Moses Austin dreamed of glory—of establishing a colony of Anglo-Americans in Spanish Tejas where hardworking, down-on-their-luck folks could find a fresh beginning. His dream was incumbent on securing a land grant from the Spanish government. So, in the late winter of 1820, he made the arduous journey from Missouri to Texas, arriving in San Antonio de Béxar on December 23. Provisional governor Antonio María Martínez barred the door on Austin and ordered him to leave Texas and never return. Dejected, he walked across the plaza and by chance ran into a prominent resident of San Antonio, a man he had met nineteen years earlier in New Orleans: Philip Hendrik Nering Bögel, better known as the Baron de Bastrop.

Bastrop listened to Austin’s story and promised to help. He escorted Austin back to Martínez’s office and persuaded the governor to allow Austin to remain in the city. Over the next two days, Bastrop and Austin strategized on how to persuade Martínez. On December 26, with Bastrop interpreting, Austin presented a proposal to settle three hundred families in Texas. Martínez was impressed and forwarded Austin’s application to his superiors in Monterrey.

Austin left San Antonio three days later to await final approval. His return trip to Missouri was more taxing than his trip to Texas. His horse was stolen while camping on the Trinity River, leaving him afoot. It took four weeks in continuous wet and cold to return to his home, where he was bedridden with pneumonia. Shortly after reaching home word reached him that his petition was accepted. Ignoring his poor health, Austin threw himself into his “Texas Venture.” At the beginning of June 1821, he fell acutely ill. On June 8, his wife Mary, whom the family called Maria, wrote to her son Stephen expressing her fears for his father’s life and telling her son that his father’s dying desire, if he should die, was for the young man to fulfill his father’s Empresario contract in Texas.

Moses Austin died two days later.

(Maria’s letter is reproduced in full and retains her original spelling and grammar.)

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Hazel Run June the 8– 1821

I rote my dear Stephen by Mr. Honey on the third Inst. informing him of his Father’s Illness—and I now rite you by our old friend Mr. Bruffey and am truly sorry that I have nothing Encouraging to communicate. I found your poor Father very ill indeed, Dr. ben Hiser [Bernhisel] thought his disorder dangerous, it being a Violent attack of Inflammation on the breast and lungs, attended with a high fever—the Dr. staid a day and night blistered and bleed most copiously and when he left us two days past I flattered myself he was much better—but oh my son I greatly fear it was only a delusion, so apt are [we] to flatter ourselves with that which will contribute to our happiness his fever has returned this day with great violence, he breathes with much difficulty and seems in great distress boath in body and mind—in short my son I feel much allarmed about him, I shall send for the Dr. by Mr. B he is lately from Philadelphia studied with Dr. Physick and is well recommended by him and the bord—his yoth and Inexperience is the only objection I have against him, but our chief dependence must be in him who is only able to save oh my god, thou has in they great mercy heretofore supported him through many dangers—tryals and difficulties of various kinds, extend they mercys we beseech the and raise him once more from a bed of sickness and thy grateful servants will sing praises to thy name forever and ever—your Father had completed all his business in this quarter much more to his satisfaction than he ever expected to do—appeared to be surrounded with friends Anxious for him to go on with his enterprise in the province texes—everyone has the highest opinion of his plans and may only waiting till thay know he has made the Establishment when they mean to follow him, several young men has already gown and many now waiting to start with him all those things distract his mind and increases his disorder he called me to his bed side and with much distress an difficulty of speech, beged me to tell you to take his place and if god in his wisdom thought best to disappoint him in the accomplishment of his wishes and plans formed for the benefit of his family, he prayed him to extend his goodness to you and enable you to go on with the business in the same way he would have done had not sickness and oh dreadful to think of perhaps death, prevented him from accomplishing—this my dear son is your fathers unhappy situation, and you can better Judge of your Mother miserable feelings than she can describe them, although my mind is filled with anxiety and my body weied down with fatigue and distress—I will indulge the fond hope of his recover and communicate the pleasing intelligence to my dear Stephen by the first opportunity—I was so disireous to be with your Father when I heard of his illness—I did not take time to write to your Brother,¹ I inclosed his letter to you, by that you will know his situation I hope the bill he sent on will be accepted in New Orleans, when the poor fellow will be Liberated and once more restored to his friends who will rejoice to see him tho poor and in a different situation from what theay was when he left them. Emily sends her moast affectionate love to you and would write if she had time though you are a letter in debt²—she has three lovely boys—Austin grows very like you and is laying all parsiality aside the most interesting child I ever saw—the infant is very butifull, I only wish you could see it and you would thing so two, he is called after Guy Morroson—farewell my son, heaven only knows what events make take place before I write again the book of futurity is hid from our eyes—for wise purposes and we ought to think it all for the best—may god bless and prosper my dear son in every just and Laudible undertaking is the sincere wishes of his ever affectionate but unhappy anxious Mother.

M Austin

[Addressed.] Mr. Stephen F. Austin Natchitoches Attention Mr. Bruffy

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¹ James Elijah Brown Austin.

² Stephen’s sister, Emily Margaret Austin Perry.

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Maria Austin to Stephen F. Austin, June 8, 1821, in The Austin Papers, vol. 1, ed. Eugene C. Barker (Fifteenth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1919), 394–95.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Cowboying was a lonely job. Though it was rich in male comradeship, it was poor in female companionship. In the old days, unless a trail outfit passed a homestead or happened upon wagon bound settlers, the average puncher wouldn’t see or talk with a woman for three or four months at a stretch. Which is why all they could think about was hurraying when close to a town.

Towns, especially cowtowns, were populated with two types of women: soiled doves (sometimes called “girls of the line,” “calico queens,” or “painted cats”) and pure doves. Regardless of the woman’s occupation or status within society, cowboys heaped upon them the utmost respect and reverence. It was a strict principle. Breaching it often brought strict punishments.

Within town, every cowhand was expected to either remove or tip his hat, with a slight nod of the head to every lady he passed on the boardwalk. He might wish her a good morning or a good day and address her as “ma’am.” If his greeting extended much beyond that on their first encounter he was apt to find trouble from the menfolk. And if his look lingered or he turned to watch her as she passed by then blows were sure to follow.

Trail etiquette forbade a cowboy who rode upon a homestead to show any romantic interest in any of the woman folk within the house. His only greeting to an unknown woman was the removal of his hat and a nod of his head and a respectful “ma’am.” His only appreciation of feminine virtues and hospitality was to eat heartily, followed with a sincere “thank you” or “much obliged” when he had had his fill.

Whether in town or on the range, cowboys never spat, cursed, scratched or adjusted their cajones in the presence of a lady. Nor did they tell coarse jokes. In the words of one writer, “Good women are not to be mentioned in levity.” Even if a cowboy paid a visit to one of the painted ladies it was ungentlemanly to boast of his exploits. When he went to courting he almost always wore his gun. Whether he was any good with it or not didn’t matter. According to cowboy historian Philip Rollins:

The gun not only was an integral part of full dress, but also was to the mind of the cowboy as effective on the female heart, and as compelling an accompaniment of love-making as to the belief of the young soldier has ever been the sword.

In a cowboy’s imagination, whether true or not, women were angels. As Raymond Adams noted, to cowpunchers women were “something holy and plumb precious. He was apt to be pretty touchy in protecting her character.”

He felt that a man was pretty low that would bring a woman in contact with dirt, or to allow her to touch it of her own accord. He placed her upon a high fence because he wanted to look up to her. He wanted her feminine with frills and fluffs all over. He had no use for those he-women who wore pants and tried to dress like men.

Rollins relates the story of a woman in pants who rode up to a group of cowboys and “made to one of them a remark which contained no impropriety beyond that the speaker placed herself and the men upon a common level. There lashed back to her the answer: ‘For God’s sake, woman, why can’t you let us look up to you?’”

You might think such sentiments are old fashioned or worse, misogynistic. In a morally confused world, such as the one we’re living through, cowboys of a certain era did demonstrate old-fashioned virtues, but they did not hate women nor did they seek to demean them. They sought to treat them as ladies. As Adams said, they placed women “upon a high fence.” As such, women during frontier days could live alone miles from a town or her nearest neighbor free of fear that a cowboy would take advantage of her. She was as safe in his presence in the middle of the wilds as she would be surrounded by her brothers in the middle of a prayer service. She could impress any man to escort her anywhere, and every man would jump at the opportunity to accompany her, without any semblance of tawdry behavior on his part. Would that we had such a culture today.

Frontier times were not idyllic. Though they were outnumbered by good men, there were bad men who did take advantage of women. If any man, at any time, under any circumstance, mistreated a woman, he was culled from the herd of polite society and branded a rogue and banished an outcast. Men refused to speak to him. Doors were shut to him. Work was denied him. If the insult was grave enough the man might be beaten or strung up or worse—he might be stripped and staked out, his arms and legs pegged to the ground over a large anthill, his eyelids slit and made to stare at the merciless sun while the ants ate dinner.

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Ramon F. Adams, The Cowman & His Code of Ethics (The Encino Press, 1969), 13–14.

Philip Ashton Rollings, The Cowboy (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 41, 72.

Mody C. Boatright, “The American Myth Rides the Range: Owen Wister’s Man on Horseback,” Southwest Review, vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 1951), 159.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

One of the wonderful serendipities of writing a newsletter is that on occasion a reader will reach out who knows much more about a subject and engages me in a deeper conversation. That happened in November 2025 when David Streitfeld sent me a nice note about “Yes, a Hell of a Vision.” Uttered by old-time Texas rancher Charles Goodnight, Larry McMurtry placed it in the mouth of Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove. David spoke with erudition about the use of that quote, and could do so not only because he’s a student of the novel but as it turns out he was in the process of editing his biography about Larry when he reached out to me. I had preordered his biography, which was released in March 2026, but he graciously provided an advanced reading copy.

Here’s my review.

This bit of wisdom from Solomon, Israel’s ancient king, seems to be at the heart of David Streitfeld’s biography of Texas’ most famous novelist: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6).

Whether Streitfeld intended Solomon’s sentiment to pulse like a heartbeat within his book or not, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is the one biographer who could unravel and tell the truth about the many contradictions that made up Larry McMurtry’s life because he was McMurtry’s friend. From the very start of Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry (2026) Streitfeld tell us:

I became a regular in Archer City [McMurtry’s hometown] and in [McMurtry’s] complicated life from the late 1990s until he died. I was a crony and confidant despite being male (he didn’t trust men), a newspaper reporter (he found them ridiculous), and a potential biographer (like reporters, but malevolent).

Just because Streitfeld was a “crony and confidant” didn’t mean McMurtry warmed to the idea of having Streitfeld write a biography of his life. In fact, in an email exchange with Streifteld where I mentioned curating a collection of essays on McMurtry and Lonesome Dove he encouraged me: “A collection of essays—always a good idea. Larry as a topic is kind of undernourished, because he didn’t allow anyone to write anything in the last twenty years of his life, including me.” In Western Star, Streitfeld mentioned the challenges of penning a biography:

Although I never pushed the idea, Larry told friends he expected me to overcome at last his deep aversion to biographers and write a book about him.

In 2009, when he was well into his eighties and time was drawing short, I went to Archer City. I asked him to endorse the idea of my writing a book about him. He said he’d have to think about it. He wrote on a blank sheet of paper, “David has to charm these people,” and listed a few names. All had been sworn to silence years before. It was like being given an impossible task in a fairy tale: Bring me the witch’s broom.

Having met David in person at the release of Western Star, I can tell you he is charming. And if he hadn’t charmed Larry and the people on Larry’s list then Western Star would be a wholly different book. As it is, David secured the witch’s broom and gives us an intimate look into McMurtry’s family lore, his personal and professional life, as well as the legends he created (knowing and unknowing) about himself.

Western Star, like every well-written biography (or poorly written biography for that matter), gives us a womb to tomb account of one of the most significant literary figures in the twentieth century. But it was the contradictions—the legends in McMurtry’s life—and the hutzpah to tell the truth about those contradictions that attracted my attention. A lesser biography, and perhaps one written without the intimate relationship between biographer and subject, would have never uncovered those conflicting truths—conflicts that didn’t much concern McMurtry. He confessed, “I have this compulsion to fictionalize. . . . I just can’t stick to the facts. By necessity, I invent.” Streitfeld doubts McMurtry was even aware of his contradictory nature. Streitfeld writes, “Larry’s life often imitated his fiction and his fiction was inspired by his life, but he was an instinctive writer who forgot each page as soon as it came out of the typewriter so he never realized any of this.”

Aware or not, McMurtry was full of incongruity. Here are some of my favorites from Western Star.

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McMurtry famously professed in his memoir Books (2008) that he grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless home, and that his father, Jeff, never read to him. In fact, as McMurtry told the story it wasn’t until his cousin Robert Hilburn, on his way to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps, dropped off a box of nineteen volumes in 1942 that a book entered McMurtry’s world. As Streitfeld writes, “It is a powerful story: the world-class storyteller who began with literally nothing.” But it was just that, a story. McMurtry’s father, whom the local paper called a “lifelong bookworm,” disputed Larry’s claim that their home was bookless and that he never read to Larry as a child. Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie was a favorite of Jeff’s and upon his death his collection of Dobie volumes was inherited by Larry’s sister Judy.

Another McMurtry tall-tale concerns the name of the family ranch in Archer County: Idiot Ridge. The name first appeared in print in McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), and reappeared in Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (1972), where Danny Deck says Idiot Ridge “was just a little bluff, with lots of mesquite trees and rattlesnakes, but in a way it was the place most truly mine.” Based on these references and in interviews with McMurtry’s sister Sue and brother Charles, George Getschow, the director of the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism at the University of North Texas, asserted in “The Rancher & Writer,” published in the university’s Spurs of Inspiration (2006), that the name of the McMurtry family ranch was Idiot Ridge. Getschow sent McMurtry a complimentary copy of Spurs of Inspiration and McMurtry took umbrage with the claim. McMurtry sent a note to the editorial team pointing out that the name of the ranch was not Idiot Ridge. It was a local name he liked and used in his fiction. And yet, as Streitfeld makes clear, Getschow and others could (and should) be forgiven for the confusion—one of McMurtry’s own making. Streitfeld writes,

If Idiot Ridge was Larry’s Yoknapatawpha County or his West Egg—an imaginary place superimposed on a reality it closely resembled—he forgot himself more than once. There’s an ambiguous reference in Narrow Grave [McMurtry’s collection of Texas essays], and he referred in a 1981 essay to “the ranch house on Idiot Ridge where I spent my boyhood.” At a minimum, he created ample opportunity for confusion. . . .

Larry’s attempt to correct the record went nowhere, even with himself. In 2017, I asked him about the name. “There was an idiot living down the road when I was a child,” he said without hesitation. “We would give him a ride when we saw him walking. There’s no one left alive to ask about him.” Larry could no longer write novels but he could still spin stories.

Perhaps my favorite legend is the one concerning McMurtry’s hypercritical essay of Texas novelists and the writing of Lonesome Dove. In 1981, he wrote “Ever the Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature,” published in The Texas Observer. According to Don Graham, “[Larry] went back and machine-gunned everybody he hadn’t taken out in Narrow Grave. It was like the Germans in World War II retracing the field for anyone still living.” In that piece, McMurtry complained that even the good Texas writers weren’t very good, and that too many Texas novelists were stuck on the frontier. Ironically, that’s exactly where McMurtry was struck. He wrote the essay while stalled on Lonesome Dove—the quintessential range novel, and the one he’s most famous for penning. As Streitfeld put it (deadpan), “He did not mention he was writing a 800-page cowboy novel, the sort of thing he was criticizing.” When asked about this contradiction after Lonesome Dove was published, McMurtry brushed the matter aside, like brushing away an irritating gnat, with a wave of the hand. “I never said the past wasn’t worth writing about,” he said. “What I said is that it’s not worth writing badly about. The past is always relevant.”

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For all his contradictions, Larry McMurtry is simply the most talented storyteller Texas has thus far produced. And David Streitfeld’s Western Star captures the contradictory Mr. McMurtry in all his glories and follies. It’s a biography lovingly written by a friend about a friend, but one that doesn’t paper over his friend’s peccadilloes, leaving us with a real man and not just the genius behind Lonesome Dove and his many other works.

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I want to tell one more contradictory story from McMurtry’s life. Quoting Streitfeld at length, with commentary from me:

All good Texans should die in Texas or, failing that, return to Texas after their death [as did Gus in Lonesome Dove]. . . .

Larry wanted his remains to spend eternity in the one place in Texas he loved without qualification: his bookstore [Booked Up, but his ashes were buried in the cemetery in Archer City next to his father]. . . . He was a bookseller and a Texan to the end, despite the inconvenience of dying far from his books in the Tucson townhouse he shared with Faye [his wife]. “Even if I die in Tucson, let’s just say I died in Texas,” he told his writing partner, Diana Ossana. It was one final fiction from a writer who reworked reality until he lost the ability to say what was true, a common fate for novelists.

In Lonesome Dove, Gus says, “I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” Larry felt differently. If you’re the greatest writer in Texas, there’s no romance in dying in Arizona.

There is nothing contradictory about that. It’s the God’s honest truth.

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Following my initial email exchange with David, he sent my article on the death of Robert Duvall, “On the Death of ‘Augustus McCrae,’” to his brother Andy, who owns and operates AMS Pictures. Andy, who is producing a documentary on Larry, reached out and asked if I’d take part in the production by doing an on-camera interview to talk about Lonesome Dove. I would and I did. I’ll post a notice when the documentary is released.

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David Streitfeld, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry (Mariner Books, 2026), 447 pages.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

No parent looking into the cherubed face of their newborn hopes their child will grow and choose a life of crime only to die in a hail of bullets. That was not the hope of Charles and Emma Parker for their newborn daughter Bonnie Elizabeth when they first looked in her baby blue eyes. And yet, that’s exactly what Bonnie became—a thief and a murderer—and how Bonnie died—bullet riddled.

Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow, a two-penny con, in 1930 in West Dallas. They began their homicidal crime spree in 1932. Over the next two years, they murdered at least twelve people, nine of whom were law enforcement officers. Bonnie, a petite shotgun-wielding blonde, fancied herself a poet. In a poem that came to be known as “The Trail’s End” (or “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”), she penned a romanticized view of their criminal life together, accurately predicting their violent deaths but inaccurately predicting their side by side burials.

In the 2019 film The Highwaymen Woody Harrelson’s character, Maney Gault, reads the first few lines of Bonnie’s poem and comments, “Used to be, you had to have talent to get published. Now you just have to shoot people.”

He was right.

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You have read the story of Jesse James,
of how he lived and died.
If you are still in need of something to read
here is the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang,
I’m sure you all have read
how they rob and steal
and how those who squeal
are usually found dying or dead.

There are lots of untruth to their write ups,
there are no so merciless as that.
they hate all the law.
the stool pigeons, spotters and rats.

They class them as cold blooded killers.
they say they are heartless and mean
but I say this with pride,
that I once new Clyde
when he was honest, upright and clean.
But the law fooled around,
kept taking him down
and locking him up in a cell
till he said to me
“I will never be free,
so I will meet a few of them in HELL.”

