The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960 Page: 470
684 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
average duration of the local community school was about four
months. His father left to join the Confederate Army in 1862. When
F. L. Moffett was four and one-half years old his father returned
from the Civil War. He remembers it.
At the age of sixteen, he rode his father's best black horse over the
hill one Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to attend a religious service in
a neighboring community. His family never saw him again for eleven
years. During this period he followed various types of work, among
them being buffalo hunting, mining, and working on ranches in
Western Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Fort Griffin was
at that time the headquarters for dozens of buffalo hunters. Frank L.
Moffett stayed there some months and then proceeded to Fort Elliot
in what is now Wheeler County, from there to Southeastern Colorado,
thence to Wyoming where he worked on a ranch, and into Montana
for the same purpose.
He then proceeded to Salt Lake City, then by rail to San Francisco,
thence by boat to Juneau, Alaska. He spent five years in that territory
and was a member of a party of four who are said to be the first white
men visitors to the upper reaches of the Stewart River, a tributary of
the Yukon. He and the other members of his party engaged in what
is known as "placer mining," which was a very elementary method of
sluicing a few flakes of gold out of immense quantities of sand on the
water's edge of the Yukon River.
In five years, he accumulated $4,000 in gold dust and brought it
back to San Francisco in a leather poke wrapped up and carried in a
bedroll. He had it minted at the U. S. Mint in San Francisco, bought
a cashier's check, and came back to Ellis County, Texas (in 1887),
where his parents had bought land in the middle 185o's. Their grand-
children still own it.
In August, 1889, he traveled by covered wagon to Hardeman County,
west of Wichita Falls and purchased a section of land, which he still
owns. He was an active civic leader in his community for twelve years.
During this tenure, the first permanent courthouse was built in the
county. His name is on the cornerstone. At age sixty-five, he made a
trip around the world. The following year he returned to Alaska for
a three month visit and rowed a boat down the Yukon River alone for
a distance of more than i,ooo miles.
Now at age ninety-eight and seven months, he reads a daily news-
paper and watches TV with interest. He has two children, Senator
George Moffett of Chillicothe, and Mrs. Mary Touchstone of the same
address. He has lived in Hardeman County almost seventy years, and
is probably the oldest living person in the county at this time. He
married Ina Farrington on December 27, 1894.
Supplementary to the above in F. L. Moffett's own handwriting
in the office are entries which will prove eternally interesting.470
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960, periodical, 1960; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101186/m1/578/: accessed April 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.