"We shall be in Hell before breakfast or San Angelo by noon"...

John Moore Shannon and his wife agreed on this as they rattled across southwest Texas in Crockett County's first Model-T one fine morning.  The couple had taken the old reliable horse-drawn carriage into town before daybreak to pick up a new horseless one, just delivered by rail and waiting to be driven away from the depot in Ozona.  The lack of an instruction manual didn't bother the rancher until he realized he had no idea of how to stop the damn thing once it started moving...

Shannon had already done some serious and rough traveling before this brief moment of crisis in the desert.  Born in 1849 to a New Orleans family of comfortable means, he saw childhood privilege transformed into abject poverty after the Civil War and his family scattered to search for new lives.  He worked his way across the country to California where he hired on as a sheep-shearer.  With a few dollars saved and interested in ranching, Shannon crossed the Pacific  to Australia to visit his dying mother.  The return voyage led to a shipboard romance with one Margaret Campbell whom he followed to her native Scotland.  Married two years later in 1874, the couple headed out to New Mexico and Kansas and then Missouri where John tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at real estate speculation. Next stop was Texas where, in the dry creosote bush country of Howard County, arriving with a net worth of $2.65, he got work as a railroad laborer in Big Spring...

His "big break" came in 1885 when Shannon and two other men contracted to fence the southern portion of the massive XIT ranch, said to have been the largest ranch in the world with more than three million acres, in the Texas Panhandle.  With his share of the profits, Shannon bought sheep and land in the semi-arid desert of the Concho Valley.  He prospered.  By 1895, he owned 256,000 acres of Crockett County as well as good chunks of Irion and Mitchell counties.  He ventured into banking and providing local telephone service...

Although John M Shannon was not the first to herd sheep in southwest Texas, he was among the first to realize the western Concho Valley and adjacent Trans-Pecos had the potential to dominate the nation's sheep and goat market.  He organized the Wool Growers Central Storage Company in 1909 almost immediately after the coming of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient line.  The firm established San Angelo as the "Wool Capital of the World."  Sheep had been profitable in Texas for decades with major shipping centers in San Antonio by the 1880s and in Kerrville by the 1890s.  With the new facilities and regularly scheduled rail service in nearby San Angelo, ranchers could cut travel time and distance to market by many days and 200 miles or more...  

It was perhaps inevitable that the 6'6" rancher with unusually long arms would become a legendary eccentric.  Bearded and described by a friend as resembling a Viking on a raiding party, Shannon was a notorious skinflint who used mesquite thorns to fasten his clothes when he lost a button.  Nor was he shy about taking off boots during business meetings and plopping feet on the table to cut his toe-nails.  The boots usually had holes in the soles.  More than once, Shannon commented he'd rather walk on cactus than wear new boots.  He usually dressed like a sheepherder, and a down-on-his luck one, at that.  Folklorist J Frank Dobie recounts the probably true story of a traveling salesman who met a bum camped out near the Concho River.  Feeling sorry for this freakish and pitiful-looking fellow, the salesman offered the man a dollar to groom and water his horse.  The tramp thanked him and went to work.  Talking to a banker in San Angelo later that day, the salesman mentioned his adventure with the strange character by the river.  The banker listened to the description and then noted the bum was customarily addressed locally as "Mr Shannon" by virtue of the fact he was the richest man in the western half of Texas...

John Moore Shannon was likely a more complicated man than his reputation as a crank suggests.  He may have been self-starting and self-reliant but does not seem to have subscribed to the notion of "every man for himself."  During an economic downturn affecting his fellow ranchers, he co-signed or otherwise personally guaranteed over three million dollars in bank loans to his neighbors and linked his financial future with theirs.  A devout Republican despite the party's role in the destruction of the Old South of his childhood, he may or may not have believed in eternal rewards and a heavenly God, saying that organized religion was useful for women and small children...

As for the latter category of persons, John and Margaret Shannon had neither son nor daughter to carry the family name on for another generation.  In their old age, they left their ranch and turned the fourth floor of the Angelus Hotel in San Angelo into a primary residence.  John Moore Shannon wanted his wealth to be useful to his neighbors, especially those with limited financial resources.  His wife agreed.  She died in 1931, not quite three years after her husband passed in 1928, shy of his 75th birthday.  Her will followed her late husband's wishes: the Shannon fortune would establish a hospital for the people of Southwest Texas.  Its endowment, including oil and gas royalties, came to the neighborhood of eighty million dollars...

Note:  Photograph of John M Shannon from San Angelo Standard Times archives