This road was so dimly lighted.
there was no highway signs to guide,
but they made up their minds
if the roads were all blind
they wouldn’t give up until they died.

The road gets dimmer and dimmer,
sometimes you can hardly see,
still it’s fight, man to man,
and do all you can
for they know they can never be free.

If they try to act like citizens
and rent them a nice little flat,
about the third night they are invited to fight
by a sub machine gun Rat-Tat-Tat.

If a policeman is killed in Dallas1
and they have no clues for a guide,
if they just wipe the slate clean
and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.

Two crimes have been done in America,
not accredited to the Barrow Mob,
for they had no hand
in the kidnapping demand
or the Kansas City depot job.

A newsboy once said to his buddy,
“I wished old Clyde would get jumped
in this awful hard times,
we might make a few dimes,
if 5 or 8 laws got bumped”.

The police haven’t got the report yet,
Clyde sent a wireless today,
saying “we have a peace flag of white,
we stretch out at night,
we have joined the N. R. A.”2

They don’t think they are too tough or desperate,
they know the law always wins,
they have been shot at before,
but they do not ignore,
that death was the wages of sin.

From heartbreaks some people have suffered,
from weariness some people had died,
but take it all in all,
our troubles are small,
till we get little Bonnie and Clyde.

Some day they will go down together
and they will bury them side by side,
to a few it means grief,
to the law it is relief,
but it is death to Bonnie and Clyde.

End.

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On May 23, 1934, on a back road in Gibsland, Louisiana, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed by two former Texas Rangers, Frank Hamer and B. M. “Maney” Gault, the Bienville Perish sheriff and his deputy, Henderson Jordan and Prentiss Morel Oakley, Dallas Country Deputy Sheriffs Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton, who knew Bonnie from her Dallas days. Clyde was buried on May 25 in Western Heights Cemetery in Dallas. Bonnie was buried on May 26, in Fishtrap Cemetery (also known as La Reunion Cemetery) in Dallas before being moved to Crown Hill Cemetery in Dallas in 1945.

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¹ This could be a reference to Dallas Deputy Malcolm Simmons Davis who was gunned down by the Barrow Gang on January 6, 1934.

² This is not the National Rifle Association but the New Deal National Recovery Administration program.

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Bonnie Parker, “Poem by Bonnie Parker,” date unknown, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, crediting Dallas Municipal Archives.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

One of the most popular pieces published on Y’allogy is on cowboy hats: “Cowboy Etiquette: The Cowboy Hat.” That article is a set of rules on the appropriate ways to handle your hat, when to remove it, and when to wear straw and felt. It was written for “citified folks” who’ve adopted a western wear lifestyle but who might not know proper hat etiquette. If that’s you, I invite you to read that piece—after all, you don’t want to run afoul “in the presence of the real McCoy” by demonstrating that “you only have hair under your hat.”

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Those raised on concrete but who want to dress like those raised on dirt typically select a conventional hat style: one with a “Cattleman’s Crease.” It’s a good-looking, modern style, but bears little resemblance to the hats worn by working cowboys in the Old West. During the glory days of trailing cattle, from 1865–1890, cowboys, by and large, wore (or something similar to) Philadelphia milliner John B. Stetson’s “Boss of the Plains”—a wide brimmed, open crowned hat made from beaver felt, first produced in 1865. Before that vaqueros along the Rio Grande and the brush country of South Texas wore sombreros made of animal fur, hemp, or other organic material.

Regardless of what the hat is made of or the shape it takes, old-time cowboys didn’t wear one as a fashion statement. To them, a hat was a practical piece of equipment—a tool to keep the sun off a man’s face and neck and to protect him from rain and hail. When cowboys became celluloid the important thing about the cowboy hat was no longer practicality but projection, creating a compelling image on the screen. This led to film and television hats that looked good, but bore little resemblance to the working man’s headgear.

But this doesn’t mean filmmakers and television productions always get it wrong when representing historically accurate cowboys’ hats on the screen. The following baker’s dozen of movie and television hats are not the most stylish or unsoiled, but they do epitomize some of the most authentic Old West cowboy hats put on film.

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Bandit (Justus D. Barnes) in The Great Train Robbery (1903) wore a historically genuine hat. The front brim is creased up to one side and the hat is pushed back on his head—a common, relaxed way of wearing the hat seen in many old-time photos. Long Hair (Bruce Dern) in The Cowboys (1972) also wore this hat style.

Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) wore a mashed open crown, where the dents are placed here and there with no discernible rhyme or reason. The curls in the front brim are equally uneven. It’s a hat that looks sweated through and slept in, just like the real thing.

Hondo Lane (John Wayne) in Hondo (1953) wore a period accurate cavalry slouch hat with the front and rear brim curled up and the crown pinched on four sides—a common style among nineteenth century cavalry troopers. This is the same hat Wayne wore in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

Festus Haggen (Ken Curtis) in the television series Gunsmoke (1964–1975) wore a sweat stained, tall open-crowned hat. The front brim is curled from where Curtis grabbed it, bearing the marks of genuineness.

Monte Walsh (Lee Marvin) in Monte Walsh (1970) wore a broad-brimmed hat with the front brim pushed up, a run-of-the-mill brim style for old-timers. The crown is tall but pinched in a sloppy Montana Peak, a crown style common at the time, and rounded with a beaver hatband.

Russ (Geoffrey Lewis) in The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) wore a modified sombrero. The brim is wide and the crown is roughly flattened with a slight front pinch, typical of South Texas cowboys of the time.

Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) wore a wide, pencil rolled brimmed hat with what is often called a “Gambler’s Crease” (sometimes known as “Telescope Crease”) where the crown is flattened evenly across. Pencil rolled hats were popular in the nineteenth century.

Tom Horn (Steve McQueen) in Tom Horn (1980) wore a hat that is popularly known as the “Gus.” The crown has a deep crease and slopes sharply at the front. The back of the crown is left untouched or opened. The fold of the brim is a little too clean but in keeping with the time period depicted in the film: early 1900s.

Barbarosa (Wille Nelson) in Barbarosa (1982) wore a wide-brimmed sugarloaf-style sombrero. The back brim is angled upward while the front brim is angled downward. The high-peaked crown is pinched toward the front. Under that hat, Nelson could have passed for a Mexican or Tejano vaquero working cattle in the late 1880s.

Augustus McCrae (Robert Duvall) in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989) wore the classic “Gus” style hat, with the same sharply sloping front crown as the Tom Horn hat, but the brim isn’t as neatly shaped. Historically, this hat wasn’t period accurate—it’s about thirty or so years too early—yet its hand-grabbed brim and leather wound hatband and patina is quintessential cowboy. Besides, how could I not include it?

Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) in Tombstone (1993) wore a black felt, wide-brimmed hat where the front quarter is curled and the ribboned crown is crushed to one side. It’s embellished with a black leather stampede string. Next to the Bandit’s hat in The Great Train Robbery, this hat is the most iconically authentic hat worn by working cowboys in the Old West.

Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) in Open Range (2003) wore a wide-brimmed hat with uneven folds where Costner grabbed it. It has a high, front pinched crown and, with the exception of Gil Carter’s and Festus Haggen’s hats, it’s the most lived-in looking hat on the list, taking on a weathered patina every working cowboy’s hat developed after months in the open.

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) in True Grit (2010) wore a classic “Boss of the Plains” hat—low open crown and flat wide brim adorned with a simple gray ribbon. Hard to get more real than that.

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Any one of these hats would have been welcomed and common on the trail during the heyday of cattle herding. But they aren’t the only movie and television cowboy hats that had a bona fide look. What hats would you add to the list?

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

One of the pleasures of working from home is that at lunchtime I can watch movies. I don’t watch a whole movie in one lunchtime sitting but stretch it out over a few days, fifteen or twenty minutes per lunch break. I typically watch a film I’ve seen many times or select a B-grade film I can abandon after fifteen or twenty minutes without feeling the need to pick it up the next day or two to finish it.

The other day I picked a movie I’d never seen before, and though it stars Jimmy Stewart and Dean Martin it didn’t look all that interesting beyond the first fifteen or twenty minutes—perfect for a lunchtime film. Based on a story by Stanley L. Hough, Andrew V. McLaglen’s 1968 Bandolero! (with an exclamation point) has Stewart playing Mace Bishop, a man pretending to be a hangman, rescuing his outlaw brother, Dee Bishop, played by Martin. The film also stars Raquel Welch as Maria Stoner.

I was perhaps five or ten minutes into the movie when I knew this was one I must finish, which I did later that evening, not even waiting for the next day’s fifteen minutes. What arrested my attention was not the storyline or the acting of Stewart or Martin, or even the presence of Welch, it was the characters portrayed by co-stars George Kennedy and Andrew Prine and their connection to Lonesome Dove.

I’ve written extensively on Larry McMurtry’s inspiration for his most famous novel, as well as the sources for some of his characters. And though I had read in Tracy Daugherty’s biography that McMurtry might have taken the names of July Johnson and Roscoe Brown from Bandolero! (in the film Roscoe’s last name is Bookbinder), that tidbit didn’t sit like a splinter until I watched the movie.

But it’s more than just the names McMurtry lifted from the film.

In both the novel and the movie, July and Roscoe hale from small towns: Fort Smith, Arkansas (in Lonesome Dove) and Val Verde, Texas (in Bandolero!). They also share the same profession: July is a sheriff and Roscoe is his deputy sheriff.

But McMurtry’s artistic theft doesn’t end there. He also took a portion of the July/Roscoe subplot from the screenplay for his novel. In the film, Welch’s character, Maria, a former prostitute, spurns the affections of Kennedy’s character, July, because she’s in love with Martin’s character, an outlaw whose name happens to be Dee. In the novel, July’s wife, Elmira, also a former prostitute, spurs his affections because she’s in love with an outlaw by the name of Dee Boot. At the end of both storylines, in the film and in the novel, both outlaws meet their end, but not before each woman has one last moment with them. Though Elmira in Lonesome Dove runs away to find Dee, and Maria in Bandolero! is kidnapped by Dee, the overlap of their stories is too coincidental to be a coincidence.

Nor can it be a coincidence that both July characters set out on a dangerous journey across unknown and desolate lands in search of the women they love, resulting in the deaths of both deputies. Roscoe in the film dies in Mexico and is buried under a pile of rocks in an abandoned village. Roscoe in the novel dies in Texas and is buried under a pile of rocks on a lonely hill overlooking the Canadian River.

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The obscure Australian playwright C. Haddon Chambers wrote an equally obscure play in 1888, Captain Swift, which is best known for one obscure line: “The long arm of coincidence has reached after me.” Whether McMurtry was familiar with that play or that line I don’t know. But he put that line to work in the novel, extending the long arm of coincidence back to an obscure film to reach for the names and professions and storyline of his July Johnson and Roscoe Brown in creating his renowned novel Lonesome Dove.

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Bandolero! directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (20th Century Fox, 1968).

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has encountered a true Texan that we’re apt to brag that everything in our state is either the biggest or best or first, even if it doesn’t make a bit of sense, like jumbo shrimp (which of course, we have the best and biggest). Such braggadocio is charming to some and exasperating to others—bless their hearts.

One of the things Texans would brag about, if more knew about it, is that the first Thanksgiving held in North America was in Texas, eighty years before the celebrated 1621 Thanksgiving of the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims in Massachusetts. In May 1541, the expedition of Fransisco Vázquez de Coronado celebrated a Feast of Thanksgiving in Palo Duro Canyon during his search for the Seven Cities of Gold.¹ Located in the middle of the foreboding llano estacado, Coronado and his men found much needed water and game along the canyon floor—signs of God’s provision and blessing—leading Fray Juan Padilla to celebrate a Thanksgiving Mass.²

But this wasn’t the only early Texas celebration of Thanksgiving. Nearly sixty years later, on April 30, 1598, another Spanish expedition, led by Juan de Oñate, offered thanks for their salvation.

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Don Juan de Oñate was a member of a distinguished family in service to the Spanish crown who married a woman of noble Castilian and Aztec blood—a descendant of both Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma II. Oñate’s father had discovered and developed mines in Zacatecas, Mexico, a profession the young Oñate adopted, speculating in and opening mines in San Luis Potosí.

Granted land in Nuevo México in 1565 by the viceroy of New Spain, Oñate cobbled together an expedition of four to five hundred soldiers, colonists, wives and children, and 7,000 head of livestock. Three years later, in early March 1598, Oñate set out across the Chihuahuan desert. Bypassing the traditional route from the Rio Conchos to the Rio Grande and following its course northward, Oñate ordered Vicente de Zaldívar to blaze a wagon trail from Santa Barbara in southern Chihuahua to what became the city of El Paso. (The modern highway between Chihuahua and El Paso follows Zaldívar’s trail.)

Almost immediately the expedition encountered difficulties. Seven days of consecutive rain mired them in miserable mud. Then the skies cleared and brought endless days of dryness. Five days from the Rio Grande the expedition ran out of food and water, forcing members to dig for roots and hunt edible desert plants. Waterlessness nearly drove them insane, including the livestock. Captain Gasper Pérez de Villargá, a member of the expedition, composed an epic poem about their journey in 1610 and wrote of their terrible thirst and their arrival at the Rio Grande, near San Elizario:

The gaunt horses approached the rolling stream and plunged headlong into it. Two of them drank so much that they burst their sides and died. Two others, blinded by their raving thirst, plunged so far into the stream that they were caught in its swift current and drowned.

Our men, consumed by the burning thirst, their throats parched, threw themselves into the water and drank as though the entire river did not carry enough to quench their terrible thirst. Then satisfied, they threw themselves upon the cool sands, like foul wretches stretched upon some tavern floor in a drunken orgy, deformed and swollen and more like toads than men.

After recuperating for ten days, on April 30, 1598, Oñate ordered a day of Thanksgiving, celebrating their salvation with Mansos Indians, who later became absorbed into one or another Apache band. The Spaniards provided wild game and the Mansos provided fish. A Mass was held by Franciscan missionaries. Oñate read the La Toma—the taking—declaring the land drained by the Rio Grande to be the possession of King Philip II of Spain.

De Villargá wrote of their Thanksgiving celebration: “We built a great bonfire and roasted mean and fish, and then all set down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before. We were happy that our trials were over; as happy as were the passengers in the Ark when they saw the dove returning with the olive branch in his beak, bringing tidings that the deluge had subsided.”

After their feast, the Oñate expedition continued through el paso del rió del norte—the pass across the river of the north—following the waterway until they settled near Santa Fé.

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1. According to the Texas Almanac, “The Texas Society of Daughters of the America Colonists placed a marker in 1959 just outside the Canyon. It declared that that the expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in May 1541 celebrated the first feast of Thanksgiving in Palo Duro Canyon.” Some claim this was a celebration of the Feast of the Ascension.

2. Other early Thanksgiving celebrations, predating the Plymouth Thanksgiving, include the June 30, 1564, French Huguenot celebration near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, and the September 8, 1565, Spanish celebration at St. Augustine, Florida.

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Gasper Pérez de Villagrá, Historic de la Nueva México, trans. Gilberto Espinosa (The Quivira Society, 1933).

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

There’s a Yellow Rose that I am going to see,
Nobody else could miss her, not half as much as me.
She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her, we nevermore will part.

These are the lyrics made famous by Mitch Miller in 1955, but aren’t the lyrics of the original tune “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” made popular a century earlier by Edwin P. Christy and his Christy’s Minstrels. The 1853 version, performed in blackface, included racial epithets objectionable today.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

There’s a yellow girl in Texas that I am going to see,
No other darkies know her, no darkey only me.
She cried so when I left her that it like to broke my heart,
And if I only find her, we never will part.

The song has been around since the 1830s.¹ The term “yellow” was a common reference to mulattos—mix raced progeny of a White parent and a Black parent—while the word “rose” was a common euphemism for a young woman. Folklorists, like Frank X. Tolbert, have claimed the tune was based on true events that happened at the battle of San Jacinto between Mexican president-general Antonio López de Santa Anna and a young indentured servant by the name of Emily D. West.

Historically, we know Santa Anna existed and what happened to him and his troops on that fateful day on April 21, 1836—Mexican forces were routed and slaughtered by Texian forces under Sam Houston and Texas won its independence from Mexico. But was Emily West a living, breathing person of the past, and if so, who was she and what does she have to do with Santa Anna and the tune “The Yellow Rose of Texas”?

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The activities of Santa Anna at the moment Sam Houston and the Texian army attacked Mexican troops at San Jacinto have been disputed and debated since 1836. After action accounts by Mexican veterans indicate lax conditions within the Mexican camp. Colonel Pedro Delgado, a member of Santa Anna’s staff, reported: “As it was represented to his excellency [Santa Anna] that [Martín de Cos’s men] had not slept the night before [because of a force march to reach San Jacinto], he instructed them to stack their arms, to remove their accoutrements, and go to sleep quietly in the adjoining grove.”

Santa Anna had retired to his own tent. According to Texian artillery Captain Isaac Moreland, who commanded the “Twin Sisters,” Santa Anna was occupied with Emily West—a mulatto young woman—who had been captured at Morgan’s Point three days before.

A known womanizer, Santa Anna, before the final assault on the Alamo, had taken a young “bride” in a mock marriage. José Antonio Menchaca, a San Antonio native and a fervent defender of Texas independence, knew about the “marriage.” He later said, “In the year 1836, Santa Anna deceived Melchora Iniega Barrera, a young woman of 17 and very beautiful who belonged to one of the best families of San Antonio. Santa Anna, not being able to obtain the favors of Señorita Barrera, said he would marry her. He arranged for one of his sergeants to disguise himself as a priest, and, in this manner, the marriage was celebrated.”²

After burning the dead bodies of the Alamo fallen, Santa Anna and his new “bride” left San Antonio in pursuit of Sam Houston and his thrown together army. Santa Anna and Melchora traveled in a treasure laden carriage. On April 2, when they reached the swollen Guadalupe River, the carriage was too heavy to cross. Santa Anna mounted his horse and sent Melchora on her way to Mexico City with a truck, as it was reported, full of silver.

On the eastern side of the Guadalupe, Santa Anna and his troops march toward San Jacinto. Along their way, on April 19, they pass through Morgan’s Point plantation in New Washington. There they capture several of Colonel James Morgan’s indentured servants, one of whom was Emily West.³

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Emily has sometimes been misidentified as Emily Morgan, as if she was Morgan’s slave. She was not. She was Morgan’s indentured servant—a free woman. She contracted with Morgan to accompany him from New York to Texas and work for him for a year, for one hundred dollars. The surviving contract, dated 1835, stipulates that Emily was originally from New Haven, Connecticut. Nothing in the contract indicates she was a mulatto.

The contract was witnessed by Simon S. Jocelyn, a prominent New Haven antislavery philanthropist, who sponsored a number of free Black organizations and institutions. The 1830 census recorded several persons living in his household: six Whites and one “free colored female” between the ages of ten and twenty-four—likely Emily West.

