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If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Dear Texas and Women’s History Enthusiast,

Texas Women’s History has had a long and distinguished legacy with both the Texas women who have made history and the Texas historians who have written women’s history. The importance of women’s contributions to the state has been and continues to be a significant part of its cultural narrative.

In this eBook, we selected articles from the Handbook of Texas Online to provide an overview of the racial and ethnic diversity, different socio-economic designations, and varying regional identities that makes Texas history so rich and dynamic. These entries are enriched with illustrations provided by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin, Library of Congress, numerous archives and museums across the state, and the public domain. Women Across Texas History Volume 1: Nineteenth Century and Before offers selected biographical sketches from the Handbook of Texas Online and articles from the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, which highlight the type of incredible content that the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) is so proud to offer.

I would be remiss if I did not specially acknowledge the dedicated TSHA staff and our amazing contributors and members—this Association continues to prosper because of you. Importantly, my graduate research assistant, Elaina Friar Moyer, was essential to the success of this eBook. She is a phenomenal researcher and editorial assistant. Additionally, I received significant support from my university, Texas A&M University-Commerce, without which this eBook and connected endeavors would not be possible. Many thanks to everyone involved.

Cheers!

Jessica Brannon-Wranosky Project Director Associate Professor of History Texas A&M University-Commerce

i Dear Texas History Lover,

Texas has a special place in history and in the minds of people throughout the world. Texas also has the distinction of being the only state in the United States that was an independent country for almost ten years—free and separate—recognized as a sovereign government by the United States, France, and England.

For more than a century, the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) has played a leadership role in Texas history research and education and has helped to identify, collect, preserve, and tell the stories of Texas. It has now entered into a new collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin to carry on and expand its work. In the coming years these two organizations, with their partners and members, will create a collaborative whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The collaboration will provide passion, talent, and long- term support for the dissemination of scholarly research, educational programs for the K-12 community, and opportunities for public discourse about the complex issues and personalities of our heritage.

The TSHA’s core programs include the Texas Almanac, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Handbook of Texas Online, TSHA Press, and education programs that reach out to students and teachers at all levels throughout the state. The central challenge before the TSHA is to seize the unprecedented opportunities of the digital age in order to reshape how history will be accessed, understood, preserved, disseminated, and taught in the twenty-first century. In the coming years, we will capitalize on these momentous opportunities to expand the scope and depth of our work in ways never before possible. In the midst of this rapid change, the TSHA will continue to provide a future for our heritage and to ensure that the lessons of our history continue to serve as a resource for the people of Texas. I encourage you to join us today as a member of the TSHA, and in doing so, you will be part of a unique group of people dedicated to standing as vanguards of our proud Texas heritage and will help us continue to develop innovative programs that bring history to life.

With Texas Pride,

Brian A. Bolinger Randolph “Mike” Campbell CEO Chief Historian Texas State Historical Association Texas State Historical Association

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. María de Jesús de Agreda ……………………………………………..…...... 1 by Donald E. Chipman

2. Angelina …………………………………………………..……….……………….. 3 by Lu Diane Hughes

3. Santa Adiva ……………………………….……………………………………….. 4 by Judith N. McArthur

4. Emily Austin Perry ………………………………………….………..………… 5 by Marie Beth Jones

5. Jane Cazneau …………………………………………………………….……….. 7 by Robert E. May

6. Sarah Bowman ……………………………………………..………………….... 11 by Regina Bennett McNeely

7. Emily D. West ………………………………………………….……………….... 15 by Margaret Swett Henson

8. Emily West de Zavala …………………………...... ………...... 19 by Margaret Swett Henson

9. Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson ………………………………………….…. 21 by Margaret Swett Henson

10. Mary Maverick ……………………………………………………………….... 25 by Paula Mitchell Marks

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

11. Margaret Houston ………………………………………………………….... 28 by William Seale

12. Tamar Morgan ………………………………………………………..……..... 32 by Sherilyn Brandenstein

13. Frances Cox Henderson ………………………………………………..…… 33 by Mary D. Farrell

14. Cynthia Ann Parker …………………………………………...... 36 by Margaret Schmidt Hacker

15. Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy ………………………………………….…….. 39 by Cynthia E. Orozco

