stephen richard eng: tennessee wild west: texans by choice or chance

8/4/2019 Stephen Richard Eng: Tennessee Wild West: Texans by Choice or Chance

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TWW Texans By Choice or By Chance; a Tennessee

Portrait Gallery 1

The Anglo-American18th-century frontier, like that of the Spanish,

was one of war. The word 'Texan' was not yet part of the English

language. But in the bloody hills of Kentucky and on the middleborder of Tennessee the type of man was already made.

T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star (1968)

"T for Texas, T for Tennessee"

.Jimmie Rodgers, "Blue Yodel No.1"

The often used statement that 'Tennessee is the mother of Texas'

has some validity .

Helen and Timothy Marsh, Tennesseans

in Texas (1986)

With a little practice, you can guess the age of books. Those Tennessee tomespublished

before 1860, with west" or "frontier" on the spine, are almost always about Kentucky,

Arkansas, or Tennessee itself--the so-called "first West" or "Old Southwest." Gradually the

words began to move with the migrants themselves.

In the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. (Summer 1968) Tommy W. Rogers notices:

With the end of the [Eastern] frontier era...Tennessee began contributing large

numbers of migrants to other states. Thus the westward movement from the

original colonies swept across the Appalachians and peopled Tennessee, andthen moving onward, drew Tennesseans after it.

In that same issue, Thomas A. Scott adds that The outstanding migrants before the Civil War

war were adventurous men, not likely to enjoy the routine activities of daily life." He examined

the Dictionary of American Biographys many volumes and enumerated how many persons

distinguished for accomplishments elsewhere, came from Tennessee.

Many went to Texas, and while history readily remembers political and military leaders,

most of the migrants were poor whites seeking freedom, not affluence. As Fehrenbach in Lone

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Star so well understands,

They probably worked harder and gained less with the rifle than they

might have done with the plow...Again and again, the hunter-settlerpacked up his few belongings, his grubby children, and his gaunt woman

and wandered on. He rarely changed his conditions but merely repeated

his former life. He carried certain dreams, and certainly a certainheartbreak, with him wherever he went...This man like the trapper before

him, was a true pioneer; he helped break a savage land, but paid a savage

price.

Filibuster James Long (see Chapter ) had made a gesture at winning Texas, and

Sterling Robertson (see Chapter ) had succeeded. A frontier fierceness about "freedom" was

in the Tennesseans heritage; the first known written constitution in America, founding the

Watauga Association (first free and independent commonwealth on the continent) was written

in Tennessee. Appropriately, Wataugas cofounder James Robertson was the uncle of Sterling

Robertson; equally fitting is this statistic: eighteen of the authors of the Texas constitution were

Tennesseans (runner-up was Virginia with eight).

One-half the white Texas population was from the two states of Alabama and

Tennessee; the 1850 census shows 17,692 Tennessee-born, to 42,265 by 1860. Being small

farmers unable to compete with plantations, they pushed to the farther frontiers to get the

most land. Never mind that East Texas was like Tennessee, and that the Midwestern prairie,

dry and sparsely wooded, was not. It was worth it!

The migrants moved in no orderly fashion, and their fragmentary records necessarily

distort the picture. Colorful episodes are easier to record (and to read), and newcomers driven to

succeed emphasize their successes, not the grinding drudgery and personal fiascos. But some of

the rigors and pangs of the Tennessee-Texas saga--or ordeal--emerge anyway in our patchwork

panorama. The tapestry is time-tattered, rent with holes, and portions were sometimes rewoven

by the participants to improve on failing memories, or please a latter-day audience. Many of our

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Portrait Gallery 3

personages were atypical even for the time, but out of letters, memoirs, and neglected passages

in larger works, the contour of their cavalcade takes on a clearer outline.

I. THE FORGOTTEN "FROSTTOWN"

Brentwood, Tennessee historian T. Vance Little reminds us that "The familiar sign'

GTT' was tacked onto many middle Tennessee cabin doors in the 1830's and 1840' s," meaning

of course, "Gone to Texas." Some residents of Williamson County founded "Frosttown," in

what is now Houston. Jonathan B. Frost went to Texas in March, 1836, to join the Texas army,

and in 1837 purchased fifteen acres. Samuel Miles Frost settled around 1837. They had German

neighbors, and according to Marie Lee Phelpsin A History of Early Houston (1959) their life

was one of "hard work, family closeness, and communal fun. The quiet of the little tree

settlement was punctuated only by the whistle of steamboats as they plied the bayou." A

Frosttown debacle was the destructionof Martin Floeck's brewery--free beer was tapped at the

grand opening, people danced-till-dawn...and one of the whirling revelers kicked over a lantern.

