682-1 Jim Farmer

Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

On June 25, 1858, Jim Farmer was born in a log house in the woods just south of what is now Lake Worth. In an interview in 1937 he recalled distinctly the loss of his little red hat while attending his first school in the White Settlement district west of Forth Worth. He also recalled a broad checked, bright-colored dress worn by little Cherokee Thompson (his future wife) while attending school at Veal’s Station. He was reared on his father’s home place in White Settlement and spent some years on the farm of his uncle while his father was in Western Texas in the cattle business.

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

Cattlemen Magazine, which did an article on him, noted that many of his classmates at Mansfield College, which he attended for two years, were prominent later in the political and business life of Texas.

“Farmer’s unofficial school activities included a moonlight foray on a water-melon patch by a group of boys who were caught in the act and the uneasiness that followed the untimely end of the dog that chased him. Farmer is an effective storyteller and you will enjoy hearing him tell of these and other events.)

In that same article it was noted:

James D. Farmer was the first mayor of north Fort Worth. He is keen student of politics and takes much interest in the civic life of forth worth. It is not unusual for him to express his views on some subject in poetry. He has the courage of his convictions and is ready to express them. However, he has the faculty to differ with one about something and no lose his friendship.

Farmer was an inveterate smoker but had to quit. He went for three or four years without having a cigar in his mouth. For about twenty years he has used three or four cigars a day but he never lights one. You seldom see him during the day without a cigar in his mouth. He with is cigar is a familiar figure about the yards at Fort Worth and when the market is very slow he uses an extra cigar or two if he has a string of steers to sell.

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

On April 19, 1883, James D. Farmer married his boyhood sweetheart, Cherokee Thompson,

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

Jim Farmer was a lifelong writer and a poet. He published many many poems and stories over the years, usually under a pen name. His two most frequent nom-de-plumes were Guillermo and Evan Lambert. I have a full scrapbook of probably at least seventy-five published poems and stories. However, most are yellowed, crumbly and unreadable. There is one, however, that was saved. It was referenced in an article in the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Apparently in his later years he put a sidewalk in all around his home. Immediately this sidewalk was used by all the neighborhood children for skating and scootering. Someone asked him if the noise bothered him. His reply was the following poem which was published widely:

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” The picture below was taken at Jack Farmer’s Ranch in Albany, which at one point was 100,000 acres. Left to right is Jack, Minnie, Check, Jeanette?, Cherry (my grandmother), Jane (my mother) Martha (her sister). I am not sure who the man is, in back is possibly Al (J.D.Jr.’s son). In front is Jim Farmer.

Essay on James D. Farmer Jeanette Farmer, who the family called, "Sis", was one of Jim’s three daughters. My generation called her “Auntie”. She was a schoolteacher who never married. She loved literature and was a published writer. Every year for Christmas she gave me a book. She wrote and published the following, which is not only a colorful description of him, it offers insight into the times.

She writes: It is not conventional to write tolerantly concerning profanity. To express open admiration for it is no less than brazen impiety. But the thing I have in mind seems, somehow, set apart from the profane. It is more in the nature of the therapeutic. “The release of pent-up forces,” says the psychiatrist, “is as essential to the soul as food is to the body.” “Pent-up emotion,” says the physician, “is an ulcer on the

