Pete Kendall: You can get to Hood County from here, but it’s not easy

There are three moderately direct routes from Cleburne to Hood County, and each is flawed.

If you take U.S. 67 toward Glen Rose and turn right on Texas 144, you have a fighting chance of being stuck behind a covey of 18-wheelers and school buses, and passing lanes are so few that you’ll miss them if you blink.

If you take Texas 171 to Cresson and turn left on U.S. 377, you’ll find plenty of passing lanes. But if you intend to cruise into the county seat, you’ll need to leave the house a few hours early. Granbury has more stop lights than Carter has pills.

If you take Farm-to-Market Road 4 from Cleburne to Acton, you’ll reduce your mileage, but the road is constantly under construction from water trucks that leave cavernous holes in the asphalt.

How deep are they, you ask? I set a trot line one morning on my former business commute. That afternoon, I removed a 6-pound channel cat.

A couple hundred years ago, nobody worried about getting from Cleburne to Hood County fast. In the first place, Cleburne and Hood County didn’t exist.

The land was thick in native grasses and belonged to the wolves, antelopes, prairie chickens, assorted felines and probably a few pioneering feral hogs.

Around the mid-19th century, travelers discovered just how treacherous the terrain could be.

“Of the country around Godley,” the “Godley History Book” noted, “Mr. J.R. McKinsey wrote in 1876 for the Cleburne Chronicle: ‘Very few houses were to be seen, the country having a wild, romantic and wilderness-like appearance. Antelope, deer, wolves and mustang ponies were the most to interest one as he passed from one section to another.’ ”

It was so far removed from civilization that cell phone service was unavailable.

“ ‘A Mr. Rucker and a Mr. Myers were on a trip searching to what is now Acton, looking for a place to live,’ McKinsey continued.

“McKinsey described what he saw: ‘Night came on and we were compelled to camp out. We were not prepared for this, as we expected to find someone living out there from whom we could beg a night’s lodging. Not so, for the country was wild, dreary and desolate.

“ ‘We spent a very uncomfortable night under the shelter of a lonely Post Oak standing near what is now the residence of Mrs. Halford, daughter of the lamented David Crockett. It rained all during the night. I inscribed my initials on the Post Oak tree.’

“They left their camp early the next morning. They were trying to find their way out and were lost. ‘The rain still came down upon us,’ McKinsey recorded, ‘but we jogged along on the trail, without knowing where it would lead us or the direction we were traveling. All of a sudden, we came in view of a house in a low valley near a branch of a creek.’

“This, evidently, is the location of the Freeland Place.

“ ‘It was the most gloomy and desolate place,’ McKinsey wrote. ‘Two very large leopard cats near by seemed as indifferent and bold at our appearance as if they were masters of the situation.

“ ‘It was known to me later as a “station house” for soldiers on the Belknap Trail leading from Fort Belknap to Fort Graham, and the creek or branch is called Station Branch.’ ”

Station Branch is easy enough to find. Before you get to Fall Creek on FM 4, you’ll see a large sign on the left welcoming you to Station Branch Ranch.

On the ranch sits an ancient log cabin, among the few structures that survived a late 19th century Fall Creek tornado. You didn’t need to know that, but I felt compelled to tell you.

And it provides a tidy introduction to the topic of the remainder of this essay: the community of Fall Creek, part of which is still in Johnson County.

The community was named after the waterway, naturally.

“Fall Creek starts this side of Cresson,” native Julian Massey told me during a tour of the area several years ago. “There’s upper Fall Creek and lower Fall Creek. That’s how the oldtimers separated it. Upper was above [FM 4]. Lower was south. Cresson is on the head of Fall Creek. You can pour water on one side of Cresson, and it goes toward the Trinity. Pour it on the other side, and it goes to the Brazos.

“Daddy [Riley Massey] bought the house I was born and raised in. I believe Tommy Morris had owned it. I don’t know if he built it. We built a second story onto the log room that was already there. There was a big kitchen north of the log room. The house had porches all the way around.

“Both my parents [Riley and Myrtle Carmichael Massey] were born at Fall Creek. My great granddaddy [William Massey] settled on the south river. He had 800 to 900 acres.”

The William and Caroline Massey cabin still stands, proud and tall, ready to withstand mischievous Comanches.

“My mother’s daddy, Major [Archibald] Carmichael, settled on the north river,” Massey said. “That bend is Carmichael Bend. So apparently the Carmichaels got there before the Masseys. The Masseys arrived in 1859. My grandmother Carmichael [Nancy R.] was a Rhodes. She married one of Major’s boys [James].”

The major and the Indians coexisted less than peacefully at times.

“My grandmother said Major would be off running the Indians, and the Indians’ women would come to the house begging. So the Carmichael women would give the Indian women corn while the men were fighting each other.”

The only people begging today in Fall Creek are hungry travelers, still trying to decide which route to take from Cleburne to Hood County.