No more brewery.

Yellow fever also swept the little town: a small girl lay dead for weeks because no one

dared approach her, even for burial.

Rhode Miles Frost wrote back to her son in Brentwood (April 17, 1855) that one relative

have had a hard time. She lives in a low flat place without a twig

to break the wind on the north side of her house for about 5 mile

with out a fence to her garden although she appears to bee intolerable good spirits...Henry goes to school. Susan goes also &

teacher says the boath of them learns verry fast. '

Frosttown is no more, virtually unremembered by the prominent Germans in the

vicinity. Even its cemetery is gone, probably having subsided into the bayou.

II. LEAVING SUMNER COUNTY

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Portrait Gallery 4

"To Emigrants to Texas," started the advertisement in the Nashville Banner and the

Nashville Whig, October 14, 1831, 'announcing "three fine schooners...as regular packets

between New Orleans and Brazos River [Austin's colony] to convey emigrants and their

baggage to that country." Land speculation was rife; Dr. John Selby, President of the Ross

Company, was offering lands of the Ross grant for sale in the same newspaper next year; and in

1837 William Randolph Peyton was trying to sell 26,664 acres off the Red River in the paper

(inquiries answered at Gallatin or Nashville).

Gallatin attorney John Wheeler Buntin left his law office in 1833 and headed for Texas

on horseback.. Nephew of Kentucky Governor Desha, Buntin helped draft Texas' constitution,

helped capture General Santa Anna, and as a member of the Texas Congress wrote the bill

authorizing the Texas Rangers (see Chapter ). In 1837, returning to Sumner County, Buntin

recruited forty whites and a hundred slaves as colonists. They went by boat, and off Galveston

Island were captured by a Mexican ship and the whites were imprisoned in Mexico City, and

The slaves set free. One of these cared for their children during the incarceration. The

unstoppable Colonel Buntin once more left Sumner County, taking a boat from Nashville and

reaching Texas unhindered.

III. PUT ON THE WHOLE ARMOR OF GOD(Ephesians 6:11)"

Leonidas Polk is most renowned for founding the University of the South at Sewanee,

And for serving the Confederacy in several campaigns as a general, eventually dying in battle.

He was a corps commander in the Army of Tennessee. But this West Point graduate earlier left

the U.S. Army to become an Episcopal missionary bishop over a swath of territory stretching

from Alabama to Texas.

The Texan, Anglo-Celtic tongue was suited to the monosyllabic, timeless vocabulary of

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the King James Bible; and the passionate Old Testament narratives of faith, family, warfare and

commitment to the land were consonant with the pioneer spirit. The moral clarity of the Bible

made frontier sense.

Bishop Polk, solider of the Lord, was a circuit rider who sometimes walked, not a

bishop in a snug rectory: willingly he braved swamps, forests and plains to preach wherever he

could. The country often sheltered fugitives, and when one suspicious Texan heard this

newcomer was one of the Tennessee Polks, he said, "Well, stranger, if it is a fair question I

would give 'a heap to know what brought you here." Told he was a clergyman, the Texan

rejoined "Go back, go back, we are not worth saving:"

Once in 1841, out in the Indian Territory, two desperate-looking characters passed him

on horseback. They nodded, he saluted back. That night he stopped at the home of Cherokee

chief John Ross, who recognized their descriptions, and said "They knew you were well

armed, or they would surely have attacked you." Bishop Polk explained he carried no weapons.

After Polk went to sleep his Negro servant told Ross this was not true, they were armed, since

he didn't want Ross or anyone else thinking they were defenseless. Polk later protested, and the

Negro rationalized his lie--"Aren't you armed, master, with the sword of the Spirit?"

Bishop Polk was luckier than Tennessee-born Anthony Bewley, a Methodist preacher.

An abolitionist, Bewley had to leave Johnson County, Texas in 1860, since one thousand

dollars was posted for his capture. He headed north, but a mob caught and hanged him.

