Relatively Unknown Heroes

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be always on the border between the Anglo Texians and the Mexican Tejanos, during his lifetime and after. He was born in the first decade of the 19th century, a native of San Antonio. He came of a prominent local family; his father Erasmo Seguin was a signatory to Mexico’s first constitution of 1824. Juan Seguin married into another prominent local family, and was himself elected to the office of alcalde, a sort of cross between mayor and justice of the peace while in his late twenties. Altogether, he was a promising young man in local politics, when Texas was merely a far-distant province of Mexico itself, and gradually becoming disaffected by the dictatorial actions of the Centralist President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,  the self-styled Napoleon of the West.

When Santa Anna soon dissolved the Mexican Congress, and threatened to come down like a ton of bricks on those who disagreed with his way of running Mexico, moderates such as Seguin were thrown into opposition, right alongside their Anglo neighbors. Stephen Austin granted a captain’s commission to Seguin, who raised a company of scouts. When General Martin Cos was thrown out of San Antonio at the end of 1835, Captain Seguin’s company of nearly forty men were among those doing the throwing. He and his company were among the small garrison of the tumbledown mission compound known as the Alamo. I have read of speculation that Seguin might have been detailed as it’s commander, given his local prominence and background… but that he personally was too valuable, first as a scout, and secondly for his local connections. He was sent out of the doomed Alamo as a courier. At Gonzales, when Sam Houston began gathering his ragged Army of Texans, Seguin gathered up the remains of his little band of Tejanos, who served as scouts and as rear-guard, as Houston fell back into East Texas.

When Houston finally turned to fight Santa Anna, at first he wanted to leave Seguin’s company out of his line of battle, fearing that in the thick of it all, Seguin’s men might be in danger from their own side. After the massacre of the defenders of the Alamo and the Goliad, many of Houston’s army were not inclined to make distinctions between Mexicans. Houston first suggested that Seguin’s Tejanos guard the camp and the baggage. Seguin angrily refused, insisting on a place for his company in the line: he also had lost some of his men in the Alamo. All of those he had left to him were from San Antonio. They could not return to their homes until Santa Anna was defeated; they had just as much or more cause to hate him as any Anglo Texian. It was their right, to take a part in the fight. Houston relented, asking only that Seguin’s men must place pieces of cardboard in their hatbands, to distinguish them.

In Stephen Hardin’s book “A Texian Illiad”— a history of the Texas Revolution, illustrated with careful sketches of many of the soldier participants — there is one of a member of Seguin’s Tejano volunteers. His clothes and equipment are of the borderlands: American shoes, short Mexican trousers, a fringed buckskin jacket, a rolled serape and a Brown Bess musket, a gourd canteen and a wide-brimmed vaquero’s hat with a rosary around the crown and a slip of cardboard with “Requerda el Alamo” scrawled on it. More about Seguin is  here : His monument in Texas is the town of Segiun, a little south of San Antonio.

Britton “Brit” Johnson was born a slave in Tennessee around 1840, and brought to Texas by his owner, who was a landholder in the Peters colony, an impresario grant in Northern Texas on the Red River. Johnson seems to have been able to read and write; although technically a slave, he worked as a ranch foreman. He must have been allowed a great deal of latitude, for in the last year of the Civil War, he was working as an independent freighter, owning his own team and wagon. He was married, and the father of four children. His home was in western Young County, in the Elm Creek Valley northwest of Fort Belknap, on property owned by the Carter family, brothers Edmund and Alexander. The Carters were free men of color, but the most prosperous family in the county, due to their ranching and freighting interests. Alexander’s wife Elizabeth Bishop Carter, was white, and after the deaths of her husband and father in law, she continued to manage their various properties and enterprises. Johnson had worked for the Carters as a ranch hand and teamster, and continued to work for Elizabeth Carter, after her remarriage to a man named Fitzpatrick and her subsequent second widowing .

In mid October of 1864, Britt Johnson and two of Elizabeth Carter Fitzgerald’s neighbors had gone to Weatherford, In Parker County, to purchase supplies. They were returning, with their wagons well-laden with when they received word that an large party of Kiowa and Comanche warriors (later estimated to be between 700 and 1,500) had gone through the Elm Creek Valley settlements like a flash fire. They had burned homes, raided, stolen cattle and horses, killed a number of settlers and taken others captive. The three men left their wagons and hurried to their homes on horseback.

