In my grandfather’s hometown he was known as the man in the red fedora, his trademark which graced the work van he used to carry the tools of his trade. He made his living on his hands and knees laying floor covering. His friends called him E. G. or Glenn. His family called him Daddy Jeter. His clients called him Mr. Jeter—and said it with reverence. They knew the cliché about a man’s word being his bond was true of my grandfather. If he gave a client an estimate for a job and later discovered a mistake in his calculation he never billed for the difference. The number he quoted was the number he billed. He ate the shortfall. In the eyes of his clients, the red fedora was a symbol of the man’s character—the quality of his work and the honesty of his word.

He was, as the old saying goes, as honest as the day is long. His word was as good as a signature signed in blood. He embodied the admonition in Matthew 5:37: “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’”

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Though my grandfather wasn’t a cowboy, he had the character of one—especially when it came to honesty. Texas humorist Bix Bender says, “Honesty is not somethin’ you should flirt with. You should be married to it.” My grandfather had a faithful and fruitful marriage to honesty, as did most working cowhands. In the words of cowboy historian Ramon Adams, “There was no such thing as petty thievery” among old-time punchers. They were not camp robbers. “In the old trail days,” Adams writes, “bags of silver and gold lay around camp after a trail drive unnoticed and with never a thought of theft.”

A cowboy might claim a maverick cow, commonly called a “slick ear”—one unbranded, without an ear mark, and alone—but he never rustled another men’s property. If he came upon an unattended branded animal he attempted to ascertain its owner and return the animal. His code of conduct demanded it. And if he was given a loan of a dollar or a horse, he was sure to pay or bring back what was owed. “I’m good for it,” was all a man need say and shake hands on it.

Of course, that wasn’t true of every man on the range. It might be said of a man who violated the code of honesty that “he was as long as a snake and dragged the ground when he walked.” But some men had no code other than penny-ante thievery. When dealing with such men, cowboys made a distinction between the theft of a horse and the theft of a cow. A cow was considered a commodity, a piece of property, and the theft of such was for the courts to decide punishment and restitution. The theft of a horse, however, was another matter. A horse on the plains could make the difference between life and death. Horse thieves were loathsome and despised. To set a man afoot by stealing his horse carried the penalty of death if caught, not by a court of law but by the individual himself or the outfit he worked for.

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It’s doubtful many or any cowboys read the Meditations by Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, but they would heartily agree with his observation: “A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it. . . . If you’re honest and straightforward and mean well, it should show in your eyes. It should be unmistakable.”

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Two old ladies were walking around an overcrowded English country churchyard and came upon a tombstone. The inscription read: “Here lies John Smith, a politician and an honest man.”

“Good heavens!” said one lady to the other. “Isn’t it awful that they had to put two people in the same grave!”

That qualifier was unnecessary on the tombstone of my grandfather. It was unnecessary on the tombstone of the average cowboy. All that need be carved was this: “Here lies John Smith, a cowboy.” His honesty was taken for granted.

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Bix Bender, A Cowboy’s Guide to Life (Gibbs Smith, 2019), 213.

Ramon F. Adams, The Cowman and His Code of Ethic (The Encino Press, 1969), 8.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.15, trans. Gregory Hays, (The Modern Library, 2002).

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

John Rigby was a Beeville, Texas cowhand, trailing cattle from south Texas to railheads in Kansas and ranches as far north as Wyoming. He worked as a drover, a segundo (second-in-command), and a trail boss. When the open range closed and cattle drives became a things of the past and fodder for mythologies, Rigby became a brand inspector—that’s when he met and befriended Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie and passed on the story of Sancho, the tamale-loving longhorn.

I first encountered the story of Sancho (told here in abridgment) in Dobie’s The Longhorns, which contains certain details Rigby, as a good teller of cowboy tales, probably fabricated. Dobie, himself, wasn’t Pharisaical about the finer points of the truth when it came to telling Texas tales, confessing that he “did some constructive work on Sancho over the years.”