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That Emily came to Texas in 1835 with James Morgan and had been captured by Santa Anna and his troops are historical facts and are without question. But whether she occupied Santa Anna in his tent on the afternoon of April 21, 1836, presumably distracting him with her sexual favors, is murky at best. Undoubtedly, she had some information, if not vital information, useful to Santa Anna about the situation in Texas. In all probability she was interrogated, if not by Santa Anna himself at least by one of his officers—Colonel Juan Almonte most likely since he spoke English.

The first historical record of the presence of a woman named Emily within the Mexican camp on that momentous day came from the pen of Englishman William Bollaert, a traveler through Texas from 1842–1844 who wrote a report about the new Republic of Texas for the British admiralty. During his travels he spoke with many notable Texans, including Sam Houston.

Bollaert’s book contains a footnote—but a bombshell of a footnote—which was written into the margin of his original manuscript. Next to his transcription of the Emily West story was the thrice underlined word “private.”

The Battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans, owing to the influence of a Mulatto Girl (Emily) belonging to Colonel Morgan, who was cloistered in the tent with General Santana, at the time the cry was made, “the enemy! they come! they come!” and detained Santana so long that order could not be restored readily again.”

Bollaert claimed the story of the mulatto girl—Emily—came from “an officer who was engaged in it [the battle of San Jacinto] in his own words.” Historian James Lutzweiler asserts that officer was Sam Houston. Houston probably heard the story of Emily West after visiting the ailing Isaac Moreland on June 5, 1842, just before Moreland’s death, before passing this “private” story onto Bollaert. Moreland claimed to have met Emily in April 1836.

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The first connection of Emily West with the song “The Yellow Rose of Texas” came from journalist and folklorists Frank Tolbert. He writes (without a source), “What became of Emily? She lived . . . to inspire a wonderful song. Musical historians seem to agree that the folk song ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ was inspired by a good-looking mulatto slave girl. And in one set of original lyrics—not the ones popularized by Mitch Miller—the girl of the song is called, ‘Emily, the maid of Morgan’s Point.’”⁴

Whether Emily West was in fact the inspiration for “The Yellow Rose of Texas” cannot be claimed as declaratively as Tolbert asserts. What can be claimed declaratively, however, is what happened to Emily immediately after the battle of San Jacinto. While she had her papers proving her freedman status when she was captured by Santa Anna, she lost her papers at some point during the eighteen minutes melee. When the Texians burned the prairie the day after the battle the prospects of finding her papers were as good as holding smoke in your hand. Without proof that she was a free woman, she could be claimed as a slave and sold.

Moreland must have encountered her within days of battle’s aftermath, probably on the battlefield as Mexican prisoners were being processed. She told Moreland who she was and that she was a free woman—a claim Morgan could affirm. It’s assumed Emily served out her indentured contract with Morgan, but once the contract had been fulfilled she sought a passport to return to New York. She wrote to the newly appointed secretary of state Robert Irion, who demanded verification of her freedman status. Since Moreland kept in touch with her throughout 1836 and into 1837, Emily appealed to him to vouch for her by sending a letter to Irion.

Moreland wrote Irion on Emily’s behalf on July 7, 1837:

Capitol, Thursday Morning

To the Hon. Dr. Irion

The bearer of this—Emily D. West has been since my first acquaintance with her, in April of –36 a free woman—she emigrated to this County with Col. Ja’s Morgan from the state of N. York in September of 35 and is now anxious to return and wishes a passport—I believe myself, that she is entitled to one and has requested me to give her this note to you.

Your Obed’t Serv’t

I. N. Moreland

Next to his signature, Moreland wrote an additional note, which he signed with his last name. This post script may have been added at Emily’s insistence as proof that she had lost her papers on April 21, 1836:

Her free papers were Lost at San Jacinto as I am Informed and believe in April of –36.

Moreland

We can say for certain Irion issued Emily a passport after receiving Moreland’s letter, but we can’t say for certain that Emily returned to New York because the Yellow Rose of Texas simply faded from the pages of history.

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1. The first known version comes from handwritten lyrics circa 1836 which can found in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin.

2. Ironically, Melchora legally married that very same sergeant after he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

3. At least six women from Morgan’s plantation were among the Mexican prisoners captured after the battle of San Jacinto.

4. Tolbert writes, “Colonel Morgan bought Santa Anna’s tent at an auction after the battle. He sent it to a friend in the United States with this explanation: ‘This was the den of the tiger, which once echoed to the cries of helpless womankind.’”

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Lora-Marie Bernard, The Yellow Rose of Texas: The Song, the Legend and Emily D. West (The History Press, 2020).

William Bollaert, William Bollaert Texas, W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham, eds. (University of Oklahoma, 1956).

James Lutzweiler, Santa Anna and Emily D. West at San Jacinto: Who Edits the Editors? M.A. thesis (North Carolina State University, 1997).

Stephen L. Moore, Eighteen Minutes: The Battle of San Jacinto and the Texas Independence Campaign (Republic of Texas Press, 2004).

Frank X. Tolbert, An Informal History of Texas: From Cabeza de Vaca to Temple Houston (Harper & Brothers, 1961).

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

“Mr. Sumner, I read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I felt it was my duty to tell you that you have libeled my state and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.” So was the reason why South Carolina United States Representative Preston Brooks gave to Massachusetts United States Senator Charles Sumner right before Brooks began beating Sumner about the head with his walking cane.

Days prior, Sumner railed about the “Crime Against Kansas,” accusing proslavery factions of “raping” Kansas and condemning Southern “plantation manners” and his Southern colleagues’ habit of “trampling” congressional rules “under foot.” Sumner called for the admittance of Kansas as a free state and attacked, among others, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks. During the speech Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who came under Sumner’s withering rhetorical blows as well, paced in the back of the chamber and was overheard muttering, “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool.”

On May 22, 1856, that damn fool was sitting at his senate desk postmarking copies of the speech that so infuriated that other damn fool who beat Sumner nearly to death.

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The caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks wasn’t the first time a member of Congress was beaten with a walking stick for political remarks. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1832, former Congressman and then-Tennessee governor Samuel Houston caned Ohio Representative William Stanbery on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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On March 31 Stanbery stood in the well of the House and accused President Andrew Jackson as scoundrel and charged Sam Houston for taking part in a scheme to defraud the Cherokee nation as part of Jackson’s controversial Indian Removal Act—the same piece of legislation (among other anti-Jackson activities) that cost David Crockett his Tennessee congressional seat when he opposed it, spurring him to tell his constituents, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” Hinting at bribes that had swirled around the Jackson administration when it came to relocating eastern tribes to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), Stanbery asked, “Was not the late Secretary of War [John Eaton] removed because of his attempt fraudulently to give Governor Houston the contract for Indian rations?”

Houston, who happened to be in Washington, D.C. with a delegation of Cherokees, was outraged. A citizen of the Cherokee nation and a noted defender of native rights, Houston had exerted efforts to protect them from unscrupulous designs and knew Stanbery’s accusation was a lie perpetrated for political expediency. Stanbery was a vocal anti-Jacksonian. Houston knew he couldn’t sue the congressman for slander due to congressional privilege, but he meant to extract a retraction from Stanbery, even if he had to beat it out of him.

After Stanbery spoke in the House, Houston marched into the foyer determined to “settle” the matter then and there, brandishing his hickory walking stick as a warning to Stanbery. James K. Polk hustled Houston outside. Later, Houston dispatched Tennessee Representative Cave Johnson to Stanbery with a formal challenge to a duel. Stanbery refused to acknowledge or reply to “a note signed Sam Houston,” but decided the best course of action was to carry on his person a brace of pistols.

When Houston learned Stanbery rejected his challenge, Houston said, “I’ll introduce myself to the damned rascal.”

Two weeks later, on the evening of April 13, Houston was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with Missouri Senator Alexander Buckner and Tennessee Representative John Blair when Blair recognized Stanbery coming out of the Brown Hotel and crossing the street. In the dim light of the streetlamps, Houston approached the Ohio congressman. “Are you Mr. Stanbery?” Stanbery stopped and bowed and said, “Yes, sir.” “Then you are a damned rascal.” Houston then lifted his cane and brought it down on Stanbery’s head, knocking his hat off.

Stanbery cried out, “Oh, don’t,” and threw up his hand to protect himself as Houston rained blows upon him. At one point in the melee, Houston jumped on Stanbery’s back and tackled him. With Stanbery bleeding from the head, the two men wrestled on the pavement, Stanbery yelling for help. He was able to pull one of his pistols and placed it against Houston’s chest and pulled the trigger. Buckner later testified he heard the gunlock snap and saw the flint flash against the frizzen and the powder fire. But the charge did not explode. Houston knocked the pistol away and stood up and continued striking Stanbery with the hickory stick. As a finishing and humiliating touch, Houston grabbed one of Stanbery’s feet and lifted it and, according to Buckner, “struck him elsewhere”—such was his testimony in the presence of ladies.

Buckner further testified: “By this time, a crowd had gathered round and some person . . . spoke to Houston. Houston replied, ‘That he attended to his business, and that he had chastised the damned scoundrel; if he had offended the law, he would answer for what he had done.’”

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Propped up in his bed, Stanbery wrote to Speaker of the House Andrew Stevenson describing how he had been “waylaid in the street . . . attacked, knocked down by a bludgeon and severely bruised and wounded by Samuel Houston, late of Tennessee, for words spoken in my place in the House of Representatives.”

On April 17 Stanbery’s note was read before the assembled House. A resolution was offered for the arrest of Houston. James Polk objected, arguing the House didn’t not have the authority to arrest Houston. Polk was overruled—the resolution passed 145 to 25. Houston was ordered detained, the first private citizen to be arrested by the House for an attack on one of its members “as a result of words spoken before Congress.”

Trial was set for April 19 and dragged on for a month. It was the most important political event in the spring of 1832. With the author of the National Anthem—“The Star Spangled Banner”—Francis Scott Key as his legal counsel, Houston argued he didn’t molest Stanbery for words spoken in the House, but for words printed in a newspaper attributed to Stanbery. (Never mind that the paper merely printed a transcript of Stanbery’s House speech.)

In the end, by a vote of 106 to 89, the House found Houston guilty of contempt of Congress and sentenced him to stand in the well of the House to endure a tongue lashing from Speaker Stevenson, who on May 14 beat Houston with a wet noodle: “I forbear to say more than to pronounce the judgment of the House, which is that you . . . be reprimanded at this bar by the Speaker, and . . . I do reprimand you accordingly.”

It’s good to have friends in high places, like the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

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Understandably, Stanbery was outraged by the House’s paltry penalty and sought greater redress by suing Houston for assault in a United States Circuit Court. In July 1832 the court found Houston guilty and ordered him to pay Stanbery five hundred dollars. Houston, in turn, wrote to Andrew Jackson, “[praying] that the fine and cost of suit may be remitted your PARDON.” Jackson accommodated: “I regard this fine as excessive and therefore remit it.”

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Several weeks after winning his pyrrhic victory in court, Stanbery was censured by the House for insulting the Speaker. That fall, Stanbery lost his bid for reelection and disappeared from the pages of history. Houston left for Texas and became a legend.

Thinking on this episode later in life, Houston wrote, “I was dying out and had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars it would have killed me; but they gave me a national tribunal for a theater, and that set me up again.”

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Joanne Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 218–20, 222.

Marquis James, The Raven (Halcyon House, 1929), 163–66, 171–72.

R. G. Ratcliffe, “Poncho Nevárez, The New Sam Houston?” Texas Monthly, June 8, 2017.

John Hoyt Williams, Sam Houston: A Biography of the Father of Texas (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 92–96.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Reverberations of revolution were already rolling across Texas when twenty-four-year-old Giles Albert Giddings arrived in March 1836 from Herrick, Pennsylvania. He came to work as a surveyor on the frontier but was soon caught up in the Texian cause of independence. On April 9, he enrolled as a private in Captain William Wood’s Company A, known as the “Kentucky Rifles” because they were originally formed in that state on December 18, 1835.

The day after joining the Texian army, Giddings posted a letter to his parents explaining his decision and expressing his love and bidding them farewell if he should fall in battle.

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Texas, Four Miles from Headquarters

April 10, 1836.

Dear Parents:

Since I last wrote you I have been engaged in arranging an expedition against the Indians, who have committed many depredations against the frontier. On my return to the settlements, I learned that our country was again invaded by a merciless horde of Mexicans, who were waging war or extermination against the inhabitants. A call was made for all friends of humanity to rise in arms and resist the foe. Men were panic stricken and fled, leaving their all behind them. I could not reconcile it to my feelings to leave Texas without an effort to save it. Accordingly, I bent my course for the army and arrived last evening at this place. I shall enter Camp this morning as a volunteer. The army, commanded by General Houston, is lying on the west side of the Brazos [River], 20 miles from San Felipe. The enemy is in that place awaiting an attack. It is reported Houston will attack them in the morning.¹ What will be the result, or the fate of Texas, is in the bowels of futurity. Yet, I think we are engaged in the cause of justice, and hope the God of battles will protect us. The enemy’s course has been the most bloody that has ever been recorded on the page of history. Our garrison at San Antonio was taken and massacred; another detachment of seven hundred, commanded by Colonel Fannin, and posted at La Bahia, after surrendering prisoners of war, were led out and shot down like beasts.² Only one escaped to tell their melancholy fate.³ In their course they show no quarter to age, sex, or condition, all are massacred without mercy. If such conduct is not sufficient to arouse the patriotic feelings of the sons of liberty, I know not what will. I was born in a land of freedom, and taught to lisp the name of liberty with my infant tongue, and rather than be driven out of the country or submit to be a slave, I will leave my bones to bleach on the plains of Texas. If we succeed in subduing the enemy and establishing a free and independent government, we shall have the finest country the sun ever shown upon, and if we fail we shall have the satisfaction of dying fighting for the rights of men. I know not that I shall have the opportunity of writing to you in some time, but shall do so often as convenient.

Be not alarmed about my safety. I am no better, and my life no dearer, than those who gained the liberty you enjoy. If I fall you will have the satisfaction that your son died fighting for the rights of men. Our strength in the field is about 1,500. The enemy is reported 4,000 strong; a fearful odds, you will say; but what can mercenary hirelings do against the sons of liberty!

Before this reaches you the fate of Texas will be known. I will endeavor to acquaint you as soon as possible. I am well and in good spirits, and as unconcerned as if going to a raising. The same Being who has hitherto protected my life can with equal ease ward off the balls of the enemy.

My company is waiting, and I must draw to a close, and bid you farewell, perhaps forever. More than a year has elapsed since I saw you, yet the thought of friends and home are fresh in my memory, and their remembrance yet lives in my affections and will [be] a secret joy to my heart till it shall cease to beat. Long has it been since I heard from you. How often do I think of home and wish to be there. The thoughts of that sacred spot haunts my night-watches. How often, when sleep has taken possession of my faculties, am I transported there, and for a short time enjoy all the pleasures of home; but the delusion is soon over and the morning returns and I find my situation the same. Dear friends, if I see you no more remember Giles still loves you. Give my love to my sister, brothers, friends, and neighbors.⁴ I would write more if time would permit, but its fleeting steps wait for none. You need not write to me, as I do not know where I shall be. With sentiments of sincere respect I bid you fare-well.

Your affectionate son,

G. A. Giddings

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Giddings saw action on April 21, 1836, at the battle of San Jacinto and was mortally wounded, passing away on June 10. He was one of nine Texians to either die during the battle or succumb from wounds afterward. He was the final Texian to die in the Texas Revolution.

Two years later, on June 7, 1838, a Headright Certificate was issued to Giddings’s heirs for one-third of a league of land by the Fort Bend County Board. The following year, on March 4, 1839, his heirs received 640 acres of land for having participated in the battle of San Jacinto. Later, his heirs were given 1,920 acres of land for having served in the army from April 11 to June 10, 1836, and for having died in service.

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¹ This was typical military scuttlebutt. Houston didn’t attack on April 11, 1836, but continued his easterly retreat toward the Sabine River, attacking ten days later at a place called San Jacinto.

² This number is greatly exaggerated. The actual number of men who surrendered at Goliad was 370—the men under Fannin’s command who surrendered after the battle of Coleto Creek on March 20, 1836, and the George Battalion under the command of William Ward who surrendered on March 22.

³ More than one man escaped the massacre at Goliad, as I point out in “John C. Duval’s Escape from Goliad.”

⁴ Giles was one of thirteen Giddings children.

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Louis W. Kemp, “Giles Albert Giddings,” The Kemp Sketch, San Jacinto Museum and Battlefield.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Cormac McCarthy famously said, “Books are made out of books.” That was certainly true of Lonesome Dove. In an interview with John Spong of Texas Monthly on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s publication, Larry McMurtry confessed he echoed the relationship between Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call on the Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving relationship, which McMurtry would have encountered in J. Evetts Haley’s 1936 Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. McMurtry also told Spong, he copied the words on Bose Ikard’s monument—a black cowboy who work with Goodnight—for Josh Deet’s epitaph, which he took from Haley’s biography of the cowman. McMurtry then added: “And I knew vaguely that I was paralleling part of [E.C.] Teddy Blue Abbott [We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher (1939)]. But I’m not thinking about that when I’m writing.”

McMurtry might not have been conscious of pulling from or shadowing others but he was influenced and inspired by other works and historical facts, including the renegade in Lonesome Dove: Blue Duck. McMurtry told Chuck Thompson of Cowboys & Indians, “Belle Starr, a rather famous female outlaw, had a boyfriend named Blue Duck. The name is derived from him. I knew Blue Duck was a great villain. The face of evil, if you can harness it, is powerful.”

McMurtry’s reliance on other books or the historic record extends beyond the major characters in Lonesome Dove. His creation of minor characters—as I pointed out in “‘My Good Friend’: Xavier Wanz”—including one of Blue Duck’s henchmen, Ermoke, the funny-named bad man Frog Lip, and the wise beyond her years Janey, also were derived from others.

Ermoke, Renegade Kiowa

The real Ermoke is a man of mystery, whose history has been lost to the ravages of time and forgotten memory. (At least I’ve not been able to uncover his history.) Though little is known about the man’s life, his image is easily discovered. William “Billy” Dixon published a photograph of Ermoke, surrounded by a “band of [four] murderous Kiowas,” in his 1874 memoir, Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, of Adobe Walls, Texas Panhandle, a volume well-known by McMurtry. The photograph was taken some two years before, in 1872, by William S. Soule at Fort Sill, Indian Territory.

In keeping with Dixon’s brief description of the actual man, Ermoke the character in Lonesome Dove, along with his Kiowa renegades, are unquestionably a murderous bunch—they would have to be to join Blue Duck’s gang. But they are more than murderers. They are rapists—insurrectionists against mankind, renegades, not merely against the law, but against all that is good and decent.

Murderers take another person’s life. Rapists take another person’s humanity, reducing them to a bestial status, perverting them into objects in which the rapist consummates his lascivious violence. This is played out in Lonesome Dove by the multiple rapes of Lorena after being captured by Blue Duck. Once Ermoke and his Kiowas, as well as Monkey John and Dog Face (notice the animalistic names), have roundly abused her, Blue Duck cowers them into gambling. He makes a comment about winning most of the livestock in the camp except Lorena. “A woman ain’t livestock,” Dog Face says. “This one is,” Blue Duck responds. “I’ve bought and sold better animals than her many times.” He then adds: “You’d do better to buy a goat.”