Britt Johnson came home to find that not only had his wife Mary and two younger children, Cherry and Charlie, been taken by the raiders, but his teenage son Jube had been killed. Elizabeth Carter Fitzgerald’s widowed daughter Susan Durgan had also died, on the front porch of her mothers’ house with a shotgun in her hands. Elizabeth, her young son Elijah, and Susan’s daughters Lottie and Millie Durgan, then aged about five and eighteen months were also captives. The raiders had also taken several thousand head of cattle and horses and set brushfires as they went, to discourage any immediate pursuit. By the time the cavalry came to the rescue, the Indian war party was long gone. When winter set in, the raiders had settled into winter camps along the Canadian River, near the ruins of an old trading post called Bent’s Fort. The captives were taken into various camps, all but Elijah. He had fallen ill, from drinking tainted water, and been killed by his captors when he had not been able to keep up. His mother was forced to watch the murder of her child - thrown alive into a bonfire.

According to legend, Britt Johnson stayed just long enough to see to the safety of his older daughter, who had been visiting a neighbor on the day of the raid; a neighbor who had just enough warning to fort up and successfully defend his house and those sheltering in it. He had often delivered freight to Ft. Belknap, and was well known to many of the Penateka Comanche, who had lived there before being moved north to Indian Territory. Johnson managed to make contact with a Chief Asa-Havay, who agreed to help him search for his family and negotiate their return… in exchange for an exorbitant ransom. Johnson was able to raise the ransom demanded when he returned to the settlements. Early in 1865 he returned to the Indian agency on the Washita River, in company with Chief Asa-Havey and another man, David White, who hoped to ransom his son from the Indians.

There were peace talks being held between the Kiowa and Comanche, and representatives of the Confederacy. The peace commissioner wrangled permission for Britt Johnson, David White and Chief Asa-Havey to travel among the Indian villages, searching for and ransoming captives. Over the next year Johnson was successful in recovering some of them, including his wife and daughters, and David White’s son. Lottie Durgan was recovered nearly a year later, and her grandmother another year after that. Millie Durgan was never found, although Britt Johnson and her grandmother kept searching for her. It is thought that she was adopted into the family of the war-chief who took her family in the Elm Creek raid. An elderly Kiowa woman named Gain Toh Oodie interviewed in the 1930ies by an interested newspaper reporter may indeed have been the child Millie Durgan.

Sadly, Britt Johnson, who had continued to work as a teamster and freight-hauler was killed with two other teamsters by raiding Indians in 1871, near Salt Creek. Those who came upon the aftermath counted nearly two hundred empty rifle and pistol shells where Britt Johnson had made his last stand, behind the body of his horse. His monument is a different sort than Seguins’, being more of the virtual sort. His efforts to rescue his family, and others are supposed to be the inspiration for the movie “The Searchers”.

Frontier Surgeon

The practice of medicine in these United (and for the period 1861-1865, somewhat disunited) States was for most of the 19th century a pretty hit or miss proposition, both in practice and by training. That many sensible people possessed pretty extensive kits of medicines – the modern equivalents of which are administered as prescriptions or under the care of a licensed medical professional – might tend to indicate that the qualifications required to hang out a shingle and practice medicine were so sketchy as to be well within the grasp of any intelligent and well-read amateur, and that many a citizen was of the opinion that they couldn’t possibly do any worse with a D-I-Y approach. Such was the truly dreadful state of affairs generally when it came to medicine in most places and in all but the last quarter of the 19th century - they may have been better off having a go on their own at that.

Most doctors trained as apprentices to a doctor with a current practice. There were some formal schools of medicine in the United States, but their output did not exactly dazzle with brilliance. Scientific method – eh, what was that? Germ theory? A closed book. Anesthesia – a mystery. Successful surgeons possessed two basic skill sets at this time; speed and a couple of strong assistants to hold the patient down, until he was done cutting and stitching. Most of the truly skilled doctors and surgeons had their training somewhere else – like Europe.

But not in San Antonio, from 1850 on – for there was a doctor-surgeon in practice there, who ventured upon such daring medical remedies as to make him a legend. His patients traveled sometimes hundreds of miles to take advantage of his skill – Doctor Ferdinand Ludwig von Herff, soon to drop the aristocratic ‘von’ from his name, and to practice his considerable medical talents on behalf of anyone in need. For besides being supremely well-trained for the time, and exquisitely skilled – Doctor Herff was an idealist, one of those rare sorts who are prepared to live their lives in accordance with the principals they publicly espouse. He was a relation of John Muesebach’s, and came to Texas in 1847 as part of a circle of young idealists called the “Forty”, who had a plan to establish a utopian commune along the ideas espoused by social critics of the time. (Yes, there were all sorts of interesting and experimental communes sprouting like mushrooms all during the early 19th century, very few of which lasted longer than the 1960s variety)