In his introduction of the story in The Longhorns Dobie wrote: “[Sancho] is entitled to be remembered along side of Old Blue, who led Goodnight’s heard, Alamo in Emerson Hough’s North of 36, “The Blue Roan Outlaw,” in Will C. Barnes’s Tales from the X-Bar Horse Camp, and the Poker Steer in Andy Adams’ Cattle Brands. And I would add: Old Dog from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

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A man by the name of Kerr had a little ranch on Esperanza Creek in Frio County, in the mesquite lands south of San Antonio. He owned several good cow ponies, a few cattle, a little bunch of goats that a dog guarded by day. At night they were shut up in a brush corral near the house. Three or four acres of land, fenced in with brush and poles, grew corn, watermelons and “kershaws” [squash]—except when the season was too drouthy. A hand-dug well equipped with a pulley wheel, rope and bucket furnished water for the establishment.

Kerr’s wife was a partridge-built Mexican named María. They had no children. She was clean, thrifty, cheerful, always making pets of animals. . . .

Late in the winter of 1877, Kerr while riding over on the San Miguel found one of his cows dead in a bog-hole. Beside the cow was a mud-plastered little black-and-white paint bull calf less than a week old. It was too weak to run. . . . Kerr pitched his rope over its head, drew it up across the saddle in front of him, carried it home, and turned it over to María.

. . . The first thing she did . . . was to pour milk from a bottle down the orphan’s throat. With warm water she washed the caked mud off its body. But hand-raising a calf is no end of trouble. The next day Kerr road around until he found a thrifty brown cow with a young calf. He drove them to the pen. By tying the cow’s head up close to a post and hobbling her hind legs, Kerr and María forced her to let the orphan suckle. . . . After being tied up twice daily for a month, she adopted the orphan as a twin to her own offspring.

[. . .]

The dogie was a vigorous little brute, and before long he was getting more milk than the brown cow’s own calf. María called him Sancho, a Mexican name meaning “pet.” She was especially fond of Sancho, and he grew to be especially fond of her.

She would give him the shucks wrapped around tamales. Then she began treating him to whole tamales, which are made of ground corn rolled around a core of chopped-up meat, this banana-shaped roll, done up in a shuck, then being steam-boiled. Sancho seemed not to mind the meat. As everybody who has eaten them knows, Mexican tamales are highly seasoned with pepper. Sancho seemed to like the seasoning.

In southern Texas the little chiltipiquin peppers, red when ripe, grow wild in low, shaded places. Cattle never eat them, leaving them for the wild turkeys, mockingbirds and blue quail to pick off. Sometimes in the early fall wild turkeys used to gorge on them so avidly that their flesh became too peppery for human consumption. By eating tamales Sancho developed a taste for the little red peppers growing in the thickets along the Esperanza Creek. In fact, he became a kind of chiltipiquin addict. He would hunt for the peppers.

[. . .]

Every night Sancho came to the ranch pen to sleep. His bed ground was near a certain mesquite tree just outside the gate. He spent hours every summer day in the shade of this mesquite. When it rained and other cattle drifted off, hunting fresh pasturage, Sancho stayed at home and drank at the well. He was strictly a home creature.

In the spring of 1880 Sancho was three years old and past white of horn and as blocky of build as a long-legged Texas steer ever grew. Kerr’s ranch lay in a big unfenced range grazed by the Shiner brothers. That spring they had a contract to deliver three herds of steers, each to number 2500 head, in Wyoming. Kerr was helping the Shiners gather cattle, and, along with various other ranchers, sold them what steers he had.

Sancho was included. One day late in March the Shiner men road-branded him 7Z and put him in the first herd north. The other herds were to follow two or three days apart.

It was late in the afternoon when the “shaping up” of the herd was completed. It was watered and thrown out on open prairie ground to be bedded down. But Sancho had no disposition to lie down—there. He wanted to go back to that mesquite just outside the pen gate at the Kerr place on the Esperanza. . . . Perhaps he had in mind an evening tamale. He stood and roamed about on the south side of the herd. A dozen times during the night the men on guard had to drive him back. As reliefs were changed, word passed to keep an eye on that paint steer on the lower side.