Frog Lip, Taciturn Killer

From my first introduction of Lonesome Dove in 1989, the close-mouthed black member of the Suggs’s gang was just another one of those forgettable minor characters that serve their narrative purpose and are either left behind or killed off. I had always assumed McMurtry created Frog Lip from his imagination and given him an unusual name, perhaps in the hopes of making him more memorable by being a little coy in naming the intimidating man with a funny sounding moniker.

McMurtry describes Frog Lip as a man in need of no words to communicate the violence pent-up within him. He is “a fine marksman” who owns “five guns of various calibers,” spending most of his time silently cleaning each one. When he kills a deer at a distance Jake Spoon “considered impossible,” which “Frog Lip seemed to take for granted,” Jake becomes anxious “that the black man’s guns would soon be posted at something besides deer.” Jakes’s fears were well founded. Frog Lip was an intimidating presence. Not even the Suggs’s ordered the man about. McMurtry writes, “Jake didn’t notice anyone giving [Frog Lip] many orders. Little Eddie Suggs cooked the supper, such as it was, while Frog Lip sat idly, not even chopping wood for the fire. The horse he rode was the best in the group, a white gelding. It was unusual to see a bandit who used a white horse, for it made him stand out in a group,” especially a black man riding a white horse. “Frog Lip evidently didn’t care” because he was utterly devoid of fear.

You can detect McMurtry winking at the audience by giving such a man such a name. Though McMurtry invented the man, I’m convinced he didn’t invent the name. Rather, he was inspired by Andy Adams’s 1903 fictionalized memoir The Log of a Cowboy, where an old black family man and trail cook is introduced by the name of “Frog.”

While the two men couldn’t have been more different, they shared a common appellation—one so strange it stretches credulity to believe McMurtry wasn’t echoing Adams.

Janey, Sacagawea’s “Daughter”

Janey, the girl Roscoe Brown comes across in the East Texas woods, is one of the most tragic characters in Lonesome Dove. All that is known of her is that she was living with Old Sam, a hermit, who “gave twenty-eight skunk hides for her,” and that she appeared, in Roscoe’s eyes to be somewhere between fourteen and fifteen. Before book’s end she will be dead and buried in the treeless wilderness of the Llano Estacado, near the Canadian River.

Like Frog Lip, Janey isn’t merely an invention of McMurtry’s imagination. She comes from his reading of the Journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, written after their 1804–1806 “Corps of Discovery” exploration of the northern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, when they sailed and poled up the Missouri River, crossed the Continental Divide, and traversed the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. “Janey” is the nickname they gave to Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied the American adventurers. In his essay, “Sacagawea’s Nickname,” McMurtry wrote,

During the seven months that it takes the Corps to get up the Missouri River, over the Rocky Mountains, and down the Columbia River, both Captain Lewis and Captain Clark struggle somewhat awkwardly with what to call Sacagawea. For long stretches, in their Journals, she is simply “the Indian woman,” or “Charbono’s Snake Indian wife,” or, more rarely, “the Squar.” . . . Reluctantly, and never very successfully, they begin to call her Sacagawea, which they spell several different ways. By this time both men have considerable respect for Sacagawea. . . .

Finally they . . . decide on a nickname, Janey. . . . The occasion on which the nickname is revealed . . . is itself of some interest. Mired in misery on the north bank of the Columbia, drenched almost every day, the captains decided to take a vote on where to construct a winter camp. All the men voted, including York, Captain Clark’s black servant; and Janey voted, too, indicating that she would prefer to camp where there were lots of potatoes. This sudden granting of suffrage-in-the-wilderness strikes me as pretty amazing, as does the offhand relation of the nickname.

Like the real Janey, the fictional Janey is a child of nature and a worthy “daughter” of Sacagawea. She is adept at living off the land, skilled in hunting, dressing, and cooking wild game—including catching frogs and cooking their legs. Though the real Janey didn’t serve as a scout for the Corp of Discovery—her husband, the French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau did—she did serve as an interpreter. The fictional Janey fulfills the role of Roscoe’s guide in his pursuit of July Johnson, as well as an interpreter of sorts. Long before Roscoe picked up the signs that Jim and Hutto, two bandits roaming the road between Fort Smith and Fort Worth, are dangerous, Janey warn him, “They’re followin.’ I been watching. I guess they want to kill you.” She guides Roscoe to a gully to hide, but he’s discovered. To protect him, Janey throws rocks at the two bandits with such accuracy Hutto, no doubt meaning it as insult, complimented her: “I suspect that girl has Indian blood.”

Indeed she does. The drop of an echo of blood from Sacagawea, her namesake.

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Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (Simon & Schuster, 1985), 314, 384, 394, 417, 477, 498.

Larry McMurtry, Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York Review of Books, 2001), 157–58.

John Spong, “True West,” Texas Monthly, vol. 38, issue 7 (July 2010), 130.

Chuck Thompson, “Larry McMurtry: Reluctant Legend,” Cowboys & Indians, August 24, 2020.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Walt Whitman was seventeen in the year 1836, living nearly 1,600 miles from the scene of the massacre. But in 1855, as a thirty-year-old man, he included what took place in a far-flung foreign country part of his magisterial poem “Song of Myself.” The country was the Mexican state of Tejas. The massacre was not the one you’re thinking of. “I tell not the fall of the Alamo,” Whitman wrote. Though unnamed, Whitman told of the capture of Colonel James W. Fannin and the 370 men under his command during the Texas Revolution at the battle of Coleto Creek and the massacre at nearby Goliad a week later.

It is a curious subject for a New York poet to put into verse. Why, of all the topics he could have written about, did he select an event that took place in a faraway country when he was boy? One Whitman scholar answers: “Is it not characteristic of Whitman’s poetical method, which always celebrates the leaves of grass in preference to the more showy flower, to pick out the less well-known event rather than the better known one?”

To Whitman, the dead of Goliad represented “the common people” and “their deathless attachment to freedom.” So he said in the preface of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

But how did Whitman learn about the Goliad massacre? Outside the Lone Star State, as one scholar put it, the Goliad massacre was “an obscure historical episode of the Texas fight for independence.” But was it really that obscure?

In the middle years of the 1840s the United States was embroiled in a war with Mexico. Texas was on the minds of many Americans, especially journalists, of which Whitman was one. As the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, on March 14, 1846, Whitman ran an extracts of an article originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine titled “Fanning’s Men, or The Massacre at Goliad.” The article was composed, for the most part, from an account of a survivor—Von H. Ehrenberg.

A few months later, on May 11, Goliad was very much on Whitman’s mind when he referenced the 1836 massacre within the context of another Anglo-Hispano conflict. In his article “Shall We Fight It Out?” Whitman wrote,“the sickening story of those brutal wholesale murders, so useless for any purpose except gratifying the cowardly appetite of a nation of bravos, willing to shoot down men by the hundred in cold blood.”

The article based upon Ehrenberg’s account wasn’t the only source of Whitman’s Goliad education—and it certainly wasn’t the inspiration for including the massacre in “Song of Myself.” That came from a letter by an unnamed Mexican officer who witnessed the massacre and wrote to his wife describing it. This letter first appeared in the 1837 edition of History of South America and Mexico and a Geographical and Historical View of Texas by John M. Niles and L. T. Pease, with Pease contributing the material on Texas. The letter was referenced often in the run-up to the Mexican War, most notably in a congressional speech by George A. Caldwell of Kentucky in January 1845 and a Senate speech by Daniel Dickinson of New York in February. Both men were drumming up support for the annexation of Texas. The letter was also published in Samuel Gregory’s 1847 History of Mexico and in Nathan Covington Brooks’s 1849 A Complete History of the Mexican War, Its Causes, Conduct, and Consequences. Both men attribute Pease as the source of the letter.

The most salient example that the Mexican officer’s letter was the inspiration for section 34 of Whitman’s poem are the italicized sentences in this passage from the letter:

“This day, Palm Sunday, March 27, has been to me a day of most heartfelt sorrow. At six in the morning, the execution of four hundred and twelve American prisoners was commenced, and continued till eight, when the last of the number was shot. At eleven commenced the operation of burning their bodies. But what an awful scene did the field present, when the prisoners were executed, and fell dead in heaps! and what spectator could view it without horror! They were all young, the oldest not more than thirty, and of fine florid complexions. When the unfortunate youths were brought to the place of death, their lamentations and the appeals which they uttered to heaven, in their own language, with extended arms, kneeling or prostrate on the earth, were such as might have caused the very stones to cry out in compassion.”

The unnamed Mexican officer officer serves as an physical witness to the Goliad massacre, while Whitman serves as a poetical witness to the Goliad massacre. Both are outsiders to Texas, but both are sympathetic to the dead—one an enemy, the other an ally.

✭

I tell not the fall of Alamo . . . . not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

Hear now the tale of a jetblack sunrise,
Here of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.

Retreating they had formed in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s nine times their number was the price they took in advance,
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
They treated for an honorable capitulation, received writing and seal, gave up their arms, and marched back prisoners of war.

They were the glory of the race of rangers,
Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a upper or a courtship,
Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and affectionate,
Not a single one over thirty years of age.

The second Sunday morning they were brought out in squads and massacred . . . . it was beautiful early summer,
The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.

None obeyed the command to kneel,
Some made a mad and helpless rush . . . . some good stark and straight,
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart . . . . having living and dead lay together,
The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt . . . . the new-comers saw them there;
Some half-killed attempted to crawl away,
There were dispatched with bayonets or battered with the blunts of muskets;
A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more came to release him,
The three were all torn, and covered with the boy’s blood.

At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;
And that is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men,
And that was a jetblack sunrise.

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Whitman’s poem about the massacre at Goliad should not be read as history. There are a number of historical inaccuracies in it. For example, the number executed was not 412, it was 342. And the episode of the “not yet seventeen” year old who “seized his assassin” has never been verified.

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Milton Hindus, “The Goliad Massacre in ‘Song of Myself,’” Walt Whitman Review 7 (1961), 77–78.

Cliff Hudder, “‘A Day of Most Heartfelt Sorrow’: Death and Texas in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’” Walt Whitman Review 29 (2012), 71.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 34, in Leaves of Grass, The First (1855) Edition (Barnes & Noble Books, 1997), 64–65.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

No group of horsemen on the Texas frontier were as feared as the Comanches—not Mexican soldados or raiders, not gunman of any race, not even Apaches. Only the Kiowa could strike a similar fear into a Texan’s heart, and even that paled at the sight of horsed Comanches. In Goodbye to a River, John Graves hints at why the Comanches were such a fearsome race: “They were The People, only a few thousand strong in their most numerous times, but total possessors of an empire of grass and timber and wild meat, and constant raiders, for pleasure, far outside the limits of that empire.”

Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, decided on a policy of conciliation with the Indians in Texas. His successor, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, had a decidedly different policy—one of enmity. During his second annual message to the Texas Congress, Lamar said,

In my opinion, the proper policy to be pursued towards the barbarian race, is absolute expulsion from the country. Nothing short of this will bring us peace or safety. . . . [Our] only security against a savage foe, is to allow no security to him. The white man and the red man cannot dwell in harmony together. Nature forbids it. They are separated by the strongest possible antipathies, by colour, by habits, by modes of thinking, and indeed by all the causes which engender hatred and render strife the inevitable consequences of juxtaposition. Knowing these things, I experience no difficulty in deciding on the proper policy to be pursued towards them. It is to push a vigorous war against them; pursuing them to their hiding places without mitigation or compassion, until they shall be made to feel that flight from our borders without the hope of return, is preferable to the scourges of war.

Pursue them he did, especially the southern Comanches of the Edward Plateau in Central Texas known as the “Honey Eaters”—the Penatekas. Rangering companies, aided by Lipan Apaches and Towkawas, eternal enemies of the Comanches, hunted the Penatekas. No amount of harassment by the Texas Rangers, however, stopped the Comanches from raiding white settlements and capturing white women and children.

After Lamar’s inauguration, sixty-five-year-old John Webster and his thirty-one-year-old wife Dorthy (“Dolly”), and their two children (ten-year-old Booker and three-year-old Martha Virginia), along with a dozen men, were attacked by the Penatekas at the headwaters of Brushy Creek (in present-day Williamson County). The men were killed and scalped—Webster was spared because of his snow-white hair. Dolly and her children were carted off as captives. After eight days of hard riding, covering 250 miles, the raiding party reached the headwaters of the (Texas) Colorado River, in the Llano Estacado, where Comanche chief Maguara (Muk-wah-rah) was encamped. At his rancheriá—a large population center occupied by Indians and Mexican and American traders—Dolly discovered thirteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart and the four children of Mitchell Putnam, all of whom had been captured in the fall of 1838.

Separated from her children, Dolly was given to a Comanche warrior as a concubine. Her days were occupied with collecting firewood and skinning and tanning buffalo and deer hides. Her nights were filled with abuse by Comanche women and use by her Comanche master. Escape seemed hopeless. But one November afternoon Dolly and her children were gathering pecans and found themselves alone. Without hesitation she grabbed her little ones and ran, following the southern course of the Colorado River. They survived on nuts, berries, and prickly pears. More than a month after their escape, with the weather turning bitter, Dolly spotted a group of men wearing Western garb. She cried out. They were not Anglo settlers. They were a group of Vicente Córdova’s men, Mexicans and Cherokees who had taken part in his rebellion against the Republic of Texas and had been routed by Texans earlier in the year. They didn’t know what to do with Dolly and her children, and before they could decide a band of Comanches rode into their camp and bought the three captives for a mule and a horse.

Returned to Muguara’s rancheriá, Dolly learned a party had been dispatched to San Antonio with one of the Putnam boys, as a sign of good faith, to see if the Texans would agree to a boundary between white settlements and Comanche hunting grounds. The Ranger commander told the Penatekas the government was willing to negotiate but only under conditions: the Comanches must return all stolen property and bring in all “American” captives—the Indians could what they liked with Tejano (Hispano Texas) captives.

The delegation reported back to Muguara, who believed an agreement could be brokered. He questioned Dolly about the Texans and asked her to make a white banner out of silk, trimmed with white ribbons. She did. And the beatings continued.

Dolly was determined to attempt another escape. But Booker, who had almost died after eating yaupon berries on their first attempt, refused to leave. He believed he had a better chance of survival with the Penatekas now that he had been adopted into a family that had lost a son of the same age. He was convinced if he escaped and was captured he’d be killed. Sometime in March 1840, shortly after Muguara and a group of Penatekas departed for San Antonio, Dolly and Martha left Booker behind and disappeared into a rain drizzled night.

What happened next in San Antonio is recounted by Hugh McLeod, Lamar’s appointee to negotiate with the Comanches, in a letter to the president.

✭

To His Excellency, Mirabeau B. Lamar:

Sir.—On yesterday morning the 19th inst. two runners came into town and announced the arrival of the Comanches, who, about a month since, held a talk at this place, and promised to bring in the Texian prisoners in their camp. The party consisted of sixty-five—men, women, and children. The runners also informed us that they had with them but one prisoner (the daughter of Mr. Lockhart).

They came to town. The little girl was very intelligent, and told us that she had seen several of the other prisoners, at the principal camp a few days before she left; and that they brought her in to see if they could get a high price for her; and if so, would bring in the rest, one at a time.

Having ascertained this, it became necessary to execute your orders and take hostages for the safe return of our own people: and the order was accordingly given by Col. William G. Cooke, Acting Secretary of War.

Lieut.-Col. Fisher, first infantry, was ordered to march up two companies of his command, and post them in the immediate vicinity of the council-room. The Chiefs were then called together, and were asked: “Where are the prisoners you promised to bring in to this talk?” Muke-war-rah, the Chief who held the last talk with us, and made the promise, replied: “We have brought in the only one we had; the others are with other tribes.”A pause ensued, because, as this answer was a palpable lie, and a direct violation of their pledge, solemnly given scarcely a month since, we had the only alternative left us. He observed the pause, and asked quickly: “How do you like the answer?”

The order was now given to march one company into the council-room, and the other in the rear of the building, where the warriors were assembled. During the execution of this order, the talk was re-opened, and the terms of a treaty directed by your Excellency to be made with them, in the case the prisoners were restored, were discussed; and they were told the treaty would be made, when they brought in the prisoners. They acknowledged that they had violated all their previous treaties, and yet tauntingly demanded that new confidence should be reposed in another promise to bring in the prisoners.

The troops being now posted, the Chiefs and Captains were told that they were our prisoners, and would be kept as hostages for the safety of our people, then in their hands; and they might send the young men to the tribe, and as soon as our friends were restored they should be liberated.

Captain Howard, whose company was stationed in the council-house, posted sentinels at the doors, and drew up his men across the room. We told the Chiefs that the soldiers they saw were their guards, and descended from the platform. The Chiefs immediately followed. One sprang to the back door, and attempted to pass the sentinel, who presented his musket, when the Chief drew his knife and stabbed him. A rush was then made to the door. Captain Howard collared one of them and received a severe stab from him in the side. He ordered the sentinel to fire upon him, which he immediately did, and the Indian fell dead. They now all drew their knives and bows, and evidently resolved to fight to the last. Colonel Fisher ordered, “fire if they [resist].” The Indians rushed on, attacked us desperately, and a general order to fire became necessary. The Chiefs in the council-house, twelve in number, were immediately shot.

The council-house being cleared, Captain Howard was ordered to from in front, to receive any who might attempt to retreat in that direction. He was subsequently relieved of command, in consequence of the severity of his wound, by Captain Gillen, who commanded the company during the rest of the action.

Captain Redd, whose company was formed in rear of the council-house, was attacked by the warriors in the yard, who fought with desperation. They were repulsed and driven into the stone houses, from which they kept up a galling fire with their bows, and a few rifles. Their arrows, when they struck, were driven to the feather.

A small party succeeded in breaking through, and gained the opposite bank of the [San Antonio] river, but were pursued by Colonel Wells, with a party of mounted men, and all killed but one, (a renegade Mexican).

A single warrior, who threw himself into a very strong stone house, refused every offer of his life, sent to him through the squaws, and after killing and wounding several of our men, was forced out by fire late at night, and fell as he passed the door.

In a melée action, and so unexpected, it was impossible to discriminate between the sexes, so similar in dress; and several women were shot. But when discovered, all were spared, and twenty-nine women and children remain our prisoners.

Our loss was as follows:

Killed—Lieut. W. M. Dunnington, First Infancy; private Kaminské, of (A) company; private Whitney, of (E) company; Judge Thompson, of Houston; Judge Hood, of Bexar; Mr. Casey, of Matagorda county, and a Mexican, name unknown. Total killed, seven.

List of Wounded—Capt. George T. Howard, Capt. Matthew Caldwell, Lieut. Edward A. Thompson, First Infantry; private Kelly, company (I); Judge Robinson; Mr. Higginbotham; Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Carson. Total wounded, eight. Captain Howard, Lieut. Thompson and private Kelly very severely.

