Texana Ranger
We let Jesse Sublett loose—he brought back these reports.
(Page 7 of 7)
Booking Down the Road
Thoughts on the recent Texas Book Festival.
Rolling north on I-35 in my Karmann Ghia convertible, it’s a beautiful autumn day. Leaves are falling, the Cowboys are losing, and the stretch of freeway between San Antonio and Austin, normally the most congested portion of the route between Mexico and Kansas, is actually moving along quite nicely.
I was coming home from the San Antonio Book and Authors Luncheon, where North Carolina novelist Clyde Edgerton delivered a spellbinding reading from his latest, Where Danger Sleeps. Clyde’s honeyed drawl was still ringing in my ears when I pulled into Austin. Traffic on I-35 slowed to a crawl after Onion Creek, and being reminded of the fact that this is the same route traveled by millions of longhorns during the heyday of the Chisholm Trail, I was tempted to moo instead of honking my horn.
Coincidentally, the bottleneck was thickened by herds of book lovers hoofing it to the Capitol extension to see and hear and schmooze with more than 100 Texas authors at the Texas Book Festival. My four-year-old son Dashiell and I joined the throngs to attend readings by several featured authors. Although we enjoyed Dallas novelist Doug Swanson’s (Big Town) reading, Dashiell felt that his delivery was a bit rushed: "I think he was in a hurry," he said. "I think he had to go somewhere after he read. Maybe it was an emergency." Children’s author Angela Shelf Meaderis didn’t disappoint, she held a tent-full of adults and children in the palm of her hand. We left her reading with lighter spirits and a much heavier book bag. In the hallway we ran into my friend, Mitch Lobrovitch, who writes for Barney, and later, we shook paws with Clifford the Big Red Dog. We also chatted with Gary Lavergne, whose excellent biography of rabid rifleman Charles Whitman, Sniper in the Tower, was published this year by University of North Texas Press.
Back on I-35 again, as we merged with the cattle trucks and Ford Explorers, the trail drives came back to me. The romantic era of the cowboys and Indians and buffalo is still with us, at least in spirit and legend. Modern Texas, and America as well, may be a nation on wheels, but we’re still intoxicated by the smell of trail dust and saddle leather. It’s a theme that’s woven through many of the books I’ve picked up on my book-trailing weekend: Through the Shadows with O. Henry, by bank robber Al Jennings, The Longhorns, by J. Frank Dobie, North to Yesterday, by Robert Flynn, and Blessed McGill, by Bud Shrake. I find the same theme in rock ‘n roll songs like "Route 66," the saga of Lewis and Clark, Charlie Siringo’s fabulous trail-driving memoir, A Texas Cowboy, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and the works of Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Willie Nelson, Wallace Stegner, Cabeza de Vaca, and countless others.
Travel means adventure and discovery which equals self-discovery. That’s the theme. I don’t need a new age guru to tell me that the journey is the destination. I used to be in a rock ‘n roll band, and I’ve seen the USA in a Chevrolet (van), and I know that one of the greatest discoveries you can make on the road is the face staring back at you in the rear view mirror. I like to think of Lewis and Clark as a struggling rock ‘n roll band on a high mileage, low budget tour.
Dashiell’s favorite score of the weekend was a new Curious George book. In this one, as in all the others, the Man in the Yellow Hat admonishes George to be a good little monkey and not get into trouble while he’s gone. But as soon as the Man leaves, George goes on one of his wild adventures and gets into lots of trouble. I think there’s a little bit of Curious George in every Texan.
Interested in the books mentioned here? Click on the links below to purchase them from Amazon.com.
Big Town
by Doug Swanson
Sniper in the Tower
by Gary Lavergne
Longhorns
by J. Frank Dobie
North to Yesterday
by Robert Flynn
Blessed McGil
by Bud Shrake
A Texas Cowboy
by Charles Siringo
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
A Capitol standoff
The Coke-Davis Dispute of 1874.
It was a classic Texas standoff: Tempers flaring, both parties heavily armed, a bloodbath feared, a President painfully aware that sending in federal troops would only make matters worse, and two opposing entities who claimed to be the only legitimate government of the state. But since it occurred 123 years before Fort Davis and only 38 years after the Alamo, CNN wasn’t there to cover what became known as the Coke-Davis Dispute of 1874.
On the evening of Monday, January 12, 1874, when the new and overwhelmingly Democratic-controlled Texas legislature moved into the Capitol to inaugurate Richard Coke as governor, there was just one problem: Governor Edmund Jackson Davis was still in the building. Protected by state troops on the first floor, Davis not only refused to step down, but refused to recognize either the governor-elect or the new legislature, which had dug in on the upper level with their own militia.
