Former Gov. Briscoe Honored
For Years Of Contributions

By Colleen Schreiber

UVALDE — Lifelong rancher and former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe was recently honored as the recipient of the National Golden Spur Award.

Briscoe comes from a long line of Southern plantation owners who migrated from Mississippi to Fort Bend County, Texas.

Andrew Briscoe came to Texas about 1832. His is the last signature on the Texas Declaration of Independence. The story is told that Briscoe was late getting to the signing because he had been thrown in jail for failure to pay taxes to the Mexican government.

Dolph Briscoe’s grandfather farmed, ranched and operated a general mercantile store west of Houston. The family raised cotton in the Brazos River bottom and ran cattle up on the prairie.

Around 1910, Dolph Sr. set out from Fort Bend County, looking for good, strong ranch country "where it didn’t rain so much that the cattle bogged down and get hoof rot."

He found what he was looking for around Uvalde in South Texas. "This area was known then — and still is — as a strong ranch country with strong grass and mild winters," says Gov. Briscoe. "And it certainly doesn’t rain too much."

Prior to his move to South Texas, the elder Briscoe did a lot of horse and mule trading, gathering them from areas in South Texas and selling them to the plantation farmers in East Texas.

He came to Uvalde County at the age of 21. Once there, he never left the South Texas area, though he operated in several counties across Texas.

Briscoe started out by leasing land and trading cattle. He prospered in those initial years and was able to expand, though he suffered some financial setbacks along the way. His first major opportunity in the cattle business came in the early 1920s as a result of his longtime friendship with a local petroleum products salesman named Malcolm Munroe.

The friendship began when Munroe was a young boy delivering kerosene to families around town. Munroe stayed in the oil business and later became a sales manager for the Humble Oil and Refining Company.

Humble Oil, founded by R.S. Sterling, who later became governor, and four other men, was the first major oil company founded in Texas that stayed in Texas.

Through Munroe, Briscoe became acquainted with Sterling and as a result of that acquaintance became partners in the cattle business.

The partners bought the 09 Cattle Company and 5000 head of cattle, 4000 more than they originally planned. Their partnership cattle were branded the 09. Briscoe later branded the 06 (open six), an adaptation of the original Briscoe-Sterling brand, and that brand remains in the Briscoe family today.

A few years later the partners bought the Chupadera ranch in Dimmitt County. Sterling was an avid hunter and would often bring his friends from Houston in a private railcar as far as Carrizo Springs and then on to the ranch to hunt.

Sterling treated young Dolph Jr. like a grandson. When Sterling was elected governor, it was Dolph Jr. who got to ride with him in the parade at the Strawberry Festival and sit next to him at the barbecue.

"I remember that I tipped over a glass of water right on the Governor," Briscoe said, "and his reply was, ‘a little bit of water never hurt anything in Dimmitt County.’"

That afternoon the Briscoes and the Sterlings were driving out to the Chupadera and Dolph was the designated gate opener.

"My father always thought that anyone opening gates should open them on the double," Briscoe recalls. "I was trying to please my father and open them on the double, but one particular time I got in too big a hurry trying to close it and it hooked the back bumper of Mr. Sterling’s car. It pulled the gate off the hinges and the bumper half off the car. Mr. Sterling thought it was pretty funny, but my father saw absolutely no humor in it."

The young Briscoe got to spend the night in the Governor’s mansion the second year Sterling was in office. It was through this close personal relationship with Sterling, Briscoe says, that he first became interested in politics.

The Depression took a financial toll on Briscoe and Sterling. They lost everything in the crash, including the Chupadera. In 1932 the cattle market broke and Briscoe himself owed about $850,000.

Dolph Jr. remembers that experience well. At the time, his father was president of Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. When Roosevelt closed the banks, Briscoe was at the Cattle Raisers convention in Fort Worth with his parents. It was the farthest the young Briscoe had ever been from home and when the banks closed he feared he and his family would never get back.