The loss of the enemy was total, with the exception of the renegade Mexican, above mentioned, thirty-five killed, including three women and two children, and twenty-seven women and children, and two old men captured. The Mexican was allowed to leave the quarters, and his departure was unobserved.

The regular troops did their duty, and the citizens rallied to our aid, as soon as the firing was heard.

Upwards of a hundred horses and a large quantity of buffalo robes and peltries were taken.

At the request of all the prisoners, a squaw has been liberated, and well mounted, to go to the main tribe and tell them we are willing to exchange prisoners. She promises to return in four days, with our captive friends; and Col. Cooke and myself will wait here until her return.

This communication is made at your request, to give you correct and early information, and is not designed to supersede the regular report of the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Fisher, to the War Department.

I have the honor to be, with high respect, your obedient servant,

H. MCLEOD, Adjutant and Inspector-General

✭

The daughter of Mr. Lockhart was (now) fifteen-year old Matilda. Mary Ann Maverick witnessed the Comanche entourage ride into San Antonio and in her memoir wrote of Matilda:

She was in a frightful condition, poor girl, when at last she returned to civilization. Her head, arms and face were full of bruises, and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh. She told a piteous tale of how dreadful the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose, and how they would shout and laugh like fiends when she cried. Her body had many scars from fire, many of which she showed us. Ah, it was sickening to behold, and made one’s blood boil for vengeance. . . . [Though] glad to be free from her detested tyrants, she was very sad and broken hearted. She said she felt utterly degraded, and could never hold her head up again.

According to Mrs. Maverick, Matilda lived only two or three years after her return.

Six days later, on March 26, 1840, a woman with an infant tied to her back stumbled into San Antonio. Her weather-beaten face was creased and caked with grime, her hair was matted and cropped Comanche style, her buckskinned clothing covered the bruises of her many beatings. She was mistaken for an Indian, her skin, according to Mrs. Maverick, “was sunburned and as dark as a Comanche.” Then she opened her mouth and “called out in good English [that] she had escaped from Indian captivity.” It was Dolly Webster and her (now) five-year-old daughter, Martha Virginia.

On April 4, 1840, Booker was exchanged for a blind Comanche man and a Comanche woman and child who had held captive after the Council House fight.

✭

“M. B. Lamar, Austin (Texas), Second Annual Message to Congress,” November 12, 1839, in The Paper of Mirabeau B. Lamar, vol. 3, ed. Charles Adams Gulick Jr. andKatherine Elliott (A. C. Baldwin & Sons, 1922), 166–67.

“Letter from Col. Hugh McLeod, communicating the defeat of the Comanches at San Antonio, March 20, 1840,” document F, in Appendix to the Journals of the House Representatives: Fifth Congress, 136–39.

Mary Ann Maverick, Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick (Alamo Printing Co., 1921), 44–45.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

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Be brave, live free, y’all.

Martyrs of the Alamo is the furriest Alamo movie I’ve ever watched. Virtually every male actor wears a coonskin cap, which is a distinguishing departure from the typical Alamo production. But the fact that Martyrs of the Alamo is the earliest Alamo movie to have survived intact is what really makes this film unique.

A Fine Arts Production, released through Triangle Film Corporation on five reels on November 21, 1915, Martyrs of the Alamo was co-written by Theodosia Harris and twenty-seven-year-old William Christy Cabanne, who also directed it. An acolyte of D. W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame, which was released to nationwide acclaim in February of that year, Cabanne’s film carries a Griffithian look.

Griffith is credited as a supervisor on Martyrs of the Alamo—though his contribution is so slight as to be nonexistent. That didn’t prevent the production company from marketing Martyrs of the Alamo as a Griffith film, removing Cabanne’s name from its promotion. To capitalize on Griffith’s connection, and to pass it off as a Griffith production, the film was given the subtitle The Birth of Texas, implying a sequel-like connection to The Birth of a Nation, Griffith’s epic extolling the “Lost Cause” and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.

Not everyone was taken in with the marketing ploy, however, or happy about it. Frank Wood, writing for The New York Dramatic Mirror on April 22, 1916, called out the deception.

To each of the Fine Arts five-reel pictures, Mr. Griffith gives a measure of supervision both before and after they are filmed. But it is the policy of the organization to give to the individual directors the fullest possible freedom to work out their own artistic salvation. It is “up to them” individually and when one of these features is called a “Griffith picture,” it is a misnomer.

Thus the term, “a Griffith director” is quite as significant as the often misunderstood “supervised by David W. Griffith.” For while this supervision is actual, both before and after the filming of a picture, it is the director whose production it really is.

Martyrs of the Alamo mirrors The Birth of a Nation in its sweeping scale, its intricate and exciting battle sequences, many of which required numerous extras, and its use of cavalry and artillery. But one notable deviation from Griffith is the understated performances of Cabanne’s actors. According to Frank Thompson, Alamo film historian, “If Cabanne did not quite share his mentor’s genius as a director, it might also be pointed out that his actors’ performances also lack the more annoying mannerism that sometimes afflicted Griffith’s. The performances in Martyrs of the Alamo are, for the most part, subdued and effective with few of the tics and mannered gestures that sometimes passed for characterization in a Griffith film.”

Unfortunately, Cabanne didn’t deviate from Griffith where it mattered most. Though the opening title card calls it “An historical account” of the Texas Revolution against Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna for abolishing the Constitution of 1824, Martyrs of the Alamo is really a reflection of the racial hatred characterized in The Birth of a Nation. Replace black skin for brown skin and you can hardly tell the difference. Just as in The Birth of a Nation, where Reconstruction blacks are depicted as rapacious and lecherous, Mexican soldados in Martyrs of the Alamo are damned for their disrespect of white men and their animalistic appetite for white women. The link between the two films is strengthened by the casting of Walter Long. In The Birth of a Nation he portrays the renegade negro Gus whose attempted rape of Little Sister (Mae Marsh) drives her to her death. In Martyrs of the Alamo he plays Santa Anna who keeps the blonde-haired daughter of an old American soldier in his tent after the battle of the Alamo. His intentions are unambiguous.

Martyrs of the Alamo was an ambitious film, depicting the battle of Béxar, the fall of the Alamo, the battle of San Jacinto, and the signing of the Treaty of Velasco—covering the months of December 1835 to May 1836. It was also ambitious in it production. Filmed entirely on the backlot of the Fine Arts Studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, the company constructed buildings to represent the village of San Antonio de Béxar, as well as an impressive baroque-style version of the Alamo chapel, with its iconic hump.¹

The film opens with a hint of the racial tensions between Mexicans and “Americans”—as the Texians were called by Cabanne and Harris. When the old Irish-American patriot’s daughter is accosted on the streets of San Antonio by drunken soldados, the old man becomes angry and pulls out his American flag and recalls, as a title card reads, “Memories of the days when the Stars and Stripes gave them the right to protection.” Susannah Dickinson (Ora Carew) faces a similar fate while making her way home. She catches the eye of a Mexican officer who flirts with her and follows her home. When her husband Almeron (Fred Burns) learns of it he grabs his gun and sets out to find the man. When he does, he shoots and kills him. Dickinson is arrested and put in prison inside the Alamo.

Thompson writes, “Since the threat of miscegenation is clearly more fearful for Martyr’s Americans than the reality of Santa Anna’s dictatorship, it is logical that the Dickinsons and another couple become the focus for the film’s drama.” The other couple is “Silent” Smith (Sam de Grasse), loosely based on Texian scout “Deaf” Smith, and the beautiful blonde daughter (Juanita Hansen) of the old Irish-American patriot (Augustus Carney). These two couples create the emotional underpinnings of the story, leading to two different endings: one in tragedy, the other in hope.

David Crockett (A. D. Sears), James Bowie (Alfred Paget), and William Barret Travis (John Dillon) are relatively minor characters in this drama. Nothing about them is historical. Crockett, who in real life was forty-nine in 1836, is depicted as a youthful, longhaired blonde. Bowie is the dandy in this picture who seems to be obsessed with keeping his boots clean, often wiping them with a bandana, and wields a none too impressive knife. And Travis, who in reality was a snappy dresser, is put in a coonskin cap and buckskin (the only film in which he’s portrayed as a frontiersman).

Seeking to avenge their ladies fair, the Americans bide their time while Santa Anna remains headquartered in the Alamo. When he departs, riding through the streets with flags waving, he places his brother-in-law General Martín Perfecto Cos in charge. With Santa Anna out of town, Cos and his men get drunk—and the Americans attack. Unable to put up an effective defense, Cos is driven from San Antonio.

The Americans now occupy the Alamo. When Santa Anna learns of Cos’s defeat, he returns to San Antonio and assaults the mission-fort in well staged battle sequences that appear as one continuous battle, blunting the sense of desperation needed for Travis to call the garrison together and to draw a line in the sand. That scene comes on suddenly. A title card flashes: “On the morning of the tenth day Travis told his men death was inevitable in the Alamo, but escape or surrender was possible. He had waited vainly hoping for reinforcement.” Travis says, “Those who wish to die like heroes and patriots, cross the line to me.” One man crosses immediately, the others hold back—the only Alamo movie in which the men seem to consider other options. Crockett, with a what-the-hell smile crosses the line and the others follow. The last man to cross is Bowie, “now near death.” Instead of being carried across on his cot, Bowie staggers over the line. One man doesn’t cross. Thompson writes, “Perhaps an earlier version of the film included the story of Moses Rose. If so, the filmmakers obviously thought better of it and deleted any reference to him; he exists in the film now only as a tantalizing glimpse.”²

The final assault on March 6, 1836, occurs when a group of soldados pop up inside the chapel via a secret tunnel, stories of which have persisted for many years.³. A more conventional retelling of the Alamo’s fall occurs when one of the walls is destroyed and soldados pour into the Plaza and overwhelm the defenders.

To enhance the racial stereotype of Mexicans as immoral brutes, Cabanne cuts to a blonde-headed, blue-eyed boy in hiding. A menacing brown hand enters the screen left and grabs the boy by the throat before a bayonet slowly empales the lad. Cabanne then cuts from that closeup to a middle shot of the soldado picking the boy up and throwing his lifeless body into the melée.

Once the Alamo falls, Cabanne fades into a series of tableaux of the dead defenders. Crockett slumps in front of the chapel, surrounded by Mexican dead. Bowie lays on his cot, two bayonets (with rifles attached) protruding from his chest, with his slave Joe (portrayed in blackface) laying beside him. Cabanne also depicts a group of surrendered survivors being executed.⁴

Martyrs of the Alamo ends with Santa Anna sending Susanna Dickinson to Sam Houston (Tom Wilson) with a warning of what will happen to all who oppose him. Houston retreats to San Jacinto. Santa Anna follows and encamps, where “Silent” Smith, feigning deafness, is (unbelievably) granted free reign, allowing him to overhear Santa Anna’s battle plan and to rescue his lady love—the blonde daughter of the old patriot—from the lustful clutches of the Mexican dictator.

As Sam Houston prepares for his attack, Santa Anna is shown in a drug induced fandango with beautiful women—an homage to the legend of the “Yellow Rose.” The title card informs us Santa Anna was a “drug fend” indulging in “shameful orgies.” (Though the women are fully clothed, the come-hither look by one implies that Santa Anna in particular and Mexicans in general enjoy engaging in group sex.)

A brief but exciting battle scene follows, with Santa Anna fleeing and exchanging his general’s uniform for a private’s uniform and hiding from Houston’s troops. Santa Anna is discovered and brought before a wounded Houston. The Americans want to hang Santa Anna but Houston convinces them to spare his life. The film concludes with Santa Anna signing the Treaty of Velasco: “And thus on May 14, 1836, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, signed the treaty, acknowledging Texas free and independent.”

The final scene shows “Silence” Smith and his girlfriend embracing, while the distraught Susanna Dickinson “could not forget at what price came victory. But on the martyrdom of those fallen heroes was built ‘The Lone Star State.’” The film dissolves to the flag of Texas, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, and the Stars and Stripes of the United States, and fades out.

The film received raving reviews. The New York Dramatic Mirror, on October 30, 1915, claimed, no doubt to the chagrin of Cabanne, that “D. W. Griffith has again proved his mastery in the staging of spectacular scenes. [The film is] wonderfully realistic and wonderfully exciting.”

Variety, in the November 5, 1915, edition agreed: “To just call this a ‘stirring drama’ would be a slur upon one of the best features in its class and of its length (five reels) that has been turned over to the screen. Some of his battle scenes excel those in Griffith’s immortal ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”

1. The hump wasn’t present in 1836. It was added by the United States Army in the early 1850s to hide a newly constructed roof.

2. I cover the historicity of this this event in my “The Legend and Legacy of “The Line.”

3. This tunnel supposedly connected either the old Grenet home on Crockett Street to the Alamo Plaza or Mission Conceptión to the Alamo chapel. A yarn also persists that Crockett escaped through that tunnel.

4. Only The Alamo: Shrine of Texas Liberty (1938), Seguin (1982), and Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986) include a scene of surrendered men facing a firing squad. (The execution of David Crockett is included the 2004 film The Alamo.)

Martyrs of the Alamo, directed by William Christy Cabanne (1915; Delta Entertainment Corporation, 2004), DVD.

Frank Thompson, Alamo Movies (Old Mill Books, 1991).

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Young men are apt to be reckless. Old men are apt to be retiring. Perhaps that explains his “cowardice” on the night of March 5, 1836, given that his warrior years were twenty-five and more years earlier. Whatever the reason, to many he was a coward—the coward of the Alamo.

A more charitable assessment of the man’s actions might lead us to conclude that what he did we might have done in a similar situation. Who knows? But one thing is certain: if he hadn’t done what he did we might not know of one of the most intriguing and intimate tales of what took place inside the Alamo before the twilight attack of Mexican soldados on March 6, 1836—that is, if the tale he told wasn’t a tall one and is to be believed.

Before we get into his story, however, we should get inside the Alamo, to get our bearings of what it might have been like behind the walls on the night of March 5.

Inside the Alamo: March 5, 1836

March 5, 1836, marked the twelfth day of the Mexican siege of the Alamo. From the first day of the siege, February 23, the Texians endured a continual cannonade from Mexican artillery. President-General Antonio López de Santa Anna had extended to the Alamo’s commander, twenty-six-year-old William Barret Travis, surrender at discretion. Travis rejected that offer with a cannon shot. Santa Anna, in turn, ordered the blood-red flag of no quarter raised over San Fernando Church and the song of the cut-throat—the Degüello—played. And the cannons roared.

On March 4 Mexican batteries advanced down the acequia—a water ditch running just on the other side of the the western wall and the northwest corner of the Alamo—to within two hundred yards of the northern wall, a vulnerable point in the garrison’s defenses, and pounded it with such devastating effect cannonballs passed through the wall.¹ Every man inside the Alamo knew an attack was imminent. Not only was the northern artillery and its relentless shelling weakening an already weak wall, Mexican forces doubled on March 3 when reinforcements marched into San Antonio de Béxar and took up positions around the adobe-stone fort and began constructing scaling ladders within sight of the garrison.² The only question was when would the attack come.

Then on Saturday afternoon, March 5, the cannonade ceased and silence descended over the beleaguered mission-fort.

Conditions inside the walls were dreadful. Rations of beef were nearly vanquished. Medical necessities for Doctor Amos Pollard were in short supply. Sanitation was virtually nonexistent. Outdoor latrines, cattle and horse pens filled with manure, and few facilities for washing, cleaning, and cooking created a toxic—and smelly—stew.

Outside the walls, on the day before, March 4, Santa Anna held a council of war to discuss plans for an attack. Sometime that evening a Béxareña—a Tejano woman from the town of Béxar—fled from the fort and passed through the Mexican lines. Despite Travis’s February 24 “Victory or Death” letter and his bold claim to “never surrender or retreat,” she told Santa Anna morale inside the garrison was low and that the defenses were crumbling.³ Lieutenant Colonel Enrique José de la Peña, in his generally reliable firsthand account of the siege and battle, recounted:

Travis’s resistance was on the verge of being overcome; for several days his followers had been urging him to surrender, giving the lack of food and the scarcity of munitions as reasons, but he had quieted their restlessness with the hope of quick relief, something not difficult for them to believe since they had seen some reinforcements arrive [on March 1 when thirty-two men from Gonzales—the “Immortal 32”—marched into the Alamo]. Nevertheless, they had pressed him so hard that on the 5th he promised them that if no help arrived on that day they would surrender the next day or would try to escape under cover of darkness; these facts were given to us by a lady form Béjar, a Negro who was the only male who escaped [presumably James Bowie’s servant Joe], and several women who were found inside and were rescued by Colonels Morales and Miñón [after the fall of the Alamo].⁴

Santa Anna’s second in command, General Vicente Filisola also recalled that Travis had considered surrender:

On that same evening [March 5] about nightfall it was reported that Travis Barnet [William Barret Travis], commander of the enemy garrison, through the intermediary of a woman, proposed to the general in chief that they would surrender arms and fort with everybody in it with the only condition of saving his life and that of all his comrades in arms. However, the answer had come back that they should surrender unconditionally, without guarantees, not even for life itself, since there should be no guarantees for traitors. With this reply it is clear that all were determined to lose their existence, selling it as dearly as possible.⁵

The Mexican accounts paint a grim picture. Things were getting desperate. But whether Travis ever seriously considered surrendering or attempting to break through the Mexican lines, he abandoned those notions by the time he called the garrison together in the courtyard. Perhaps, as Filisola indicates, Travis had received word from Santa Anna that there would be no guarantees of life. Even if Travis hadn’t received a written message from Santa Anna, the message of the blood-red banner and the Degüello was unmistakably clear.

Travis gave the men a choice: fight or flee. A few hours before sunset, he called the company together and addressed them.

My brave companions—Stern necessity compels me to employ the few moments afforded by this probably brief cessation of conflict in making known to you the most interesting, yet the most solemn, melancholy, and unwelcome fact that perishing humanity can realize. . . . Our fate is sealed. Within a very few days—perhaps a very few hours—we must all be in eternity. This is our destiny, and we cannot avoid it. This is our certain doom. . . .

Our business is, not to make a fruitless effort to save our lives, but to choose the manner of our death. But three modes are presented to us. Let us choose that by which we may best serve our country. Shall we surrender, and be deliberately shot, without taking the life of a single enemy? Shall we try to cut our way out through the Mexican ranks, and be butchered before we can kill twenty of our adversaries? I am opposed to either method; for, in either case, we could but lose our lives, without benefiting our friends at home—our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, our wives and little ones. . . . My choice, then, is to remain in this fort, to resist every assault, and to sell our lives as dearly as possible. . . .