When the herd started on next morning, Sancho was at the tail end of it, often stopping and looking back. It took constant attention from one of the drag drivers to keep him moving. By the time the second night arrived, every hand in the outfit knew Sancho, by name and sight, as being the stubbornest and gentlest steer in the lot. About dark one of them pitched a loop over his horns and staked him to a bush. This saved bothering with his persistent efforts to walk off.

[. . .]

One day the cattle balked and milled at a bank-full river. “Rope Old Sancho and lead him in,” the boss ordered, “and we’ll point the other cattle after him.” Sancho led like a horse. The herd followed. As soon as he was released, he dropped back to the rear. After this, however, he was always led to the front when there was high water to cross.

[. . .]

When, finally, after listening for months, day and night, to the slow song of their motion, the “dogies” reached their “new home,” Sancho was still halting every now and then to sniff southward for a whiff of the Mexican Gulf. The farther he got away from home, the less he seemed to like the change. He had never felt frost in September before. The Mexican peppers on the Esperanza were red ripe now.

The Wyoming outfit received the cattle. Then for a week the Texas men helped brand CR on their long sides before turning them loose on the new range. When Sancho’s time came to be branded in the chute, one of the Texans yelled out, “There goes my pet. Stamp that CR brand on him good and deep.” Another one said, “The line riders had better watch for his tracks.”

And now the Shiner men turned south, taking back with them their saddle horses and chuck wagons—and leaving Sancho behind. . . .

Spring comes early down on the Esperanza. The mesquites were all in new leaf with that green so fresh and tender that the color seems to emanate into the sky. The bluebonnets and the pink phlox were sprinkling every hill and draw. The prickly pear was studded with waxy blossoms, and the glades were heavy with the perfume of white brush. It was a good season, and tallow weed and grass were coming together. It was a time for the spring cow hunts and the putting up of herds for the annual drive north. The Shiners were at work.

“We were close to Kerr’s cabin on Esperanza Creek, John Rigby told me, “when I looked across a pear flat and saw something that made me rub my eyes. I was riding with Joe Shiner, and we both stopped our horses.”

“Do you see what I see?” John Rigby asked.

“Yes, but before I say, I’m going to read the brand,” Joe Shiner answered.

They rode over. “You can hang me for a horse thief,” John Rigby will tell, “if it wasn’t that Sancho paint steer, four years old now, the Shiner 7Z road brand and the Wyoming CR range brand both showing on him as plain as boxcar letters.”

The men rode on down to Kerr’s.

“Yes,” Kerr said, “Old Sancho got in about six week ago. His hoofs were worn mighty nigh down to the hair, but he wasn’t lame. I thought María was going out of her senses, she was so glad to see him. She actually hugged him and cried and then she begun feeding him hot tamales. She’s made a batch of them nearly every day since, just to pet that steer. When she’s not feeding him tamales, she’s giving him piloncillo [lumpy brown sugar from Mexico].”

Sancho was slicking off and certainly did seem contented. He was coming up every night and sleeping at the gate, María said. She was nervous over the prospect of losing her pet, but Joe Shiner said that if that steer loved his home enough to walk back to it all the way from Wyoming, he wasn’t going to drive him off again, even if he was putting up another herd for the CR owners.

As far as I can tell, Old Sancho lived right there on the Esperanza, now and then getting a tamale, tickling his palate with chili peppers in season, and generally staying fat on mesquite grass, until he died a natural death. He was one of the “walking Texas Longhorns.”

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J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns (Bramhall House, 1941), 259–266.

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

Larry McMurtry considered himself a “minor regional writer,” by which he meant he was not a major talent like Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, or Flannery O’Conner, whom he called “a great writer.” In McMurtry’s estimation, these writers were untouchable—beyond reach. He wasn’t. Being a minor novelist didn’t worry McMurtry. “Literature is fed by minor talents,” he said in an interview. “It’s okay to be minor. In fact, if you can be minor you’ve made a considerable achievement, because more people don’t register in the scale of minor or major at all.”