IV. JOHN H. REAGAN

The eighty-one year old retired judge had a young man's gait, and a wife not thirty years

old. He delighted in the parade that took him from Knoxville to Sevierville, one day in August

of 1900. His name was John H. Reagan, probably the most famous person born in Sevier

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County next to Dolly Parton.

He left Tennessee in May, 1839. When he crossed the Sabine River of Texas, his

worldly goods plus a ten dollar-bill were tied in a handkerchief. Probably he wondered how he

could afford to write home, since he noticed the exorbitant postage to get a letter from Texas to

Tennessee--seventy-five cents, total! Little did Reagan foresee he would one day be Post

Master General of the Confederacy.

He traveled in Nacogdoches County, stopping for the night in San Augustine. Over

supper he heard about the latest killing; next day at someone else's home he heard about two

more in town, and registered dismay that three men in two days had died violently. His host

asked where he was from; Reagan said "East Tennessee.

"Well," he said, this may seem strange to one from that

country; but from the example of murders in this community

not much harm comes; in these cases one desperado killsanother." Such was my introduction into the Republic of

Texas.

Reagan was immediately plunged into another chapter of the Cherokee tragedy that had

begun in Tennessee. (See Chapter ). Driven into Texas, the Cherokees, used to forests and

mountains, confronted the Great Plains and were incited by Mexicans to fight the Texans (a

charge Fehrenbach in Lone Star, Chapter 14, disputes). Sam Houston fought for peace with the

Indians with whom he once had lived. But by June 1939 President Lamar wanted the Cherokees

removed to prevent their siding with Mexico, Reagan reported.. He was impressed with the

candor of Chief Bowles who said if he fought the whites would kill him, if he refused his own

people would. Combat soon ensued, and Reagan marveled at eighty-three year-old Bowles, "a

magnificent picture of barbaric manhood," wearing a military hat, silk vest, and sword and sash

presented by President Houston. Last to leave the field, Bowles, would have surrendered, but

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Portrait Gallery 7

Reagan's captain shot him in the head. ("I did not want to see him killed, and would have saved

his life if I could.")

In December of the year Reagan was off on a surveying expedition, his group

exchanging fire with Indians at one point: The following October, Reagan recounts trying to get

through the tall timber in Indian country, to avoid detection. He managed to start a fire by

shooting his pistol into some decayed wood; next morning he was caked with ice, almost

freezing to death.

Reagan's future would include considerable achievement--sponsorship of the Inter-State

Commerce Commission, and advocacy of railroads, service in the U.S. Senate. Immediately

after the Civil War Reagan urged Black suffrage, even as he had opposed the slave trade

earlier; but upon the defeat of the Confederacy Reagan was thrust into prison for a while,

another hardship over which he triumphed.

V. "...NOTHING TO WRITE HOMEABOUT"

"Those young men who leave home with slender means and expect to find Texas an El

Dorado; a theatre for the easy accomplishment of their most ambitious designs, have been

selected by the gods for at least a bitter disappointment," wrote twenty-two year-old Alfred

Thomas Howell to his family in 1832. He had grown up in Tennessee, but his people had

moved to Virginia; he was a law school graduate, and hoped attorneys would be in demand on

the Texas frontier.

His father was a preacher, and young Alfred was repelled at the bad (and ill-attended)

Texas preaching. One Baptist parson took a drink before and after his sermon; the mixed crowd

(whites, Negroes, Choctaws) gathered solely to laugh at him. Big land owners, highly respected

And self-important despite "ignorance and egotism" were to Howell "about as agreeable as

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Portrait Gallery 8

garbage." Nor did he like frontier attire (or much of anything about Texas); he was appalled that

a man dressed in cow skin boots, rifle on the shoulder, Bowie knife on the belt, might turn out

to be State legislator. Even people who today "are now comparatively honest" probably had

something to hide: "in nine cases out of ten" they were "renegade forgers or horse thieves.'"

Young Howell had committed "moral suicide in coming to Texas" since among other sins, men

on Sundays played nine pins in lieu of church. In public Howell would diplomatically admit

"there shall be no place like Texas," which for him was a true statement.