16. Zilpha Husk ……………………………………………………………….…….. 41 by Mary M. Standifer

17. Rachel Hamilton Hornsby ……………………………………………..….. 43 by Randolph B. Campbell

18. Josefa (Chipita) Rodríguez ………………………………………….…….. 44 by Marylyn Underwood

19. Salomé Ballí Young ………………………………………………………..…. 46 by Alicia A. Garza

20. Henrietta Chamberlain King ……………………………………………… 47 by Edgar P. Sneed

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

21. Mary Ann (Molly) Goodnight …………………………………………….. 50 by Joyce Gibson Roach

22. Elizabeth (Lizzie) E. Johnson Williams …………………………….… 53 by Roberta S. Duncan

23. Myra Maybelle (Belle) Starr …………………………………………….... 55 by Leon C. Metz

24. Angelina Dickinson ……………………………………………………….…. 58 by Katherine L. Massey

25. Jenny Bland Beauchamp ……………………………………………….….. 60 by Judith N. McArthur

26. Carry Nation ………………………………………………………………….... 62 by James C. Martin

27. Bettie Munn Gay ………………………………………………………….…… 65 by Melissa G. Wiedenfeld

28. Mary Elizabeth Lease …………………………………………………….…. 67 by Sherrie S. McLeRoy

29. Belle M. Burchill …………………………………………………………...... 70 by Amber R. Konzem

30. Ellen Lawson Dabbs …………………………………………………….….. 74 by Melissa G. Wiedenfeld

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

31. Lucy E. Parsons ……………………………………………………………..… 76 by Carolyn Ashbaugh

32. Elisabet Ney ………………………………………………………………….... 78 by Emily F. Cutrer

33. Mariana Folsom ……………………………………………………………... 80 by Tony Black

34. Mary Eleanor Brackenridge ……………………………………………… 81 by A. Elizabeth Taylor

35. Betty Eve Ballinger ………………………………………………………..... 84 by Elizabeth Hayes Turner

36. Hally Ballinger Perry …………………………………………………….... 88 by Nancy Baker Jones

37. Teresa Urrea …………………………………………………………………… 90 by Frances Mayhugh Holden

vi SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

38. “Spanish Laws for Texas Women: The Development of Marital Property Law to 1850” ………………………………………………………………. 92 by Jean Stuntz

39. “The Meaning of Participation: White Protestant Women in Antebellum Houston Churches” ………………………………………..………. 92 by Angela Boswell

40. “The Texas Building and the Women’s Fair Exhibit Association of Texas” …………………………………………………………………………………. 92 by Jeffrey A. Zemler

vi María de Jesús de Agreda 1 By Donald E. Chipman

María de Jesús de Agreda (the Lady in Blue) was born in the Spanish village of Agreda near the border of Aragon and Navarre in April of 1602, the eldest daughter of Francisco Coronel and Catalina of Arana. In her youth María, baptized María Coronel, demonstrated unusual piety and remarkable memory. At the age of sixteen, she convinced her father that he should convert the family castle into a convent for Franciscan nuns. She took religious vows on February 2, 1620, and the name María de Jesús. The new order soon expanded beyond the confines of the castle and moved to the convent of the Immaculate Conception in Agreda. The nuns' habit was colored Franciscan brown (pardo) with an outer cloak of coarse blue cloth.

Throughout the 1620s María de Jesús would Painting, María de Jesús de Agreda, repeatedly lapse into deep trances. On these aged 20, hanging in the Museum of occasions she experienced dreams in which the Viceroyalty of New Spain, she was transported to a distant and unknown Tepotzotlán, . land, where she taught the Gospel to a pagan people. Her alleged miraculous bilocations took her to eastern New Mexico and western Texas, where she contacted several Indian cultures, including the Jumanos. Sister María related her mystical experiences to her confessor, Fray Sebastián Marcilla of Agreda. His superiors contacted the archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Manso y Zúñiga. The archbishop, in turn, wrote the religious superior of New Mexico in May of 1628, requesting information regarding a young nun's alleged transportations and teachings in northern New Spain. That communication arrived in New Mexico shortly before a delegation of some fifty

1 Jumano Indians appeared at the Franciscan convent of old Isleta, south of present Albuquerque, in July 1629. The Jumanos had come to request religious teachers for themselves and their neighbors. They demonstrated rudimentary knowledge of Christianity, and when asked who had instructed them replied, "the Woman in Blue."

An expedition headed by Fray Juan de Salas, organized in New Mexico, set out for the land of the Jumanos. Guided by the chief of the Jumano delegations, it reached a locale in Southwest Texas where it was met by a large band of Indians. The Indians claimed that they had been advised by the Woman in Blue of approaching Christian missionaries. Subsequently, some 2,000 natives presented themselves for baptism and further religious instruction. Two years later, Fray Alonso de Benavides, a former religious superior in New Mexico, traveled to Spain, where he sought more information about the mysterious nun. He interviewed María de Jesús at Agreda. Sister María admitted that she had experienced some 500 bilocations to New Spain and acknowledged that she was indeed the Lady in Blue.

During the last twenty-two years of her life, María de Jesús was an active correspondent with the Spanish king, Philip IV. She died at Agreda on May 24, 1665. Her story was published in Spain several years after her death. Although the abbess said her last visitation to the New World was in 1631, the mysterious Lady in Blue was not quickly forgotten in Texas. In 1690 a missionary working with the Tejas Indians heard the legend. In the 1840s a mysterious woman in blue reportedly traveled the Sabine River valley aiding malaria victims, and in the twentieth century her apparition was reported as recently as World War II. Statue, María de Jesús de Agreda, outside of the Convent of the Order of the Immaculate Conception in Agreda, Soria, Spain.

2 Angelina 2 By Lu Diane Hughes

Angelina is a name supposedly given by Spanish founders of missions in eastern Texas in 1690 to an Indian woman who served as guide and interpreter. In 1712 André Pénicaut, who was accompanying Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, mentioned a "woman named Angélique, who has been baptized by Spanish priests . . . . She spoke Spanish, and as M. de St. Denis too spoke that language fairly well, he made use of her to tell the Assinais chiefs to let us have some guides for hire." Angelina is believed to be the same woman who rescued French officer François Simars de Bellisle from the Hasinais and sent him back to the French. She is mentioned by Father Isidro Félix de Espinosa as interpreter for the Domingo Ramón expedition of 1716, by Francisco de Céliz during the Martín de Alarcón expedition of 1718– 19, and by Juan Antonio de la Peña during the Aguayo expedition of 1721, being described variously as "learned" and "sagacious." Her name was given to the Angelina River as early as 1768, in Gaspar José de Solís's diary. Espinosa, Peña, and, much later, Juan Agustín Morfi (1774–75) state that she had learned Spanish in the missions along the Rio Statue of Angelina in Lufkin, Texas. Grande, perhaps at San Juan Bautista.