When asked where Cormac McCarty stood in the pantheon of major and minor writers, McMurtry said he didn’t think much of McCarthy’s earlier works. McMurtry liked No Country for Old Men, but conceded that “[McCarthy’s] great book, if he has a great book, is Blood Meridian.” Though McMurtry admired the novel, he criticized it for being a “little windy” and losing focus at times. It’s “great passages,” however, “are really wonderful.” But McMurtry concluded, “I’m not sure it alone lifts [McCarthy] out of the category of being a minor regional writer.”

Of his own works, the ones that could possibly lift him out of the category of minor talent into the category of major talent, McMurtry listed one book of nonfiction and one book of fiction: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and Duane’s Depressed. Not Lonesome Dove—a novel he dubbed the “Gone With the Wind of the West.”

Why?

No doubt it had to do with the fact that Lonesome Dove was a failure in McMurtry’s eyes. It didn’t do what he set out for it to do: demythologize the West. Just as Gone With the Wind romanticized the antebellum South, so Lonesome Dove became “the chief source of western mythology,” he lamented.

That is true. But that doesn’t diminish the singular achievement that is Lonesome Dove. There’s hardly a novelist alive today, including this one, who wouldn’t consider Lonesome Dove as their greatest accomplishment if they had written it. The same is true for Blood Meridian, which McMurtry acknowledged as McCarthy’s magnum opus. McMurtry believed any given generation might only produce two or three major writers. Though he regarded himself and McCarthy as minor novelists, and Lonesome Dove as anything but a major work, the consensus of much of the reading population, as well as critical readers, disagrees with McMurtry’s assessment of his own talent and that of McCarthy, including their two magisterial works, Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian.

Because this is true, I thought it would be interesting to compare these writers and their two major novels.

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Storytellers & Stylists: Both Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy are two of the greatest storytellers and stylists in the late 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century. When it comes to the language in Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian both mastered the vernacular of the native Texan. This was easy for McMurtry. He grew up among cowboys in Archer County, Texas. It was perhaps more of a challenge for McCarthy, but his twenty-five or so years in El Paso shaved the Eastern Tennessee holler from his pen.

Publication: It was one of those delightful serendipities that both Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian were published in the same year: 1985.

Genre & Setting: Both Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian are cataloged as literary westerns. But they are more than westerns in the literary tradition, they are also journey epics. Lonesome Dove is set in the mid-1870s (post-1876) in South Texas and involves a cattle drive to Montana with a return to Texas. Blood Meridian is set between the years 1849 to 1878, beginning in Tennessee with a runaway who joins the Glanton scalp hunters in Texas, who ply their bloody trade throughout northern Mexico into New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The story eventually ends back in Texas.

Length: Though McMurtry called Blood Meridian a “little windy” in places, it’s not a terribly long novel (certainly not compared to Lonesome Dove), coming in at 116,404 words. At 365,712 words, Lonesome Dove weighs in at three times the length of Blood Meridian.

Violence: It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the fact that both novels are westerns, that violence is a central theme in both works. McMurtry, in his effort to demythologize the West, believed his was writing a violent tale. And though there is violence aplenty, compared to what modern readers and viewers have experienced in this regard the violence in Lonesome Dove comes off as little more than a playground scuffle. This is certainly true compared to the violence found in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is brutal in its descriptions and effects. I’ve written about this at greater length in “The Blood of Ambivalence” and “Beautiful Violence.”

Women: On June 5, 2007, Oprah Winfrey interviewed McCarthy and asked him about the lack of women in his work. He said, “I don’t pretend to understand women. I think men don’t know much about women; they find them mysterious.” So, he didn’t focus on them (until he wrote his last novel Stella Maris). Blood Meridian presents no notable women. Those who are there are little more than creatures of domestic service or objects of desire. Contrast this with McMurtry, one of the greatest creators of female characters in American letters, and Lonesome Dove, where Lorena, Clara, Elmira, and Janey are all fully developed characters with names, backstories, and narrative arches.