He liked Texas birds, if not Texans, such as the beautiful "paroquettes," and he liked the

fishing. In 1855 he discovered that San Antonio was "strangely beautiful and there is a romance

connected with everything about it." Earlier, even-Texas mud had affronted him, it being like

tar and impossible to get off.

Gradually he found his law career, married, and survived with his wife in an unheated

hotel room. He never had much money, clients paying him in livestock and produce. The Civil

War intervened--Alfred saw East Texas Historical Association. action, and his wife lost two

brothers--and in 1866 the couple were still struggling to make a life in Texas.

His corrosive remarks about Texas have been good-naturedly republished by the East

Texas Historical Association.

VI. MORE LETTERS HOME

Mexico sent two armies on raids into Texas in 1842; just across the Rio Grande, 265

Texans confronted around two thousand Mexicans at the village of Mier. While most of the

Texans survived, they were taken prisoner and paraded through the streets of Salado. One out

of every ten was to be shot, General Santa Anna declared, chosen by lots from a box of 159

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'white and seventeen black beans. Robert Dunham, a Methodist from Tipton County,

Tennessee, prayed for those selected. Earlier, Dunham had written home to Peyton Bailey

Fateful in Tennessee, seeking clothing and assistance. After the fateful beans were drawn,

Dunham wrote to his mother"inhalf an hour my doom will be finished on earth for I am

doomed to die by the hands of the Mexicans for our latest attempt to escape." Blindfolded and

tied, they were shot in the back of the head.

VII. CAMEL CAVALRY

By 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, later President of the Confederacy, thought

that camels might help the army hold the newly-won southwest territory. In the summer of 1860

Lieutenant James Holman of Fayetteville, Tennessee, around twenty-four years old was

directed by the Commander of the Department of Texas," Robert E.Lee, to lead a topographic

expedition out from San Antonio, to help establish a new military post along the Rio Grande

"and a shorter route" from the Pecos river to Fort Davis. His company included twenty-five

mules--and twenty camels. His diary records the kind of cruel terrain he traversed--"thorns,

thistles, cactus...thick jungle of vines"--while climbing difficult heights. One of the camels fell

and smashed two water kegs, and water had to be severely rationed.

The camel experiment failed overall--some of the creatures escaped, and for decades

were sighted by bewildered Indians and others in the Southwest.

James Holman soon resigned from the U.S. Army, serving the Confederacy in the Army

of Tennessee; he was captured, paroled, then he rejoined the Confederates and hid out awhile

after the war in West Texas. Returning to Fayetteville, he was a commissioner from Tennessee

to the Paris International Exposition in 1878; he died in 1910.

VIII. TENNESSEAN TRAIL DRIVERS

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The first English settlement in America was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and a

branding iron has been exhumed there, indicating how much cattle have always been a part of

Southern life. The slaves of South Carolina were often cowboys. A medium-to-large hound

sometimes called the "Tennessee brindle" or bulldog is the descendent of the Colonial herder

dog. The President of the Boone and Crockett Society wrote in Ranch Life and the Hunting

Trail (1888) that

The very term "round-up" is used by the cowboys in the exactsense in which it is employed by the hill people and mountaineers

of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, with whom

also labor is dear and poor land cheap, and whose few cattle

are consequently branded and turned loose in the woods exactlyas is done with the great herds on the plains.

His name was Theodore Roosevelt.

By 1840 Carroll County, Tennessee had three times as many cattle as people, though

Kentucky was more cattle oriented. Tennessee's major contribution to the 'cattle industry is of

course through its emigrants to Texas.

In the 1837-50 period, of those northeast Texas stock raisers born out of state, the

majority (35%) were from Tennessee (Kentucky came next, 24%). In the East Texas Piney

Woods in 1850, those owners of two hundred or more head of cattle born elsewhere were led by

Tennessee and South Carolina (16% each). Jesse Chisholm was born in Tennessee of a Scottish

father and a Cherokee mother, drove cattle over at least two trails, the most famous of course

being the Chisholm Trail through what is now Oklahoma to his trading post near Wichita,

Kansas. And John Chisum, born in Tennessee, moved to Texas in 1837 and built the first

courthouse in Paris, Texas despite no formal education; he became a cattleman in 1854, and in

1866 drove herds north with the famous Charles Goodnight. (Chisum later was a figure in the

Lincoln County cattle war: see Chapter ).

