Matador Half-Dugout

Civilization pushed west of the Mississippi, erecting homes as it went. It stopped short of West Texas, however, stunned by the arid, flat country. The land was said to be an “uninhabitable wasteland” by Army explorer R.B. Marcy. So most people avoided the area and moved elsewhere. True adventurers who saw the West Texas plains as a place where cattle could get fat cautiously ventured in. There, they encountered an environment void of anything to disrupt the endless horizon. For shelter, they scooped out a hole in the ground.

Most dugouts were constructed between 1875 and 1900. Dugouts were situated into embankments with their only door facing southeast to catch breezes in summer and protect the inhabitants from cold weather in the winter. Roofs often were made of hides, sod or thatch. Although it did provide protection from the weather, dugouts also attracted intruders. One account described dugout life. “Around-the-clock, year-in, year-out, the greatest abominations to dugout life were the rattlesnakes east of the Pecos … west of it … it was centipedes, insects, scorpions, stinging lizards, tarantulas and vinegaroons.”

Dugouts didn’t last long as family dwellings. Settlers moved into more conventional homes when materials became available. Dugouts remained in use on the plains as bunkhouses or outposts for cowboys who formed a human fence around the rancher’s herds in the years before barbed wire.

The Matador Half-Dugout was a bunkhouse. J.C. Davis started his ranch in 1887 east of present-day Lubbock. He constructed a half-dugout in 1888 on school land he patented a year later. Davis built the dugout from cottonwood trees that grew along the Plum River (the South Pease). He built a fireplace with rocks and rubbed the inside of the dugout with red clay.

The half-dugout sheltered two or three cowhands who worked on the ranch.

Davis traded the property to the Matador Ranch for land elsewhere. The ranch used this half-dugout for its cowboys, who called it the Old Red Line Camp (one account had it as the Old Red Lake Camp). In the winter, when the chuck wagon was brought in, as many as nine cowboys shared the space. The cowboys left carvings, drawings and bullet holes in the red clay walls.