Like the 1960s variety, most of Ferdinand Herff’s companions in the “Forty” were students of universities at Giessen or Heidelberg, or the industrial school at Darmstadt. Hermann Spiess had already toured through the United States and Texas before returing to Germany with all kinds of ambitious plans. Originally the plan was set up their community in Wisconsin, but when one Count Castell, who was an original member of the Mainzer Adelsverein heard of their intentions, he offered them funding and support if they would establish it Verein land-grant in Texas instead. The offer was accepted and in mid-summer of 1847 the “Forty” arrived in Texas, led by Herff, Spiess and Gustav Schleicher, a trained engineer who would eventually oversee building of the rail system throughout Texas. They had brought along a huge train of baggage, supplies and equipment, including seeds and grapevines, mill machinery, a small cannon, many dogs, one woman - a cook/housekeeper named Julie Herf (no relation), Doctor Herff’s complete collection of surgical impedimenta, and a good few barrels of whiskey. By late fall, they had moved all this (and a herd of cattle) to their town-site, on the north bank of the Llano River near present-day Castell. They set up tents, built a long building to use as a sort of barracks and common-room, planted crops and named their little town Bettina, after a leading star-intellectual of the day… and settled in to live their dream of communal living close to the land; think of it as Ferdinand and Hermann’s Excellent Frontier Adventure.

It didn’t last beyond a year, of course – being very long on ideals and enthusiasm, but short on relish for actual, back-breaking agricultural labor. The community foundered on the rocks of human nature and self-interest; most of the members remained within the larger society of the Germans in Texas, but not before Doctor Herff performed a single amazing feat of surgery there. This took place within weeks of his and the “Forty’s” arrival, during that halcyon period when Meusebach’s peace treaty with the Comanche held between the two peoples. A Comanche with an advanced case of cataracts appeared at Bettina, asking to be healed. Dr. Herff had already been treating various Indians who presented themselves, and would eventually become fairly fluent in the Comanche and Apache dialects… but this was a tall order and a touchy situation. They did not dare turn the Comanche away. Amazingly enough, Dr. Herff had brought the latest in ophthalmologic instruments with him and had performed cataract surgery – in Germany.

There were certain other challenges to be met; they would have to use ether to anesthetize the patient, and Doctor Herff would have to have sufficient light to operate. Ether being flammable, there was no way to light an indoor surgical site with the usual sorts of lamps and candles with reflectors. He would have to operate outdoors. Being a fastidiously tidy sort of man, he insisted on it being a clear, dust-free, windless and insect-free day, and boiling the water used to irrigate the eyes of his patient. A dozen of the commune members stood by, armed with palm-leaf fans to keep flies away… and Dr. Herff set to work, probably knowing that this was an operation that could not be botched. Even if there was peace between the German settlers and the Comanche, an unhappy Comanche warrior was not likely to express his unhappiness in a simple letter of complaint to the medical guild.

Fortunately for Dr. Herff and the other Forty, the primitive surgery was wildly successful, the patient was ecstatic at being able to see well again, and as he departed, promised the doctor the most generous reward at his command – a woman. One can imagine a great deal of jollity at Dr. Herff’s expense over the next three months from the other young men of the “Forty” – but at the end of the time, the Comanche appeared again, with a young Mexican girl in tow, and handed her over to Dr. Herff. Who promptly handed her over to the care of the only other woman in Bettina, the housekeeper/cook, Julie Herf. The girl’s name was Lena, or Lina; she had been a long time with the Comanche and was never able to recall enough about her original family to return to them. Eventually, she married Hermann Spiess.

Dr. Herff practiced medicine tirelessly for most of the next sixty years, establishing San Antonio’s first hospital and several medical associations and serving on the Texas Board of Medical Examiners. Generally, if there is a surgical “first” anywhere in Texas during the last half of the 19th century, it’s a sure bet that he was the surgeon responsible.

Rennaissance Man

Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and Sam Houston, his personal life was already fairly checkered, including one divorce. Unlike the first two, Ford would live through the tumultuous affair that was the Republic of Texas. Like Sam Houston, he would survive all the vicissitudes that an active life on the Texas frontier could throw at him, and die in bed at the ripe old age (for the 19th century) of 82. I assume he was mildly surprised by this happy chance. He had survived the usual accidents and epidemics of an age which predated antibiotics and germ theory in general, any but the crudest of surgeries, and routine vaccination for nothing but smallpox. He had also survived service in two wars and innumerable campaigns along the borders and against various hostile Indian tribes, several rounds of frontier exploration, election to public office… and as a newspaper editor, in the days when public discourse was conducted metaphorically with a set of brass knuckles.