Ethnographers indicate a high degree of mobility among Indians generally in Texas. Angelina might have accompanied her family to Coahuila, been traded from the area as a slave, and returned; or she may come from elsewhere, and her appearance in East Texas might be due to chance. Espinosa says of her that "she had been reared in Coahuila, since her parents had been there a long time when the Spaniards left Texas in 1693." She has been the object of much romanticizing, including a painting by Texas artist Ancel Nunn.

3 Santa Adiva 3 By Judith N. McArthur

Santa Adiva, a Tejas Indian woman of some undetermined high status, was discovered by Fray Gaspar José de Solís during an inspection tour of the missions of Spanish Texas in 1767–68. Father Solís recorded in his diary for April 30, 1768, that in the Tejas village near the San Pedro River he encountered an Indian woman called Santa Adiva, whose name was said to mean "great lady" or "principal lady" and who was accorded queen-like status. She was described as living in a large, multiroomed house, to which other Indians brought gifts. Solís reported that Santa Adiva had five husbands and a large contingent of men and women in her service.

Mural of a Native American Woman, Sweetwater, Texas. Courtesy of David Kozlowski.

4 Emily Margaret Austin Perry 4 By Marie Beth Jones

Emily Austin Perry, early colonist, was born on June 22, 1795, in Austinville, Virginia, the daughter of Maria (Brown) and Moses Austin and the sister of Stephen F. and James E. Brown Austin. Her family moved to Mine a Breton (later Potosi), Missouri, when she was almost three years old. She attended Mrs. Beck's Boarding School in Lexington, Kentucky, from October 1804 until December 1808. In 1811 her mother took her to Camden, New Jersey, briefly, and then to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit relatives, and then enrolled her in the Hermitage Academy near New York City. On August 13, 1813, Emily married James Bryan in Potosi, and they lived with her parents at Durham Hall in 1813– 14, then moved to Hazel Run in 1815 and lived for a time at Herculaneum, all in Missouri. After James died on July 16, 1822, Emily took in boarders and taught school at Hazel Run to support her family until her marriage on September 23, 1824, to James Franklin Perry. She had eleven children, six of whom lived to adulthood. These included William Joel, Moses Austin, and Guy Morrison Bryan. One Bryan son and three Perry children all died before their second birthdays, and Mary Elizabeth Bryan died in a cholera epidemic at the age of eleven. On June 7, 1831, the family, composed of Emily and James Perry, four Bryan children, and Stephen Perry, left Potosi, Missouri, for Texas. They arrived on August 14, 1831, at San Felipe de Austin, where Emily and the younger children remained for several months. The family lived for the next year on Chocolate Bayou, then began development of Peach Point Plantation near Brazoria, where Emily made her home for the Portrait of Emily Austin Perry. next nineteen years. Courtesy of the Brazoria County Historical Museum.

5 She was devoted to her brother, Stephen F. Austin, and was expected by him to set an example for the other colonists. During the Runaway Scrape, she and her children fled to the east and were aboard a ship on , close enough to hear the guns fired at the . That panic almost caused the loss of the colony, Austin wrote later, adding that Emily, who wanted to visit the United States, should "stay at home and abide the fate of Texas." Rutherford B. Hayes, who visited at Peach Point in 1848, wrote that Emily, "instead of having the care of one family, is the nurse, physician, and spiritual adviser of a whole settlement of careless slaves. She feels it is her duty to see to their comfort when sick or hurt." By May 1851 Emily's health was so poor that she went to the United States to seek treatment. She returned home on July 1, and on August 15, 1851, she died at Peach Point. She was buried in the family cemetery on the plantation. Descendants still meet at Peach Point each June to celebrate her birthday and pay honor to her memory.

Emily Austin Perry historical marker.

6 Jane Cazneau 5 By Robert E. May

Jane Cazneau [pseuds.: Montgomery, Cora Montgomery, Corrine Montgomery], journalist, author, promoter, and unofficial diplomat, daughter of William Telemachus and Catharina (Coons) McManus, was born in or near Troy, New York, on April 6, 1807. Her father served in the United States Congress from 1825 to 1827. She had three brothers, including Robert O. W. She was apparently raised Lutheran but seems to have become Catholic as a young woman. She married William F. (or Allen B.) Storms in 1825 and had a son but was divorced in 1831. Three years later she was named as 's mistress in a divorce suit Jane McManus Cazneau. brought against the former United States vice president. Jane McManus Storms (she used both surnames at different times after her divorce) first became active in Texas in 1832, when, to offset declining family fortunes, she investigated opportunities both to resettle her parents and to contract to bring immigrants to Stephen F. Austin's colonies, in what was then the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. With her brother Robert she traveled to Texas on the first of nine trips that she made there between 1832 and 1849. She applied to Austin for a headright and a league of coastal land in 1834 and 1835, respectively. An acquaintance recollected that the Mexican government granted her eleven leagues of land for her project but that she lacked the financial means to move her settlers, a group of Germans, from the Texas coast to the designated colony. According to this account, the enterprise broke up at Matagorda, where Jane resided for several months. She may not have lived on her land long enough to get final title and may have forfeited her claim. In a letter posted from New York in 1835, she alluded to owning 1,000 acres in Austin's colony, over and above a league she claimed as a settler. She speculated actively in Texas land from

7 1834 to 1851. Meanwhile, apparently in 1833, her brother Robert and her parents moved to Matagorda, Texas, although her father returned north before his death in 1835.

