Texas Stories I Like to Tell My Friends

Real-life Tales of Love, Betrayal, and Dreams from the History of the Lone Star State

T. Lindsey Baker

• Publisher: Abilene Christian University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780891128588
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

An entertaining collection of colorful stories from Texas history that give readers plenty of reason to laugh, cry, and gain an even greater understanding of the people and moments that have been a part of the Texas story."It looked like millions of stars were shooting down to the ground, " said Julia Palmer Roberts, with "streaks of fire flying in every direction." The 1833 meteor shower struck fear into the hearts of people across America, including Julia's family in Texas, who met the phenomenon on their knees, praying for help during what they were sure was the end of the world. Julia's is just one of the stories that author and historian T. Lindsay Baker relates in Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends. Baker has been finding and telling stories from Texas history for decades. Even before he published his popular Ghost Towns of Texas books, Baker was writing a regular column for the local newspaper in Thurber, Texas, inviting readers to laugh and cry with stories from years-gone-by. Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends brings those stories together for readers all over. This volume focuses on stories that originated in the 1800s, bringing out many details about pioneering, slavery, the Civil War, and forgotten moments in time like the forming of a ghost town, a failed railway strike, the tracking of a horse thief, and more. Alternately startling and enlivening but always interesting, Texas Stories provides a valuable reading experience for anyone interested in the stories of people who came before us.

VI.
PRAIRIES AND LAKES

Courtship at the Cow Lot Gate

In 1904 Newton C. Duncan of Wheelock, Texas, told a tale of old-time Texas at the annual meeting of the Old Settlers' Association of Bell County. When I read it, I thought that it deserved retelling.

Duncan prefaced his remarks with an explanation that the Republic of Texas in 1837 granted to all men who had fought in the Texan Revolution land in payment for their services. As soon as the men received their grants, if they were single, most of them started looking for wives as helpmates in settling on the land. Before long just about all the eligible females were either married or engaged.

Duncan remembered one man named Sam who received his discharge from the army a little later than most of the other soldiers, and by the time that he returned home virtually all of the ladies and girls in the vicinity were committed to other suitors except for an older widow, Mrs. Sikes. Later Sam found a girl named Lizzie who was much more to his liking than the widow, but Lizzie played hard to catch.

On one occasion Sam met Lizzie at the gate to her father's cow lot, where the girl was milking the family's cows. Lizzie shut the gate, keeping Sam on the outside. Leaning over the gate, he told her that he had come on serious business and wanted to talk with her, proceeding to enumerate all the inducements that he could think of for her to marry him, including his land grant. He finally admitted to Lizzie that there was no one left in the neighborhood but herself and the widow Sikes.

“Well, why didn't you take the widow, Sam?” queried Lizzie.

In response Sam explained that he had found three objections to wedding the widow. “Wa'al, I found on close examination she had lost an eye,” he said, continuing, “then she's red-headed, roman-nosed and worst of all, she smokes a gourd-neck pipe that will hold half a plug of tobacco, and I have always had a horror of being burnt.”

Lizzie said that she thought Sam's judgment was probably sound, suggesting that she had cast her eye on him before. “I've been thinking something about getting married an' I reckon I had just as well begin talking about it now as any time,” she said.

Lizzie then stated that she would consider marrying Sam, but only on three conditions: “You've got to make me three promises; first, that you won't drink whiskey; second, that you won't gamble; and last, that you won't ride a pitching horse.”

Sam said that he could easily agree to the first two conditions, but the third one presented some problems. “I've already promised Major Golden,” he replied, “to catch some buffalo calves for him next spring, and mighty nigh all his horses pitch.”

Lizzie apparently concluded that two promises out of three was pretty good so she went to the house, talked with her parents about the match and agreed to marry Sam a few days later.

Thus the courtship at the cow lot gate came to fruition before the judge when Sam and Lizzie became man and wife.

An Irishwoman's Memories

“We left Dublin, Ireland, on the good ship Quebec in 1853,” remembered Mrs. A. D. Gentry when interviewed at Fort Stockton, Texas, almost one hundred years ago. As a child with her family, she sailed first to Liverpool and then on to New Orleans, the trip taking over three months.

