This is a picture I took recently of an old line shack camp about 20 miles West of Canadian, Texas on the South side of the Canadian River. When I was a youngster I recall the wooden pens on the North end of town where local ranchers would corral their cattle once they got them to town in order to load them on to wooden cars and ship them via the ATSF railroad North to Kansas City or Chicago usually.

These shacks were a resting camp for cowboys driving their herds from their ranches to the stock pens in Canadian. Their horses were quartered in the back and the front two rooms were for the cowboys to bunk.  

My friend Kelly Ward and I played in those old stockyards many a time. We invented a game of tag where we chased one another but our feet could not touch the ground. Both of us could only walk/run on the board fences and close or open gates to foil which one was chasing the other.

In those days local children had more freedom to explore and expand their imagination without worrying about somebody with a cell phone calling 911 and reporting "kids running a muck on the train tracks," or "kids with shotguns on first street shooting pigeons."

Common sense disappeared shortly after those old wooden stock pens did and paved streets arrived.

Happy Trails...