Land interests and the presence of family gave Jane McManus a vested interest in the future of Texas. When the erupted, she announced an intent to contribute money and arms to the cause of Texas independence. In the mid-1840s her columns in the New York Sun helped swing United States public opinion in favor of the annexation of the Republic of Texas. She contributed "The Presidents of Texas" to the March 1845 issue of the Democratic Review. That same year her Texas and Her Presidents, With a Glance at Her Climate and Agricultural Capabilities was published in New York. In December 1849 she married Texas entrepreneur and politician William Leslie Cazneau. From 1850 to 1852 she and her new husband lived at Eagle Pass, where he founded a town, opened a trade depot, and investigated mining opportunities. Jane recounted her experiences there in Eagle Pass; or Life on the Border (1852). In this book, in letters to United States Senator William H. Seward, and in columns for the New York Tribune, she charged that Mexicans had been kidnapping Texas residents into peonage in Mexico. Her complaints induced the United States Department of State to broach the issue with the government of Mexico. Eagle Pass also inspired Frederick Law Olmsted to investigate the matter. Olmsted reported in A Journey Through Texas that he found no Jane Cazneau used Cora Montgomery as evidence to corroborate Mrs. Cazneau's a pseudonym. Courtesy of the Library accusations. Throughout the antebellum of Ben E. Pingenot Auction Catalogue. period, she maintained close ties to Mirabeau B. Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas. Lamar dedicated a volume of poetry to her (Verse Memorials, 1857). Her will, drafted in 1877, lists 1,000 acres at Eagle Pass and other Texas properties among her assets.

8 Jane Cazneau participated in United States diplomacy almost a century before the first woman was appointed to the United States Foreign Service. During the Mexican War she played an important, if unofficial, part in the unsuccessful secret peace mission of Sun editor Moses Yale Beach to Mexico City, from November 1846 to April 1847, an assignment authorized by President James K. Polk. During that mission she became the only female war correspondent and the only American journalist to issue reports from behind enemy lines. Upon returning to the states she championed the "All Mexico" movement. Between 1847 and her death she also promoted United States annexation of , United States commercial penetration of the , American William Walker's conquest of Nicaragua, United States control of transit routes across the Mexican and Nicaraguan isthmuses, and other variants of "Manifest Destiny." She resided for much of the 1850s in the Dominican Republic, where her husband was serving as United States secret agent and commissioner, diplomatic missions which she helped initiate. It is difficult to separate ideology from self-interest when it comes to her expansionist advocacy; she and her husband made substantial investments that promised profit if the United States government implemented her policies. To promote these causes as well as her opinions on domestic political issues, she wrote letters to presidents and demanded and received presidential audiences. She socialized with and sent letters to politicians and journalists, including James K. Polk, James Buchanan, , , Thurlow Weed, and William H. Seward. She contributed pieces to city newspapers on the East Coast, including the New York Sun, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the Washington States, and the New York Tribune, as well as magazines such as Hunt's Commercial Magazine and the Democratic Review. She bought into the New York Morning Star, so that she could use its press to publish her own expansionist journal, the short-lived Our Times. Between 1848 and 1853 her column "The Truth," regularly published in the Spanish-and- English-language newspaper La Verdad, advocated the annexation of Cuba to the United States. Her books, particularly The Queen of Islands (1850) and Our Winter Eden: Pen Pictures of the Tropics (1878), conveyed her expansionist message. The Cazneaus purchased Esmeralda, an estate in the Dominican Republic, in 1855. Though the administration terminated Cazneau's diplomatic appointment to that country in 1861, around the time that Spain was reannexing the Dominican Republic, he and his wife remained at their estate. When Spanish troops destroyed Esmeralda in October 1863, they fled to Keith

9 Hall in Jamaica, another of their properties. After Spanish evacuation of the Dominican Republic in 1865, they returned and became involved in both the project of President Andrew Johnson to acquire a United States coaling station at Samaná Bay and President U. S. Grant's attempt to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States. William Cazneau died in 1876. Jane Cazneau died in the sinking of the steamship Emily B. Souder, bound from New York to , on December 10, 1878. Her will left her property to Ann S. Stephens, a prolific New York writer.

Jane McManus Cazneau historical marker in Matagorda County.

