Letters, memoirs and memories weave frontier tale of wilderness, war and Texas
Pioneers arrive as statehood sparks war with Mexico
By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher
Rosemary Meeks and her college roommate were skinny dipping in a West Texas windmill's tank when the cowboy came over the hill, trailing cattle.
That was a sunny day from a summer break after the school year ended in Loving County, population 115 at the time, the least populated county in America.
Non-native Texans make note, Loving County is today in that part of America wrestled from Mexico by Zachary Taylor.
The summer the troops en route to that war passed by, Rosemary's family lived on Horse Creek, north of Cookville.
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Rosemary's great grandfather, John King, wrote about it in his memoirs. He wasn't but 3, but he remembered that his father knew a lot of the soldiers in the Kentucky and Tennessee regiments who'd marched down the ancient trace across Sulphur and White Oak. It was the road in front of the house Carter King built.
Carter knew the soldiers because he was a soldier, a veteran of the Creek and Seminole Wars. He came here from Tennessee, in the first wave of settlers after Texas statehood.
Rosemary was about half raised by Carter's great granddaughter, Mary.
Rosemary's mother married a Dutchman, Dirk Johan Peter Nicholaas Gaymans.
Dirk for short.
South Africa was a Dutch colony and Dirk had gone there, putting land in cultivation.
A man of means, he traveled.
He came into the states by way of Canada, then down through California. It was 1936, the year Texans celebrated the 100th anniversary of Sam Houston whipping Santa Anna at San Jacinto.
It was a big deal, and Dirk came to look.
He went to the official celebration in Dallas where he met Elizabeth King, Rosemary's mom.
They married.
A mathematician, Dirk found work keeping drilling logs in oilfields. By the time Rosemary came along, Dirk and Elizabeth were oil-patch gypsies, following work through Texas and Oklahoma.
By Christmas of her first grade year, Rosemary had attended five schools.
Enough, the family said, and secured Rosemary with her grandparents in Greenville, Mary and Kyle Cross.
It was 1944, and for a year Rosemary was spoiled by a doting grandfather.
"He'd get up in the morning and warm a quilt in front of the cook stove, then come in and wake me up," Rosemary said. Wrapped and hugged into a warm, loose blanket, Rosemary began her day in the kitchen with the old man, being spoon-fed coffee laced with sugar and cream.
Going with him to the "mule barn" made an impression. There was a trolley in Greenville then, and they rode it.
When they weren't at the mule barn or the vet's office, "I got in the way while he was working on pens in the back yard," Rosemary said.
When it rained, Kyle did work in a tack room in the barn.
Then he died.
Until she was 12, Rosemary lived with "Miss Mary."
As a girl in Mt. Vernon, Mary King was a "book worm, well read and cultured," wrote Xylander Carson.
Xylander was a teacher in Franklin County at the turn of the century. The letter he wrote came in 1944 and was addressed to Miss Mary's sister, Birdie, then living in Cumby.
Like Rosemary, the family moved around over the years.
"I called on your sister at your home, and often met your father and brothers on the streets of old Mt. Vernon," Xylander said, "when the courthouse stood in the middle of the square, fenced with a log chain used as a hitching post."
The letter came from Dallas, and Rosemary has a copy.
Xylander said illness had confined him to his room for four months, mentioned that he had finished the chapter about Mt. Vernon in his auto biography.
Rosemary has links to a lot of people who liked to write. Ben K. Green - make that Ben King Green, an author noted for his humor in anecdotal accounts of horse and buggy days in East Texas, is a cousin, another product of that early East Texas gene pool.
Xylander graciously lamented that Miss Mary "fell in love with and married the other fellow," but said his life had been good. Though "doomed to poverty" as a teacher, he'd married a woman of "courage, spunk and energy," a good mother to his six children.
She died.
Widower Xylander said he hoped to visit Mt. Vernon in the spring, that he would stop to call on Rosemary's Aunt Birdie in Cumby, if he was up to the trip.
