the
disputed tracts and fenced it. Over the next three months the fence was cut at
least six times. A small-scale range war nearly erupted when the Lazy S men
blamed the Mallet cowboys and prepared for action. DeVitt obtained an
injunction against the Slaughter occupation of the land, but the Lazy S cowboys
refused to vacate it until faced with a contempt-of-court threat.
Cooler heads
prevailed in the end, and a Lubbock district court ruled in favor of the Mallet
interests. Although Slaughter took the fight before a federal judge, he was
unable to win a reversal, and his employees had to go around the five-mile
stretch of DeVitt's land. Later, Slaughter attempted to buy for $26,000 some of
the land the Mallet was using under lease agreements, but the Hockley County
commissioners who owned the leases firmly retained their commitments to DeVitt.
As a result of the controversy DeVitt incorporated his land into the Mallet
Land and Cattle Company in 1903. Under the terms of the agreement the Mallet
lands were to be held in common by the company, with W. D. Johnson as
president. DeVitt retained controlling interest in the cattle and other
livestock. That arrangement lasted for the next forty years.
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| Hereford Cattle |
Between 1905 and 1907 some 4,500 Hereford cattle bearing the
Mallet brand grazed 200 sections in four counties. DeVitt kept most of his
stock cows for three years at a time, selling only the calves annually,
generally for twenty dollars each. At the end of every third year he sold the
cows and started with fresh stock. In 1925 and 1926 about 6,000 acres of Mallet
land were put into dry-land farming for cotton and feed crops. DeVitt's
favorite feed came to be cottonseed cake, with which he fattened cattle before
shipment. After the Santa Fe Railroad built through the area, he stored this
feed in a warehouse at Ropesville. The ranch also had a large number of horses,
which DeVitt kept in the pasture in honored retirement after they had passed
their prime. By 1936 the Mallet Ranch was running some 3,000 cattle on 53,138
acres.
Today the Mallet Ranch encompasses approximately 50,000
acres of pasture and another 5,000 acres of farm land and is mostly located
west of Lubbock in the southwestern quarter of Hockley County. It was largely
the unique personality of Christine, who inherited a part of the ranch as well
as a part of its oil royalties, that insured its survival. Christine's
insistence that her mother and sister hold onto her beloved ranch even during
the Great Depression brought about the DeVitt family wealth.
Christine insisted that one part of the ranch be left
pristine. Because of her, the ranch comprises one of the largest blocks of
virgin high plains prairie still in existence.
Cattle in this area require 40 acres per cow. The ranch
cattle were regarded as one of the best bred herds in the Panhandle. Over the
years, the acreage waned. David DeVitt took on another partner, F. W. Flato,
Jr., from Flatonia, Texas.
In Christine’s early childhood, Lubbock was a tiny village
and the Mallett Ranch was one hundred miles from the railroad. Land laws
required David DeVitt to live six months of the year on the “proved up” ranch.
He moved his wife and children to Fort Worth so the children could attend
school. (And, according to what Miss Christine told my mother) because her
mother and father often fought about his womanizing. Christine loved returning
to the ranch in summers. By 1925-1926, DeVitt turned 6,000 acres into cotton
fields.
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| West Texas cotton field |
Christine graduated from high school in Fort Worth. Her elder
brother had died in a hunting accident. Realizing that her remaining brother
was destined to take over the Mallett she loved, she went east to Hollins
College in Virginia for two years and then the Forest Park College in St.
Louis, from which she graduated.
While away, she discovered an affinity for music and
bookkeeping. When she returned to Fort Worth, she taught for a while at
Riverside High School and DeZavala Elementary School, the elementary school she
had attended. But, in 1932, her younger brother died in a high-speed collision with
a tractor-trailer. Two years later, her father died. After threatening to
disinherit her for her criticism and her stubbornness, David DeVitt had not
done so. She and her sister Helen and their mom inherited his share of the
Mallett Ranch.
Christine returned to Lubbock and lived in the Hilton Hotel.
She took on the job of keeping the Mallett intact and in the cattle business. She
convinced her mother and sisters to hold firm against attempts to break up the
ranch.
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Postcard of Hilton
Hotel in Lubbock TX |
Her father’s partners and the manager they had appointed
tried to keep her from making any decisions concerning the ranch. In spite of
that, Christine negotiated a handsome lease for the first oilwell on the land
in 1937.
