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A former slave who became a cowboy, a rancher, and a Texas legend
Daniel Webster Wallace was born in bondage in South Texas. By the time of his death, nearly eight decades later, he'd amassed a fortune—and a place in West Texas history.
He contended with thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, dust storms, outlaw gangs, poisonous snakes, disease, infection, sunstroke, lack of food and water, stampedes, and skirmishes with Native Americans. “Even now, in 2024, a lot of people aren’t aware of how diverse cowboy culture was,” says Robert Tidwell, interim director of collections, exhibits, and research at Texas Tech’s National Ranching Heritage Center, in Lubbock. Realizing he needed to learn how to read and write before he could become a successful rancher, he enrolled as a second grader at a segregated Black school in Navarro County, almost three hundred miles east of his newly acquired land.
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