10 Sarah Bowman 6 By Regina Bennett McNeely

Sarah Bowman, commonly known as the Great Western or the Heroine of Fort Brown, legendary camp follower of the Mexican War, hotelkeeper, and sometime prostitute, was born Sarah Knight in 1812 or 1813, but whether in Tennessee or Clay County, Missouri, is unclear. She acquired several husbands during the course of her travels, many without benefit of clergy, so there is considerable confusion about her surname. In various sources and at different times she is referred to as Mrs. Bourjette, Bourget, Bourdette, Davis, Bowman, Bowman-Phillips, Borginnis, and possibly Foyle. A mountain of a woman who stood six feet two inches tall, she picked up the nickname Great Western, probably in a reference to the contemporary steamship of that name, which was noted for its size. John Salmon Ford wrote that she "had the reputation of being something of the roughest fighter on the and was approached in a polite, if not humble, manner." Little is known about Sarah before the

Depiction of Sarah Bowman as an innkeeper during the Mexican War by Samuel B. Chamberlain.

11 Mexican War. Rumors claim that she was with Zachary Taylor's forces during the Seminole Wars, but her first substantiated appearance occurred in 1845, when she accompanied her husband, a soldier in the Eighth United States Infantry and a member of Taylor's army of occupation, to Corpus Christi. At that time the wives of enlisted men could enroll with the army as cooks and laundresses and follow their husbands into the field. Among these camp followers was the Great Western, who cooked for appreciative officers. Sarah first distinguished herself as a fighter at the crossing of the Arroyo Colorado in March 1846, when she offered to wade the river and whip the enemy singlehandedly if Gen. William Jenkins Worth would lend her a stout pair of tongs. The legends surrounding her exploits grew during the bombardment of Fort Brown in May 1846, when she refused to join the other women in an underground magazine but calmly operated her officers' mess uninterrupted for almost a week, despite the fact that a tray was shot from her hands and a stray shell fragment pierced her sunbonnet. Her fearlessness during the siege earned her another nickname, the Heroine of Fort Brown. She traveled with the army into the interior of Mexico and opened a hotel in Saltillo, the American House, where Depiction of Sarah Bowman as a cook at Fort she again demonstrated her bravery Texas. Courtesy of the University of Texas at during the battle of Buena Vista by Arlington Libraries. loading cartridges and even carrying some wounded soldiers from the battlefield to safety. During this period she was married to her second husband, known variously as Bourjette, Bourget, and Bourdette, a member of the Fifth Infantry. Sarah apparently remained in Saltillo as a hotelkeeper until the end of the war, but in July 1848 she asked to join a column of dragoons that had been ordered to California. By this time her husband was probably dead, and she was told that only married women could march with the army. Undaunted, she rode along the line of men asking, "Who wants a wife with fifteen thousand dollars and the biggest leg in Mexico? Come, my beauties, don't all speak at once. Who is the lucky man?" After some

12 Sketch of Sarah Bowman crossing the Fort Yuma parade ground in 1853 by Private Henry Pratt. Courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society. hesitation a dragoon named Davis, probably David E. Davis, stepped forward, and the Great Western once again marched with the army.

In 1849 Sarah arrived in El Paso and briefly established a hotel that catered to the flood of Forty-niners traveling to the gold fields. She leased the hotel to the army when she left for Socorro, New Mexico, with a new husband, Albert J. Bowman, an upholsterer from Germany. When Bowman was discharged on November 30, 1852, the couple moved to Fort Yuma, where Sarah opened another restaurant. She lived first on the American, then the Mexican, side of the river, to protect her adopted children. By the mid-1860s she was no longer married to Bowman, but she served as company laundress and received an army ration. In 1856 she traveled to Fort Buchanan to set up a hotel ten miles below the fort. She had returned to Fort Yuma by 1861. Although Sarah was well known as a hotelkeeper and restaurateur, she probably had other business interests as well. One chronicler referred to her as "the greatest whore in the

13 West," and Lt. Sylvester Mowry, a soldier stationed at Fort Yuma in 1856, wrote of Sarah that "among her other good qualities she is an admirable `pimp'." The date of Sarah's death, reportedly caused by a tarantula bite, is unclear, though one contemporary source indicates that she died in 1863. She was buried in the Fort Yuma post cemetery on December 23, 1866, with full military honors. In August 1890 the Quartermaster's Department of the United States Army exhumed the 159 bodies buried at the Fort Yuma cemetery and moved them to the presidio at San Francisco, California. Among these bodies was that of Sarah Bowman.

Tombstone of Sarah Bowman.

14 Emily D. West 7 By Margaret Swett Henson

Emily D. West, erroneously called Emily Morgan by those who presumed her a slave of James Morgan and the "Yellow Rose of Texas" by twentieth-century myth-makers, was born a free black in New Haven, Connecticut. She signed a contract with agent James Morgan in New York City on October 25, 1835, to work a year as housekeeper at the New Washington Association's hotel, Morgan's Point, Texas. Morgan was to pay her $100 a year and provide her transportation to Galveston Bay on board the company's schooner, scheduled to leave with thirteen artisans and laborers in November. She arrived in Texas in December on board the same vessel as Emily de Zavala and her children. On April 16, 1836, while James Morgan was absent in Galveston in command of Fort Travis, Mexican cavalrymen under command of Col. Juan N. Almonte arrived at New Washington to seize President David G. Burnet, who was embarking on a

Statue of Emily D. West by Veryl Goodnight in Houston. Courtesy of Joe Holley Photography and the Houston Chronicle.