But I leave every man to his own choice. Should any man prefer to surrender, and be tried and shot; or to attempt an escape through the Mexican ranks, and be killed before he can run a hundred yards, he is at liberty to do so.⁶

Travis then unsheathed his sword and with the point traced a line in the dirt. Sheathing his sword, he said, “I now want every man who is determined to stay here and die with me to come across this line. Who will be first? March!” The first man to cross was twenty-five-year-old Tapley Holland, one of Captain William Carey’s gunners, who exclaimed: “I am ready to die for my country!” Other men began to cross over, including the sick and wounded. The bedridden James Bowie said, “Boys, I am not able to come to you, but I wish some of you would be so kind as to remove my cot over there.” Four men picked up his cot and carried him over the line.⁷

Señora Candelaria—María Andrea Castañon Villanueva—who claimed to have tended the ailing Bowie said, “One evening Colonel Travis made a fine speech to his soldiers [and] he drew a line on the floor with the point of his sword and asked all who were willing to die for Texas to come over on his side.” She said all did but two: the bedridden Bowie, who asked to be carried across, where “Colonel Davy Crockett and several others instantly sprang towards the cot and carried the brave man across the line,” and an unnamed man who “sprang over the wall.”⁸

Though Susanna Dickinson, wife of artillery Captain Almeron Dickinson, makes no mention of Travis scratching a line in the sand, she remembered that Travis “On the evening previous to the massacre . . . asked the command that if any desired to escape, now was the time to let it be Known, & to step out of ranks. . . . One stepped out. His name to the best of my recollection was Ross. The next morning he was missing.”⁹

The Man Who Left the Alamo: Louis “Moses” Rose

Susanna was wrong in her recollection. The man’s name was Rose—Louis Rose, sometimes called “Moses” because of his age: he was fifty-one at the time of the 1836 siege and battle.¹⁰

Rose, a Frenchman from Nacogdoches, undoubtedly was the most experienced military man inside the Alamo.¹¹ Born on May 11, 1785, in Laferée, Ardennes, France, Rose joined Napoleon Bonaparte’s 101st Regiment in 1806, seeing combat in Naples, Portugal, Spain, and Russia, having survived the frozen retreat from Moscow during the brutal winter of 1812. Two years later, Rose was named to the French Legion of Honor—France’s highest and most prestigious order of merit—for his service as aide-de-camp to General Jacques de Montfort.

Rose emigrated to Texas sometime in 1826 and joined the Fredonian Rebellion and took part in the battle of Nacogdoches in 1832. Somewhere along the way, he met and befriended James Bowie. In the fall of 1835 Rose accompanied Bowie to Béxar and joined the Texian cause. He (most likely) fought at the battle of Concepción during the siege of the town and took part in the subsequent attack, driving General Martín Perfecto Cos and his Mexican troops from Béxar. When Bowie entered the Alamo on January 19, 1836, Rose rode in his company, along with a detachment of thirty men from Goliad. He was with Bowie every day up and until the evening before the decisive battle.

Given his swarthy complexion and his fluency with Spanish, Rose could pass for a Mexican, especially at night. So when Travis gave the garrison a choice to stay or leave, Rose chose to leave. The man who published Rose’s story wrote,

He directed a searching glance at the cot of Col. Bowie. There lay his gallant friend. Col. David Crockett was leaning over the cot, conversing with its occupant in an undertone. After a few seconds Bowie looked at Rose and said, “You seem not to be willing to die with us, Rose.” “No,” said Rose, “I am not prepared to die, and shall not do so if I can avoid it.” Then Crockett also looked at him, and said, “You may as well conclude to die with us, old man, for escape is impossible.”¹²

Rose said nothing more. He grabbed his satchel of belongings and scaled the four and half foot wall of the cattle pen and jumped into the near-full moon darkness. He slunk along the north wall to the acequia and followed it to the gently flowing San Antonio River, where he waded across the shallows and walked through the sleepy town of Béxar. To any passing soldados he would appear as an old, bedraggled Bexareño. He recrossed the river at the ford of the southern side of the loop, following it out of town southward for about three miles. He then struck an easterly course, cross-country toward the colonies.¹³

To avoid Mexican patrols, Rose traveled at night—a dangerous proposition itself, as he was soon to find out. One evening he hit a thick patch of prickly pear, impaling his legs with dozens of cactus thorns. More than a week and two hundred miles later he stumbled to the door of a friend who lived along Lake Creek, some sixty miles northwest of San Felipe—Abraham and Mary Ann Zuber. Rose could barely walk. The Zubers took him in and treated his badly infected wounds, using forceps to remove the embedded thorns and applying salve to his legs. He stayed with the Zubers for a couple of weeks. While recuperating, he recounted the gist of Travis’s speech and of how Travis drew the line with the tip of his sword and how he, Rose, made his escape from the Alamo. He told the story so many times the Zubers virtually committed it to memory—or so they professed.

When he recovered enough to travel, Rose left the Zubers for his home in Nacogdoches, where he operated a meat market for a while and lived as a hermit. In time, his story spread and whenever someone asked him why he fled the Alamo his unwavering response was, “By God, I wan’t ready to die.”

Rose didn’t stay long in Nacogdoches. He left sometime in the early 1840s, drifting further east. Eventually he hired onto the Logansport, Louisiana, plantation of Aaron Ferguson. A few years later, now bedridden from the cactus wounds which never healed properly, he lived in a small wooden shack. The Fergusons cared for him until his death, burying him in their family cemetery. More than a century later, an 1813 French coin stamped with Napoleon’s image was found nearby.¹⁴

The Man Who Published the Story: William P. Zuber

Abraham and Mary Ann Zuber’s son, William, wasn’t at their home when Louis Rose showed up with his thorn-infected legs. In 1836, William was a fifteen-year-old boy solider with Sam Houston’s army. When he returned home after the battle of San Jacinto, where he served in the rear guard, he learned from his parents the story of Travis’s line in the sand, his appeal to the Alamo defenders, and Rose’s escape.

Thirty-five years later, in 1871, William put the story to paper, aided by his aged mother’s (remarkable) memory. He submitted Rose’s account to the Texas Almanac, which published it in 1873 under the title, “An Escape from the Alamo.” Zuber’s article concludes with a signed statement from his mother endorsing it.

I have carefully examined the foregoing letter of my son, William P. Zuber, and feel that I can endorse it with the greatest propriety. The arrival of Moses Rose at our residence, his condition when he came, what transpired during his stay, and the tiding that we afterwards heard of him, are all correctly stated. The part which purports to be Rose’s statement of what he saw and heard in the Alamo, of his escape, and of what befell him afterwards is precisely the substance of what Rose stated to my husband and myself.¹⁵

Three years after it’s publication, Rufus Grimes, brother of Alamo defender Albert Grimes and a neighbor of the Zubers, wrote to Texas governor E. M. Pease expressing his belief in Rose’s story. “This account is entitled to full credit,” Grimes wrote. “This Wm. P. Zuber is a man of undoubted veracity and when Rose escaped from the Alamo he made his way to the house of Abram Zuber an old friend and acquaintance then living in Roans Prairie in this county (Grimes) where he staid until his feet got well enough to travel again (his feet & legs were full of the cactus thorns), traveling in the night—Zuber tells me of many other interesting statements made by Rose beside what is stated in the sketch.”¹⁶

Since then, Texas historians have debated the veracity of Rose’s story, or at least Zuber’s recounting of the story. William C. Davis, a well-respected scholar, in Three Roads to the Alamo, provides an extended note discounting Rose’s account. “Nothing in the story stands up to scrutiny, and none of the survivors made any mention of such an incident, except Mrs. Dickenson, and she only mentioned it after Zuber’s account appeared in print, and at a time when her own accounts were becoming increasingly imaginative, inaccurate, and derivative.” After listing a number of troubling facts about Rose’s story and Zuber’s romanticized retelling of it, Davis concludes: “The event simply did not happen, or if it did, then something much more reliable than an admittedly fictionalized secondhand account written thirty-five years after the fact is necessary to establish it beyond question.”¹⁷

Others, however, like James Donovan, an equally credible historian who dedicated the afterword in The Blood of Heroes to the question of whether Rose’s story is true or not, concludes:

An important point to bear in mind is this: there is not a single event associated with the siege and fall of the Alamo that has been related in so many independent versions by so many different individuals attesting to its fundamental truth. Furthermore, not a single one of these people had an ulterior motive, e.g., for money or for personal aggrandizement, in supporting Zuber and his 1873 account. There now exists enough reliable evidence to consider the existence of Moses Rose, his escape from the Alamo, and the line drawn by Travis to be acceptable, factual history.¹⁸

For myself, I tend to lean toward Donovan. But whether the Rose story is a tall tale or not, my heart is with J. Frank Dobie: “For Travis to have drawn the line would have been entirely natural, the more natural because of the fact that in both history and fiction Rubicon lines have repeatedly been drawn for fateful crossings. Because an act has precedent is no reason for denying it. History is sprinkled with momentous sentences spoken by military men at crucial hours. These men about to die in the Alamo must have been conscious of doing a fine and brave thing. Travis certainly thought that he was acting a part that the light of centuries to come would illumine.”¹⁹

Todd Hansen, who compiled the definitive writings about the Alamo in The Alamo Reader, agrees with Dobie.

In the end, perhaps Dobie was closest to the truth. We know that for the defenders, the line had to be there, and crossed, at least in a figurative sense, regardless of what literally happened. Thus we can also ask, does it really matter? What does matter is that we are left to wonder, as Zuber noted, whether we ourselves would have chosen Rose’s way out. Seldom does history—or life—offer such clear, decisive options. It is the choice that all but one of the defenders made that has led to the major fascination with the Alamo story.²⁰

And no less a careful historian as Walter Lord, who wrote the first popular account of the siege and fall of the Alamo ends A Time to Stand with “a print the legend” type of conclusion: “If Zuber was hiding a gentle fabrication, he was also protecting a shining legend—and what harm is a legend that only serves to perpetuate the memory of valor and sacrifice? As matters stand, there’s still room to speculate, and every good Texan can follow the advice of J. K. Beretta in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly: ‘Is there any proof that Travis didn’t draw the line? If not, then let us believe it.’”²¹

The epigraph is from J. Frank Dobie, “The Line that Travis Drew,” in The Alamo Reader: A Study in History, ed. Todd Hansen (Stackpole Books, 2003), 286, 287.

¹ The fragile condition of the north wall is discussed in James E. Ivey’s (unpublished manuscript) “Mission to Fortress: An Architectural History of the Alamo,” 7. John Sowers Brooks, who was stationed at Goliad, passing on information heard from a courier from the Alamo—likely James L. Allen—wrote to James Hagarty on March 9, 1836: “We have heard from Bexar. . . . [Santa Anna] has erected a battery within 400 yards of the Alamo, and every shot goes through it, as the walls are weak.” The following day, Brooks wrote his father, A. H. Brooks: “The enemy have erected a battery of nine pounders within 400 yards of the Fort, and every shot goes through the wall.” Hansen, 606, 607.

² John Sutherland had been the garrison’s physician but was sent from the Alamo by Travis to bring help from Gonzales. He had returned after the battle to see the funeral pyres. He wrote in his draft account, “Santa Anna arrived with his division of the army . . . [and] directly commenced making Scaling ladders—which was Seen from the Alamo.” Hansen, 179.

³ On the Travis letter see the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, “William Barret Travis Letter from the Alamo, 1836.”

⁴ José Enrique de la Peña, With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution, trans. Carmen Perry, expanded edition (Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 44. Historian Stephen L. Hardin writes, “The Negro mentioned by de la Peña was Travis’s body servant known to history only as ‘Joe.’ Although Joe was seemingly illiterate, he told his story to [Republic of Texas] President David G. Burnet’s cabinet on March 20, 1836. The slave’s accounts of the battle were recorded by William Fairfax Gray and George Childress, but in neither of their versions did Joe mention that his master was contemplating surrender. Perhaps Gray and Childress neglected to record that unpleasant detail.” Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution (University of Texas Press, 1994), 274 n. 37. I say “generally reliable account” because de la Peña’s account of David Crockett’s surrender and execution is fraught with difficulties, as I explain in “On the Death of David Crockett.”

⁵ Vicente Filisola, Memoir of the History of the War in Texas, vol. 2, trans. Wallace Woolsey (1849; reprint, Eakin Press, 1987), 176–77. Susanna (Dickinson) Hannig, who was in the Alamo during the siege and battle, testified that “A Mexican woman deserted us one night, and going over to the enemy informed them of our very inferior numbers, which Col. Travis said made them confident of success and emboldened them to make the final assault, which they did at early dawn on the morning of the 6th of March.” Hansen, 46. This would mean Travis had to have been in communication with Mexican officers.

⁶ William Barret Travis, as recounted by Louis Moses to Ann Zuber, retold to William P. Zuber, “An Escape from the Alamo,” reprinted in Hansen, 245–46, 247. Zuber confessed Travis’s speech was his own creation, but continued to argue that it captured the essence and spirit of what Travis said on March 5, 1836. See Hansen, 250, 253–54.

⁷ Hansen, 247, 248.

⁸ Madam Candelaria, in the St. Louis Republic before her death in 1899, reprinted in Timothy M. Matovina, The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives (University of Texas Press, 1995), 59–60. Hansen asserts that Madam Candelaria “definitely was not in the Alamo,” 731. Enrique Esparza, an eyewitness and survivor of the battle of the Alamo, was a boy of either eight or twelve years of age (his birth year is disputed: either 1824 or 1828), in an interview with Charles Merritt Barnes of the San Antonio Daily Express (May 19, 1907) also claimed Travis drew a line in the dirt with his sword, reprinted in Matovina, 82.

⁹ Susanna (Dickinson) Hannig, in Hansen, 48. She reported: “Col. [Juan Nepomuceno] Almonte (Mexican) told me that the man who had deserted the evening before had also been Killed & that if I wished to satisfy myself of the fact that I could see the body, still lying there, which I declined.”

¹⁰ Some have doubted Louis Rose’s existence. James Donovan addresses the proof for Rose’s existence in The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo—and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 361–62, 465n; see Hansen, 273–74, 278.

Concerning Rose’s presence at the Alamo, Donovan writes, “His name was not on either of the two lists of the Alamo garrison—the January 15, 1836, muster roll or the February 1, 1836, election certificate—although other men known to have died in the Alamo were also not listed. (The garrison roster was somewhat fluid in the months between the battle of Béxar and the arrival of the Mexican army on February 23, with volunteers coming and going rather freely. But on March 24, 1836, Telegraph and Texas Register had run a list of the fallen derived from couriers John W. Smith and Gerald Navan that included the entry ‘Rose, of Nacogdoches,” 356.

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, in 1986, compiled muster rolls for all who fought in the Texas Revolution. Using the Telegraph and Texas Register they list as having been at the Alamo a “Rose” (first name unknown) from Nacogdoches, where Louis Rose lived before the revolution began, see “Muster Rolls of the Texas Revolution,” Texas History Trust, pdf, 26.

Esparza later identified Rose as the man who escaped in the May 19, 1907, San Antonio Daily Express, reprinted in Matovina, 82. The official Alamo website lists James M Rose from Ohio, the nephew of President James Madison, on their “defenders” list, which includes only those who fought and died during the final battle.

¹¹ The biographical sketch of Rose is compiled from William P. Zuber, “The Escape of Rose from the Alamo,” reprinted in Hansen, 245–50, Robert B. Blake, “Rose and His Escape from the Alamo,” part of which is reprinted in Hansen, 274–82, and Natalie Ornish, “The Life of Louis (Moses) Rose: Alamo Survivor and Soldier of Fortune,” Texas State Historical Association.

¹² Zuber, in Hansen, 428. Crockett use of the phrase “old man” seems odd since Crockett himself was forty-nine at the time.

¹³ Rose claimed he departed the Alamo on March 3, 1836, a date Zuber continued to repeat in subsequent writings. Both Rose and Zuber are mistaken. There was no reason for Travis to call the men together and offer them a desperate choice on March 3. On that afternoon James Butler Bonham, one of the Alamo’s couriers, rode into the fort with news that James W. Fannin and several hundred men were on their way from Goliad to reinforce the besieged garrison. Zuber also writes that when Rose stood on the wall “he was amazed at the scene of death that met his gaze. From the wall to a considerable distance beyond the ground was literally covered with slaughtered Mexicans and pools of blood.” Rose asserted that when he jumped from the wall he landed “sprawling on his stomach in a puddle of blood” and that his satchel of clothing came loose, depositing his clothes in blood. This is certainly not the case since there had been no general engagement against Mexican forces before March 6. Hansen, 248.

¹⁴ See Donovan, 347–48, 463–64n; Hansen, 274–82.

¹⁵ Mary Ann Zuber, Prairie Plains, Grimes County, Texas, May 9, 1871, reprinted in Hansen, 250.

¹⁶ Rufus Grimes, in Donovan, 354–55, see also 464n.

¹⁷ William C. Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis (HarperCollins, 1998), 731–32, n. 99.

¹⁸ Donovan, 374.

¹⁹ J. Frank Dobie, “”The Line that Travis Drew,” reprinted in Hansen, 286.

²⁰ Hansen, 293.

²¹ Walter Lord, A Time to Stand (University of Nebraska, 1961), 204. Of course, additional evidence about Rose and his story has come to light since Lord wrote in 1961, as this article attests.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

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He was an enigmatic character—soldier, adventurer, prospector, cartographer, and memoirist, even if much of his memoir is made up.

Herman Vollrath Ehrenberg was born in the village of Steuden, Prussia on November 17, 1816. At the age of eighteen he emigrated to the United States, sailing aboard the Ludwig, disembarking on the docks of New York City. He was alone. Nothing is known of his activities in New York, except a mention in his memoir of eating in John Jacob Astor’s restaurant and of the young attractive women he saw on Broadway. A year later, in 1835, he was in New Orleans volunteering to fight in the Texas Revolution as a member of the New Orleans Greys.

When he arrived in Texas, Ehrenberg took part in the siege of Béxar (1835) and fought at the battle of Coleto (1836), where he was captured with the rest of Colonel James W. Fannin’s command and sent to Presidio La Bahía (Goliad), where on March 27, 1836, Mexican soldados under the command of José de Urrea massacred the Texians. Ehrenberg was one of twenty-eight men to escape the bloodletting, receiving a saber slash across his forehead.

Making his way west as far as the Colorado River he was recaptured by Mexican troops. This time he was sent to Matagorda Bay, where he and other prisoners labored for the Mexican army. However, after Antonio López de Santa Anna was defeated by Sam Houston at San Jacinto, and the rest of the Mexican army retreated across the Rio Grande, Ehrenberg escaped a second time.

He became a citizen of the Republic of Texas and served in a ranging company in 1840. While on the frontier, he became ill and sailed for Europe for medical treatment. While recuperating in the university city of Halle he wrote his memoir. Finished sometime in 1842, Ehrenberg sent the manuscript to Otto Wigand, a Leipzig publisher, who released Ehrenberg’s autobiography in three volumes: Texas und Seine Revolution [Texas and Its Revolution] (1843), Der Freiheitskampf in Texas im Jahre 1836 [The Struggle for Freedom in Texas in the Year 1836] (1844), and Fahrten und Schicksale eines Deutschen in Texas [Wanderings and Fortunes of a German in Texas] (1845). His memoir became the most popular German-language publication on Texas, though he never saw any in print. He had returned to America in the summer of 1843.