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There were even several long cattle drives from Texas to Memphis, after 1857. And the

year before, Jesse Day of Hays County, Texas (born in Tennessee) drove cattle to Chicago.

After the Civil War, Captain James H. Polk (brother of Leonidas, see part III of this

chapter) returned home to find his father's Maury County estate in extreme financial distress. So

he began shipping cattle to San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and other Texas points. With brother

Lucius he established the famous Polk Stock Yards at Fort Worth, supplying Angus, Durham,

Holstein, Devonshire and Hereford cattle.

In 1924 the monumental Trail Drivers of Texas was published in Nashville. Compiled

by J. Marvin Hunter, editor of Frontier Times (who helped expose William F. Drannan: see

Chapter ). The volume weighs over four pounds, and contains hundreds of old-time

accounts, many of them connected with Tennessee. Some of the cowboys had parents from

Tennessee, such as Hiram C. Craig of Brenham, Texas, whose parents trekked to Texas by

wagon, or ~W. B. Hardeman Devine, Texas, whose Tennessee family's contributions to the

West fill an entire book. Or William C. Irvin, born in Seguin, Texas in 1846, who had a

Tennessee mother whose brother, J. F. Tom, was a noted Indian fighter in Texas. And Robert S.

Dalton of Palo Pinto, Texas, born in Texas, but whose father Marcus Lafayette Dalton came

from Tennessee in 1838, settling finally on the Brazos River. He was killed, scalped and

mutilated by the Indians, and his son acquired the bow which fired the fatal arrow, and still had

it in 1924.

Many who were born in Tennessee were still living in the 1920's when Trail Drivers of

Texas was assembled.

Joe Chapman of Benton, Texas was born in 1854 in Tennessee; his parents emigrated when he

was but five, settling in Jack County on Hall's Creek. They chained their horses to trees, to foil

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raiding Indians, who in 1860 killed his father with eighteen arrows, and scalped him. He

recalled little children who were killed and mutilated in 1863. His first cattle drive was in 1872,

and he remembered when they crossed the Red River one cowboy drowned.

Sam Garner of Lockhart, Texas, was born in Tennessee in 1847, joined the Confederate

army, and in 1869 experienced his first cattle drive. He was once stopped by a sheriff on the

Kansas-Nebraska line, who tried to "quarantine" his herd. When the lawman (if indeed he was)

fell asleep, Garner sneaked the herd over the line in defiance

T. J. Garner of Loveland, Colorado, was born in Tennessee in 1843, his parents dying

when he was small. He lived in Caldwell County, Texas; when the grown men left for the Civil

War, he learned to retrieve wild cattle from the brush as soon as he could ride. He joined the

Texas Rangers in 1870, and two years later was driving cattle to Kansas. His boss once almost

got hanged by some other ranchers, but Garner drove them off with a Winchester. Garner

remembered without nostalgia. "three to seven months' work, night and day, in hailstorms,

stampedes, blizzards, and the like. And then when the cattle were delivered and we would go to

town to find lead whizzing around too close to be comfortable and see poor fellows falling to

rise no more. I do not want any more of the old life."

W. B. Foster of San Antonio was born in 1849 in Sequado Valley, East Tennessee. His

mother died when he was three; and at around age twenty-one he came to Texas. "Killed my

first wolf on Donwitz Hill now being in the city limits." Once during a stampede he saved a

little girl's life by scooping her up just in time. Once a "bad man" beat up a defenseless

seventeen-year old cowboy, so an older cowboy punished the offender with a leather quirt.

Foster supplied an interesting sociological statistic--he and the young cowboy were the

ones out of the twenty-two trail-drivers who had never killed a man. Foster once encountered

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some Indians, and had to have several resulting arrows cut out of him with a pocket knife. And

he knew "Wild" Bill Hickok in Abilene: "He was very kind to me and I thought a great deal of

him."

Sam H. Nunneley of San Antonio was born in Hickman County, middle Tennessee, in

1851; in 1869 he took a train to Memphis, "terminus of all roads going west." He went by

steamer down the Mississippi, then up the Red River. He enjoyed shooting alligators. Next year

he traveled with one "Townsend Megeath" in Collins County, West Texas, whom he later

believed to be bandit Frank James. (Such sincere identifications of the Jameses occur almost

everywhere, and not one tenth can be true; since usually unsupported by evidence, scholars

set them aside.) Nunnelley also records his buffalo-killing in New Mexico, spending two

weeks with a professional hunter who slew five thousand that season, selling them to Fort

Worth people for around a dollar apiece.