"However, my feeling at this time," he said, "is that I have not much more time allotted me here . . ."
After her grandfather died, Rosemary lived with the widowed "Miss Mary," coming of age on a diet of Dickens, spiked with stories about her great grandfather, John.
The King family lived in Titus County when it was wilderness, years John King wrote about in his memoirs in 1906.
A one-armed veteran of the Civil War, he was a man of strong convictions.
He said, for example, that automobiles should be banned from public roads.
Miss Mary said he had asthma, and had to sleep sitting up, and that he loved quoting poetry. Mary learned the poetry he knew, Rosemary got her start with Mary.
Rosemary can drive a school bus, too.
Elizabeth and Dirk divorced. Rosemary and Elizabeth moved west. They went to Grassbur, 18 miles northeast of Post, a town beneath the breaks of the Cap Rock.
Later, Rosemary got work as one of three teachers at the school in Loving County.
She lived on a ranch, 154 sections, sprawling land. Empty country, a ranch so big that fencing crews stayed out for a week at a time.
It was a hot day. Rosemary's college room mate came calling. Free spirits liberated by the desolate beauty of a sun-split spring day, there they were, swimming in the stock tank.
It was a good place to cool down, to drink sun, to listen to the windmill turn in the silence, to catch up.
The three teachers at Rosemary's school taught the lower grades. The bus gathered students from across Loving County. The older kids were bused another 40 miles over to more cosmopolitan Wink.
Rosemary got her bus driving job by default - neither of the other two teachers wanted to start the working day at 4 a.m. and get back home after dark.
The next year, she got the principal's job the same way.
As school commander, she made better working conditions for the bus driver her agenda.
She was just at that point in her story when she noticed a hint of dust on the far horizon. Rosemary stood up, shading her eyes, watched the hint of dust thicken. Looked like it might be moving.
Rosemary got dressed. Demurely as any southern belle, to preserve dignity, Rosemary declined giving up the name of the old room mate, who responded to the dust alert too slowly.
"That cowboy," Rosemary said, "got an eye full."
PART II Thirty years have passed since Rosemary Meeks came to visit a Titus County cousin, or at least a cousin who briefly lived in Titus County.
Referring to Rosemary's sheaves of family papers, letters and memoirs, the cousins went searching north of Cookville, looking for any home fitting the description of the one room cabin where Carter Beverly King came with a wife and their first three children, born back in Tennessee. Their next eight children were native Texans.
The cousins searched for the house described in the memoirs of John Henry King, named for an uncle named John Henry King who served as a Titus County Clerk. That John Henry King was removed from office by Union forces when they occupied Mt. Pleasant following the Civil War.
That John Henry King was a brother to Carter. When he came to Texas, he brought along their father, another John King, born in 1774 "to Harry King, an Englishman, whose wife was Betty Brown, an Irish woman. Harry King fought in the Revolutionary War, from beginning to end," wrote Carter King's son, John in his memoirs.
Two weeks after his wife died, John King the memoir writer went back to his law office in Cumby and began writing tales of death, disease and wars mixed among the recollections of seasons, the success and failures of crops, the price of cotton, the day the Indians set fire to his childhood world at Horse Creek.
The family came west from Tennessee, descending the Mississippi on a river boat, then chugging up the Red River to the mouth of Caddo Lake, crossing that wilderness swamp, following the channel of Big Cypress to the Port of Jefferson. They hired a teamster, came overland by wagon through Daingerfield, then eight miles further north to Horse Creek.
It was 1846.
Carter King homesteaded 320 acres in the new state of Texas.
The year before, Texas had become the only independent nation to join the Union by treaty. Ten years earlier, Carter King fought alongside Sam Houston, Davy Crockett and Kendall Lewis in the Creek and Seminole Indian Wars.
