Don't give up on your crazy ideas

Food trucks are a hot thing these days but the idea of making your business mobile has been around for a while — take for instance, the first business in Portales.

According to the book “Roosevelt County History and Heritage,” sometime prior to 1898, Josh Morrison operated a really small general store in the Big Salt Lake area just west of the Texas state line in east-central New Mexico. It was nearby what was known as Portales Springs, where ranches, including the DZ Ranch, ran cattle.

Morrison — known as Uncle Josh -- was eeking out a living selling goods to the cowboys of the DZ and other ranches as well as travelers and freighters on the road from Yellow House Canyon to Fort Sumner, which ran past the spring.

A new railroad, the Pecos Valley and Northeastern Railroad, known locally as the “Peavine,” was being built up the Pecos Valley from Pecos, Texas, to Roswell during the late years of the 19th century. By 1898 the rail bed had pushed northeast through the sandhills on its way toward Amarillo.

A tent city had sprung along that section not far from Portales Springs and Uncle Josh took notice in an enterprising and capitalist sort of way.

A dollar was there to be made and so Morrison lifted his wood-framed store building onto wooden sleds and hitched it to his wagon and a stout team and took off across the prairie to help found the city of Portales and become the first business in Portales.

According to early day Portales resident Clint Fairly it wasn’t as Herculean a feat as it might seem because the store’s flimsy construction was “no more than a shirt tail.”

Morrison was in business for a bit during Portales’ early years and some of his ancestors still live in the city. Since that time lots of other businesses have been started “on a shirt tail,” and many of those succeeded and thrived because of the hardy pioneer spirit of the people.

I’ve watched lots of people, including my father, do things that seemed just as crazy but most of those ideas worked out eventually because he wasn’t afraid to act on his idea and he didn’t give up easily.

Working at the Chamber of Commerce in Portales I see lots of folks going off half-cocked on their business dreams. Underfinanced and unprepared for business they can’t be swayed. I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to explain those things to them because I’ve seen it work. Instead, I shake my head and explain to those questioning the sanity of the situation “that feller there is just keeping the independent in the term independent businessman.”