Recollections of Early Texas Read online

  RECOLLECTIONS

  of Early Texas

  Personal Narratives of the West Series

  John Holland Jenkins and Mary Jane Foster Jenkins, ca. 1848

  RECOLLECTIONS

  of Early Texas

  The Memoirs of

  JOHN HOLLAND JENKINS

  Edited by

  JOHN HOLMES JENKINS, III

  Foreword by J. FRANK DOBIE

  AUSTIN UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

  ISBN 978-0-292-77037-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-292-74937-5 (library e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-78860-2 (individual e-book)

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-7234

  © 1958 by the University of Texas Press

  Copyright © renewed 1986

  Sixth paperback printing, 2008

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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  TO MOTHER AND DAD

  WHO DID NOT KNOW

  OF MY PREPARING THIS BOOK

  YET WITHOUT WHOSE UNWITTING AID

  IT COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN COMPLETED

  WITH ALL MY LOVE

  Foreword

  John Holland Jenkins was thirteen and a half years old when the Alamo fell in 1836 and he became a soldier of the Texas Republic under General Sam Houston. He and his family had been in Texas about eight years. It was not until 1884, when he was past sixty years old, that he began writing down for publication in the Bastrop Advertiser, the weekly newspaper of his county, the reminiscences that, as now put into book form, light up for whoever will read the earliest days of early English-speaking Texas.

  Jenkins’ memories of what happened in his boyhood world are as specific, though not so elaborately detailed, as the childhood and boyhood recollections of W. H. Hudson, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Serghei Aksakoff, and other singular recorders of the Far Away and Long Ago in their lives; but Jenkins, so far as his recorded reminiscences go, had no childhood or boyhood. If he recollected any gleams of magic before the light of common day faded them out, he failed to transmit even one of them. He revealed not self but the society of cabin-dwellers, Indian fighters, and buffalo hunters that he belonged to. His reminiscences are the stuff of narrative history concerned with the purely physical but not of the novel that would sound deep into the thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences of human beings—whether on a frontier of vast vacancies or in a great city outwardly dominated by masses of people and machines.

  However that may be, it is something extraordinary to have at this late date a contemporary of one and a third centuries ago speak in fresh accents of those forever vanished times. The cedar logs for the Jenkins cabin, built about forty miles down the Colorado River from where Austin was later to be established as the capital of Texas, were “cut with axes and dragged up with horses.” The boards for roof and siding were hand-hewn, from that curious island of pines for which the Bastrop area remains botanically distinguished, and brought by hand and horse to the cabin site and placed without nails. Without mills, the home-raised corn was hand-ground for bread and the high-priced coffee beans were roasted in a pan and then “tied in a piece of buckskin and beaten upon a rock with another rock” to make them release their virtue in boiling water. In the absence of corn, the settlers at times substituted the dried breasts of wild turkeys for bread, eating unsalted venison for meat. There was no money crop and there was virtually no money for these first settlers. A family farm consisted of about ten acres planted by hand in corn, with maybe a dozen rows of cotton, to be cleaned of seeds by hand and home-spun for clothes.

  Eli Whitney’s body had been moldering in the grave only about three years when the Jenkins family set out from Alabama for Texas. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, invented in 1792, was making planters over the South rich and slaves high and was ginning out the Civil War like the loom of destiny, but such outposts of settlers as the Jenkins community had hardly felt the first breath of industrialization before Josiah Wilbarger was scalped, in 1840.

  Texas was still country-living and frontier-minded in 1889, the year that J. W. Wilbarger’s Indian Depredations in Texas was published and became a household book over the land. Wilbarger made use of the materials now gathered into Recollections of Early Texas. He would have been derelict not to have made use of them. The Wilbarger and Jenkins families were old neighbors, friends, and fellow warriors. If Recollections of Early Texas had appeared in book form in the 1880’s it might have raced Indian Depredations in Texas for popularity; the two books are of the same kidney.