Kendall Lewis had come to Texas too, living among the Caddo on Swanno Creek, his place of residence during his tenure as the Texas Republic's Ambassador to the Indian Nations, wrote historian Traylor Russell. By the time Carter King arrived, former president, and new Texas Governor Sam Houston was presiding over the state's first legislative session.
Sixty years had passed. Like the season in which he began writing, John King was in the winter of his life. His loss of an arm in the Civil War merited one line in the story he took two months writing. He fought in the battles along the banks of the Mississippi, upstream of Vicksburg, where Union forces laid siege.
It was a desperate campaign for the Confederates, infantry along the shore trying to stop the advance of Northern gunboats.
He wrote of the aftermath of a battle in which 25 of the 45 men in his company were killed or wounded, charging through volleys of fire between breastworks along the shore, trying to overrun Union artillery. He wrote of burial detail, gathering the dead in groups of 12, arranging bodies along the line of a trench, feet together.
"We threw dirt over them with no coffin, no shroud, no markers," he said. "Finishing our grim task, the following day we were ordered over the same ground to bury the federals."
There's a long account of war in winter, cold and raining, and days melting together with soldiers "lying flat as fox squirrels on the ground for we were being shelled by three batteries."
There was a teacher from Daingerfield, Brice Willis, "the son of a widow, a native of Georgia, having arrived in Texas just before the war.
"A fine officer, an elegant gentleman, as brave a man as ever wore the gray, he was shot dead by my side the third day of December, where we fought among dead horses and men, broken down wagons and artillery, water and mud . . .
"I sent his sword to his mother and sister. No better man sleeps beneath the sod on that field where I buried him."
There's a brief, stark account of a demented soldier, a memory of being ordered out on patrol, forming a "picket" to advance under cover of night.
"I was sick of fighting, and as soon as I took my post in the line I sat down behind a little cedar and slept in the mud, awakening about 1 a.m. to find my comrades had retreated."
In the hours that followed, he worked his way back to where his lines had been, discovering himself still alone, abandoned, assumed to be a prisoner until he found his outfit the following day.
Winter turned to spring, melted into summer, battle after battle. Vicksburg fell that July.
"I was wounded on the morning of the 19th, losing my arm to a cannon shot and here my military service ends," he said. He was captured, and two weeks later released "without my parole of prisons, surgeons or nurse, given two weeks rations." He made his way back to a Confederate hospital and three months later, returned to Texas, arriving in Mt. Pleasant in October, 1863.
The doom of the Confederacy hung in the air.
"We could buy nothing with Confederate money. Cotton was being shipped to Brownsville and sold in Mexico. Cash came in Spanish and Mexican currency, trade was in silver and goods."
In Louisiana, Union forces gathered for an invasion of Texas.
Still, a year passed peacefully, defeated armies and wounded soldiers drifting home.
Through the winter of 1864-65, "all in Titus County was peace and goodwill among neighbors. Now and then there would be a whisky fight, but there was no quarreling."
Little changed, even with the formal surrender of the South.
"All went well until 1867 when Governor Throckmorten and all state officers elected in June, 1866 were turned out of office and 200 Union Soldiers arrived in Mt. Pleasant, enforcing re-construction orders, "executing laws allowing the imprisonment of whites on the complaints of negroes."
Economically, things got worse with an invasion of "leaf worms" that destroyed the cotton crop in 1867.
Confederate veterans became second class citizens; local elections held in December, 1869 were a "farce," with local offices filled by "scallywags and carpetbaggers, radicals taking office." To support occupying forces, property taxes were quadrupled, reaching $2.30 per $100 evaluation.
John King moved his family into what's now Franklin County. Then he moved to Cumby.
All those years later as he wrote, he recalled 88 names of the men from Titus County with whom he went off to war.
"There were 110 of us in that first muster," he said, "so I have forgotten 22."
The new soldiers reported to camps, first in Texas, then in Little Rock, and before they ever got into battle, hundreds died of disease.
"One of the Titus County boys drowned as we were crossing the Red River," he said.