Captain William Carroll McAdams was born in Tennessee in 1825. His parents were

related to the Scottish royal Stuarts, and they left Scotland to escape religious persecution. His

father Douglas McAdams built the first "macadamized" (crushed stone) road in the U.S.

according to Captain McAdams (relationship to John Loudon McAdam, the inventor of the

process, not established).

Captain McAdams ran away at seventeen and fought for General Zachary Taylor,

becoming known as "Mustang Bill," working for the Texas Republic, and then the U.S. army as

a scout. Several times he staged raids on robber strongholds. (In the Mexican War he rescued

some prisoners in a daring mission into Mexico, killing their guard.) He joined the Texas

Rangers of John Coffee Hays (see Chapter ), and bore the scar of an Indian arrow wound to

the end.

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When he would leave home for any period of time, his wife would dress up like a man,

with a belted six-gun and rifle slung on her shoulder, to make Indians think Captain McAdams

was still at home.

His first cattle drive was in 1863; others were in 1865 and 1867. In 1870 he was in a

ferocious Indian fight on Salt Creek in Young County, Texas; many of his men were killed. In

Trail Drivers, Hunter writes: "Captain McAdams during the Indian wars of Texas was called a

'minute man'; he kept his horse ready especially for long and hard rides...he could ride further

with less food and sleep than any man of his day."

George W. West was born in Tennessee, and was one of the first to drive cattle to

Kansas from Texas. He had several large ranches and became a "town builder and

philanthropist."

Dan Waggoner was born in Tennessee in 1828, moving with his parents to Texas in the

1840's. Solomon "Sol" Waggoner, his father, received a land grant in Hopkins County; he died

when Dan was twenty. Around 1855 he drove 242 longhorn cattle with his wife to Denton

Creek in what is now Wise County, Texas. Indians often scattered his stock. Starting in 1869

he began driving herds to Kansas. When he died in 1904 he owned a million-acre ranch, with

45,000 cattle, 2500 horses.

Mr. Mabel Gilbert, born in 1797 in North Carolina, came from Dickson County,

Tennessee, to Franklin County in Northeast Texas in 1837. He became another famous early

rancher--and so did John Emberson, who arrived in Lamar County in 1835, owning one

hundred head of cattle by 1840. He came from Arkansas, and earlier, Tennessee.

In the 1930's the well-esteemed Federal Writer's Project of the W.P.A. interviewed

around four hundred Texas cowboys, ex-slaves and ranch women; the transcripts were

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discovered buried in the Library of Congress.

One of the cowboys was W. E. Oglesby, born in 1863 in Lincoln County, Tennessee;

his parents cameto Texas in 1872 in an eighteen-wagon train, mostly Tennessee families (such

as the Jack Abner's, the Hugo Garrison's, Dr. Miler's, the Hall's, and the Gray's). Having

sold their land, they had little money "because in those days real estate did not sell for much."

Men and women each carried guns and ammunition. The women were mostly good shots; Mrs.

Oglesby was excellent with a rifle, regularly hunting game with her husband; hence "the

women were ready to shoot in defense of the train at anytime." But the five-month trip was

without incident.

Oglesby expectedly reflects the cattleman's view of sheep herding --the cowmen had got

there first, and the sheep ruined the grazing for cattle. Ranchers ordered their cowboys to shoot

sheep on sight; so the sheep men decided to shoot cowboys caught in the act; and then the

cowboys were ordered to shoot sheep men on sight. Oglesby describes a forty-five-minute

shoot-out, ten cowboys versus ten herders ("our guns and part of our clothing were covered

with blood") and some on both sides were killed. From then on "the cowboys hunted

sheep men earnestly." The sheep herders soon left for a range section unfit for cattle.

Unfortunately, memoirs of Tennessee-born sheep herders have escaped our attention.

Oglesby says that in Fort Worth cowboys frequently shot out the lights and bar fixtures

in the saloons, only "to satisfy their devilment emotions and not to be destructive or vindictive."

