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· Central County Ways ·

Central County was a big rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks.

The loneliness was called the Dead Hills.

They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back.

. . . poor trees . . .

The population of Central County was around eleven hundred people: give or take a death here and a birth there or a few strangers deciding to make a new life or old-time residents to move away and never to return or come back soon because they were homesick.

Just like a short history of man, there were two towns in the county.

One of the towns was close to the northern range of mountains. That town was called Brooks. The other town was close to the southern range of mountains. It was called Billy.

The towns were named for Billy and Brooks Paterson: two brothers who had pioneered the county forty years before and had killed each other in a gunfight one September afternoon over the ownership of five chickens.

That fatal chicken argument occurred in 1881 but there was still a lot of strong feeling in the county in 1902 over who those chickens belonged to and who was to fault for the gunfight that killed both brothers and left two widows and nine fatherless children.

Brooks was the county seat but the people who lived in Billy always said, “Fuck Brooks.”