Critical Acclaim: Blood Meridian won no literary awards when it was published, and was met with lukewarm sales. However, it did receive (and continues to receive) critical acclaim in the academy, if not always by general readers. McCarthy and his work have been and continue to be subjects of academic study. McMurtry and his work, on the other hand, have not received the same academic scrutiny. “Larry as a topic is kind of undernourished,” McMurtry’s biographer David Streitfeld told me. Nevertheless, Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer for fiction and is more popular and beloved among readers than McCarthy’s great work.

Film: Within four years of its publication, Lonesome Dove the miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, aired on CBS to high praise. Blood Meridian, however, has continued to elude and frustrate filmmakers. Many believe the novel to be “unfilmable.” As of this writing, an adaption is in the works. But we’ll have to see whether the lyric beauty and brutality of McCarthy’s prose can be translated to the screen.

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Many readers, I believe, are drawn to Lonesome Dove—and come away loving it—because the language is approachable, the style is familiar, and the characters are relatable. Blood Meridian is a more challenging novel for the very reasons why Lonesome Dove isn’t—much of the language is exigent, the style has a hint of the archaic, and the characters are odious. But both are worthy of your time and attention. They are simply two of the greatest American novels written in the last half century.

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.

Texans have a sense of humor as big and broad as the size of Texas and as eclectic and eccentric as the shape of Texas. Novelist John Steinbeck discovered this truth when he made his famous drive across America and published his equally famous book about it: Travels with Charley in Search of America. Steinbeck noted, “The Texas joke . . . is a revered institution, beloved and in many cases originating in Texas.”

Two of the original originators of Texas humor came from the pens of Alexander E. Sweet, “the dean of Texas humor,” and John A. Knox. From 1881 to 1895 they published Texas Siftings, a weekly magazine of vignettes that kept the rest of America and part of Europe informed as to the funny doings of Texans and Texas. Eastern dudes and European dandies gobbled up the magazine like they might a plate of barbecue or a bowl of chili. At its height, from 1886 to 1891, Texas Siftings sold 150,000 copies a week at newsstands and in railcars.

Neither man was born in Texas, nor even in the United States. Sweet was born in Canada and Knox was born in Ireland. But as the saying goes, they got to Texas as fast as they could. Though not natives, they loved their adopted state and their adopted country. They combined this love in an Independence Day piece on how Texas cowboys celebrate the Fourth of July.

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Although the cowboy is undoubtedly a cow-catcher, he does not travel on a railroad train when he catches cows, but on the back of a pony. The cow-catcher on the locomotive is an entirely different sort of institution, but it is just as careless about whose cattle it picks up as the cow-catcher on the pony is said to be. When the cow-catcher on wheels picked up a cow or a yearling, the railroad company has to pay three or four times its value; but when the cowboy comes across a stray maverick, it is very difficult to persuade him that it did not belong to him in the first place.

The cowboy can always be found hid under a large hat. . . . The reason he wears a hat of this size, is because no longer ones are made. The same remark applies to his spurs, which are large enough to be mistaken for the spurs of a mountain. We do not know why the cowboy always leaves his swallow-tails coat, black stove-pipe hat and kid gloves at home when he goes out on the trail, but, perhaps, he is afraid he might stampede the herd if he undertook to head them off in that garb.

There is one toy, however, which the cowboy never leaves at home when he goes to Kansas, and that is his pistol. He uses it to celebrate the Fourth of July with, and he always celebrates the great National holiday whenever he can procure the materials to celebrate with, and he is very apt to procure them if they are on the place. The reason the cowboy celebrates the great natal day of American independence so much, is because he is overloaded with patriotism. Traveling on the road, without an almanac, the cowboy manages to forget what the day of the month is, so, to be sure, he celebrates the day whenever he gets to town. If the cowboy were provided with almanacs, so that he could tell when to celebrate the Fourth, it would be a good idea, and perhaps assist in removing the impression that the cowboy drinks whiskey and shoots off his pistol from other than patriotic motives.

