Henry W. Strong, scout, rancher, and frontiersman, was born in Carroll County, Mississippi, on March 27, 1849. He spent his early years on his father’s turpentine plantation in Choctaw County, Alabama. Strong left Springhill Catholic College at Mobile, Alabama, to join Company I, Fifteenth Confederate Cavalry, for service during the Civil War.qv He moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Texas in 1870 and in 1871 began raising hogs around Flat Springs near Jacksboro. About 1873 he quit ranching to become a scout and guide for Ranald S. Mackenzie and later claimed to have laid out the Mackenzie trail in the winter of 1873-74. In 1878-79 Strong lived in the Gilbert Creek area in Wichita County. He went to Hood County in 1880 but in 1882 was back in Wichita County running a sheep ranch on the Allen Palmer place. Strong moved to Henrietta in 1888 and spent twenty years in Grayson County, 1889-1909. Because of his knowledge of the Red River area he was a witness in the suit of Oklahoma v. Texas (1921), involving title to the oil rights in Red River north of Burkburnett. Strong was living near Iowa Park in 1926, when he wrote My Frontier Days and Indian Fights on the Plains of Texas. He married Pinkee Parks on July 7, 1875, in Jacksboro. He died in Palestine in 1927.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Louise Kelly, Wichita County Beginnings (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1982). Henry Strong, My Frontier Days and Indian Fights on the Plains of Texas (Waco, 1926). Ernest Wallace, Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier (Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1964).
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