15 schooner for Galveston Island. As the president and his family sailed away, the troops seized Emily and other black servants at Morgan's warehouse, along with a number of white residents and workmen. Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived at New Washington the following day, and after three days of resting and looting the warehouses, he ordered the buildings set afire and departed to challenge 's army, which was encamped about ten miles away on Buffalo Bayou. Emily was forced to accompany the Mexican army. With regard to the Yellow Rose legend, she may have been in Santa Anna's tent when the Texans charged the Mexican camp on April 21, but it was not by choice. She could not have known Houston's plans, nor could she have intentionally delayed Santa Anna. Moreover, in their official reports after returning to Mexico, none of his disaffected officers mentioned the presence of a woman or even that el presidente was in a state of undress. After the battle Emily found refuge with Isaac N. Moreland, an artillery officer, who later made his home in Houston and served as county judge. Strangers assumed Emily was James Morgan's James Morgan. slave because she was black.

A story was told around campfires and in barrooms that Emily had helped defeat the Mexican army by a dalliance with Santa Anna. The only discovered documentation for this in the nineteenth century was a chance conversation in 1842 between a visiting Englishman and a veteran on board a steamer from Galveston to Houston. William Bollaert recorded in his journal, "The battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans, owing to the influence of a Mulatta Girl (Emily) belonging to Col. Morgan who was closeted in the tent with G'l Santana." Bollaert does not identify the veteran or say Emily was Morgan's slave. The edited diary, published in 1956, included that notation as a footnote with Bollaert's name attached, a fact that led readers to believe the note was a footnote in the original manuscript. The editor's 1956 footnote launched prurient interest on the part of two amateur historians who concocted the modern fiction. Francis X. Tolbert, a prolific journalist, says in his The Day of San Jacinto (1959) that Emily was a "decorative long-haired mulatto girl...Latin looking woman of about twenty." No footnote documents this description or the

16 author's statement that she was in Santa Anna's tent. Tolbert also presumptively identified Morgan as the informant. Henderson Shuffler, also a journalist, became a publicist for Texas A&M University in the 1950s, wrote historical articles for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and made speeches while working at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in the 1960s. On one occasion he said Emily was "the M'latta Houri" of the Texas Revolution, a "winsome, light-skinned...slave of James Morgan." He added that she was a fitting candidate for the identity of the girl in the then- popular Mitch Miller version of "The Yellow Rose of Texas.“ Shuffler credited Tolbert for bringing Emily's story out into the open and then manufactured more fantasies, including the whim that "her deliberately provocative amble down the street [in New Washington was] the most exciting event in town." He added that her story was "widely known and often retold...in the 1840s." In closing, he suggested that a stone might be placed at the San Jacinto battleground "In Honor of Emily Who Gave Her All for Texas Piece by Piece." In 1976 a professor of English at Sam Houston State University, Martha Anne Turner, published a small book, The Yellow Rose of Texas: Her Saga and Her Song, an outgrowth of a paper she delivered in 1969 at the American Studies Association of Texas. She credits Shuffler's speech and adds even more undocumented details before tracing the roots of the song. Thus the story was full-blown for the journalistic frenzy of the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986.

The real Emily D. West remained in Texas until early 1837, when she asked for and Martha Anne Turner’s The Yellow received a passport allowing her to return Rose home. Isaac Moreland wrote a note to the of Texas: Her Saga and Her Song with the Santa Anna Legend (1976) secretary of state saying that he had met Emily in April 1836, that she was a thirty-six-year-old free woman who had lost her "free" papers at the battleground. She stated that she came from New York in September 1835 with Colonel Morgan and was anxious to return home. Although

17 there is no date on the application housed in the Texas State Archives, Mrs. Lorenzo de Zavala, by then a widow, was planning to return to New York on board Morgan's schooner in March, and it seems possible that Morgan arranged passage aboard for Emily.

Passport of Emily D. West. Courtesy of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

18 Emily West de Zavala 8 By Margaret Swett Henson

Emily West de Zavala, wife of the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, was born on September 9, 1809, in New York state, possibly in Albany or Brooklyn. She married Lorenzo de Zavala in New York City on November 12, 1831, at the Church of the Transfiguration. They eventually had a daughter and two sons. In early 1833 Emily left New York to join her husband in Toluca, Mexico, where they remained until he was named Mexican minister to France in October 1833. The couple left Paris for New York by 1835, however, because Zavala had disassociated himself from Antonio López de Santa Anna's increasingly dictatorial course. Emily de Zavala arrived at Morgan's Point, Texas, in December 1835. Zavala had bought a home on a labor of land north of Buffalo Bayou, called Zavala Point, the previous summer. Emily's citified ways reportedly were not popular in the Emily West de Zavala. neighborhood. When Santa Anna's troops approached in April 1836, the Zavalas fled down the San Jacinto River to the home of William Scott, where a number of families awaited a steamer to take them to safety on Galveston Island. Before the boat arrived Mrs. Zavala attempted to return to her home for a chest of silverware, but she met others fleeing the Mexican troops and retreated to Galveston. The Zavalas returned to their home in June to find that the buildings had been used for a hospital. Zavala's health declined, and he died in November. Emily returned to New York City in 1837 and soon married a German immigrant, Henry M. Fock (or Folk). The couple returned to Zavala Point in early 1839; they had two children. Emily

19 became a widow again in September 1849, and on March 5, 1851, she married a sawmill owner, E. D. Hand. After his death around 1860, she remained at her house on Buffalo Bayou until it burned about 1866. By 1870 she moved to Galveston, where her eldest son, Augustine Zavala, lived. She sold the land at Zavala Point to her second son, Richard, to keep the family cemetery in the family. Emily de Zavala died on June 15, 1882, in Houston and was buried at Zavala Point.