  They carry one back to the generations of old-timers who considered themselves as having virtually nothing to say unless they could give a firsthand account of an Indian scrape—or of a few killings, preferably involving John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson, or some other notability among bad men. The bad men came after the Civil War. Not a single white man killing, unless it has escaped me, occurs in these Jenkins reminiscences of bloodshed and also of white-skinned brutality as naked as any red-skinned. There was hardly another area in Texas that during the process of being “redeemed from the wilderness” suffered so long and so often from Indian molestation, unless it was the Sabinal Canyon country, celebrated by A. J. Sowell in his Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas (1900), and the Parker–Palo Pinto counties area west of Fort Worth.

  The man Jenkins made no bones about his preference for Ed Burleson as a leader over Sam Houston. His account of Houston’s cursing him is one of the characteristic outright honesties of the book. The feelings between Houston and Burleson were fierce and deep and they were shared by partisans of both leaders. The historical value and interest of this narrative lies to no small extent in the sidelights it throws not only on personalities but on certain vivid episodes—the Runaway Scrape, the Mier Expedition, the Santa Fe Expedition, Texas Ranger campaigns, etc.

  John Holland Jenkins had little schooling, but a human being’s congenital intelligence, memory, and proclivity for observing are not dependent upon schooling. Frequent quotations from classical writers show that Jenkins had read and remembered. He was aware of style in written histories and defined his own purposes in writing. “Little incidents here and there,” he observed, “these touches of reality, are necessities in historical narration, just as salt, pepper, and sauce are essential to the right flavoring of soup, roast, and vegetables.” Moreover, he felt an inner urge to add to what he entitled “The Treasury of Truth.”

  Of course, every narrator, whether of fiction or fact, whether writer or talker, knows the effect of detail, for good detail never loses freshness or power to illuminate life. One would have to go no further than the details in this book, cumulative in effect, concerning horses to realize that on the frontiers, as the saying went, a man on foot was no man at all, and that a man on a good horse had the advantage over both nature and enemy.

  There was the “Duty Roan,” a horse about which tantalizingly little is told. There was Jonathan Burleson—brother to the great Ed—hemmed up by Indians on a bluff “nearly thirty feet high,” but he was riding a good horse, the horse made the tremendous leap, and horse and rider got to safety without a scratch. On one horse raid, Indians stole General Ed Burleson’s “celebrated” Scurry, a present to him from one Richard Scurry, manifestly an “American” horse in contradistinction to the low-priced mustang breed. Burleson and eight or ten men took the trail of the horse thieves, but when they caught up with them the General was severely handicapped for want of a horse that could run. One of his party named Spauld
ing rode the best horse of the lot and when the chase began, across a prairie, Burleson yelled out, “Twenty-five dollars for Scurry, Spaulding!” A little farther on, in a louder voice, Burleson yelled again, “Fifty dollars for Scurry, Spaulding!” And then, as the chase grew hotter, it was, “One hundred dollars for Surry, Spaulding!” Burleson got Scurry back, but whether Spaulding got the hundred dollars Jenkins does not say.

  How the bodies of slain bee hunters were buried in the hollow stump of a bee tree they had cut down, for the discoverers of the bodies had no way of transporting them to a settlement; how the comrades of another man who died far out dug his grave with the “blade bone” of a buffalo and covered him up; how the prairie bottoms were covered with “wild rye,” while “sage grass” (little and big bluestem) was high enough for Indians to hide in—these and many other details transport us to the times. Jenkins’ prowess as a bee hunter calls up that classic of bee-hunting days, T. B. Tharpe’s The Hive of the Honey-Bee, in which the hero avers that he could course a bee in the air “a mile away easy.” The last sentence in the Jenkins narrative sums up the sympathy for the life with which it is written: “And now, after sixty years of the best hunting, I believe I would ride twenty-five miles [on horseback, of course] to see a fresh bear track.”