Always they'd return to pay for the damages. It just amused them to see the customers dive for

cover like fluttering quail..."generally" no one was hurt. He recalls one policeman foolishly

trying to curtail some cowboys so engaged--one of them punched him unconscious, and they

began shooting up the town till the cooler sheriff persuaded them to ride out. They did, shooting

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out the lights in only one block, returning next to pay for them.

James H. Childers was born in 1855 in Georgia, but grew up in Tennessee, 1868-77, then

Came to Fort Worth where he became foreman on the Boaz ranch around 1880. Wire was often

detected cut by rustlers; Childers tells how a Negro supplied the local sheriff with some

incriminating letters resulting in the jailing of a rustlerwho had been stealing from his own

boys. In the 1930's, Childers noted, the rustlers were using trucks to carry off cattle. After

seventeen years' cowboying, Childers brought his own ranch, and in 1918 became a County

Commissioner in Tarrant County.

To conclude the story of Tennesseans and Texas cattle, we may mention two discernible

symbols, of two Tennessee-born, legendary ranchers. The visible ruts of the old Chisholm Trail,

along the Santa Fe railroad track. And the mansion of David Waggoner, still standing on a hill

outside of Decatur in Wise County.

IX. STALKING THE BUFFALO

In the eighteenth century there were actually wild buffalo in the Appalachian mountains.

Daniel Boone hunted them in North Carolina in the 1750's. But all were gone by around 1820.

A full grown bull might be six feet tall at the shoulder, and weigh over two thousand

pounds. With millions on the Great Plains slaughtering them was irresistible sport.

George W. Polk, born in 1847 at "Hamilton Place" in Maury County, Tennessee (see

Chapter ), was in the valley of the Elm Fork of the Brazos River, Texas, in July of 1873. On

the Fourth of July he saw four or five hundred buffalo, and galloped toward them with rifle and

revolver ready. Then he halted, fearful his horse might fall prey to the dangerous prairie dog

holes up ahead.

Later he had another chance, and chose to stalk the buffalo and managed to kill several.

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Sometimes he was able to sneak very close; other times the beasts seem wary and took flight

quickly.

Polk noticed the herds were always followed by packs of large grey "Lobo" wolves, as

well as by coyotes. The Lobos would cut down the stragglers, the old, young or wounded

buffalo. One night they attacked and ate an oxen, while the coyotes howled in a chorus that kept

Polk and his crew up' till dawn. Another time, a Lobo crept close to camp, but was shot by a

Mexican employee; in death throes the wolf leaped and crashed onto a sleeping man, and in the

ensuing snarling chaos the awakened group thought the Indians were attacking:

Polk reports that "The flesh of the buffalo was much coarser, than that of domestic

cattle, but possessed that wild flavor, so much esteemed by epicures. The tongues, tenderloins

and hump ribs were the choicest parts. the ribs roasted with a camp fire, a la barbecue,

were especially delicious."

Buffalo in Tennessee are kept today by Elgie Flowers (Greenfield), Kermit Hancock

(Big Bell Ranch), and Frank Rudy (Nashville).

X. RANGERS FROM TENNESSEE

The bill which authorized the Texas Rangers was introduced by a Tennessean, Colonel

John Wheeler Buntin; and the most famous Ranger of the nineteenth century was John Coffee

Hays (see Chapter ). Of the famous Hardeman family, derived from William Hardeman of

Williamson County, Tennessee, the sons William and Owen were born in Tennessee, and

became Texas Rangers. In a four-month period in 1837, they rode with Erastus "Deaf" Smith of

Natchez.

Benjamin McCullough was born in 1811 in Rutherford County, Tennessee. His father

moved to West Tennessee, and the fever of adventure infected his son. At twenty one he struck

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off for the West, failing in his effort to join some Rocky Mountain trappers. Then he met David

Crockett, followed him to Texas, just missing a chance to die at the Alamo, but getting in on the

Battle of San Jacinto. Later he rode with border scouts after Indians and Mexicans. IN the

Battle of Plum Creek he fought the Indians who had burned Linnville, Texas.

He served in the Rangers under Captain "Jack" Hays, and in the words of Samuel C.

Reid was "in almost all the expeditions of the time and engaged in nearly all the fights."

He died in the Civil War at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas.

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stephen richard eng: tennessee wild west: texans by choice or chance

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