Having lost her mother to yellow fever at New Orleans, in April 1857 the little girl was sent to live with family members in Belton, Texas. She sailed from New Orleans to Galveston on the Swamp Fox and then spent about three weeks in Houston awaiting her relatives, who carried her to her new home in Belton in May.

“We made the journey from Houston to Belton in a buggy,” she remembered. “It was in Belton that I saw my first biscuits and cornbread,” which she considered “very unpalatable.” Soon she learned otherwise, and in time she came to relish both.

After the outbreak of the Civil War, the young Irishwoman made do with only the barest of necessities. “Our coffee was made of parched wheat and our cake we sweetened with honey, for there was no sugar to be had, and at times we made tea from live oak leaves,” she said.

The women of Belton militantly appropriated many of the items that they needed for housekeeping. When they required cotton fiber for spinning, they stopped the government wagons hauling it and confiscated what they needed from protesting drivers. “When we had obtained all that we needed, we told them to drive on,” she reported. On one occasion during the war, six hundred pairs of cotton cards were delivered to a mercantile firm in Belton. “The women just went down and demanded that the cards be given to them, as they had to have them and had no money to pay for them,” she said, adding, “This was done though with grumbling consent.”

After the close of the war, the young woman married J. J. Greenwood and moved to the frontier near Lampasas, Texas. There she found herself again forced to rely on her own resources. “We cooked on an open fire in huge iron [Dutch] ovens and pots,” she noted. From the heat of the cookfires, she remembered, “a woman needed no rouge . . . to render her complexion a carmen shade.”

Everything that the family used required tremendous amounts of labor to produce. Candles, for example, were made at home from the tallow rendered from the fat of butchered cattle. “To make the tallow hard,” she explained, “we used our own manufactured beeswax, making a mixture which answered every purpose.”

On the frontier, Mrs. Gentry made an entire suit of clothes for her husband from scratch, spinning and weaving the fabric from a mixture of cotton and wool and sewing it entirely by hand. Reflecting on her efforts, she reminisced, “It was not at all a bad looking suit for that day, and I marvel now when I look back and I wonder how I did it.”

Texas Fur Trade

When one thinks about the fur trade, ordinarily one thinks of the Rocky Mountains and the intrepid mountain men at their rendezvous. Certainly the Brazos River of Texas doesn't come to mind, but the fur trade once flourished there.

Seventy years ago historian Eugene C. Barker discovered in the Nacogdoches Archives at the Texas State Library an 1832 letter that sheds important light on the day-to-day life of Texas fur traders. In the letter Indian trader Francis Smith wrote from Fort Tenoxtitlan, on the Brazos River in present-day Burleson County, to A. G. and R. Mills in Brazoria, Texas. More than anything else, the letter presents a want list of goods that Smith needed for the coming summer trade.

On March 11, 1832, Smith reported trading with a Frenchman for eight tanned buffalo robes, with American hunters for cattle hides, and with Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and Kickapoo Indians for beaver pelts. “My cart is now loaded with beef hides, deer skins, buffalo hides & robes, some leopard [cougar] & beaver,” Smith reported. “My oxen are tied to the wheels and are to start for Brazoria tomorrow morning.”

Among the goods that Smith expected to need for the Indian trade were such varied items as silk handkerchiefs, fishing lines, spurs, small check pattern calico cloth, straight awls, tin cups and pans, pocket knives, axes, and tomahawks. Not all the goods Smith had received had been satisfactory. “I have found that the common strouding is not good for those beaver hunters,” he said. “They will not wear but tolerable broadcloth.”

Trader Smith also wanted a good wagon to transport his furs and peltries. “Please . . . send to Cincinnati for a first rate large ox wagon for the road with . . . tires not less than 2 inches wide.” He continued, “I cannot do without it. I am willing to pay the price, but I want one that will please me. I have the money laid by to pay for it.”

