brands – Page 2 – Texas History Notebook

Dan Waggoner and His Descendants

Daniel Waggoner was born in 1828 in Tennessee to Solomon and Martha McGaugh Waggoner. Daniel was the second of the siblings to be born in Lincoln County, Tennessee before the family moved to Missouri where most of the other siblings were born. The family finally settled in Hopkins County, Texas. Daniel married Nancy Moore in 1851 in Hopkins County. The following year their only son William Thomas Waggoner was born. Nancy passed away in 1853. Five years later, Daniel married Sicily Ann Halsell, daughter of Electious and Elizabeth Jane Mayes Halsell. Sicily was from a large ranching family, also of Wise County. The couple had no children.

XIT Ranch

(image credit: tshaonline.org)

The XIT was once one of the largest ranches in Texas, comprising 3 million acres along the Texas-New Mexico border in the Panhandle area of the state. In 1879, the State of Texas was looking for funds with which to build the Capitol building. The Texas Legislature appropriated the remote Panhandle acreage to a syndicate led by Illinois natives John and Charles Farwell in exchange for an agreement to build the Austin structure. The original cost of the Capitol building was projected to be $1,500,000 but wound up costing about $3.7 million with the syndicate funding all but about $500,000 that the state picked up.

6666 Ranch

Legend has it that rancher Samuel Burk Burnett won the ranch in a high stakes poker game and that another player, out of money, had bet his ranch on his poker hand, only to lose to Burk Burnett’s hand of four sixes. It makes a great story, right? Burnett denied the story more than once. Nevertheless, the legend has endured and 6666 has been the ranch brand. The capital L is for Loyd, the name of Burnett’s first wife and her family.