Ehrenberg’s narratives are as enigmatic as the man himself. According to historian James E. Crisp, Ehrenberg filled his work with “embellishments and outright lies . . . [made] up stories . . . [putting] his own words in other people’s mouths, and [inventing] imaginary Texans.” But Crisp admires Ehrenberg and offers an explanation for this mystifying man.

To understand Ehrenberg is to appreciate a young Texas “everyman” as he presents himself as a proud citizen of the Texas Republic. To a great extent, the early Texan character was molded by the experience—both factually and in popular mythic memory—of the Texas Revolution. Ehrenberg’s memoir embodies both the facts and the myths. To understand him is, to a great extent, to understand Texas, even the Texas of today—which still carries the legacies—the glory and the burden—of that iconic history.

The following passage from Ehrenberg’s memoir recounts when the defenders at Goliad first heard about the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence. It is both fact-based and fairy-tale, making ample use of the glory and burden that has become the iconic history of Texas.

Der 2. März [March 2, 1836]

On March 5, we received a refreshing bit of news from the representative assembly at Washington [-on-the-Brazos].¹ On the second of March, our first congress had solemnly proclaimed the independence of the former province of Texas from the Mexican confederation of states, and declared that the territory between the Rio Grande, the Sabine River, and the Red River from that day on was taking its place as the Republic of Texas among the nations of the world.²

The weather that day was as stormy as the jubilation that resounded through the colony. The new star gleaming on a blue flag over Goliad for the first time was fluttering and fighting with the winds of a raging storm. It had been waving in all its glory over the walls of Goliad for hardly an hour when suddenly a fresh assault by the storm sent the flag with flagstaff and star swirling down inside the fort. Its fall was indeed a bad omen, but what new nation, as it bounds into existence, does not have to put up with some adversity? Only a little time elapsed, however, before the blue banner was whipping again in the wrathful winds. Soon the winds subsided and the departing sun was gilding the purple clouds on the western horizon that for us was the farewell signal to the abating storm.³

1. Ehrenberg guessed at the date of March 5, 1836, when the men at Goliad heard the news of the Texas Declaration of Independence. A missive from prolific letter-writer John Sowers Brooks from Goliad on March 4 made no mention of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The first allusion of it from the presidio came from Thomas B. Rees on March 8, and Brooks, writing on the ninth, only speaks of the Declaration as a probability, not a certainty. Burr Duval, captain of volunteers from Kentucky at Goliad, considered the news unofficial on the ninth. The following day, the tenth, Books wrote that the news of a declaration of independence was merely “rumored.” Fannin, writing on March 11, said he had received no official word from the Convention that a declaration had been issued.

2. Though Ehrenberg used the word “congress,” it was the Convention of 1836 that declared independence on March 2 and wrote the Constitution of the Republic of Texas before adjourning—and fleeing the oncoming Mexican armies. The delegates at the Convention of 1836 did not determine the boundaries of the Republic of Texas. The eastern and northern boundaries with the United States along the Sabine and Red Rivers were essentially inherited from Spain and Mexico. The Rio Grande boundary with Mexico was anticipated by the Treaties of Velasco signed with Antonio López de Santa Anna following his capture after the Battle of San Jacinto, but these treaties were never ratified by Mexico or Texas. The First Congress of the Republic of Texas, on December 19, 1836, “declared the southern and western boundary of Texas to be the Rio Grande from its mouth to its source and thence a line due north to the forty-second parallel”—known as the Stovepipe.

3. The flag Ehrenberg describes is most certainly the banner of the Georgia Battalion, which had been organized by William Ward in Macon, Georgia, after a town meeting on November 12, 1835. Volunteers, primarily, from Macon, Milledgeville, and Columbus marched through Knoxville, Georgia, on their way to Texas, when a flag was presented to them by seventeen-year-old Joanna Troutman. It was flown by the unit upon arrival in Velasco, Texas, on December 20, and again as they arrived with Fannin at Copano on February 1, 1836.

Though Ehrenberg says the banner was “a blue flag,” most eyewitnesses describe the flag as a white field of silk with an “azure” five-pointed star attached on each side. On one side was affixed the words “Texas and Liberty” and on the other side, the Latin phrase, “Ubi Libertas habitat, ibi nostra patria est”—“Where Liberty dwells, there is our country.”

Lewis Washington, a survivor of the Georgia Battalion at the Goliad Massacre, remembered the wording “Liberty or Death” instead of “Texas and Liberty.” He also stated that at some point the flag was being lowered from the flagstaff at Goliad at sunset “when by some unlucky mishap, the beautiful silken banner became entangled in the halyards, and was torn into pieces. Only a small fragment remained adjusted to the flag-staff; and when Col. Fannin evacuated Goliad, to join Gen. Houston, in accordance with received orders, the last remnant of the first ‘Flag of the Lone Star,’ was still fluttering at the top of the staff from which floated the first ‘Flag of Independence’”—the so-called bloody-arm flag raised with the “Goliad Declaration of Independence” on December 20, 1835.

Herman Ehrenberg, Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg, trans. Louis E. Brister and James C. Kearney, ed. James E. Crisp (Texas State Historical Association, 2021), xvi, 227. On the notes, see pages 209, n. 20; 221; 234–35, n. 27, 28, 30.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

On the day of the fight, February 21, 1896, it had rained off and on over the arid Trans-Pecos where Langtry was situated. The 182 or so spectators and the two combatants had come by train from El Paso. To reach the battle site, according to The New York Times, they had to navigate a “precipitous descent of a seldom-used wagon road . . . over rocks and boulders” and across “500 yards of sand and mud” to reach the makeshift bridge over the Rio Grande. There, at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon, in the middle of the river, on the Mexican side, stood a boxing ring, encircled with a sixteen foot high canvas wall.

It was there, on a sandbar, Robert “Bob” Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher traded punches for the boxing heavyweight championship.

Robert Fitzsimmons was born in Cornwall, England but moved to New Zealand when he was ten-years-old. When he reached his teen years, he went to work in a factory, later hammering out horseshoes as a blacksmith. He got involved in bareknuckle fighting and became known as “The Fighting Blacksmith.” In 1883, under the encouragement of champion bareknuckler Jim Mace, Fitzsimmons moved to Australia and trained under black heavyweight champion Peter Jackson. Though Fitzsimmons had a powerful upper body, developed from years of hard labor, he had skinny legs, often appearing in the ring wearing woolen underwear to hide them, and never weighed more than a modern super-middleweight fighter: 168 pounds. But he was a cagy fighter. His punches were compressed but accurate. In time, he became known as the hardest hitter in the ring.

When Jackson and Mace believed he was ready, Fitzsimmons set sail, in 1890, for the United States, home of the undisputed world heavyweight champion: John L. O’Sullivan—the “Boston Strong Boy.”

Peter Maher was the “The Irish Giant,” where he was a boxing champion. He immigrated to America around the same time as Fitzsimmons. The two men squared off just two years later. Now fighting as “Ruby Robert,” because of his red hair and freckles, Fitzsimmons was nearly knocked from the ring in the first round by Maher, who was six years younger and at least one stone heavier (fourteen pounds). Fitzsimmons managed to regain his composure and fought Maher to twelve rounds, when Maher conceded the fight.

That same year, 1892, “Gentleman Jim” Corbett defeated the champion John O’Sullivan for the heavyweight title. In September 1894, Corbett fought and defeated Peter Courtney in what became the second boxing match recorded on film—the first was between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing three months earlier.¹

A year later, in 1895, Fitzsimmons challenged Corbett to a title fight. Corbett, who was more interested in the trappings of celebrity than defending his heavyweight title, put Fitzsimmons off for a time, but eventually relented. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight was publicized by East Texas promotor Dan Stuart, who announced the bout would take place in Dallas. But when wind of the fight reached the governor’s office, the reformed-minded Charles Culberson called a special session of the Legislature to outlaw prizefights.

With the law passed and signed, the fight was rescheduled for Hot Springs, Arkansas, for October 31, 1895. The governor there, however, dispatched the state militia to prevent the fight. In the process of trying to find a third venue, Corbett grew disgusted and vacated his title, conferring it onto Maher, who that year, had fought and scored a first round knock out of Steve O’Donnell, one of Corbett’s sparring partners. According to Maher’s biographer, Corbett said to Maher: “You are the champion of the world. Any title which I may hold I confer on you. My withdrawal from the prize ring is final. I regard you as a worthy man to hold the championship.”

When Fitzsimmons heard that Corbett had bestowed his title on Maher, he cried foul. Since he had defeated Maher three years earlier, Fitzsimmons claimed the title for himself—and had the backing of many in the fighting community, which said that Maher’s title was merely “a gift championship.” The National Police Gazette, the leading boxing rag at the time, argued that Maher had to beat Fitzsimmons in the ring to authenticate his claim to the title, writing, “He has been hailed as the champion but conservative, reasonable, thinking people, appreciate the fact that the simple act of handing a title to a man on a gold plate is not the only thing that is required to make him a champion.”

A rematch between the two hard hitters was an easy sell, especially with a $10,000 purse put up by a party that wanted to film the fight.² But where could Stuart schedule it? A group of El Paso businessmen were the answer to that question. Whether they were ignorant of the Texas law or simply ignored it, they approached Stuart with a bonus of $6,000 if he would stage the Fitzsimmons-Maher rematch in their city. Stuart, who was an old political adversary of the governor, agreed, taunting Culberson by declaring, “Nothing short of lightning or the destruction of the earth by fire can stop the contest we have arranged to pull off.”

Governor Culberson couldn’t destroy the earth with fire, but he could prevent a boxing match within the borders of Texas. He dispatched a company of twenty-six Texas Rangers under Woodford H. Mabry to El Paso. It wasn’t lightning, but it was enough to to ensure the match wouldn’t take place.

Then, on February 6, 1896, lightning did strike. On that day, President Grover Cleveland signed into law New Mexico Senator Thomas Benton Catron’s anti-fighting and gambling bill, outlawing, according to the Springfield, Massachusetts Morning Union, any “pugilistic encounter—between man and man . . . for money or for other things of value, or for any championship” within any state or territory within the United States. The Fitzsimmons-Maher fight was no exception. In fact, the U.S. Attorney General Judson Harmon said, “If they fight in any territory of the United States, we will follow them to the ends of the earth if necessary to bring them to justice.”

It looked like the rematch was off and Maher the conferred champion.

Enter justice of the peace Judge Roy Bean, the self-styled “Law West of the Pecos.” He had followed developments of the Fitzsimmons-Maher bout from his saloon, the Jersey Lilly, in Langtry, on the Texas-Mexico border. Bean proposed a solution to Stuart’s situation. He should skirt the law without breaking the law—stage the fight on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande across the border in Mexico, outside the jurisdiction of Texas and the United States. Stuart agreed and scheduled the fight for February 21, 1896.

When Mabry learned about the change of venue, he telegraphed the Vale Verde County sheriff’s office. Deputy Sheriff J. G. Reagan went to Langtry to question Bean, who assured the lawman that no laws would be broken in his jurisdiction, and that as far as he knew the boxing match was to take place across the river. Reagan then dispatched a telegram to Governor Culberson: “Prize fight takes place across river whose jurisdiction are we under yourself or judge Roy Bean await your instructions.”

That same day, in El Paso, Fitzsimmons and Maher, along with 182 paying spectators—and the Texas Rangers—boarded a train for Langtry. When they arrived, Bean lead them, followed by local cowboys, down the main street, onto a wagon road down the limestone bluff to the river, then across a footbridge at Eagle Nest Crossing. There stood a boxing ring encircled with a sixteen foot high canvas wall.

The Texas Rangers, who had no authority in Mexico, remained on the Texas side and sat on a bluff to watch the fisticuffs. Mexican authorities, who knew nothing of the fight, could do nothing to stop it. The closest company of soldiers were stationed around Eagle Pass, some 120 miles away.

The men stepped into the square, took off their overcoats, caps, and trousers, and shook hands in the center of the ring. Fitzsimmons and Maher donned their five-ounce gloves as referee George Siler gave instructions and warnings. Returning to their corners, timekeeper Lou Houseman banged a gong and the fight was on.

Before leaving for Langtry, Maher bragged to a reporter for the El Paso Daily Herald: “When Fitzsimmons defeated me at our first engagement I was a big, strong fellow to be sure, but a mere novice in the art of boxing. I was hardly more than a boy and had but the most elementary knowledge of the game of stop, hit and get away. Even at that I had Fitz nearly out in the first round, but I didn’t know enough to take advantage of point I had gained. I do not mean to repeat my former mistake and stay away from him. I honestly believe I can win. . . . Of one thing the sporting public can rest assured—the battle will be swift and hard. . . . Fitz will have to knock me stone out to win.”

And that’s just what Fitzsimmons did. In ninety-five seconds after the bell rang, Ruby Robert knocked out The Irish Giant. Despite a bloody lip, Fitzsimmons said, “I got in on him with my right and caught him squarely on the jaw. I knew it was all over when I landed on him. It was dead easy from the start.”

For Maher’s part: “I thought I had him licked until he punched me under the jaw and then it was all over with me and I quit thinking.”

1. Corbett came out of retirement to reclaim his title by fighting Fitzsimmons in 1897, a fight that was also put on film—the longest film ever released at the time at 1.5 hours long. Fitzsimmons knocked out Corbett in the fourteenth round.

2. Because it had rain sporadically thoughout the day it was overcast and the light was too poor to film, though a kinescope had been set up. (If the bout had been recorded no film has ever been discovered.)

Matt Donnellon, The Irish Champ Peter Maher: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Only World Heavyweight Champion and the Records of the Men He Fought (Trafford Publishing, 2008).

Adam J. Pollack, In the Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons (Win by KO Publications, 2007).

Jack Skiles, Judge Roy Bean Country (Texas Tech University Press, 1996).

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Bullies come in all shapes and sizes, ethnic and geographical backgrounds, and religious, political, and ethical persuasions. They are young and old, men and women, rich and poor. They are found in schoolyard playgrounds and churchyard pews, Fifth Avenue boardrooms and Pennsylvania Avenue statehouses. They traffic in bloody noses and black eyes (and bruised egos), courtroom lawsuits, and open warfare with other nations.

They are obsessed with power—“[lording] over” others, in the words of Jesus (Matthew 20:25). They are practicers of Thomas Hobbs’s philosophy: that mankind’s “perpetual and restless desire” is “after power, that ceaseth only in Death.” They live in a bifurcated world articulated by Thucydides’s maxim: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” They are egocentric, demanding others acquiesce to their power or be subject to intimidating and terrorizing violence—verbally and, if necessary, physically. They are thuggish, preying on the vulnerable, or those they perceive as weak. They lack empathy, compassion, mercy, humanity, or guilt for their words and actions. They are brutes and braggarts, surviving off their well-deserved cruel reputations.

But it is equally true that bullies are small-souled and waif-spirited—“ghostlike,” in the words of philosopher Peter Kreeft. “A person who sees himself as metaphysically weak, as ghostlike in his being, may want to assure himself of his substance, his reality, of the fact that he is alive, by the two most desperate acts of bullying: rape and murder, entering the living body of another forcibly to create or destroy life.” They are chicken-hearted—cowardly to the rotten center of their hard-boiled hearts, just as Texas Bix Bender said: “Hard-boiled eggs are yellow at the core.” With spines no stronger than a chicken’s neck, they snap under the force of equal or greater power.

Though camp cook Po Campo says of Blue Duck, the protagonist in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, “There is no worse man. Only the devil is worse,” many of the bully’s cowardly traits are seen in this badman.

As McMurtry did with a number of characters, he based his fictional Blue Duck on the real Blue Duck, who was no devil. He was a hooligan and highwayman, born on June 17, 1859, in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) as Bluford Duck (Sha-Con-Gah). A member of Sam Starr’s cutthroats—and perhaps (but probably not) Belle Starr’s lover—Blue Duck plied his trade in armed robbery and cattle theft around the Red River.

But on June 23, 1884, along with William Christie, Blue Duck murdered farmer Samuel Wyrick in a drunken outburst. They were soon captured by Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Cochran and presented to Judge Isaac C. Parker—the “hanging judge”—in Fort Smith, Arkansas, who sentenced them to death. Christie was later cleared of the charges and released. Blue Duck plea-bargained and was sent to Menard Penitentiary in Chester, Illinois for life—inmate 2486.

In 1895 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He appealed to President Grover Cleveland for a pardon, which was granted March 20. Blue Duck died some six weeks later on May 7, 1895, at the age of thirty-six. He is buried in Catoosa, Oklahoma.

When we meet Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove, he is a more menacing character than the real outlaw upon which he is drawn.* Physically, he is an imposing man, with a “heavy, square face,” cold, empty eyes”—“cold as snake’s eyes”—and large hands. “He held the rifle in the crook of his arm, handling it like a toy,” is how McMurtry described the man’s size.

And yet, unlike Judge Holden in Cormac McCarty’s Blood Meridian or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—both psychopathic—McMurtry’s Blue Duck is merely a dangerous bully. Yes, “He had survived twenty years or more in rough country, at a rough game, and could be expected to be formidable, if he was around,” but he is a bully nonetheless.

Blue Duck preys on the weak. When we are introduced to him, by the river where Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Lorena had been frolicking, Gus tells Lori that Blue Duck was “One we ought to have hung ten years ago. Couldn’t catch him. . . . He’s got a bunch of murderers and child-stealers. He used to work the Red River county from New Mexico all the way across to Arkansas, hitting settlers. They’d butcher the groups and take the horses and kids.”

A few pages later, McMurtry writes, “Blue Duck stole white children and gave them to the Comanches for presents. He took scalps, abused women, cut up men. What he didn’t steal he burned, always fleeing west onto the waterless reaches of the llano estacado, to unscouted country where neither Rangers nor soldiers were eager to follow.”

And in one of the climatic scenes, Blue Duck kills the frightened and inept Roscoe Brown, as well as the boy Joe and the girl Janey.

Blue Duck relies on his reputation. Folks in Texas and New Mexico continued to blame Blue Duck for heinous crimes even after he committed suicide by jumping through a jailhouse window—an episode McMurtry took from from the suicide of Kiowa chief Satanta who jumped from his Jacksboro, Texas prison window on October 11, 1878. McMurtry writes: “Blue Duck had ranged the llano for so long, and butchered and raped and stolen so often, that superstitions had formed around him.”

Blue Duck uses intimidation to force submission. After he steals Lori and they stop to water their horses, Blue Duck said to her: “I got a treatment for women that try to run away. I cut a little hole in their stomaches and pull out a gut and wrap it around a limb. Then I drag them thirty or forty feet and tie them down. That way they can watch the coyotes come and eat their guts.”

On the next page, Blue Duck tells Lori, “I oughta just gut you and leave you here and let [McCrae] bury whatever the buzzards and the varmints don’t eat.”

Blue Duck is a braggart. When we first encounter him, Blue Duck tells Gus, who’s sitting on a rock in the middle of the river with his pistol, “I can’t wait all day just for the chance to shoot two worn-out old Rangers”—referring to Gus’s partner Woodrow F. Call. “There are plenty that need killing besides you two.”

