Recollections of Early Texas

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
J
OHN
H
OLMES
J
ENKINS, III

Foreword by
J. F
RANK
D
OBIE

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

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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 Spaulding 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. F
RANK
D
OBIE

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.