HALLIE C. STILLWELL,
A RANCHER AND TEXAS LEGEND,
DIES AT 99
As a rough rancher, chatty newspaper columnist, justice of the peace, chili cook-off queen and mistress of a museum devoted to her life, Mrs. Stillwell, who was known as Miss Hallie far beyond the sweeping curve of the Rio Grande, became a Texas tourist attraction.
A native of Waco whose restless father kept the family on the move, including three years homesteading in the New Mexico Territory, she was 13 when she hitched up a four-horse team, gathered the reins and led a Conestoga convoy that took her family to the dusty little town of Alpine in the Big Bend region of southwestern Texas.
Six years later she received a teaching certificate, strapped on a six-shooter and set out for the town of Presidio on the Rio Grande, a major crossing point for Pancho Villa’s raiders. When her father accused her of going off on a wild-goose chase, she stood her ground. “I’ll gather my geese,” she said, a retort that established her independence and provided the title for an autobiography.
After a year of dodging Mexican raiding parties and fending off drunken American soldiers, she took a safer position in Marathon, some distance from the border. Her father was relieved, until she decided to marry Roy Stillwell.
Though Mr. Stillwell owned a 22,000 -acre spread 45 miles south of Marathon, he was a taciturn, hard-drinking, pokerplaying widower more than twice her age. He may not have seemed a suitable husband, but the first time he drove up in his sporty Hudson Super Six, she later explained, “He decided he liked me, and I decided I liked that car.”
Assuring her father that “I’d rather be an old man’s darlin’than a young man’s slave,” she married Mr. Stillwell in 1918. She was 20 and he was 40.
After a honeymoon in San Antonio, Mr. Stillwell, whose first wife had not been the ranching sort and had lived in town, took his bride home and proudly showed off the 12-by-16-foot one-room cabin where he had lived for years with three crusty and decidedly misogynist ranch hands.
Meager as it was, the cabin had all the comforts of a bridal home except an actual bed. The couple slept on a bedroll on the floor, and Mrs. Stillwell had to be up and dressed by dawn to avoid being trampled by the cowboys trooping in to fix breakfast.
The hands, miffed enough at being displaced to the barn, were not about to let a woman meddle in the manly work of cowboy cooking. As it happened, they did not mind her performing such ladylike chores as riding herd on the cattle, wrestling calves to the ground for branding and shooting deer and other game for the table, especially after they discovered that she was a better shot than they were.
Not that they had any choice. Because the ranch was only 23 miles from the border and well within bandito-raiding range, it was considered unsafe to leave her home alone even though her husband kept a rifle in each corner of the house.
One day, after she proved her prowess as a marksman, Mrs. Stillwell, who rode with a .45 strapped to her waist and a 30.06 rifle slung across her saddle horn, was allowed to stay behind. It proved to be a disaster. Responding to some pent-up urge, she spent the day scrubbing an accumulation of charcoal graffiti off the cabin walls and used sand to scour the coffeepot until it gleamed inside and out.
After the cowboys returned and discovered that she had erased years of ranch records, they never let her forget it. “Washed any walls lately?” they would ask. They were more distressed at what she had done to their lovingly seasoned coffeepot. The coffee, they reminded her for years, was not fit to drink for six months.
As the babies started coming, a couple of bedrooms were added, and while her three children were in school, Mrs. Stillwell would even spend the week in town, but on weekends and in summers she continued to ride with her husband.
After her husband died in 1948, she soldiered on alone until 1964, when she turned the ranch over to her two sons and moved to Alpine, where she became justice of the peace for the Connecticut-sized Brewster County.
The work included serving as coroner, a job, she noted, she had mastered by observation as a teenager after watching a sheriff and his deputy cut down a challenger in a gunfight. Soon, she said, a man in a black coat strode up, took one look at the bloody remains, said, “He’s dead,” then whirled on his heel and left.
In recent years, Mrs. Stillwell had lived in a mobile home on the edge of the ranch where her daughter established a park for recreational vehicles with a replica of the cabin room she lived in as a bride in the 1920’s.
In addition to regaling tourists, she worked on a sequel to “I’ll Gather My Geese,” her autobiography. Now being completed by a granddaughter, it is titled, “My Goose Is Cooked.”
Mrs. Stillwell is survived by two sons, Roy and Guy, and a daughter, Dadie, all of the Big Bend region; a sister, Glen Harris of Presidio;9 grandchildren;15 great-grandchildren and 2 greatgreat-grandchildren.
August 24, 1997