Marriage Certificate of Emily West de Zavala and Lorenzo de Zavala. Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

20 Susanna Dickinson 9 By Margaret Swett Henson

Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson (also spelled Dickerson), survivor of the Alamo, was born about 1814 in Tennessee, perhaps in Williamson County. Her first name has also been recorded as Susan, Susana, and Suzanna; her maiden name is sometimes given as Wilkinson. On May 24, 1829, she married Almeron Dickinson before a justice of the peace in Bolivar, Hardeman County, Tennessee. The couple remained in the Vicinity through the end of 1830. The Dickinsons arrived at Gonzales, Texas, on February 20, 1831, in company with fifty-four other settlers, after a trip by schooner from New Orleans. On May 5 Dickinson received a league of land from Green DeWitt, on the San Marcos River in what became Caldwell County. He received ten more lots in and around Gonzales in 1833 and 1834. The Dickinsons lived on a lot just above the town Susanna Dickinson. Courtesy of the on the San Marcos River, where Susanna took Daughters of the Republic of Texas in at least one boarder. A map of Gonzales in Library. 1836 shows a Dickinson and Kimble hat factory in Gonzales. Susanna's only child, Angelina Elizabeth Dickinson, was born on December 14, 1834.

Susanna and her daughter may have joined other families hiding in the timber along the Guadalupe River in early October 1835, when Mexican troops from demanded the return of an old cannon lent to Gonzales four years earlier. The resulting skirmish, the battle of Gonzales, was the first fight of the Texas Revolution. Susanna said goodbye to her husband on October 13 as the

21 Painting, Dawn at the Alamo, by Henry Arthur McArdle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. volunteers left for San Antonio under command of Stephen F. Austin. She remained in Gonzales through November, when newly arriving troops looted her home.

She joined Dickinson in San Antonio, probably in December 1835, and lodged in Ramón Músquiz's home, where she opened her table to boarders (among them David Crockett) and did laundry. On February 23, 1836, the family moved into the Alamo. After the battle of the Alamo on March 6, Mexican soldiers found her—some accounts say in the powder magazine, others in the church—and took her and Angelina, along with the other women and children, to Músquiz's home. The women were later interviewed by Santa Anna, who gave each a blanket and two dollars in silver before releasing them. Legend says Susanna displayed her husband's Masonic apron to a Mexican general in a plea for help and that Santa Anna offered to take Angelina to Mexico.

Santa Anna sent Susanna and her daughter, accompanied by Juan N. Almonte's servant Ben, to Sam Houston with a letter of warning dated March 7. On the way,

22 the pair met Joe, William B. Travis's slave, who had been freed by Santa Anna. The party was discovered by Erastus (Deaf) Smith and Henry Wax Karnes. Smith guided them to Houston in Gonzales, where they arrived after dark about March 12.

Susanna Dickinson probably followed the army eastward in company with the other Gonzales women. Illiterate, without family, and only twenty-two years old, she petitioned the government meeting at Columbia in October 1836 for a donation, but the proposed $500 was not awarded. She needed a male protector, and by June 1837 she was cohabiting with John Williams, whom she married about November 27, 1837. He beat her and Angelina, and she petitioned in Harrisburg (later Harris) County for a divorce, which was granted on March 24, 1838—one of the first divorces in the county.

By 1839 Almeron Dickinson's heirs had Angelina Dickinson. Courtesy of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas received rights to 2,560 acres for his Library. military service; they sold the land when Angelina reached twenty-one. Subsequent requests to the state legislature in November 1849 were turned down. Susanna tried matrimony three more times before settling into a stable relationship. She wed Francis P. Herring on December 20, 1838, in Houston. Herring, formerly from Georgia, had come to Texas after October 20, 1837. He died on September 15, 1843. On December 15, 1847, Susanna married Pennsylvania drayman Peter Bellows (also known as Bellis or Belles) before an Episcopalian minister. In 1850 the couple had sixteen-year-old Angelina living with them. But by 1854 Susanna had left Bellows, who charged her with adultery and prostitution when he filed for divorce in 1857. Susanna may have lived in the Mansion House Hotel of Pamelia Mann, which was known as a brothel, before marrying Bellows. The divorce petition accuses her of taking up residence in a "house of ill fame." Nevertheless, Susanna received praise from the Baptist minister Rufus C.

23 Burleson for her work nursing cholera victims in Houston, where he baptized her in Buffalo Bayou in 1849.

Susanna's fifth marriage was long-lasting. She married Joseph William Hannig (or Hannag), a native of Germany living in Lockhart, in 1857. They soon moved to Austin, where Hannig became prosperous with a cabinet shop and later a furniture store and undertaking parlor; he also owned a store in San Antonio. Susanna became ill in February 1883 and died on October 7 of that year. Hannig buried her in Oakwood Cemetery, and even though he married again, he was buried next to Susanna after his death in 1890.

Susanna Dickinson. Courtesy of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Tombstone of Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson Hannig.