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” spirit—it could lead to grave ills. It must be drained.” Thus the learned professions recognize the universal need of an emotional escape hatch. How human kind responds to this urge to “get it off the chest” depends on conditioned reflexes. A child may kick and scream. Nice old ladies, goaded too far, can slam a door with significant fervor. A man I know claims eloquence in four languages: English, Spanish, Sailor, and Oilfield. He can, on occasion, substantiate this claim. And his is a most untidy verbiage. There are some who seek refuge in the bottle. And we have those who suffer in silence. To each is own… In an era fast fading into oblivion, in a land fast being settled and fenced, there is a manner of speech—a picturesque parlance—which belongs exclusively to the West, to the cow country and to the man whose business is cattle, himself fast becoming a legend. His is a racy idiom—a fluent flow of fanciful phrases—easy, relaxed, as natural and as wholly reflexive as the breath he draws. As a means of communication it is not elegant, but it is wholly adequate. It is a dependable safety valve for honest wrath. Sometimes it can seem a solace against drought, blizzard, government interference, and woes ad infinitum that plague the cattleman. For an otherwise inarticulate cowboy, it provides a verbal outlet for deeper emotions—love, grief, and yes, reverence. There is a story that a minister and a cowboy were each seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. The minister, deeply moved, spoke from the fullness of his heart—“Lord, how wonderful is thy handiwork.” The cowboy reached up and removed his hat. He spoke quietly to his companion—“Don’t that beat Hell?” They were expressing the same emotion. The difference was in syntax, not sincerity. If his verbal communion with his Maker seems, to the uninitiated, casual and informal, one must remember that a life of constant conflict with the forces of nature has brought the cowman into a close relationship with his Creator. He often needs and he often receives Divine Aid. He has a working partnership with the Almighty. And he speaks to him as one partner to another. These are good men and true—men of worth and dignity—the salt of the earth. They take their personal obligations and their church affiliations seriously. They take their cussing likewise and most are past masters of the pungent phrase. I recall with singular clarity the day that I knew that this vernacular was not an iniquity but a tool of the trade—a matter of taste and certainly of talent.

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” My father, a livestock commission man, was one of this breed—honest, fearless, a Presbyterian, a fanatic prohibitionist, a friend to all who came his way. He was a big man, more than six feet tall, very handsome and very distinguished. He habitually wore in his mouth a long unlighted cigar on which he chewed reflectively throughout the day. I was his official chauffeur and one blistering Texas afternoon it fell my lot to drive him out some forty miles from Fort Worth to where a customer was to ship a bunch of nondescript old strays who had, by sheer villainy, hitherto escaped the loading dock. We arrived as the gaunt old specters came straggling in, milling uneasily as sore and weary cowboys struggled to divert a few young cattle, not ready for market, to the adjoining pasture where the wire gap had been thrown back to receive them. By some unaccountable insanity, the engineer of a rattle-trap old switch engine, backed in on the siding, chose this moment to open one of its wheezy valves and release a long hiss of steam. That did it! They were gone in a second—in a roar and a great choking cloud of dust. The Great Partner was standing by or we might all have been killed. As it was, no man or horse was in their path. They took off straight back to the thousand or so acres of brush from which they had so recently and so painfully been gathered. All but one—an old dun-colored steer, a mean and crafty old hunk of hide and tallow, related to Satan as much in character as he was by hoof and horn, had elected to stand his ground. A departing cowboy yelled to us to hold him there. But he had no intention of being held. He had decided to escape to the near-by pasture instead of entering the small trap where he was supposed to await deportation. And accordingly, he started toward the gap. My father descended from the car and ran toward him waving his hat. At least it was a reasonable facsimile of running. My Pop was nearly seventy, a little on the heavy side, but he hadn’t run in twenty years. Dun gave him a calculating look but he swung about and retreated. He soon turned and came back, only to be waved back a second time. This see-saw routine went on

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” and on. Each time Dun advanced he gained a few feet. His adversary, realizing this, committed what turned out to be a tactical error. He took up a last stand in front of the open gap. The day was hot, the dust was stifling, and Dun was bored and tired. If this hatwaving was a bluff, he would call it. He did. He tore across the cattle guard and into the pasture, knocking my parent down and into the barbed wire gap. Before I could even wonder if he had been killed, my father rose to his full height. One leg of his trousers was ripped in the rear from belt through cuff. His best Stetson had been trampled in the dust. His cigar was gone and he had no spare. His glasses were bent and hung at a cock-eyed angle. He stood, middle-aged and fat, pants leg flapping, blood trickling from his many wounds, sweat pouring in rivers down his dusty face, the maddest man I ever saw. For one horrified instant I thought he would have a stroke. But I needn’t have worried. He, apparently, knew all about the release of pent-up forces. And he rose to the occasion forthwith and ably. He indulged in some very competent selfexpression. I who had a moment before been thinking dispiritedly of a bathtub and a cool house, was suddenly electrified. I listened delightedly to the saltiest, the toughest, the most un-Presbyterian terminology it has ever been my pleasure to hear. The assault on the character of that old dun-colored demon was a masterpiece of polished prose—of words and phrases worn smooth in their passage down the years. Dun’s personal shortcomings, and they were many and lamentable, were well taken care of. Dun’s maternal ancestry, even more lamentable, was disposed of in the graphic, time-honored cliché, known to most small boys and to all ancestors of small boys. It left Dun’s bovine genealogy open to grave question. The discourse, for obvious reasons of censorship, cannot be reproduced here, but it bore the hallmark—the stamp of artistry and authority. To me, a prim pedagogue, obligated to uphold high morals and pure English, it was music to my ears and refreshment to my spirit. I had a feeling that a virtuoso was playing to an empty theater. But it was not quite empty. Dun was there. He had stopped on a little rise nearby and he looked back listening, as if his ear were attuned to just such rhetorical harmonies. This was a language he understood, and he stood for a long moment giving my father’s remarks careful consideration.