Smith's Indian customers were often particular about their wants, and he attempted to meet their desires. He wrote, for example, “French or Mackinaw blankets is all the sort that will sell here.” Another place he complained, “the keg tobacco I cannot give to the Indians. I have sold wine several times [but] it has been returned as often.”

The shoes he received were especially unsatisfactory. “Those prunella shoes would never sell here. They have two faults: no heels & square toes. Please never send me any square toes. I send you [back] one dozen of them and keep the half dozen not to be without shoes. I think they may last me 17 years if I take good care of them.”

In closing his letter, Smith expressed the frustration he felt in being so isolated at his post on the Brazos. “I do not know how to get my money to you. I cannot shut up and go down, for I am the only one that has anything to sell of consequence.”

The Gainesville Cyclone of 1854

Eight-year-old Tommy and nine-year-old Louise Howeth, brother and sister, lie side-by-side in the Fairview Cemetery at Gainesville in the Red River Valley. Their graves are in what today is Division D in the burial ground, in front and south of the chapel. The thing that sets them apart from the other people there is that they started the cemetery.

The story of Tommy and Louise goes back to the evening of Sunday, May 28, 1854. They were in the home of their parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Howeth, together with an aunt and uncle and their two children. The Howeths lived on the fringe of settlement, their home being one of the handful that had been built west of Gainesville.

In May 1854 Gainesville was barely a town. When W. B. Parker visited the community a few weeks later, he described it as being a “collection of five or six log cabins, dignified with the name of a town.”

On the evening of May 28, 1854, the sky darkened and the winds began to rise as a typical late springtime convectional storm brewed toward the west. W. W. Howeth, then a boy, later recalled, “A tornado was forming, and in a few minutes . . . reached from the earth to the cloud above, with all its blackness, whirling and roaring.”

Having nowhere else to seek shelter, the two families all huddled in William Howeth's cabin. Little did they imagine the force that the cyclone was about to exert. The entire house was blown down upon its inmates, killing all of the children but one. The two wives were so severely injured that their lives were threatened.

Other frontier families in the Gainesville area suffered as well. Mrs. William C. Twitty and her stepsister, a Mrs. Olivo, had spent the Sunday visiting in the home of Mrs. Twitty's father, Daniel Montague. Late that afternoon, as the two ladies headed for their respective homes, the clouds darkened and the thunder began to rumble.

The Standard in Clarksville, farther down the Red River Valley, reported that the homes of both the Twitty and the Montague families were “uprooted . . . even the bed clothes torn to shreds by the force of the wind.” The storm struck after Mrs. Olivo had returned home, and she saved her children from its fury only by “placing them in a small cellar under the floor,” although she herself was seriously hurt.

In the same neighborhood, James Rutledge suffered damage to crops and home. “The roof of his house was blown clear away and has not yet been found,” reported the paper.

Some of the damage was incredibly gruesome. When he passed through Gainesville shortly after the storm, W. B. Parker noted “a horse was blown into a tree, where it happened to catch by its fore-leg and shoulder; these were torn from the body and were still hanging there, the balance of the carcass lying in a field a full quarter of a mile off.”

Summarizing the devastation at Gainesville, The Standard described the cyclone as having been “a gale unparalleled save by the hurricanes of the tropics” . . . and that it was.

The Greek Engineer at the Compress

John Bohopolo was his name—the Greek engineer at the cotton compress in Gatesville, Texas—and R. L. “Uncle Bob” Saunders knew him well. A century ago Saunders worked as a grease monkey for Bohopolo at the Southwestern Compress Company in Gatesville.

Large-scale cotton cultivation came to Coryell County after the Civil War. Farmers from other southern states migrated there, settling in the river valleys where the bottomland proved especially fertile. The rich soil in the bottoms averaged producing a bale of cotton to the acre. Since most of the farmers had big families, they had ready supplies of labor to pick the harvest in late autumn and winter.

With increased cotton production, it was necessary for the Coryell County raisers to ship it to market as inexpensively as possible. In 1882 the Cotton Belt Railway came to Gatesville, and soon its trains began relieving the situation by hauling hundreds of cotton bales to market. A difficulty that the shippers encountered, however, was that the bales not only weighed five hundred pounds apiece but they also were bulky. Gatesville had no compress.