If the cowboy were to cease celebrating so much, his breath would not be as strong as it is. It is so strong, occasionally, that if he would only tie a slip knot in the end of it, he could rope and hold a steer with it. He often celebrates the glorious Fourth in a Kansas town and in the middle of winter. At least he makes it so hot for everybody in the town that the citizens think, from the sultriness, that July cannot be very far off.

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John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin Books, 1986), 230.

Alexander E. Sweet and John A. Knox, Sketches from Texas Siftings (reprint: Copano Bay Press, 2018), 26–28.

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.

To say that Oscar Wilde was flamboyant is to state the obvious, sort of like saying water is wet or jalapeños are hot. In the words of one writer, he was “known for his affections, including dressing opulently in purples and broaches, often with an eccentric sunflower in his lapel.” Heck, even his name was flamboyant: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He was one of the leading lights of nineteenth century aestheticism—the movement that rejected the Victorian notion that art should fulfill some ethical end rather than the mere conveyance of beauty. “Art for Art’s Sake” was the their motto—the Latin of which is captured in Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Leo the Lion logo: Ars Gratia Artis. Composers W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, penned an operetta, Patience (1881), lampooning aestheticism and its colorful proponents, including Wilde. When the production toured the United States, Wilde lectured across America in hopes of bolstering his fame. Wilde’s summer speaking tour of 1882 included stops in the land of cowboys—Texas—where he drew curious crowds who came to gawk at this Irish dandy’s dress and manner. He was twenty-seven, a decade and more from publishing A Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

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Wilde began his Texas tour in Galveston on June 19, 1882. Curiosity seekers, especially among the ladies of the town, poured into The Pavilion to hear him lecture on “Decorative Art,” which was covered in the June 21 edition of The Daily Decatur Daily Republican: “Oscar Wilde lectured before an immense audience at Galveston the other night. His lecture was flat and insipid and many left disgusted before the talk concluded.”

Not an auspicious beginning.

The following day, the editor of The Galveston Daily News criticized Wilde for a dreary delivery, an off-putting manner, and presenting an obscure subject. These “elements,” the editorial read, “will cause the brightest and purest language to fall flat on the general public.” The editor’s conclusion was unsparing:

So of the work last night, Mr. Wilde’s lecture was not a success by any means and were he to appear to-night he would scarcely rally a corporal’s guard. Curiosity to see the so throughly advertised young gentleman has been gratified, and that done, there is nothing more to enjoy, for what of real pleasure could be extracted from his work is overbalanced by the martyrdom that must be endured in getting to it.

Ouch!

Though the Galveston newspaper was brutal in its assessment, Wilde was taken with the city. “Galveston, set like a jewel in a crystal sea,” he told a reporter for the New Orleans Picayune, “was beautiful. Its fine beaches, its shady avenues, or oleander, and its delightful sea breezes were something to be enjoyed.” Of the citizens, he said, “The people of Galveston were wonderful to me. They made me an honorary Colonel in the Texas Rangers. So I wrote immediately to my friends and told them that they should henceforth address me as Colonel Wilde.”

A year later, on September 24, 1883, after he had returned to England, while giving a speech on his “Impressions of America,” he told an audience at Wandsworth Town Hall in London, “When I went to Texas I was called ‘Captain’; when I got to the centre of the country I was addressed as ‘Colonel,’ and, on arriving at the border of Mexico, as ‘General.’”

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Wilde faired little better in Houston, where on June 23 he delivered the same lecture at Gray’s Opera House. According to a reporter for The Dallas Weekly Herald, the audience was “small.” Though he conceded “The subject-matter is good,” Wilde’s “style is exceedingly drawling and affected.” As a result, “He has not caught on here very effectively.”

