A Town Remembers
by C. W. (Bill) Smith
R
Foundation of motel where the Johnson family lost their lives. All photos in this story are courtesy of Terrell County Memorial Museum.
ain had fallen steadily through
the afternoon and night of June
10, 1965, at times a drizzle, at
times the bottom seeming to drop out.
A stalled thunderstorm in the hills and
canyons of the Edwards Plateau west of
Sanderson, Texas dumped as much as
11 inches of rain in that area by sunrise
of June 11, according to local ranchers.
Sanderson Creek and all its attendant
feeders quickly filled up, pushing a
mass of water down the watershed, try-
ing to find a way through the brush and
mesquite-clogged waterways to empty
12
Cenizo
into the Rio Grande. Each arroyo,
ravine and rivulet fed even more water
until the flood became a torrent. As the
water moved along it took out fences,
railroad bridges, telephone poles and
scrub vegetation, creating a massive
battering ram as it moved downstream
to take out even larger structures.
Six miles west of Sanderson a long
diversion dam channeled the deluge.
The dike had been thrown up in the
1930s when the state was building US
Highway 90, to force Sanderson Creek
under one large bridge to save money,
Second Quarter 2015
rather than fording the snaking creek
bed with two smaller bridges. As water
from the creek rapidly filled the area
behind the dam with its narrow outlet,
the earthwork soon collapsed in a roar
and an even larger wave of water and
debris headed toward the hapless town.
Just west of Sanderson the water
from two large draws, Three Mile and
Red Mill, came crashing into the mael-
strom of debris, bridge timbers, tele-
phone poles and cross ties, punching
the water into a black mass riding six or
seven feet above the already-swollen
creekbed, making a canyon-wall-to-
canyon-wall battering ram some 15 feet
high and five football fields wide. The
water swirled with whirlpools, eddies
and currents, creating what one man
said looked like a veritable tornado of
water. Now the water had become a
hideous black monster, ready to devour
the town of Sanderson.
• • • • •
Peto Perez was just a 15-year-old
kid, that summer. Slim Muller had
given him a summer job pumping gas