Here Lies Texas 
History Lesson 
Remains of the Day
I thought I knew everything about history until I strolled through the Texas State Cemetery, where Stephen F. Austin holds court, the Confederacy lives on, and the greatest shortstop ever is waiting to be discovered.
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The lettering on Austin’s monument remembers him as “wise, gentle, courageous and patient.” They might have added lucky. A law student in Louisiana when his father, Moses, applied to the Mexican government for a land grant in Coahuila y Tejas, Austin’s initial reaction was to wonder if the old man had lost his marbles. But when Moses died without completing his project, his son picked up the torch. Austin and his first group of settlers arrived at a spot between the lower Colorado and Brazos rivers, in December 1821. Austin was a diplomat, not a warrior— critics called him an “appeaser”—but there were warriors enough for the job ahead.
My favorite grave site belongs to Buchel. He had fought for armies all over Europe by the time he and his brother arrived at the German settlement of Carlshafen (later Indianola), on Matagorda Bay, in 1845. An adventurer with a reputation for dueling, Buchel had been an officer in the French Foreign Legion, trained cavalry for the Ottoman Empire, been granted the title of pasha, and earned a knighthood for serving Spain’s infant queen, Isabella II. Buchel’s brother became a farmer in DeWitt County, but Augustus Carl returned to military life when the Mexican War broke out, serving on General Zachary Taylor’s staff at the Battle of Buena Vista. Later he commanded the 3rd Texas Infantry at Fort Brown, fighting off invaders along the Rio Grande and preserving the overland cotton trade to Mexico. He died in 1864, leading three hundred Confederate soldiers on a charge at Pleasant Hill, Louisiana. The faded inscription on his white stone marker reads “We know that those who for their country die, through glory live again immortally.”
Towering above these heroes of the Republic like a mutant stalk of gray granite is the monument to Edmund J. Davis, who was considered a traitor by many Texans because he raised a cavalry regiment that fought for the Union. At 31 feet, the monument is the tallest in the cemetery; present rules (except on Republic Hill) restrict monuments to 7 feet. Elected governor in 1869, during Reconstruction, by a margin of eight hundred votes, Davis established a state police force that was loathed by Confederate sympathizers, not just because it was corrupt but because it permitted blacks and Hispanics in the ranks.
A number of contemporary Texas leaders are buried on Republic Hill, including Bullock and Barbara Jordan, whose monuments were so massive that they had to be lifted by a crane over the tree line. The mountain red granite headstone speaks of Bullock’s famous love for the state (“God Bless Texas”) but does not dwell on the accomplishments that made him one of the most powerful men in modern Texas politics. In death as in life, Jordan was a pathfinder, the first (and, to date, only) black woman to be buried at the state cemetery. The power and passion of her speeches gained the national spotlight during the Watergate hearings in 1974, when she lectured the House Judiciary Committee on the fine points of the Constitution. Carved on one side of her headstone is the word “Teacher,” which is how she thought of herself, and on the opposite side the word “Patriot.”
Several recent governors rest on the hill, among them Ann Richards, John Connally, and Allan Shivers. Richards’s permanent marker was installed in March, and her modern white marble headstone, one of the most distinctive in the cemetery, quotes from her 1991 inaugural address: “A glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.” Attached to the double headstone at the grave site of John and Nellie Connally is a statue of Saint Andrew, which they obtained at Westminster Abbey. When the statue arrived at the cemetery, the staff removed sweat rings from the iced-tea glass Nellie would place there after she had finished working in her garden. Not far away is an open space that turns out to be two plots reserved for George W. and Laura Bush.
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s remains lie beside the governor who preceded her, her disgraced husband, James “Pa” Ferguson. I was disappointed to discover that Ma’s headstone made no mention of her most famous quote, apocryphal or not: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
Several famous Texans who are buried elsewhere are represented by cenotaphs or memorial markers, among them Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson, who survived the Alamo and delivered the news of its fall to Sam Houston. She is buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery. An outline of his famous fedora decorates the cenotaph of legendary Cowboys coach Tom Landry, who is buried in Dallas. Pulitzer Prize—winning author James Michener, who moved to Austin to write a book about Texas and stayed on, is remembered here by a cenotaph, but his remains are buried in Austin Memorial Park.
In fact, you can almost count on your fingers the number of writers, artists, and musicians buried here. As author Stephen Harrigan notes in an upcoming book about the Texas State Cemetery, precious few intellectuals are “shoehorned in among the real movers and shakers of Texas history.” There’s Frank Dobie, his lifelong friend Walter Prescott Webb, and Fred Gipson, who wrote Old Yeller. So much for men of letters. Inscribed on Dobie’s tombstone is a message that must sound alien to the ears of many Texans: “I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth.”
The only musician I could locate was an opera singer I’d never heard of, May Peterson Thompson, who in the twenties was known as the “Golden Girl of the Metropolitan Opera.” Thompson’s principal connection to Texas was that she married an Amarillo man who served on the Railroad Commission. That’s about it for the arts. Richards gave her longtime companion, Bud Shrake, a proclamation entitling him to a state plot, but he hasn’t decided if he wants to use it. When Larry L. King appeared near death in February in a hospital in Washington, D.C., Shrake did lobby to get King a spot, only to be told that King wanted no part of the riffraff in Austin, preferring instead to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in a vacant lot in Putnam, next to where his boyhood home once stood. (Subsequently, after a number of prominent Texans, including Laura Bush, pushed to set aside a plot for him, he changed his mind.) Harrigan concludes that maybe it is just as well that the doers outnumber the dreamers in the state cemetery: “Without all the violence, heroism, bigotry, backroom dealing and sometimes surprising reach of those splendidly unliberated minds, the chroniclers of Texas would have nothing to write about.”
Making my way back to the parking lot, down the slope of Republic Hill and across a half-full part of the cemetery called Statesman Meadow, I stop to admire the headstone of the great Willie Wells. It sits directly behind the caretaker’s cottage, built in 1903. As was the case in life, his grave seems segregated from his fellow Texans’. Born in Austin in 1906, Wells was never allowed to play in the major leagues, but he posted a lifetime batting average of .363 in the Negro National League and in Mexico, Canada, and Japan. Willie got the nickname El Diablo from a nasty habit of padding his glove with pieces of brick and rock to discourage aggressive base runners. How good was he? Buck O’Neil, who saw the likes of Honus Wagner, Pop Lloyd, and Ozzie Smith, once said that if he had to pick a shortstop for his team, it would be Wells. He was finally inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in 1997, eight years after his death. In October 2004, the cemetery committee had his remains disinterred from Evergreen Cemetery, in Austin, and moved here. Surprisingly, he is the only pure athlete on the grounds.
Looking at El Diablo’s grave, I’m not sure if it shows how far we have come or how far we have left to go. Either way, it’s an honor to be in his presence.
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