Elected governor by a narrow margin in 1869, Davis already knew what it was like to have a “kick me” sign on his back. If it wasn’t enough that his radical wing of the Republican Party pushed the implementation of many progressive Reconstruction programs including school integration and the extension of the basic rights of citizens to blacks, his unpopularity was solidified by his commanding of a cavalry regiment during the Civil War—for the Union army. During his term, Davis also established the State Police, whose ranks included a good number of African-Americans (as well as whites and Hispanics), and many white Texans who blanched at the prospect of black Texans enjoying the right to vote positively saw red at the idea of a former slave carrying a gun and a badge. Davis also irked many ex-Confederates when he took out a notice in an Austin paper in 1871 urging people to buy pies from Mrs. Brown, an African-American, instead of those sold by Mrs. Warren, who’d lost two sons in the rebel army.
So no one was surprised when Confederate hero, Richard Coke, stomped Davis by a margin of 2 to 1 in the 1873 election. But because of certain technical irregularities in the election and, believe it or not, a missing semi-colon in the State constitution, the State Supreme Court ruled the election invalid and Davis subsequently decided to hang in there like a bad cold, declaring that his term would not officially expire until April 28, 1874. Undaunted, the Democrats were armed and ready to oust the most unpopular governor in Texas history. While hundreds of blacks gathered on the Capitol grounds to show their support for Davis, the mayor of Austin, a Coke man, was arrested in an attempt to take over a state ammunition storehouse.
As the week wore on, the crisis continued to escalate. Davis sent an urgent telegraph to President Grant requesting federal troops. Grant turned him down. His only remaining option was to use the State Police and militia forces still loyal to him, but he was painfully aware that such a confrontation was bound to end tragically, no matter what the final outcome. Although it was largely unrequited, Davis loved Texas and loathed the idea of Texans shedding other Texans’ blood—again.
But none of that really mattered to the Coke forces. All that mattered to them was that Davis knew when to give up. On Friday, January 16th, Edmund Davis left the capital in a horse-drawn carriage, cheered by an assembly of his faithful militia. Monday morning the sun would shine down on a state once again ruled by Democrats, and a capitol building where Coke was the real thing.
The Big E had finally left the building.
Me & Billy the Kid
Well, it wasn’t quite like pulling the sword from the stone, but to an eight-year-old boy, it was a hell of a thrill. The year was 1963, and I was poking around in the dirt on my grandparents’ Hill Country farm. Previous expeditions had recovered an impressive cache of animal skulls, fossils, cool rocks, and other stuff, but this time I unearthed a hunk of rusted iron that my fertile imagination proved to be an old, completely rusted Colt .45 sixshooter! Naturally I jumped to the exciting conclusion that the gun had belonged to none other than Billy the Kid, who was the hero of many an eight-year-old boy at the time.
I’m older and wiser now, and that gun has long since gone the way of my collection of cat’s eye marbles and other boyhood treasures, but I’ve never forgotten it. More importantly, I’ve never forgotten the thrill of finding that chunk of Wild West history by merely poking around in Hill Country dirt.
That experience reinforced the idea that the place where I lived was special. Exciting things had happened here. After all, the town I lived in, Johnson City, was also the hometown of LBJ. We even attended the same church. Many times I literally stood in the shadow of this giant man, and the experience left an indelible impression on my mind.
I grew up reading stories in national magazines that focused on the hardscrabble Texas Hill Country as not only the place where the leader of the free world was born and raised, but considered the environment that had molded and shaped his great vision and insight. That made me proud. I grew up with the odd, egocentric conceit that small towns and rural areas are not, after all, insignificant. That where you’re from, and the things that happened there, matter.
Thirtysomething years after digging up that sixgun and looking up at LBJ, I’m still poking around for connections to the past. As a novelist and freelance writer, I try to put the material I find into profitable use, in both fiction and nonfiction work, but I know I’d keep digging even if there wasn’t a dime in it. I love the thrill of stumbling over some heretofore unrealized story or surprising link to the past. For example, the subject of my previous column, the Coke-Davis Controversy of 1874 “A Capitol Standoff,” was completely unknown to me until, one day, ten years or so past, I literally tripped over a plaque commemorating this bizarre incident, and I felt as if I’d just dug up another rusty sixshooter.
It’s that spirit of surprise and serendipity and déja vu I hope to infuse in future “Texana Ranger” columns.
By the way, I later learned that, in all likelihood, Billy the Kid never passed through my grandparents’ farm. However, he did have some Texas connections. I’ll expound on some of those in a future column.
My Library