Wilde’s appearance at the Turner Opera Hall in San Antonio on June 21, according to the June 22 edition of The Evening Light, was met with “a large audience” of San Antonio’s “intelligent and elite” citizens. The editor didn’t mention Wilde’s delivery, again on “Decorative Art,” but on his features and flamboyant dress.

About nine o’clock Mr. Wilde made his appearance upon the platform. His face is distingue [distinguished] in feature, exhibiting decided force of character, combined with a considerable indication of nervous temperament, which is toned and effemmalised [sic] by his long, rough hair, which falls upon his shoulders. He was attired in a black velvet suit, ancient in design and picturesque in appearance; the coat and vest being cut a la courtier. From the vest was suspended the fob ribbon and seal. Instead of trouser he wore breeches gartered at the knee, silk stockings, low shoes and buckles. A plain white lace cravat of rather large dimension, adorned his neck. His appearance resembled much “the fine old English gentleman” of George III, and French courtier of Louise the XVI, such as we see represented upon our well mounted stages.

Wilde stayed in The Menger, one of the most luxurious hotels in Texas in 1882, which suited him just fine. He had famously quipped: “Let me be surrounded by luxury; I can do without the necessities.” While in San Antonio he toured the missions and was moved by “those old Spanish churches with their picturesque remains of tower and dome, and their handsome carved stonework, standing in the verdant and sunshine of the Texas prairie.” He was particularly impressed by Mission San Jose: “the finest example of beautiful architecture I came across in all of America.”

Of the Alamo, which sits next door to the Menger, he was unimpressed. In 1882 the Alamo’s Long Barracks was a general store—later that year, it became the warehouse for Hugo and Schmeltzer. The chapel had been used by the U.S. Army as a depot. When Wilde visited it was rundown, prompting him to comment on how the “noble” structure was in a “monstrous” state. He also believed it was shameful that Texas had allowed this most “sacred of shrines to fall into such Philistine conditions.”

When asked how his San Antonio lecture went, the Picayune reported that he believed the women enjoyed it very much but the men were too distracted to get much out of it. They were “walking in and out with their squeaky boots and clanky spurs,” he said. “The men were going out for beer, you see. Evidently, men in Texas cannot survive more than an hour between beers.”

That was especially true if he expected a Texas man to listen to an Irishman lecture on interior design and wallpaper—then and now.

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John Cooper, Oscar Wilde in America (website).

Roy Morris Jr., Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America (Belknap Press, 2013).

W. F. Strong, Stories from Texas: Some of Them are True, vol. 1 (Berkeley Place Books, 2018).

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.

Before the story of Augustus McCrae, Woodrow F. Call, and the Hat Creek boys became a novel it was a 1972 screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich titled “Streets of Laredo.” The film was never made and the script languished in a Hollywood filing cabinet. McMurtry bought back the rights and turned it into his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove. Though I’ve written about this in “The Blood of Ambivalence,” the tale of how the novel got its moniker is well-known, at least among those who follow such things. It came about because of a serendipitous encounter. As McMurtry tells it, he couldn’t decide on a title until one evening while dining at Ranchman’s steakhouse in Ponder, Texas, he looked out the window and there it was: a bus painted with “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church” along its side.¹

What isn’t generally known, however, even by those who follow such things, is that the original screenplay upon which the novel is based had many titles before the film was abandoned. “The streets of Laredo” is the opening line of “The Cowboy’s Lament,” a bleak ballad about a young puncher shot in the chest on the streets of that South Texas town. He asks his passing compañeros to mourn him dead and bury him with roses.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin;
Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.
Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin;
Throw roses to deaden the clods as they fall.”

Though the screenplay opens in that Texas border town, it has little to do with Laredo. In the words of McMurtry biographer David Streitfeld, “Larry and Peter were . . . trying to evoke the eponymous cowboy ballad.”

Unfortunately, the 1949 movie starring William Holden by the same title was owned by MCA, which refused to release its rights to the title, forcing McMurtry and Bogdanovich to come up with another title. However, nothing else was as good, as the following ideas prove.