When Blue Duck threatens to gut Lori and leave her for the buzzards, he says, “I hope that goddamn old Ranger hurries along. I owe him a few.” Lori asks, “Gus? Gus won’t come. I ain’t his.” “He’s coming,” Blue Duck said. “I don’t know if its for you or for me, but he’s coming.”

And while sitting in a New Mexico jail, Blue Duck boasts to Call: “I should have caught [McCrae] and cooked him when I had the chance.” Call, “annoyed by the man’s insolent tone,” responds, “He would have killed you. Or I would have, if need be.” With an insolent smile, Blue Duck said, “I raped women and stole children and burned houses and shot men and run off horses and killed cattle and robbed who I pleased, all over your territory, ever since you been a law. And you never even had a good look at me until today. I don’t reckon you would have killed me.”

Blue Duck is a coward. For all his terror and danger and braggadocio about killing and cooking Gus, Blue Duck has a cowardly center—as all bullies do. He had more than one chance to go at Gus, but in the end Blue Duck tucked tail and ran. By the river he as much admitted his cowardice: “I can’t wait all day for the chance to shoot two worn-out old Rangers,” then mounted and rode away. Gus, a true tough man, was humble enough to tell Lori, “I don’t underestimate him, though he’d have to step quick to beat me and Call both.” Later, Gus tells Call, with a bit of humor, that “It would have been touch and go who got kilt. I might have got him or at least wounded him, but I’d have probably got wounded in the process and I don’t feel like traveling with no wound.”

When Gus comes after Lori, Blue Duck refuses to meet him barrel-to-barrel. He sends his “bunch of murderers and child stealers” to ambush Gus in the open expanse of the Llano Estacado. In their horse chase, Gus rides into a buffalo wallow—a small depression in the ground where a buffalo had rolled—and kills his horse to fort-up behind. He than engages Blue Duck’s men in a gun battle. They eventually skedaddle by July Johnson and his party.

When Gus joins July and the others, they track Blue Duck’s men to their hiding place and Gus says, “They don’t know it, but the wrath of the Lord is about to descend upon them. I dislike bold criminals of whatever race, and I believe I’ll go see that they pay their debts.” July then asks, “You want to go at them alone?” Gus says, “They’re easier to scare at night. I expect I’ll just run most of them off. But I do intend to kill Mr. Duck if I see him. He’s stole his last woman.”

Meanwhile, in Blue Duck’s camp, he’s preparing to leave, knowing Gus is on this way. Monkey John asks, “You gonna leave?” “That’s right,” Blue Duck said. “I aim to look for a better crew. The whole bunch of you couldn’t kill one man. You never even attacked that second bunch [July’s crew]. It was probably just a cowboy or two.”

Coward to the core.

Cowards blame others for not doing what they themselves bragged about doing but didn’t do. In Gus, Blue Duck found a man who met, unflinchingly, his aggression—and exceeded it. Gus would tangle with the whole bunch alone while Blue Duck would turn yellow and hightail it.

After Gus and Lori return to where Roscoe, Joe, and Janey were killed, Gus says to July, “If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill him. But if I don’t somebody else will. He’s big and mean, but sooner or later he’ll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he’ll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he’ll just get old and die.”

Sooner or later, every bully faces the justice they so richly deserve.

Edna Ferber, the author of Giant, who dealt with her share of bullies, wrote, “A bully must be met with instant repulse or he multiplies his own violence. A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.”

She’s absolutely right. You can’t negotiate, reason, or appease bullies. If you try they become more emboldened in their bullying. The only language they understand and respect is power and force. The only way to deal with a bully is to wack him. And wack him again. And again . . . until he turns the other cheek.

* McMurtry identifies Blue Duck as both an “Indian” and a “Comanchero”—traders with Plains Indians. This is an interesting contradiction since Comancheros—so named because Comanches were their best trading customers—were not Indians, but Hispanics from Northern and Central New Mexico.

Texas Bix Bender, A Cowboy’s Guide to Life (Gibbs Smith, 2019), 68.

Edna Ferber, in Julie Gilbert, Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film (Pantheon, 2024), 344.

Thomas Hobbs, Leviathan (E. P. Dutton and Company, 1950), 79.

Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion (Ignatius Press, 1992), 139.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (Simon & Schuster, 1985), 332–33, 334, 337, 365, 366, 414, 416, 428, 429, 432, 437–38, 441,444, 812.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (Everyman’s Library, 1910), 394.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Robert Duvall, actor and honorary Texas Ranger, is dead. He passed away on Sunday, February 15, 2026, at the age of ninety-five. His film career spanned sixty years, beginning with his film debut as Arthur “Boo” Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He made a brief but memorable appearance as “Lucky” Ned Pepper in True Grit, starring John Wayne (1969). Many forget he was Frank Burns in the movie M*A*S*H (1970). But none can forget his performance as Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather II (1974), or his portrayal of the surfing obsessed Lt. Col. Kilgore who loved the “smell of napalm in morning” in Apocalypse Now (1979), or of the hard-bitten Marine Lt. Col. “Bull” Meechum in The Great Santini (1979). However, it was his performance as country and western singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies (1983) that not only won him a Best Actor Oscar, it also endeared him to audiences.

Many other roles were to follow—wonderful roles: Max Mercy in The Natural (1984), Euliss “Sonny” Dewey in The Apostle (1997), which Duvall wrote and directed, Mr. Hillyer in Rambling Rose (1991), Frank Childers in Sling Blade (1996), Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals (2003), Hub McCann in Secondhand Lions (2003), Bluebonnet “Boss” Spearman in Open Range (2003), Prentice “Prent” Ritter in Broken Trail (2006), Red Bovie in A Night in Old Mexico (2013), and Jean Pepe in The Pale Blue Eye (2022), his last film—he was ninety-one.

And yet, none of these roles marked him as did his personification of Augustus “Gus” McCrae in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989)—the eccentric former Texas Ranger who befriends pigs but doesn’t rent pigs, and who has a fondness for Latin he can’t understand. In an interview about filming Lonesome Dove, Duvall told Bob Welch, “When we finished shooting, I said, ‘I can retire now. I’ve done something I can be proud of.’ Playing Augustus McCrae was kind of like my Hamlet. It may be my favorite role.” When asked why Lonesome Dove has held up so long, Duvall said, “The English have Shakespeare, the French have Molière, the Russians have Chekhov, the Argentines have Borges, but the Western is ours—from Canada to the Mexican border..”

On playing the part of Gus, Duvall said, “The writing was so good that I innately responded to the part.” He did more than respond, he personified the part. Everyone who has seen the miniseries and loved it—especially the character of Gus—knows no other actor but Robert Duvall could (and can) embody the person of Augustus McCrae. In honor of his portrayal, which continues to bring joy to so many, I offer a baker’s dozen of Gus’s greatest moments and lines. Though Bobby didn’t write the words, he made them breath and gave them life.

1. During the opening when the Hat Creek crew are having supper, Gus tells Bolivar, the cook, “I want you to quit whacking that dinner bell for supper. You can whack it at noon if you want to, but let off doing it in the evening. A man with any sense at all can tell when it’s sundown without you whacking that bell.”

2. After supper, Gus, Newt, and Bolivar are sitting on the porch. Bolivar is sharpening his knife and compares it to a wife. Gus says, “If that’s the case your wife over there in Mexico’s getting pretty rusty by now. She don’t get sharpened more’n twice a year, does she, Bol?” Bol says, “She is old. Like you.” Gus responds, “The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

3. Before the Hat Creek outfit heads out with a herd of cattle for Montana, Gus visits Lorena (Lorie) in the Dry Bean saloon. He says to her, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for a poke.” She’s astonished and informs Gus that she’s with Jake Spoon. “Tell you what,” Gus says, “let’s cut cards. If you’re high, you win the fifty dollars and you can forget the poke. If I’m high I’ll still give you the fifty dollars but I get the poke.” When they cut cards Gus draws the Queen of Hearts. Lorie accuses him of cheating, to which he says, “Well, I wouldn’t say I did and I wouldn’t say I didn’t. But I will say this—a man who wouldn’t cheat for a poke don’t want one bad enough. Let’s go, darling.”

4. After crossing the Nueces River with the herd and burying Sean O’Brien, the Hat Creek crew, hats in hand, stand around the freshly dug grave. Gus breaks the silence. “I’ll say a word. This was a good, brave boy here. He had a fine tenor voice and we’ll all miss that. There’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful. Dust to dust. Let’s the rest of us go onto Montana.”

5. Gus and Call ride into San Antonio to find a new cook after Bolivar refused to cross the Nueces River. They visit the Buckhorn saloon where they and Jake used to frequent in their rangering days. The bartender is insolent. He says to them, “You dern cowboys oughta broom yourselves off before you walk in here. We get all the sand we need without the customers bringing it in.” When Gus pays for their drinks and the bartender reaches for the money, Gus grabs the man’s hair and slams his nose into the bar, breaking it. Gus then pulls his gun and turns the bartender’s face with it toward a faded picture behind the bar and says, “Besides the whiskey, I think we’ll require a little respect. I’m Captain Augustus McCrae and this is Captain Woodrow F. Call. Now, if you care to turn around you can see how we looked when we was younger and the people ’round here wanted to make us senators. The thing we didn’t put up with then was dawdling service, and, as you can see, we still don’t put up with it.” The bartender curses Gus and Gus hits him with the barrel of his pistol, knocking him out. Gus pours himself another drink and raises his glass: “Well, here’s to the sunny slopes of long ago.” When Call tells Gus he’s lucky he wasn’t thrown in jail, Gus responds: “Whacking a surly bartender ain’t much of a crime.”

6. Gus and Call ride back to the Hat Creek outfit with their new cook, Po Campo, but Gus peals off to visit Lorie who is sitting along a creek. She wants to go to San Francisco but knows Jake won’t take her. And when she can’t convince Gus to take her, she becomes gloomy. Gus says to her, “Listen, Lorie. Life in San Francisco’s still just life. If you want only one thing too much it’s likely to turn out a disappointment. The healthy way to live is to learn to like all the little everyday things. . . . Like a sip of good whiskey of an evening, or a soft bed, or a glass of buttermilk, or, say, a feisty gentleman like myself.”

7. While Gus and Lorie are visiting, Blue Duck rides in to water his horse. After Gus and Blue Duck exchange insults, the halfbreed rides on. Fearing Blue Duck might try to steal the Hat Creek horses, Gus tries to persuade Lorie to accompany him to the outfit. She refuses and Gus leaves her. When he returns to the Hat Creek crew he sends Newt to Lorie’s camp and Deets to track Blue Duck. Gus and Call get into an argument. Call says Jake should have left Lorie in Lonesome Dove, to which Gus responses (with a bit of humor if you think about Call being a young girl): “If you was a young girl with your whole life before you, would you wanna stay in Lonesome Dove? Maggie done it and look how long she lasted.” Irritated Gus would bring up Maggie, a prostitute whom he had shamefully visited for a while, Call says, “She might a’died anywhere. It just happened she died in Lonesome Dove, that’s all.” In frustration Gus responds, “I God, Woodrow, you just don’t never get the pint, do you? It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.”

8. After Blue Duck kidnaps Lorie and Gus rescues her, they ride back to where sheriff July Johnson left his inept deputy Roscoe Brown with the boy Joe and the girl Janey—all three have been butchered by Blue Duck during the night. July is digging shallow graves and says to Gus, “It’s all my fault. You told me to stay.” He tells Gus he wants to join him if he’s going after Blue Duck. Gus says, “Yesterday’s gone and we can’t get it back. . . . These lives here are lost for good, son, and giving pain for pain ain’t gonna bring ’em back. If I ever run across Blue Duck again I’ll kill him for you . . . and for her, too.”

9. On the Kanas plains, after learning of the murder of some cowboys by Dan Suggs and his brothers, who also stole the cowboys’ horses, Call, Gus, Deets, Pea Eye, and Newt go after them. Deets informs the others that Jake is riding with the outlaw crew. When the Hat Creek boys ride into the Suggs camp Jack tries to talk himself out of a hanging. Gus is unmoved. “You know how it works, Jake. Ride with an outlaw, die with an outlaw. I’m sorry you crossed the line.”

10. On the outskirts of Ogllala, Nebraska, Lorie is afraid Gus is going to leave her for a woman he used to love a long time ago in Texas: Clara Allen. Gus tells Lorie not to worry. He plans to take her when he visits Clara. Lorie says, “She’ll know what I am.” “Yes,” Gus replies, “she’ll recognize right off you’re a fine human being. You don’t duck your head to nobody, Lorie. Not to me. Not to Clara. Not to nobody.” Lorie asks, “I bet she was always a lady, wasn’t she?” Gus lets her know, “A lady can slice your jugular as quick as a Comanche. Clara’s got a sharp tongue. She’s tomahawked me many a time in the past. You’ll like her.”

11. Just before the Hat Creek crew is turned loose on the town, Gus greets them, “Hello, girls. I hear you’re planning an orgy when we get to Ogallala.” Jasper Fant is none too happy with Gus’s joke: “It’s fine for you to laugh. You got Lorie.” Gus, always a quick wit, says, “Yes, but what’s good for me ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

12. At the Allen horse ranch, after their picnic, Clara convinces Lorie to stay with her and her two daughters. Lorie asks, “Would you come back, Gus?” Looking over the faces of all the ladies, young and old, Gus says, “Sure I’ll come back. A ladies man like me can’t be expected to resist such a passel of beauties.” When Cara and the girls leave to prepared Lorie’s room, Lorie asks, “You will come back, won’t you?” Gus says, “Yes, but you probably won’t want me.” “Why wouldn’t I?” Gus says to her, “Because by then you’ll have discovered there’s more in this old world than just me. You’ll find there’s others that treat you decent.”

13. After Gus and Pea Eye are attacked by Indians in Montana, Pea leaves Gus in a shallow cave along a creek bed gravely wound. With the help of an old trapper, Old Hugh, Gus makes his way to Miles City. In a doctor’s office, with one leg amputated, Call finally catches up with Gus. Call insists the doctor take off Gus’s other leg, which is infected with gangrene. Gus pulls his pistol and points it at Call and reminds him that he the one man Call can’t boss. Call says to him, “You don’t like to do nothing but sit on the porch and drink whiskey,” and Gus didn’t need legs for that. Gus responds, “I like to kick a pig ever’ once in a while. How would I do that?” As the night passes, Gus says to Call, “I’ve walked the earth in my pride all these years. If that’s lost, then let the rest be lost with it. There’s certain things my vanity won’t abide.” Gus then asks Call to bury in Texas, to buy his share of the cattle and give the money to Lorie, and to find him a couple pieces of paper and a pencil so he can write a letter to Clara and Lorie. After writing his letters, Gus closes his eyes and lays still. Call whispers, “Augustus.” Gus open his eyes and looks into Call’s and says, “I God, Woodrow, it’s been quite a party, ain’t it,” and breathes his last.

I have read and watched that death scene more times than I can count. And yet, I am struck—and surprised—every time I read or watch it by how it fills me with profound sadness. But now, with the passing of Robert Duvall, the poignancy is palpable, as if the fictional character of Augustus McCrae, enfleshed by one of the greatest actors of our time, has really and finally died.

And so I say with Gus at the death of Jake and with Horatio at the death of Hamlet, “Yes, he died fine, didn’t he?” “Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to they rest!”

Vaya con Dios, mi amigo—the one of a kind Augustus McCrae: Robert Selden Duvall.

Bob Welch, “At Home With Robert Duvall,” American Cowboy, June 6, 2014.

Bill Wittliff, Lonesome Dove, teleplay, “Part 1: Leaving,” scenes 3, 5, 38; “Part 2: On the Trail,” scenes 67, 81, 85, 90; “Part 3, The Plains,” scenes 128, 159, 160, 181, “Part 4, Return,” scenes 199, 239, 239.

William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 5.2.306–307, in The RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works (The Modern Library, 2022), 1976.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.

Clichés become clichés because there’s a kernel of truth in them, including this well-known gem: “Everything is bigger in Texas”—bigger hats and hair, bigger egos and mouths, bigger prom mums and football rivalries, bigger land and sky, bigger guns and trucks, as well as the biggest cattle drive on one of the biggest ranches in Texas in the big sky country of the Panhandle.

The T-Anchor Ranch (though it wasn’t called that at the time) was established on a 320-acres tract at the Spring Draw near the junction of Palo Duro and Tierra Blanca Creeks (near present-day Canyon) in Randall County in the fall of 1877 by Leigh R. Dyer, the brother-in-law of Charles Goodnight. It was the first ranch in Randall County, the second in the Panhandle—Goodnight’s JA Ranch being the first. Shortly after its formation, Leigh and his brother Walter cut cedar logs from Palo Duro Canyon and constructed a two-room “dog-trot” cabin—the first substantial structure in the Panhandle. From there, under the DY brand, Dyer ran four hundred head of shorthorn cattle crossbred with JA bulls.

A year later, Dyer sold the ranch to railroad surveyors Jot Gunter and John S. Summerfield, and their partner Willam B. Munson Sr. In the fall of 1880, Jud Campbell trailed 3,800 cattle from Louisiana, Arkansas, and East Texas to the Randall County ranch and were branded GMS. This herd faired poorly during the winter of 1880–1881 and had to be replenished the following spring when Campbell drove another bunch to the ranch. Those that survived the winter had scattered. To keep their cattle from drifting, Campbell and the GMS hands fenced in the operation’s growing landholdings: a “small pasture” of 240,000 acres, which comprised the eastern half of Randall County. It was the first extensive fencing in the Panhandle.

In the fall of 1881, Jule Gunter, Jot’s nephew, bought Summerfield’s interest. For a time the ranch continued to brand cattle with GMS but added the Crescent G. However, when Jule brought 3,500 head branded with the T-Anchor from his Burneyville Ranch in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), the company dropped the other brands in favor of the T-Anchor.

The following summer, on August 24, 1882, sixteen punchers from the T-Anchor fanned out over the ranch that now consisted of all or part of seven Panhandle counties: all but a small portion of Randall, most of Deaf Smith, as well as portions of Swisher, Castro, Armstrong, Briscoe, and Oldham. Cowboys flushed cattle from the canyons and gathered them at Big Lake near Tulia to water and bed them down. Once bedded, it took a rider, at a fast trot, an hour to circle the herd.

The next day, the outfit threw the cattle on the trail, driving them to the main ranch outside of Canyon. Waiting to count them were Jule Gunter and Vas Stickley, the T-Anchor foreman. Six hours and thirty-two some odd miles later the leaders passed through the gate at 2:00 in the afternoon—the drag or the stragglers hadn’t even started. They didn’t pass through the counters until well after dark.

The final tally was 10,652 head of cattle and 125 horses in the remuda—the largest cattle drive in history. A record that still hasn’t been broken.

W. H. Childers, in Texas Cowboys: Memories of the Early Days, ed. Jim Lanning and Judy Lanning (Texas A&M University Press, 1984), 18.

C. Boone McClure, “A Review of the T-Anchor Ranch,” Panhandle-Plains Historical Review, vol. 3 (1930), 64–77.

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’allogy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber, it helps offset research and writing expenses—and ensures that Y’allogy remains cost free.

You can also show your support by purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.