Who Shot J.W.?

Solving a cold case history mystery of a murder on the lonely Llano Estacado.

- Bill Neal

With cold, unblinking eyes, a well dressed gentleman stared at J.W. Jarrott as he walked with his wife, Mollie, down the main street of Lubbock, Texas, in August 1902. J.W. said to Mollie: “There’s a man I’d rather not see in this country.”

After the Jarrotts passed, the stranger quietly disappeared.

Settling a Slice of No-Man’s Land

That spring, J.W. had begun settling his family and 24 “nesters” on uninhabited plains southwest of Lubbock—a semiarid, windswept wilderness, without trees or flowing streams.

Before the Santa Fe railroad reached Lubbock in 1909, only 293 hardy pioneers populated the county, the 1900 census reported. Just 44 lived to the west, in Hockley County.

J.W. brought his homesteaders to southern Hockley County; the northern part was largely owned by XIT Ranch. A broke Texas had traded this land after the capitol burned down in Austin. In 1882, the legislature granted a Chicago group 3.05 million acres in exchange for a red granite capitol, a frontier skyscraper that stands to this day.

Cattle barons resented any intrusion on “their” turf—particularly by nesters. And particularly J.W.

The lawyer had seized an opportunity to settle a slice of no-man’s land, pointed out to him by his friend, the commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, Charles Rogan. A surveyor error left an unfenced vacancy that ranchers utilized as free grasslands. Rogan classified this strip “school land” and placed it on the market to homesteaders, pursuant to Texas’s Four-Sections Act.