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Nesterville
and Hardin Store (Burkburnett Cemetery) In 1880 there were about 12 families in the area of Gilbert. The range cowboys called these people "nesters" and therefore called the settlement Nesterville. In the fall of this year John Hardin purchased a store in Nesterville or Gilbert. This log cabin store had been built and stocked by George W. Darby in the spring of 1880. Darby had been forced to liquidate his business because he had extended to much credit to the poor settlers who could not meet their commitments. Hardin paid Darby fifty dollars for the building and his meager stock of goods. Darby had also been the first postmaster for that area, so this job was transferred to Hardin. Hardin moved the building to the site of the dugout. He immediately made a trip to Fort Worth to buy a wagon load of goods. Hardin appointed his wife, Cordelia, to be general manager of the store. The mother of Cordelia, Annie Adams, served as store clerk to the occasional customers. Since the store was in good hands, Hardin continued to farm and trade. There was also a Baptist Church and a school in Nesterville. There were about 30 pupils attending the school several months of the year. The community held fish fries on the river, went plum hunting and shot deer and turkey. Usually after church services, everyone would go to someone's home for a community dinner. These occasions were the height of social life. The drought of 1881 forced some of the families to leave. But the Hardins clung to their new home. They had seen its beauty before and they would see it again. In the fall of 1881, representatives of a fertilizer company moved into the Wichita Settlement. They advertised to the settlers that they would buy all the buffalo bones they could get for $14 to $18 per ton. Since white hunters had slaughtered the buffalo by the thousands, the northern Texas prairies were strewn with hundreds of tones of buffalo bones. The settlers collected and sold the bones. Hardin participated in this trade. The Comanche, Kiowa and Wichita Indians were placed on reservations in and around the Wichita Mountains. Hardin was a trader at heart and so were the Indians. He enjoyed a profitable business by carrying on trading relations with them. The Indians traded government issued goods for other merchandise which they desired.
The Longhorn The early American settlers in Texas had another name for the Longhorns; Spanish cattle. They were cattle whose ancestors first arrived hundreds of years earlier, with Columbus, with the Spaniards. The Longhorn roamed wild in Texas. The name was taken because of the horns. A Longhorn reached his full growth at about 10 years of age but the horns grew as long as the animal lived. The horns grew up to 7 ft. 9 in. between the tips. One steer named Champion had horns to measure from tip to tip, 9 ft. 7 in. He was exhibited all over the U. S. Both bulls and cows possessed the long horns and knew how to use them. It was said that the longhorns were fifty times as dangerous to a man on foot as the fiercest buffalo. They had survived as wild animals because they could take care of themselves. The longhorns could locate water - smell was one way - as much as 15 miles away. A small herd of cows actually would put out two cows to stand guard while the others went to a watering place. They would forage by night and hid in the thickets by day. The longhorn could live only on grass and water. In the winter, they ate the bark of the cottonwood tree. When grass was scarce, a longhorn could put its front hoofs against a large tree trunk and stretch up to eat the leaves of the thorny tree known as the mesquite. Because the Longhorn could survive so well, it prospered. There were millions. There were so many that they would be able for some years to support the men, women and children of Texas. There is perhaps no other case in history where a civilized people depended so greatly, for so much, on a single wild animal.
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