TOM ROSS

                    
Search Engine for the Gazetteer

   Search this site      powered by FreeFind
 
 

                     

OLD MAN TOM ROSS

Search this site      powered by FreeFind
    
 

Old Man Tom Ross would fight or shoot. There was a horse race out on he Cow House and he had an altercation with Ault Ferguson and snapped a pistol three times right in his chest. It was an old cap-and-ball and it didn’t go off. This is the same Ferguson that killed Tetric down at Rock House.  Ross’s Crossing on the Cow House, named after Tom Ross. He said that Ross ran for sheriff but didn’t get many votes. That crossing was up the stream from the Highway 281 bridge.

(The name Cow House Creek was always a puzzle. Sounded as if a house or shelter for cattle. An appealing theory was that it was from a corruption of the Spanish for a small horse, a cayuse. However, some years ago at Belton the county auditor told me he had worked in the Comptroller’s office or Land Office, and saw an ancient map covering the area at the junction of the Leon with the Cowhouse. Squares on the map showed houses of different individuals. One was the house of Mr. P. Cow, and marked Cow’s House. It was where the Cow House flowed into the Leon, place of the present lake. This obviously was the origin of the name, not a Spanish as were the other streams. Several times in the West when I told old-timers I was from Hamilton County, they said "Cow House Creek" and laughed. It was a famous creek, and more so when Camp Hood was established for a different reason.) Sloneker Springs was named for an old gentleman I knew later after he moved to the Plains. My father and my uncle first lived in a log cabin across the creek there, when they ran cattle. Can remember the old structure in the edge of the woods.)

On the same day as the above incident, Dave Smith brought in two fellows named Jenkins, pleasant fellows, handcuffed them and took them to the old Eagle Saloon (Not sure I have this name right.) The little fellows asked them to look and see how they could pull their hands out of the handcuffs and they did it easily. He did not know where these young fellows came from.

 

 
Home ] Up ]


People and Places: Gazetteer of Hamilton County, TX
Search this site powered by FreeFind

Copyright © March, 1998
by Elreeta Crain Weathers, B.A., M.Ed.,  
(also Mrs.,  Mom, and Ph. T.)

A Work In Progress