The troops built a railroad, 65 miles from Little Rock north to the White River.
In March, they moved to Corinth, in April they engaged the enemy at Shiloh, on the west bank of the Tennessee River, in Hardin County.
It was the first major battle in the "West," involving 65,000 Union and 44,000 Confederate troops. Some 24,000 were killed or wounded. The battle became a decisive victory for the federal forces when they advanced to seize the railway at Corinth.
"The rest," said John King, "is history."
Listen:
He wrote as well of the imprint of the world made so long ago, seen through the eyes of a 3-year-old. It was April in East Texas.
"The face of nature was a poem, high green grass, flowers in profusion," he wrote. "There is nothing on earth like it now."
He remembered the federal troops passing along the wilderness route past Horse Creek that summer in 1846, when Texas joined the Union touching off the new war with Mexico.
But that war was far away.
The first state legislature was in session and Andrew Titus was the delegate from Red River County. When he wrote legislation creating Titus County, "he named it for himself," Mr. King wrote.
Within a year, General Zachary Taylor had defeated Santa Anna, driving the Mexican general far to the south, then returning to the Union as a war hero.
"Though I was too young then to understand such things, General Taylor ran for President as a Whig. A war hero and slave holder, he drew both the Southern and the soldier vote," he wrote, then indulged himself in recollections.
"Pardon me for giving a faint description of our home in the wildwood. It was a neat little cabin, one room and a loft of plank, shedded on both sides. There was our smoke house, the beginnings of a small peach orchard, a crib and a stable. Thirty yards distant, we walled in the spring. Green cane linked the creek bottom with the foot hills. Horse Creek was deep, its water blue and clear, full of fish with mussels buried by the hundreds along its sandy shoals."
In November of the Keith family's second year, "Indians passed our house and set grass afire all over the country. The next day, the families forted up and the men went after the Indians. When my father and the others overtook them, the Old Chief refused to talk until our men prepared to fire on them. Then he said that they had a permit to hunt, that they were friendly, that they were setting fires only to drive deer into the open . . . they were told to get out and stay out of the white settlements, and they did. Afterwards, we might find an old wigwam, a few moccasins, but never again any Indians."
In 1850, they built a new home on a bluff over the creek.
In June, 1854 there was an eclipse of the sun, "and then no rain until November, and just a few drops then. Fires got out in the fall along roads from camps in the woods. All the range burned, the creeks dried up and cattle starved for lack of water.
"Navigation ceased at our market at Jefferson in the fall. By spring, the Red River had dropped so that shipping ceased at Shreve's Port. As summer drew near, the East Texans went overland in ox wagons, 350 miles to Gaines Landing on the Mississippi, where profiteering drove salt to $12 a sack.
His father began hunting as a way to make money, averaging killing three deer a day, selling hams for $1.50 and hides for 25 cents.
But there was good rain that summer, and wheat in the burned-over fields along Horse Creek made 25 bushels an acre.
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The winter he was 12 snow stayed on the ground a month, "the longest cold spell since we had come to Texas."
He was 16 in October, 1859, when the slavery issue driving a wedge through the nation erupted in violence at Harper's Ferry.
He was 17 when Abe Lincoln's election triggered secession. The Titus County company marched to Clarksville, gathering with three regiments of cavalry.
The town fathers organized a parade. Down by the livery, they fired the town cannon, accidentally killing a horse and wounding a man.
Thus was his view of the war already off to a poor start when a soldier kicked over a loaded musket which discharged, killing a man in his sleep during their first week in camp.
Among Rosemary's copies of letters and memoirs, in an old envelope of pictures is a portrait of a young John King, a man with fierce eyes, turned in such a way as to make his empty right sleeve less obvious.
He married Mattie Ward, the Titus County girl whose death those years later triggered the spill of all these memories, thoughts forced into some sort of organization as he began writing for Rosemary, the great grand daughter he'd never know.