He went to his father with his concerns, and the elder Briscoe replied, "Son don’t you worry. We don’t have any money in any bank anyway, and the longer they keep them closed the better."

After that crash, his father started over again. J.M. West of Houston bought the Chupadera, and Briscoe was able to hire on with West. The following year he was able to lease the Catarina Ranch, which joined the Chupadera. Soon after, he found the Margarito Ranch in northern Coahilla, Mexico. The seller wanted $50,000 for 225,000 acres stocked with cattle and two sawmills.

It sounded like a steal. The only problem was that Briscoe didn’t have $50,000. He returned to Fort Bend County where he had been raised and was able to secure financing through some of the locals.

In addition to good Hereford cattle and much later Santa Gertrudis, Briscoe also ran sheep under herd, as did many South Texas ranches at that time.

"Sheep made money," Briscoe says, "and there was a strong demand for wool."

During the Depression his father had a company called Uvalde Livestock Loan Company. Many of his customers were in the sheep and goat business. Briscoe says his father wasn’t happy with the way his loan customers’ wool and mohair was being handled, so in 1933 he founded the Uvalde Wool and Mohair Company.

During the peak times, Briscoe estimates their warehouse handled half a million pounds of wool and half a million of mohair, considerable tonnage given the fact that there were three other warehouses in Uvalde competing for that same business.

Briscoe kept sheep under herd on his South Texas country until 1939. By then herding had essentially become a thing of the past. Without herding, however, raising sheep in South Texas was next to impossible because of predators.

Dolph Jr. attended the University of Texas in 1939. While there he met his wife to be, Betty Jane "Janey" Slaughter. They married in 1942.

When he returned home from World War II, Briscoe worked for his father on their South Texas ranch and in Mexico. A year later, in 1949, he went into politics. Mrs. Briscoe, he says, signed him up and he was a candidate before he even knew it.

Neither set of parents was keen on the idea of having a politician in the family. His mother’s words were: "I don’t want any son of mine in politics," and the Slaughters were mostly of the same opinion.

Briscoe ran on a platform of better schools, better roads, and water conservation.

"The issues haven’t changed much over the years," he remarks.

Possibly one of the greatest accomplishments of his legislature tenure was co-sponsorship and passage of the Colson-Briscoe Farm to Market Road Program. In those years Texas was much more of a rural state and there was a strong movement to do something about the rural roads, Briscoe says. All the various associations were in strong support of the legislation. The slogan was "get the farmer out of the mud."

"‘Course, out here in our part of the country it was ‘get the farmer out of the dust,’" Briscoe says.

Getting the legislation passed, the former governor admits, was harder than he anticipated. Everyone was in agreement that something had to be done about the road system. The real issue had to deal with the handling of the money.

The program was to be funded from reserves built during the War. The county commissioners wanted the money to be appropriated to the counties to build the roads. Others wanted it appropriated to the state so that the building of the roads could be done in a uniform and continuous manner.

Briscoe took the side that the work should be done by the state. "If it was up to the counties, when they hit their county line, the road would just stop. We felt that wasn’t the best approach."

The Texas Farm Bureau took the position that the money should be appropriated to the counties. By the end of the session, Briscoe says, he had alienated more than just the Farm Bureau. He had all the county judges and county officials against him, as well.

Once the bill passed and the highway department started building roads, however, the controversy was dispelled. The farm to market system is mostly complete. The problem today is maintenance. Briscoe explains that the highway department initially tried to get as many miles built as quickly and as cheaply as possible, so many of those roads simply wore out after 10 or 15 years. The farm to market roads that haven’t been swallowed up by the metropolitan areas and urban roads are now being rebuilt.

During his eight-year tenure as a state representative Briscoe was also involved in helping get the Rural Electrification Authority established.

The sudden death of his father in 1954 soon took Briscoe out of the Austin political arena back to South Texas to carry out his family responsibilities full-time.

Briscoe remembers the drouth of the 1950s well, because about the time he returned to the ranch full-time the drouth was going full swing.