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” By some process of bovine reasoning, he seemed to know he had gone far enough. Then he did what any cowman knows he did—the totally unexpected. He lumbered with great dignity back across the cattle guard. And, with a flirt of his tail and a movement almost like a ballet dancer, he darted into the trap and calmly started browsing on its few tufts of dry, dusty grass. He was in no way chastened in spirit, no less villainous in character. He had not been persuaded. He had been convinced. My father limped over and fastened the gap. Dun lifted his head and stared across the fence at him. A long and understanding look seemed to pass between them. Were they antagonists? Each knew the password of a great fraternity. They understood the same language. Perhaps both knew they were haring the last fading echoes of bawling herd and yelling cowboy. Perhaps each knew himself to be a symbol of a glorious epoch that would pass this way no more. As we drove away, we paused and looked back in silent salute to the gallant old rack of bones who stood lonely and bewildered at the end of the trail. His freedom was gone. Sun and space and solitude were lost to him forever. He seemed to know. But his fighting spirit was unbroken. Dignity and pride still were his. And why not? Had his progenitors not once been the very dependence of prosperity in this land? Had they not been the great herds that once grazed these prairies and helped to build a vast industry? Were they not the genesis of an era so colorful as to be unsurpassed in all the world? Already they were immortalized in sculpture and painting, in song and story of a great nation. My father pronounced a final imprecation as we drove away, which somehow had more the ring of a tribute and perhaps a little of the sadness of a benediction. “You__ _____ old brindle cuss”, he said. And added, “I’ve been shoved by many a son __ _ _____ who isn’t fit to live in the same country with you.” Many silent miles later, he said, “Sister, call Doc first thing in the morning and get my glasses fixed. My eyes keep watering.” To the hardy souls who understand it, the speech of these men is just part of the sound and color and movement of a once magnificent way of life. Were they profane or were they just proficient? I leave it to a jury of there peers, if, indeed, they have any peers.

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

Here he is playing with his granddaughter, Sarah, Minnie’s daughter:

The Bow Tie Jim Farmer’s beloved Check died a year and a half before him. He had worn a tie his entire life, even in this hunting picture he can be seen wearing a coat and tie!

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards”

He was a large man, well over six feet. Check was tiny, under five feet. My mother told me that as his last act every morning before leaving the house, he would put his bow tie around his neck, and lift up Check and hold her while she tied his tie. He would then kiss her and put her down. From her death onward, he wore his bowtie dangling around his neck. He would not tie it, nor would he allow anyone else to.

Here is the poem he wrote about her:

Cherokee

By Evan Lambert Blithesome as the day is long All the hours beguiled with song, Always happy, glad and free, Is the winsome Cherokee; Dropping lashes black as jet For she is a sweet brunette’

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Jim Farmer “The Grand Old Man of the Fort Worth Stockyards” She’s mischievous, full of glee, Is the winsome Cherokee Amongst far nations I have been, All their daughters have I seen, Yet none seemed so fair to me As the winsome Cherokee. But why speak such praises fine, When she never can be mine? Lost forever more to me Is the winsome Cherokee. Oft in dreams I seem to kiss Those sweet lips in endless bliss, But I never more will be Kissed by winsome Cherokee, Though I did possess the earth, ‘Twould be but a farthings worth, Unless I the form could see Of the winsome Cherokee. He died in January 1942 at the age of 84. In his obituary it was said: Starting in 1938, it had become a custom for his friends and associates to honor Mr. Farmer with a birthday celebration. At one of these affairs it was stated that “if all the cattle he had bought and sold could be strung out in single file, the leaders would be drinking out of the Atlantic Ocean when the “drag’ of the line would still be in Fort Worth.”

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