The Liberty Gazette
June 27, 2023
Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely
Way back in the Mesozoic era, before there were airplanes, the Mastodon and Wooly Mammoth used to meet their dinosaur friends at a big watering hole about 500 miles west of here, so we’re told. More than a week later, Alvar Nunez happened upon it, probably the first European to do so. While the dinos left record of their presence in the form of bones, Nunez documented his journey on paper in 1585. An Eastern Apache tribe met him at the big water and offered him food and clothing. He’d been shipwrecked and traveling through what we now call Texas. The Comanches didn’t exist yet, but sometime later when they formed out of the Shoshone tribe, they too discovered this great big spring near a river. For the next 200 years that the Comanche ruled the area without rival, the big spring favored by dinosaurs became a holy site and the heart of Comanche existence.
A little more time passed, all the while the remains of Mammoth and friends becoming geology, and the area was perfect for laying rails for steam engines. Towns like Midland, Odessa, Abilene, and Big Spring sprung up. Then all this development caused the water table to drop. So today we might ask why Big Spring is named as it is, and we can imagine Sabre-toothed tigers and Paluxysaurus Jonesi (our state dinosaur!) seeing their reflection as they lap up cool spring water. And then we can consider the whole circle of life thing and how over the millennia oil has formed and been discovered in that same area. This brings us up to what may have been about the time of your grandparents or great-grandparents, and you may have heard tales over Christmas dinners of the excitement when oil was discovered in the Permian Basin. The prospect of opportunity brought some wily characters to West Texas. Fellows like Seymour Ernest Jacobson Cox, living at an exciting time in history – the birth of the aeroplane.
It was 1919 when Cox caught wind of potential gushers in Big Spring. He acquired drilling leases on 200,000 acres on the McDowell ranch. When one of his wells struck, Cox planned a Texas-sized celebration. Investors came from around the world, just as the dinosaurs had, hoping to get a piece of the action, and Cox was the kind of guy who could get them hyped. “This black gold,” he proclaimed to the crowd, “is a messenger of a new day in Big Spring and West Texas.” And with that, according to the Big Spring Herald, a local cowboy appeared overhead “riding” Cox’s single-engine aeroplane, “perched on a saddle in front of the tail and blazing away with his six-shooter.”
We don’t know which airplane it was, but Cox had worked with Glenn Curtiss to build the Curtiss-Cox, which he named “Cactus Kitten,” and which would go on to win second place at the 1921 Pulitzer Trophy Air Race in Omaha, Nebraska, flown by Clarence B. Coombs, and made possible by the life gift of dinosaurs.
ElyAirLines.blogspot.com
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