It was a tough drouth to survive, Briscoe says, and he like others sold way down but not totally out. The one good thing about the drouth, he says, is that it got a lot of ranchers interested in range management and range improvement, particularly brush control. Briscoe started rootplowing and reseeding during that time, and he has continued that practice over the years.

It was during the same time period that ranchers really started pushing a screwworm eradication program, and Briscoe was among the leaders. In 1958 Briscoe was an officer in the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, and he and others went to Florida to see first-hand the successful eradication program there.

In 1961 the Southwest Animal Health Research Foundation was organized to promote the strange new eradication program, based on overwhelming the breeding process of native screwworm flies with sterile lab-raised competition. Most every livestock and agriculture organization was part of the new foundation. The group faced an uphill battle from the beginning, however, because USDA wasn’t willing to sign on to their idea; the bureaucrats insisted Texas would never be able to control reinfestations from Mexico.

The ranching industry believed differently, and SWAHRF raised some $3 million by assessing ranchers 10 cents a head on sheep and goats and 50 cents on cattle.

That money was used to build a plant to raise and sterilize flies for release.

The program got underway in 1960, and eradication in Texas, Briscoe says, was achieved in about three years.

"The problem was so bad among the ranchers that they were willing to take a chance. No one knew for sure if the technology would work, but they decided to gamble on it. Fortunately it did work, and it made an absolute difference in the ranching world."

Briscoe returned to politics in 1968, running an unsuccessful campaign for governor. Four years later he signed on again and won. He ran on a platform of no new taxes or increases in existing taxes, and once in office Briscoe held to that promise.

"How did I do it? Number one, it was what I ran on and I made it clear that I was going to keep that promise. When some in the legislature said that they couldn’t write a budget within the existing income, my question to them was ‘Can you pass a tax increase over a governor’s veto?’ That ended that conversation."

Briscoe’s first term was a two-year term. During that term, legislation passed to change the governor’s term from two to four years. He ran for a second term and became the first governor to serve a four-year term.

Briscoe has made numerous other contributions to the livestock industry, one being the establishment of the Mohair Council of America. Briscoe was its first chairman.

Over the years, he has seen the rise and fall and the rise again of the mohair business, followed the last few years by yet another fall.

"One year we had over four clips of mohair stacked up that we couldn’t sell. We’re about there now," he remarks.

Despite that, Briscoe continues to believe in the future of the mohair industry. Today Briscoe Ranch Inc. has more goats than ever before.

"It will either turn out to be very much the right thing or very much the wrong thing," Briscoe says.

Today Briscoe operates some 600,000 acres of land in Uvalde, Dimmitt, Webb, Maverick, McMullen, Kinney, Brewster and Culberson counties. He also has a ranch leased with the Nunley brothers in Cochran County west of Lubbock. The Briscoe-Nunley partnership began many decades earlier with Dolph Sr. and R.J. "Red" Nunley.

Briscoe says he’s not partial to any particular area of Texas. He likes it all, but spoken like a true rancher, he adds that the best country is always "where it rains the most."

He believes agriculture has a bright future and doesn’t buy into the talk that young people can no longer make a go in agriculture.

"Agriculture has become very capital-intensive, and it is a mature industry, but I still believe to be true what I’ve seen from my own observation through the years — that if a young person is willing to work hard enough, long enough and put in the effort, they’ll find someone who will finance them," Briscoe says. "The money is out there, but these loan institutions want someone who is going to work at it and be successful."

Briscoe believes it is easier to get a loan today simply because there are more lenders available, but again he stresses that the key is the person wanting the loan.

"To say you can’t get in agriculture is absolutely wrong," he continues. "You can, but you have to work at it. You have to dedicate your life to it, and most times you can’t get involved in politics."

Governor and Mrs. Briscoe have three children, Janey Briscoe Marmion, Dolph Briscoe III, and Cele Briscoe Carpenter, and six grandchildren.