  My people never did believe in voting for a Confederate veteran for public office solely because he was one-armed, one-eyed, half-witted, or possessed of some other defect calculated to influence the majority of voters. When I became acquainted with Johnny (John Holmes III) Jenkins (born March 22, 1940), he was just past fifteen and was doing the research and editorial work that now add much to his great-great-grandfather’s Recollections. I do not vote for Johnny Jenkins because he became an editor so young but because he has edited so ably. Many a Ph.D. thesis shows less scholarship and less intelligence than Johnny’s editorial work and is not nearly so interesting. Some of his notes are for students; some will add to the comprehension of readers in general.

  The biographical dictionary at the end of the book is an achievement in usefulness and handiness that might well be adopted by editors of various historical narratives. Like his ancestor, Johnny Jenkins seems to consider it his duty to put down the truth whether it is complimentary or not. As he searches on into the ever-receding Beyond, he will learn that in the realm of thought—perhaps the highest, though not necessarily the most delightful, realm that a historian enters—a great many conclusions based on irrefutable evidence are not patriotic according to politician standards and are not complimentary at all to what Mark Twain dubbed “the damned human race.”

  J. FRANK DOBIE

  Preface

  In March of 1836 Texas was in an uproar. Independence from Mexico had been declared, one Mexican Army had already been driven from Texas, and preparations were being made for the full-scale war which was undoubtedly soon to come, for an army of six thousand regular Mexican soldiers under Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had captured San Antonio, and laid siege to the little mission San Antonio de Padua, commonly known as the Alamo. Inside were 187 valiant Texans, under Colonel William B. Travis.

  At the town of Gonzales, a few miles away, men from all over the state were banding together to form an army which would attempt to defeat the Republic of Mexico and the self-styled “Napoleon of the West.” Among the recruits from the little village of Bastrop was a boy named John Holland Jenkins. Although only thirteen years old, he was remarkably tall and stout and could easily pass for a man. The outcome of the siege at the Alamo had particular importance for him—his stepfather was one of the Texans in Colonel Travis’ band. On March 7 tidings came that the Alamo had fallen; every one of the Texans had been killed by the Mexicans. The cries of anguish from the wives and children of the thirty-two men from Gonzales who had been killed left a deep and lasting impression on the youthful mind of John Jenkins.

  In a few days the Commander-in-Chief, Sam Houston, arrived, organized the army, and began the retreat which ended with the Battle of San Jacinto and victory for the Republic of Texas. Jenkins did not participate in the battle, however, because he had been detailed by Colonel Burleson to return home and move his now twice-widowed mother and his brothers and sister to safety. Thus at the age of thirteen John Jenkins became the man of the family, but he was equal to the job.

  After the Texas victory and capture of Santa Anna, Jenkins took his mother and family back to their home in Bastrop County, and successfully protected them through all the hardships and dangers of pioneer life. Bastrop then was actually beyond the frontier. There was as much danger of Indian attack from the east as from the west—and the little settlement received far more than its share of raids and thefts from the hostiles.

  The story of those Indian depredations and the Mexican invasions is recounted in this book. After Texas became a thriving and populated state of the Union, and Jenkins had retired with his wife to a quiet life on his farm, he was requested by his children and neighbors to set down his recollections of early Texas. He began by writing, with the help of his daughter-in-law, a series of articles made up of his own personal reminiscences of life in pioneer Texas. These were published in the Bastrop Advertiser during 1884 and 1885. He then began to collect the reminiscences of other old Texans—Captain Rufus Perry, John Morgan, Captain Dan Grady, Captain Claudius Buster, William Clopton, Captain Samuel Highsmith, Judge N. W. Eastland, and many others. Most of these were published by the Advertiser at various times between 1884 and 1889. Jenkins’ death on November 30, 1890, ended his research, but he had already contributed much toward the preservation of historical data of colonial Texas.