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Unable to use “The Streets of Laredo,” McMurtry and Bogdanovich changed the title to “The Brazos,” a river in Texas. If they were going to do that, however, given where the script begins, “The Rio Grande” would have been a better option. They soon scrapped “The Brazos” in favor of the head-scratching title “Angelo,” which fared no better than the river title.

Stymied, McMurtry compiled a list of different ideas in a memo to Bogdanovich, drawing on his knowledge of cowboy ballads and from the themes in the script. McMurtry listed seven potential titles for the film based on cowboy songs:

• “Once in the Saddle.” This is another line from the cowboy ballad “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

• “I’m Bound to Follow the Longhorn Cow. ” This is the title of a trail driving song. It’s an odd suggestion because the screenplay involves horses, not longhorn cattle.

• “My Horses Ain’t Hungry.” This is the opening line of an old Appalachian folk song called “The Wagoner’s Lad.” It’s a better title given the stock the old Texas Rangers steal and herd in the Palo Duro Canyon.

• “Bringing in the Sheaves.” This is the title of a favorite hymn sung by cowboys up and down the trail, based on Psalm 126:6 about those sowing in tears and reaping in joy.

• “They Say There Will Be a Great Roundup.” This is a line in the trail driving tune “The Cowboy’s Dream,” a favorite of Texas evangelist Abe Mulkey, who used it to urge cowboys to come forward during frontier camp meetings.

• “Go Turn My Horses Free.” Like the earlier horse title, this at least relates to the theme of the screenplay. This line comes from “Forty Years a Cowpuncher,” by working cowboy E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott in We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. McMurtry used it as an epigraph for part 3 of Leaving Cheyenne.

• “Take My Saddle from the Wall.” This is a line from another trail driving song: “Good-Bye, Old Paint.” McMurtry used this title for an essay he wrote in 1968. McMurtry said to Bogdanovich: “I’ll give it to you.”

McMurtry listed four thematic titles derived from the script itself:

• “The Old Timers.” Like the novel Lonesome Dove, the screenplay centers around three aging ex-Texas Rangers: Woodrow F. Call, Augustus “Gus” McCrae, and Jake Spoon. McMurtry and Bogdanovich had hoped to secure the talents of aging actors John Wayne (Call), Jimmy Stewart (Gus), and Henry Fonda (Jake).

• “Los Companyeros.” I think McMurtry meant “Compañeros,” Spanish for companions or partners.

• “The Partners.” If Bogdanovich didn’t like the Spanish title, then this simple English one about the three friends and partners in the horse drive might appeal to him.

• “Palo Duro.” This a deep cut canyon in the Texas Panhandle (outside of Amarillo) which serves as a major location in the screenplay.

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McMurtry’s typed memo lists one last title: “I Hate to Leave You, Kate.” Pinpointing the source of this suggestion stumped me, but I believe it comes from the assassination of Jack O’Neil by John Rucker, when over a gambling dispute, Rucker, from hiding, unloaded a double-barreled shotgun into O’Neil as he walked down a Denver street in 1859. O’Neil’s sweetheart was named Kate. As O’Neil lay dying, he called for her and said, “I hate to leave you, Kate, but I reckon I am all in. The cards were cut wrong and I guess it had to be.”²

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¹ In a September 30, 1997, lecture at the University of North Texas, McMurtry claimed he saw the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church bus along side the road while driving through Ponder to Fort Worth.

² Rucker was “tried” in a kangaroo court and acquitted. When the Civil War broke out, he signed on with William Quantrill’s guerrillas, which included the Younger brothers and James brothers, and participated in the bloodletting of the Lawrence (Kanas) Massacre. Rucker was later killed by Tom Anderson, one of his fellow cutthroats.

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Larry McMurtry, “A Preliminary Treatment: or, Materials Toward a Movie,” undated memo provided by David Streitfeld to the author via email, May 30, 2026.

David Streitfeld, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry (Mariner Books, 2026), 232.

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.

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.

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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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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.