Today it’s FedEx or UPS. In the 1850s, Fort Worth anxiously awaited the ox freighter

These days people get deliveries from the FedEx driver. But 150 years ago, people got deliveries from the FedOx driver: the ox freighter.

Fort Worth’s first ox freighter was John White. In the 1850s and 1860s White drove an ox-drawn wagon, hauling goods from Fort Worth to Houston and Galveston, then hauling goods from Houston and Galveston back to Fort Worth.

White was born in Germany on Jan. 9, 1819, and came to America as a teenager. By 1853, according to Howard Peak in the June 11, 1922, Star-Telegram, White was freighting for the army in Fort Worth. White later freighted for the town’s first general stores. (Peak in 1856 was the second child born in Fort Worth and as an adult often wrote about the early days.)

Wagons drawn by horses or oxen weren’t driven by just freighters. Wagons were the minivans of the old West into which migrants loaded family and belongings as they traveled westward.

A few yokes (pairs) of oxen were capable of pulling a lot of weight. On Sept. 15, 1858, the Weekly Houston Telegraph reported that all the machinery of a flour mill, including 7,000-pound millstones from Europe’s Pyrenees Mountains, had been delivered by “the same public carrier, the ox wagon.”

The job of the ox freighter was not easy. Roads were few and primitive: rutted and muddy, little more than trails. There were no motels, no HoJos or Cracker Barrels, no roadside parks, no CB radios, good buddy. On top of that, Native Americans did not always appreciate the intrusion of freighters.

Mrs. M. O. Holloway was 12 years old when she came to Fort Worth in 1849. In the May 29, 1921, Star-Telegram she recalled that White once was overdue on his return to town.

“After a few weeks we supposed he had been killed by the Indians,” she recalled.

She said that the day White finally showed up was “a day of great rejoicing.”

Despite the fact that ox freighter John White was out of town much of the time, his face must have been the most popular one in town in early Fort Worth. That’s how Peak remembered White in the July 9, 1922, Star-Telegram.

Peak said that White’s round trip between Fort Worth and Houston took six weeks. On the day White was expected to return to Fort Worth, people would stand on the courthouse square and stare down the road hoping to see the dust raised by White’s team of 12 oxen.

White’s return, Peak wrote, was “the occasion of much enthusiasm and hilarity,” especially when he brought whiskey.

Historian Julia Kathryn Garrett writes in Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph that when White finally returned to town, his freighter was surrounded as townspeople pitched in to help him unload his precious cargo. Townspeople eagerly bought his limited stock of salt, sugar, coffee, dried fruit, flour, gunpowder, lead, seeds, shoes and cloth on a first-come-first-served basis. (Picture a nineteenth-century version of Black Friday at Walmart.)

But then came the railroads, creating billowing, bellowing competition for ox freighters. A train could make in a few days the trip that had taken John White a few weeks.

By the time the Texas & Pacific railroad arrived in Fort Worth in 1876, John White was 55 years old with many miles behind him. By 1880, Fort Worth had rail lines to the east, west, and north. White, then 61, listed his occupation on the 1880 census as “farmer.”

John White, Fort Worth’s first FedOx driver, died in 1904 and is buried in Denton County.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.