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| Oilwell pump jack |
After eleven years of lawsuits and countersuits, Christine
won and became manager of the Mallett. With the help of cowhands and foreman,
she rebuilt the Mallett Hereford herd, profitably, the way her father had. Some
1,100 oilwells now dot the ranch. While Helen became a philanthropist in
Lubbock, Texas, it was Christine who oversaw the ranch.
Wadkie Fowler, the foreman most favored by David DeVitt was
let go by the partners after DeVitt died. Christine loved the Fowler family and
continued to spend many hours in their kitchen. To them, she was gentle, kind,
and offered no criticism.
In town, however, her reputation was of a rich and powerful Texan. In
her apartment at the Hilton, she played high-stakes poker and drank Cokes until
the cleaning crew rebelled. The Hilton evicted her. She bought a house in
Lubbock and then another and another, each of which she filled with stray cats.
But, she kept the Mallett Ranch profitable. Personally, she lived frugally. She
waited until nearly midnight on December 31 before making her charitable
donations.
Her sister Helen returned to Lubbock in 1943 and with her
brought gentleness to Christine. She introduced Christine to the world of Lubbock’s
art and music and women’s study clubs. Helen demonstrated to her sister the
projects that needed help and founded the Helen Devitt Jones Foundation.
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| Helen DeVitt Jones |
Later, Christine founded her CH Foundation. Her first gifts
went to Lubbock Methodist Hospital and the School of Nursing, and she continued
generous donations to those institutions. She gave to education, music, arts,
YMCA and YWCA, and prevention-of-blindness projects. My favorite of her
projects was Ranching Heritage Museum at Texas Tech, which she dedicated to her
parents. She supposedly shunned dedicating to churches, but left one of her
homes to the First Christian Church my family attended.
For several of Christine’s last four years, my mother worked
for Miss Christine. My mother and my Aunt Elizabeth “sat” with Miss Christine at
Lubbock Methodist Hospital. Because of her considerable donations, Miss
Christine had the hospital’s top floor and received excellent care. Even so,
she wanted someone with whom she could visit and to wait on her. (She
apparently enjoyed my mother because Mom would argue with her.) She disliked
hospital food and paid a couple to prepare foods she liked and bring them to
her for lunch and supper, giving the hospital food to whomever sat with her.
For breakfast, she drank a Coke. She also paid someone to feed and care for her
numerous cats.
She told my mother of a time when she and her three siblings
and their mother took a vacation on the train to visit relatives in California.
When they returned home, they found only a vacant lot where their home had
been. Her father—often at odds with her mother over his philandering—had moved their
entire house and belongings. In spite of his treatment of his wife and
children, there is a DeVitt Street in Fort Worth, named in his honor.
Miss Christine also told my mother that until her father
died, she had not known he was so wealthy. He treated her mother and his children
with such penury that Christine thought he must be struggling. When he died in
1934, she was shocked to learn he was a multi-millionaire.
One personally funny thing regarded Miss
Christine’s addiction to Coca-Cola. My mom had long argued with my dad that his
drinking only a Coke for breakfast was dangerous to his health. She wouldn’t
let me get away with the same (I tried, but she was a very good mother) and insisted
I have a nutritious breakfast each morning. When she related to me that Miss
DeVitt drank only a Coke for breakfast, I had a good laugh at my mom’s expense.
The Mallet Ranch buildings and headquarters court area
represent the owner’s effort to establish and maintain a quality lifestyle on
an isolated West Texas ranch. Today it is an intact example of an early
twentieth century ranching enterprise. The buildings and the headquarters court
have been sadly neglected since the death of Christine DeVitt.
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| Deteriorating Mallett Ranchhouse |
The Mallet Ranch/Llano Estacado Heritage Foundation has
developed a plan of creating an outdoor education center that will allow
visitors to experience the ranch in situ instead of relocating the ranch
headquarters (as has been done with others at the Ranching Heritage Center).
However, due to neglect, the ranch structures are losing authenticity and
integrity that cannot be replicated if deterioration continues.
Miss Christine DeVitt had the foresight to pump wealth into
the community. She guided the Mallett Ranch through droughts, disasters, and a
major Depression with a successful Hereford operation and oil kingdom. Christine
died October 12, 1983.
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Sources:
TEXAS RANCH WOMEN: Three Centuries of Mettle and Moxie,
Carmen Goldthwaite, History Press, pp 110-119.