He arrived in Texas in 1836 at the age of 21, having missed Santa Anna’s campaign against the recalcitrant Texans, and Sam Houston’s momentous victory over him at San Jacinto by a bare month. That was about the last significant historical event in Texas that John S. Ford would miss. He would be in the thick of it for the next sixty years, and at the end of his life he would sit down and turn his pen to writing his memoirs, which would fairly double as a history of Texas in the 19th century.

Over that time, Ford embraced a variety of causes with vigorous if sometimes unwise enthusiasm: unionism, temperance, know-nothingism, and secession, and education for the deaf. But he began his career in Texas with a medical practice in the settlement of San Augustine. He had studied medicine in Tennessee, with a local doctor, and under the rather sketchy standards of the time was qualified to hang out a shingle. He spent eight years there, practicing medicine, teaching Sunday school, and riding as a volunteer ranger with a series of local companies… including one commanded by Jack Hays. He also taught himself law. One supposes that San Augustine was a small town, where residents had to double-up on various jobs. In 1844 he was elected to the Texas Legislature as a pro-annexation platform, and took himself off to Washington on the Brazos. He served a term, married (for the second time) and decided to give up medicine for the newspaper business, specifically a weekly paper called the Texas National Register.

Ford was very much a partisan of Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, who was not all that popular in Austin; Ford leapt to his defense with gusto. He and his partner changed the name of the paper to the “Texas Democrat”, and campaigned persistently for such things as more and better schools, and effective defense of the frontier. It was for the time, a rather liberal newspaper… and Ford participated gleefully in every ruckus raised in a state where the political scene usually resembled the ‘tomcats in a sack’ model. But in late 1845, Ford’s wife fell ill, and soon died, in spite of all he could do. Grief-stricken, he took himself off to join the company that his old ranging friend Jack Hays was raising… for Mexico was disputing with the United States over the Texas border. Ford eventually became the regimental adjutant, and from his practice of writing “rest in peace” or “RIP” below his signature on the required reports of casualties, the nickname of “Old Rip”, which followed him for the rest of his life.

But the peacetime business of running a newspaper had palled; Ford and his partner sold the newspaper, and he went off with an acquaintance, Major Robert Neighbors, to explore a route across the southwest to El Paso. Gold had been discovered in California, that very year, and an overland route to California via Austin and El Paso would prove profitable. Then he raised a company of rangers to settle the hash of various outlaws and bandits in the Lower Rio Grande valley, before returning to newspapers and politics for a few years. But in the late 1850ies he went back to captaining a ranger company… in succession fighting against the Comanches, who had never left off raiding the north-western frontier, and a Mexican bandit named Cortina, who had made the Rio Grande valley practically a war zone. The Cortina “war” was settled just as the question of slavery and states’ rights fatally poisoned the 1860 presidential elections.

The election of a free-soil man like Lincoln sent pro-slavery states bolting for the exit; Texas being one of those, as much as Sam Houston and other unionists could do to hold fast. And “Rip Ford” was among those urging secession, confident above all that since Texas had gone it alone once before, it could be done again. He was one of those who organized the states’ secession convention. Upon secession from the Union being approved by a majority of Texas voters, he was commissioned as a colonel to raise a command and take over the Union Army’s forts and commands between Brownsville and El Paso. This had just been done, when word arrived of the surrender of Ft. Sumter. Ford had just enough time to get married again, before he was off into the field, fighting an assortment of enemies; the Yankees, renegade Indians, and Mexican outlaws. His command fought the very last land fight of the Civil War, in May of 1864 at Palmito Ranch, nearly a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

He was desperately ill for a considerable time after the death of the Confederate dream: no doubt that had something to do with it, but he was plagued by reoccurring bouts of malaria, first contracted during the Mexican War, and pneumonia brought on by the constant rigors and deprivation suffered during the war, for he had not spared himself any more than he had his men. Eventually, he recovered enough to continue involvement in state politics, and writing for various publications. He himself was elected mayor of Brownsville, and state senator, and appointed as superintendent for the state institution for the deaf. He transformed it into a school, rather than an asylum, and took enormous pride in the progress of its’ students and graduates, until reoccurring ill-health forced him to resign.

In 1884, he moved with his family to San Antonio, where he spent the last thirteen years of his life writing; articles, memoirs, news stories, contributing to a wide variety of publications, being interviewed by other history buffs, and throwing a conniption fit about the Texas Historical Association making no difference in its constitution between members and ‘lady members’. (He was against it, but eventually dropped his objection.) He had written his personal memoirs, and gotten a fair way into an ambitious, eye-witness history of Texas from 1836 to 1886, when he suffered a stroke, and died after lingering in a coma for several weeks.

