At some point, in maybe 1950, my close friend said that he heard that an airplane had crash-landed in a field south of Freer and the plane was still sitting there. A local volunteer fire department chief told someone who told someone and the news worked its way around to us.

This was mesquite and brush country...cactus and caliche...there were few fields south of Freer. My friend knew that area and he had a good idea where it was, so we decided to go see it.

He had a Model A pickup that had the bed removed, and then he got a coupe body and put that on the frame. We drove out over a bunch of caliche roads and sure enough there was a somewhat open field that had been dragged.

This "dragging" process was when someone wanted some acreage cleared so he would hire two bulldozers and they would hook a big anchor chain between them. Then, maybe 300 feet apart, they would drag that chain across the property and this would pull over mesquite trees and break up all the cactus.

Some people thought that this dragging was sufficient to let cattle graze but after a couple of years, it wasn’t anymore because all they had accomplished was break and scatter cactus and then now many of the cactus pieces had taken root. After another three years, the cactus could be so thick it would be difficult if not impossible to walk through.

After dragging, the mesquite should be shoved into big piles and burned. This, in the heat of the summer, would dry out the broken cactus and prevent it from taking root. Then the field could be cleared to become whatever the owner wanted that the caliche, heat, and dry weather would permit.

The pilot of the Bellanca was lucky that a field was there and in pretty good condition.

The Bellanca was a beautiful four-place, low-wing, wood and fabric plane with retractable landing gear, and it had a distinctive tri-tail. It had a vertical fin and then near the tips of the horizontal tail were two smaller fins to assist yaw control when landing.

The Bellanca fuselage had a slight airfoil shape. The idea was that the fuselage would provide some lift to augment the wing lift. Over the years, there were at least three different engines in the various Bellanca models. This one had a horizontally opposed engine rather than the radial engine used on some models.

It was red and trimmed in cream. It had been well cared for.

The landing had been a good, controlled one with landing gear retracted. The prop was not broken but with the gear retracted, there would have to be some damage to the undersides of wing and fuselage. I would guess that this would have been more cosmetic than structural.

I went back a couple of days later and a section of fence had been temporarily taken down and there were tracks where some equipment had come in and they probably removed the wings and then lifted everything onto soft pallets on a flat-bed truck.