Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy - Softcover

Taylor, Lonn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0875654347 ISBN 13: 9780875654348

Verlag: Texas Christian University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In a collection of essays about Texas gathered from his West Texas newspaper column, Lonn Taylor traverses the very best of Texas geography, Texas history, and Texas personalities. In a state so famous for its pride, Taylor manages to write a very honest, witty, and wise book about Texas past and Texas present. Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy is a story of legacies, of men and women, times, and places that have made this state what it is today.  From a history of Taylor’s hometown, Fort Davis, to stories about the first man wounded in the Texas Revolution, (who was an African American), to accounts of outlaw Sam Bass and an explanation of Hill Country Christmases, Taylor has searched every corner of the state for untold histories.Taylor’s background as a former curator at the Smithsonian National Museum becomes apparent in his attention to detail:  Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, artists, architects, criminals, the founder of Neiman Marcus, and the famous horned frog “Old Rip” all make appearances as quintessential Texans.  

Lonn Taylor’s unique narrative voice is personal.  As he points out in the foreword, it is the stories of Texans themselves, of their grit and eccentricities, that have “brought the past into the present . . . the two seem to me to be bound together by stories.” People—real Texans—are the focus of the essays, making Texas, My Texas a rite of passage for anyone who claims Texan heritage. There are just a few things every good Texan “knows,” like the fact that it is illegal to pick bluebonnets along the highway, or that the Menger Hotel bar is modeled after the one in the House of Lords in London. Taylor points out with his usual wit that it is not, in fact, illegal to pick any of the six varieties of bluebonnets that grow throughout our state, and that few Texans would know that the bar is modeled after the one in the House of Lords, as few Texans are Lords. These are just a few examples of Taylor’s knowledge of Texas and his passion for its citizens.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LONN TAYLOR is a Texas native who has had a distinguished career as an author, columnist, and museum curator.  Taylor’s books include Texas Furniture: The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840-1880 (with David Warren, University of Texas Press, 1975); The American Cowboy (with Ingrid Marr, Library of Congress, 1983); New Mexican Furniture, 1600-1940 (with Dessa Bokides, Museum of New Mexico Press, 1987); The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag That Inspired the National Anthem (Harry N. Abrams, 2000), and The Star-Spangled Banner: The Making of a National Icon (with Kathlenn Kendrick and Jeffrey Brodie, Smithsonian Books, 2008). He writes a weekly column about Texas called “The Rambling Boy,” for the Big Bend Sentinel.  Taylor has retired to Fort Davis, Texas, with his wife Dedie. 

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Texas, My Texas

Musings of the Rambling Boy

By Lonn Taylor, Barbara Mathews Whitehead

TCU Press

Copyright © 2012 Lonn Taylor
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87565-434-8

Contents

Foreword, by Bryan Woolley, 
Introduction, 
I. TEXAS PAST, 
1. Fort Davis: Plaza or Square?, 
2. Los Ciboleros in the Panhandle, 
3. The Paynes, Black Seminole Cowboys, 
4. "An Unfortunate Admixture of African Blood", 
5. Heat, Dust, and Boredom, 
6. The Epic of Henry O. Flipper, 
7. Charlie Siringo and the Pinkertons, 
8. Noah Smithwick, Blacksmith and Memoirist, 
9. Teddy Roosevelt in Texas, 
10. The Liar's Skill, 
11. Sam Bass Was Born in Indiana, 
12. Muy Grande Rifles, 
13. The Texas Signers, 
14. The Villain of San Jacinto, 
15. Ferdinand Lindheimer, Frontier Journalist, 
16. Real Cowboys Don't Have Time to Sing, 
17. Roy W. Aldrich, the Erudite Ranger, 
18. Wigfall Van Sickle, the Sage of Alpine, 
19. The Mexican Revolution in Texas, 
20. How Leighton Knipe Left His Mark on Marfa, 
21. The Dead Man's Springs, 
22. Jack Hoxie and Hollywood in Fort Davis, 
23. Stanley Marcus, Civilized Texan, 
II . TEXAS FAMILY, 
24. Family Sagas, 
25. My Grandmother Taylor, 
26. Uncle Will, 
27. Aunt Bessie, 
28. My Dead Grandfather, 
III. TEXAS PRESENT, 
29. Fort Worth Bars, 
30. Beatniks on Camp Bowie Boulevard, 
31. Willow Way, 
32. Joe Frantz, Raconteur, 
33. The San Antonio River Walk, 
34. Texas-German Christmases, 
35. Bill Dodson, Candelillero, 
36. Luis Jiménez, Artist in Fiberglass, 
37. Desert Rain, 
38. Forty-Two, 
39. King William Street, 
40. Tigie Lancaster's Mules, 
41. The Seven Timmermann Sisters, 
42. Czechs and Polkas, 
43. Fayette County Fourth of July, 
44. Billy D. Peiser, El Indio, 
45. The Paisano, 
46. Rube Evans and Polo, 
47. Bear Cages and Santafees, 
48. Two Jumps and Old Folks, 
49. Horny Toads, 
50. They Didn't Take Paper Money During the Revolution, 
51. "Texas, Our Texas" and Other State Symbols, 
52. Too Many Bluebonnets, 
53. Our Town, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

FORT DAVIS: PLAZA OR SQUARE?

