Gay Schlittler Storms' North Texas Tales
column from the April 10 2005 edition of "The Graham Leader"
Panthers
were scary in 1863
Sunday, April 10, 2005 - Frightening stories about mountain lions have circulated since the frontier
saw its first settler.
There have been only four reported mountain lion attacks of people in Texas in more than 100 years,
one of them fatal. All the reported attacks occurred in Big Bend National Park.
But that's not to say there have
not been sightings of mountain lions in Young, Palo Pinto, Throckmorton and outlying counties. Old-timers talk about being
startled by a panther in an abandoned barn or in one of the caves now at the bottom of Possum Kingdom Lake.
Surprisingly
enough, there were no recorded casualties from mountain lions before 1900. But there were close calls, and some of those encounters
were recorded.
William Veale taught a little school in Miller's Valley on the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1863.
One day Phin Reynolds' brother brought a panther's foot home from school and told how he got his prize.'
Reynolds' brother
and some school children were at the river eating their lunch . One little girl was on a shoal, leaning over washing her hands.
The girl looked around and saw a half-grown panther, crouched and ready to spring. She practically flew out of the water in
one bound, but her jump was no match for the panther's split-second spring. The cougar landed squarely on her back and pinned
down its prey.
The other children saved the day by attacking the cat. A brave older boy named Press Mauldin grabbed
a rock and knocked the panther off the girl into the water.
The panther surprised everyone by jumping back to the
river bank where the children were. The cat pounced on another school boy, Tom Curtis, who had leaned over to wash his slate
and was oblivious to the previous attack. Mauldin hit the scrawny panther with a deadly blow, knocking him off Curtis and
killing the cat.
When the children examined the panther, they saw that its ribs were showing, and it looked sick.
That's why the cat had been so bold.
Ten years after this episode, another mountain lion attacked a child at the home
of John Selman. The door was open to the outside, and the Selman's baby was in a cradle opposite the doorway. A mountain lion
sprang through the open doorway on top the cradle, grabbed the baby in its jaws and carried it away from the cradle.
Webb, a neighbor who was visiting, grabbed the panther by the tail. Mrs. Selman snatched the baby
away while Webb continued to pull on the cat's tail. Webb flung the panther into the fireplace. The cat sprang back into the
open room toward the door where everyone hoped it was fleeing. Instead, the panther ran for a bed and crawled under it. The
men retrieved loaded rifles from over the fireplace and killed the panther where it crouched.
This story was
published in 1872 in the Saturday Evening Post. Reynolds said, 'We knew all of the parties and heard all of the details before
it was published by The Post.'
To be honest, there are many more newspaper and magazine stories of mountain
lion attacks today than there were of big-cat attacks in frontier Texas. One newsletter warned that 'more cat attacks have
occurred in the last 10 years, than in the previous 100-year period (in the U.S.).' Biologists and wildlife organizations
such as Texas Parks and Wildlife instruct hikers on dealing with a hungry mountain lion.
But unless one falls into an exceptionally
unlucky ratio of probability, one is many more times likely to step on a rattlesnake or get bitten by a black widow spider.
That's a little comfort, at least they can't run faster.
(Source: Phin W. Reynolds,'Chapters from the Frontier
Life of Phin W. Reynolds,' compiled J.R. Webb, 'West Texas Historical Association Year Book' (1945), reprinted in forttours.com)