Among modern historians, he and Winston Churchill shared a most unique facility for having made almost as much history as they wrote.

The Anti-Lily Bart

I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in at any time.

Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. No place there for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating. I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving -  didn’t find it a little bit of a relief, to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline. Curiously, the very first American female law officer  was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming… in 1869.  When it came right down to it, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage in Cheyenne quite as violently as it did in Westminster, or arouse a backlash anywhere near as vicious;  curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.

But someone like Lizzie Johnson could have had the life and career that she did, nowhere else. She was born in Missouri in 1840, and came to Texas with her parents six years later. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Johnson was a schoolteacher and devout Presbyterian, who brought his growing family to Texas. Eventually he set up a boarding school in Hayes County, south of Austin and some distance from San Marcos, which drew pupils from the area – and astonishingly, a fair number from other Southern states. Lizzie’s father, known as the Professor had originally intended it to be a boys school but so many girls applied that it morphed into a coeducational secondary school. The school prospered, and Lizzie (along with her brothers and sisters) taught classes – including bookkeeping. Lizzie turned out to be particularly gifted at mathematics.

This talent would have an unexpected bearing on her later career, which began to blossom in the decade following the Civil War. She taught school in a couple of small towns near Austin before opening her own primary school there in 1873; in a two story house on property she had purchased in her own name. She did more than teach school, though: complaining of boredom with the same old teaching routine and social affairs in letters to her brother, she had begun to write popular fiction under various pen names for the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper… and she also did bookkeeping. Her brother John had kept the books for the Day brothers, who had extensive ranching interests in Hays County, and were old neighbors of the Johnson family. There were seven Day brothers; inevitably they were known as the “Weeks”. John never entirely recovered from battlefield injuries incurred during his service as a soldier, and when he died, Lizzie took over in his stead. Her father had kept a small herd of cattle to supplement his income from the school, and Lizzie was now in possession of an income of her own, which she could invest in whatever she chose.

And she chose to invest in real estate, and in cattle, about which she became startlingly knowledgeable, for a maiden lady schoolteacher. By the time she opened her own school; she had registered her own brand, owned land and cattle, and was sending substantial herds north to the Kansas railheads. Her life seems astonishingly modern, the farthest thing imaginable from the repressed and constrained fictional women in contemporary novels by serious writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. She worked at what pleased and rewarded her, and no one – not her father or other male relative had anything to say about her household, her income, and her considerable business interests. Well, her surviving brothers - all younger – might have had a lot to say, but apparently little enthusiasm for attempting any means of control over a formidable woman like Lizzie.

 I think of her as the anti-Lily Bart. Another astonishingly modern touch – she married well beyond the age that a woman was expected to have committed in matrimony, and it was not for lack of serious suitors. For Lizzie was – to judge from contemporary formal daguerreotype portraits of her, in which the length of film exposure made any facial expression except the kind you could hold for some length of time out of the question – a rather attractive woman. Victorian standards of beauty differed considerably from the modern one, admittedly; they favored round-faced blondes, and Lizzie was dark-haired and looked rather like a 19th century Demi Moore. She was no frump, either, but dressed elegantly and in the latest fashion. She was courted assiduously over several years by one of the Day brothers and a number of other prosperous men, every one of whom knew her as a woman of property… and moreover, exactly how she came by it. Brains, beauty and business sense apparently had considerable allure.

At the age of 39, this frontier Kate married her Petruchio. He was a handsome and raffish widower with several children, named Hezekiah Williams. Although a retired Baptist preacher, and a moderately unsuccessful rancher, he was also a bit of a gambler and drinker. Sensibly, Lizzie married him with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement in place. She would control her own property acquired before the marriage, as well as anything she acquired in her own name after it.

 It seems that Lizzie Johnson Williams chose as well in her marriage as she did everything else, for they maintained a devoted and happily competitive relationship, both in business and in their personal life for thirty-five years. They went up the cattle trail to the northern railheads three times, Lizzie and Hezekiah each with a separate herd; it is thought that Lizzie was the only woman rancher who trailed cattle that she herself owned wholly, in the post-war cattle boom. When she died in 1924, ten years after Hezekiah, her neighbors were astonished to find out that she owned property worth a quarter of a million dollars. She had lived in a modest, not to mention miserly style since the death of her husband.   She did not marry into money, or inherit through her family; every dollar of her estate she had earned herself, by teaching, writing and bookkeeping, and parlaying those earnings into land and cattle investments, using her own best judgement. A thuroughly modern woman, a hundred years before such women were more the norm.