A cotton compress is an industrial machine which exerts high pressures to mash cotton bales together tightly for shipment. A compressed bale measures only about half the size of an uncompressed bale. The economy of transportation for compressed bales is obvious.

Not long after the arrival of the railroad, the Southwestern Compress Company of Tyler, Texas, built a compress adjacent to the Cotton Belt tracks in Gatesville. The complex included a long, raised wooden loading platform with the compress machinery near its center. An office stood at one end, while the boiler producing the steam power to operate the heavy machinery was at the other.

The Tyler firm sent Earl Fain to supervise the new compress, while it employed John Bohopolo, the Greek engineer, to run the steam equipment. Integral to the successful operation of the compress were six black workers, all of them highly skilled, who the company also sent to Gatesville from Tyler. They were the “press men” and the “truckers,” responsible for keeping a steady flow of bales moving to and from the compress machinery on hand-drawn four-wheel carts called “trucks.” Martin Payne and George Johnson were the two press men, “and they knew their business,” Saunders related. Overseeing the work of the truckers, Payne and Johnson kept a steady stream of trucks in motion when the press was running. When Payne called for more cotton, the truckers according to Saunders “would sure go in a long lope” pulling their cotton-laden carts.

With Fain supervising the overall operation of the compress and the black laborers moving the bales of cotton where needed, engineer Bohopolo ran the steam equipment. “He was the man that pulled the levers that controlled the pressure rams,” Saunders said.

Bohopolo came to Gatesville from Goose Creek in Harris County, and like most Greeks, he loved the sea. “He used to tell me,” Saunders related, “that when he wasn't working as a compress engineer, he owned a boat and fished and smuggled quite a bit . . . in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Having lived on the sea, the Greek had learned many of the English language oaths of mariners, and he rarely hesitated to use them to get results. “Believe me,” Saunders said, “everybody stepped lively when old man John Bohopolo screamed a few of them deepsea curses.”

The Greek engineer was as striking in appearance as he was in behavior, every day wearing a black wool broadcloth suit and a white shirt open at the collar. “When he pulled the pressure levers, he had on gloves,” Saunders remembered. “He was dark complexioned, and with his handle bar mustache and all them glad rags that he wore,” Saunders declared, “John Bohopolo was a sight to behold.”

He is still remembered in Gatesville.

Letters from the Republic

“Kind moments afford me an opportunity of writing,” is how Milly Talitha Rawlins began a letter back home to Illinois from the Republic of Texas in March 1845. A transcript of her letter is preserved with others from her family in the Center for American History at the University of Texas.

Milly Talitha Rawlins was a teenaged daughter in a group of relatives and friends that her father, Roderick Rawlins, organized in 1844 to emigrate from Illinois to the Republic of Texas. The party consisted of Rawlins, two sons and five daughters and their families, as well as several friends.

They located on Ten Mile Creek on the west side of the Trinity, being the first settlers in the vicinity. “Our nearest neighbor is seven miles [away], except those that came along with us,” Milly Talitha Rawlins wrote. Her father, Roderick, noted similarly that “There was no settlement . . . until we came.”

Another family member, Polly Rawlins, in a contemporary letter, described the new home in Texas: “I am very well pleased with the place that father has settled on,” noting, “I think it pleasantly situated. . . . We are in a tolerably good house and have enough to eat.” About this home, Milly Talitha Rawlins commented, “We are at this time in a comfortable house. [It] has two rooms to it.

The setting impressed Milly Talitha Rawlins more than her new home: “We are close to a beautiful spring which affords us plenty of water. We are in the prairie on a tolerably high place, all around as green as a wheat field. The prairies are beautiful, high and rolling.”

The location in Dallas County, according to Milly Talitha Rawlins, afforded abundant wild game. “Buffalo can be seen by thousands in the prairies about 20 miles from this place, and deer and turkey to any amount. Wild bees are found plenty.” The presence of predatory animals didn't seem to concern the teenager. “Panthers, bears [and] wildcats are tolerably plenty and wolves to any...