EVEN THOUGH it has a population of only 1,160 people, Fort Davis can be a difficult town for strangers to find their way around in. This was brought home to me one day when a houseguest managed to get lost walking from our house to the courthouse, which is only four blocks away and whose clock tower is clearly visible from our back porch. The problem, as our embarrassed guest explained, is that several of our downtown streets intersect each other at forty-five degree angles, and a careless turn can put a pedestrian several blocks off course. These angles result from the fact that Fort Davis was originally laid out on two separate but adjoining grids. Those grids open a window into the two cultures that shaped our town's and the Big Bend's history.

The two grids are the result of competition between Fort Davis's two leading businessmen in the years just after the Civil War, but they also reflect two competing ideas about urban landscape, one Catholic and Hispanic and one Protestant and Anglo-American.

Daniel Murphy was an Irishman, born in County Cork, who immigrated to the United States in his teens, served in the army during the Mexican War, and ended up in San Antonio, where in 1852 he married Susan Hennesy, a native of County Antrim in Ireland. When the young couple arrived in Fort Davis in 1855, there was nothing here but the fort, which had been established the year before, and the San Antonio-El Paso road, which the fort was built to protect. Murphy took up land across the road from the fort, where the Dirks-Anderson Elementary School is now, and built an adobe hotel, saloon, and mercantile store. His customers were travelers on the El Paso road and soldiers at the fort. He prospered, and by 1860, at the age of thirty, he was the second-wealthiest man in Fort Davis, with real and personal property valued at $11,500.

The Murphys retreated to San Antonio during the Civil War, and Susan Murphy died there, leaving a son and five young daughters. Daniel Murphy married Susan's widowed sister, acquiring five more children, including four stepdaughters. The combined families returned to Fort Davis in 1868 and Murphy reopened his businesses. The Murphy home became the social center of the fort and four of the Murphy daughters married army officers.

The Murphys were devout Catholics, and in the 1870s, as the town of Fort Davis started to grow, Daniel Murphy donated the land due east of his home and store for a Catholic church and school. At about the same time he laid out a residential subdivision stretching five blocks southwest from his store, with the main street, now Davis Street, paralleling the El Paso road. He must have envisioned Fort Davis developing as a typical Hispanic town, like San Antonio or Presidio del Norte or the towns he had seen in Mexico, with the Catholic Church and the principal businesses fronting on a plaza. When that happened, Murphy's store and saloon would be on the plaza, across from the church, and the lots that he had laid out would increase in value due to their proximity to the plaza.

But things did not work out that way. Murphy's business rival in Fort Davis was Whitaker Keesey, a Yankee from Ohio who came to Fort Davis after the Civil War as a civilian employee of the army. Keesey also realized that the town was growing, and in 1874 he and his bother Otis homesteaded an eighty-acre tract of land a mile south of the fort, more or less in the middle of nowhere, and built a store on it. A year later the Texas legislature created Presidio County, which included Fort Davis, and Keesey immediately donated the block of land due west of his store for the county courthouse. Keesey knew that in Ohio courthouse squares, not churches, were the centers of towns, and he gambled that Fort Davis would develop in the same way, although he hedged his bet by donating another lot just south of the courthouse to the Methodist Church. Keesey's gamble paid off and he became an extremely wealthy man. His store prospered and became the largest mercantile enterprise between San Antonio and El Paso. He expanded the building several times after the courthouse was built across the street, and today the large rock structure he built in 1906 serves as the Jeff Davis County Public Library. You can still see his name, W. Keesey, carved in stone over the front door.

Whitaker Keesey had a friend, William Lempert, who came to Fort Davis at about the same time as Keesey and worked as a civilian clerk at the fort. Lempert was the stepson of an Eighth Infantry officer who had been stationed at the fort in the 1850s and he knew a good thing when he saw one. He acquired 160 acres adjoining Keesey's land north of the courthouse by the simple expedient of marrying Paula Ponce de Leon Robinson, the widow of the original grantee, in 1874. He built the Lempert Hotel, now the Veranda Bed and Breakfast, on his land in 1883 to accommodate citizens attending court, and then laid out a subdivision north and west of the hotel, now called the Home Addition. The Home Addition's main streets ran due north and south, parallel to the lines of Lempert's and Keesey's land grants. They intersected those of the Murphy Addition at forty-five degree angles, producing the confusion that caused our houseguest to get lost a hundred and twenty...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Texas Christian University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0875654347
• ISBN 13: 9780875654348
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 199
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland