Historic Midland

MIDLAND: LAND OF COWBOYS
It can be truthfully said that a land region’s general characteristics determine the kind of people
who will settle it, and that was the case for what came to be commonly known as “the Midland
Country.” It was a prime grazing land conducive to herds of sheep and cattle—and the herdsman and
the cowboy discovered it as soon as the Indian threat had been removed.
Sitting at the southern end of the Great Plains, the Midland Country is blessed to be a part of one
of the five great grazing regions on the Earth. A marvelous “sea of grass” covers the entire Great
Plains, and, during the 1880s, when the first permanent settlers arrived, that grass was stirrup-high
in many locations.
Although Herman Nelson Garrett, Jim Garrett, John Cullen and a man named Zakeros are said to
have been the first herdsmen to locate in Midland County, they only opened the floodgates as word
of the wonderful grazing land on the Staked Plains spread rapidly.
Col. C.C. “Lum” Slaughter was the first man to located on the Staked Plains, establishing his Long
S Ranch on the head of the Colorado River and Tobacco Creek near the New Mexico line in 1877.
His top-quality cattle, bearing the Long S brand, ranged over a huge chunk of land 200 miles square
and encompassing about 24 million acres. Slaughter later “purchased ranch land, fenced it and at one
time owned in fee simple more than 1,000,000 acres of land and was for years the largest individual
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Young Lee ‘heels a calf’ on the Frying
Pan Ranch, Winkler County. Lee,
born January 2, 1880, also worked on
the “C” Ranch and the Quien Sabe
Ranch and participated in the last
trail drive in the Permian Basin. He
helped “string” 2,000 head of cattle
from Midland to Friona in 1923, a
job that took 25 days.
Midland: Land of Cowboys | 7