Tewa and Dine’ Indigenous people who also engaged in pastoralism likely referred to sheepherders as Kuwa P’aanu or Na’nee-kaadii. The Pastores and Indigenous sheep tenders traveled as far eastward as present-day Oldham County. Later, many Tewa headed north and entered Colorado through the San Luis Valley. What is now New Mexico did not achieve statehood until 1912. Before that, permanent colonial settlements did not exist until 1876, when Casimero Romero, a resident of Mora County, New Mexico, settled on the Canadian at a site where the old west town of Tascosa developed.
Following an old Comanchero trail, the Romero family travelled on a train of 14 brightly painted schooner wagons, each pulled by four yoke of oxen. They brought with them a dozen hired hands, their families and three thousand sheep, numerous horses and enough cows to provide milk and beef for the fledgling settlement. Also, to the settlement, the Agapito Sandoval family came with another fifteen hundred sheep and a blacksmith named Henry Kimball, its first English resident.
In addition to herding sheep, Romero’s men set about manufacturing adobe bricks. A year later they began building a plaza, which included a ranch house surrounded by a truck garden and a grove of cottonwood trees all watered by a newly completed ditch irrigation system.
Other families from this first group of settlers built their own homes and later joined by other Pastores who added the names of Trujillo, Montoya, and Barrego to the mix. By 1880 the Spanish-Mexican-Indigenous populations along the Canadian River in the Tascosa vicinity numbered almost three hundred.
Soon cattlemen arrived in the area, laying claim to land. Rather than dispute the land claims and resulting fences, most of the sheepmen drifted back to New Mexico and some into Colorado, where free range was still a way of life. But a few of the Spanish settlers remained, choosing to develop other enterprises.
In 1882 Casimero Romero traded his pastoral pastime for a new profession. He established a freight hauling business between Tascosa and Dodge City, and its success allowed him to diversify further. At one time he owned a hotel and restaurant in Dodge City and operated a butcher shop in Tascosa. When the railroads began to cross the Panhandle, he downsized his freighting route to provide service on a local level.
Twenty years after leading the first group of sheepherders eastward, Romero decided to return to New Mexico, where he bought a ranch and relocated his family in 1896. Although the pastores had a relatively short tenure along the Canadian River, they played some important roles in the development of the Texas Panhandle. Casimero Romero could be considered the ‘founding father’ of Old Tascosa. His freight business connected various outposts and isolated communities, thus becoming critically important in the creation of trade routes and towns in the Panhandle and surrounding areas.
Today a few adobe bricks, scattered along the creek beds around Old Tascosa speak of the brief residence of New Mexico’s pastores. But many of the place names on the Llano Estacado were chosen by these early settlers and illustrates a direct link to their European Spanish heritage.
Information used in writing this story came from two Texas history books, The Texas Panhandle Frontier by Frederick W. Rathjen, and Panhandle Pilgrimage by Pauline Durrett Robertson and R.L. Robertson.
For High Plains Public Radio, I’m Debra Bolton in Manhattan KS.
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High Plains History is a production of High Plains Public Radio.