  John Holland Jenkins was born on September 16, 1822, near Demopolis, Marengo County, Alabama. At the age of six or seven he moved with his parents, Edward and Sarah (Parrent) Jenkins, to Texas as members of Stephen F. Austin’s Third, or Little, Colony. The family first lived with the William Bartons on Barton Creek, near Rosanky, while Edward Jenkins and Thomas H. Mays were surveying a league of land for the Jenkinses, which was granted to each emigrant family. In the spring of 1830 they began their new life on their league, which lay on the west bank of the Colorado River, about thirty-five miles below Austin.

  Indian depredations were constant, and young John frequently saw the savages skulking about. Occasionally a band of Indians claiming to be friendly would appear to trade with the colonists, but more often than not it would be found the next day that some livestock or other property was missing. Then, in 1833, while working out in a field, Edward Jenkins was murdered, supposedly by marauding Indians, although no conclusive proof was ever found. This left the widowed mother, who was four months’ pregnant, with three defenseless children. She was forced to move into the town of Bastrop with friends and sell half of her husband’s land.

  Bastrop then was a thriving settlement. It was one of the largest towns in Texas, for at that time Houston, Austin, and Dallas had not even been laid out. Located where the Old San Antonio Road crossed the Colorado River, it was in one of the most fertile and beautiful areas in Texas. Stephen F. Austin, speaking of the Bastrop area, recorded in his journal:

  Tuesday, August 7 (1821). Came to the Colorado River—poor, gravelly ridges and near the river heavy pine timber, grapes in immense quantities on low vines, red, large, and well flavored, good for Red wine. The Colorado River is sometimes less than the Brazos, banks very high—generally clear of overflow—bottom and banks gravelly, water very clear and well tasted, current brisk, the river very much resembles Cumberland River, except that there are no rocks and it is some larger.

  The bottom where the road crosses is about five miles, mostly high prairie, clear of overflow, land rich, timber Pecan, Ash, Oak, Cedar, abundance of fish.*1

  The town of Bastrop was established about 1829, when Martin Wells settled there with his sons, and grew steadily until 1839, when Austin was laid out and made capital of the Republic. From that time on, progress in Bastrop was small.

  In 1835 Mrs. Jenkins remarried—to James Northcross, a
Methodist minister from Virginia. They had one son.

  After Northcross’ death in the Alamo, John Jenkins took his mother and the rest of the family back to their half-league of land across the river from Bastrop, where he cared for his mother until her death in 1840, and raised his younger brothers and sister. On October 29, 1845, he married Mary Jane Foster, daughter of another old pioneer family. They had six sons and one daughter.

  Much of the material in the Jenkins reminiscences has appeared in other works, usually without acknowledgment, but the memoirs themselves present such an interesting and enlightening view on pioneer life in early Texas that publication in full is long overdue.

  The book has its shortcomings. The original reminiscences are rough and loosely connected, words and names are frequently misspelled, and there are some confusing grammatical errors. It seemed desirable, however, to preserve the original flavor of the narrative; hence revision has consisted mainly in correcting spelling and grammar and rearranging the articles for the sake of continuity. Critical and explanatory notes have been added.

  Noah Smithwick was used as much as possible for comparison of accounts, rather than John Henry Brown, Frank Brown, James DeShields, or J. W. Wilbarger. Smithwick moved to California in 1861 and lived there the rest of his life. Hence there is little chance of his narrative having been influenced by Jenkins, who was first to attempt to assemble a history of the Indian hostilities in Texas. The two Browns, DeShields, and Wilbarger, however, used Jenkins’ reminiscences freely and many of their narratives are exact repetitions of the Jenkins accounts. Wilbarger, particularly, quotes Jenkins word-for-word without acknowledgment.

  It is hoped that the succeeding pages will not only be of value to the historian as a reference but will also prove as entertaining and as exciting to those who are interested in understanding and reliving the lives of their forefathers as it has to this young Texan.