24 Mary Maverick 10 By Paula Mitchell Marks

Mary Adams Maverick, pioneer and diarist, whose published memoirs chronicle her pioneer experiences in Texas, was born on March 16, 1818, in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, the daughter of William Lewis and Agatha Strother (Lewis) Adams. Adams was a lawyer. Mary grew up on the family plantation three miles north of Tuscaloosa, where she received schooling. On August 4, 1836, at her home, she married Samuel Augustus Maverick, who had participated in the Texas Revolution. After extended visits to relatives in Alabama and South Carolina, the couple moved to Texas at the beginning of 1838.

The Mavericks searched for years for a permanent home along the unsettled Texas Mary A. Maverick. Courtesy of the frontier. They located first in San Antonio, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. where Sam wished to spend his time speculating in West Texas land; then, during the Runaway of '42, an exodus of families from San Antonio at the news of approaching Mexican soldiers under Adrián Woll, they set up a home on the Colorado River near Gonzales. They moved to Decrows (Decros) Point on Matagorda Bay in 1844 and remained there until October 1847, when they returned to San Antonio.

Most of Mary Maverick's energies during these early years in Texas went into the raising of her family. She bore ten children in twenty-one years; four died of illness before they reached the age of eight, leading their mother to seek solace in

25 the spiritualism and alternative medical treatment so popular in mid-nineteenth-century America. As her surviving children grew up, she became increasingly active in the public sphere. During the Civil War, when she had four sons in the Confederate Army, she was active in San Antonio relief efforts. She also devoted much of her time to church work. A devout Episcopalian, she was instrumental in establishing and developing St. Mark's Church in San Antonio and served as president of the Ladies' Parish Aid Society for over twenty years.

After her husband's death in 1870, as San Antonio grew and thrived, Mary Mary Maverick and family (1851). Courtesy of Maverick made efforts to see that the the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. pioneer past was not forgotten. She was a prominent member of the San Antonio Historical Society and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. She helped promote the annual Battle of Flowers celebration, and she served as president of the Alamo Monument Association for many years, during which she kept before the public the need for restoration of the historic site. Her watercolor sketch of the mission, completed during her first residence in San Antonio, is often referred to by historians, and in 1889 she wrote a brief account of the fall of the Alamo.

Daughters of the Republic of Texas Mary had kept diaries of her frontier official seal. Courtesy of the Daughters of experiences, and in 1880 she shaped the Republic of Texas. them into memoirs. Fifteen years later,

26 with the help of her son George Madison Maverick, she published a limited number of copies. The memoirs have since been reprinted and provide a vivid picture of life on the Texas frontier. Mary Maverick's work, particularly her eyewitness account of the Council House Fight in San Antonio in 1840, has often been cited in studies of Texas pioneer life. She died on February 24, 1898, and was buried beside her husband in City Cemetery No. 1, San Antonio.

Mary Maverick diary. Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

27 Margaret Houston 11 By William Seale

Margaret Houston, wife of Sam Houston, was born near Marion, Alabama, on April 11, 1819, the daughter of Temple and Nancy (Moffette) Lea. On the death of her father in 1834, she moved with her mother from the family farm in Pleasant Valley, near Marion, into town, to the home of Margaret's elder brother Henry Lea, a successful businessman and state legislator. She was educated first at Pleasant Valley Academy and subsequently at Judson Female Institute.

In Mobile, Alabama, in 1839 she was introduced to Gen. Sam Houston at a party held by her sister Antoinette, Mrs. William Bledsoe. Despite an age difference of twenty- six years and Houston's well-known difficulties with drink, they were married on May 9, 1840, after a year-long courtship. Margaret Houston. Courtesy of the Margaret's kin apparently opposed the Sam Houston Memorial Museum. marriage. Soon after the wedding, members of her family moved to Texas, where they moved in and out of the Houstons' lives for the next quarter century.

Margaret, a beautiful young woman, was utterly devoted to Houston through their twenty-three-year marriage. Some of his faults she openly battled, while others she had to learn to tolerate. Being deeply religious, she could not stand his drinking. Rather than nag him, she made him realize that his drinking hurt her and profaned the sanctity of their home; in this way she led Houston to declare total abstinence, which, with some difficulty, he kept to for the rest of

28 his life. Convincing him to join the Baptist Church and be baptized proved a greater task, but one in which she succeeded, with the help of Rev. George W. Baines, on November 19, 1854, when Houston was baptized by Rev. Rufus C. Burleson in Little Rocky Creek, near Independence.

There were compromises: Houston's wandering she found herself helpless to curtail. Not long after moving to Texas Margaret realized that her health, particularly her chronic asthma, prevented her following him in his restless journeys from place to place; she determined then to make a home that would beckon him, but not to follow. During Houston's long years in the United States Senate, she never once went to Washington, nor did she travel his nearly endless campaign trails. Staying at home, she created a domestic circle on which he looked increasingly as a haven. Her letters to him reinforced the shrine of home. Her method worked, in a great measure, for in his absences he longed for her and the large household, which ultimately included eight children. The letters of husband and wife tell not only of a love of family but a deep love for one another.

The Houstons had numerous houses in Texas. Only one of these they kept continuously, Cedar Point, on Trinity Bay. It was a modest building, like most of the rest, built of logs, weatherboarded, with four or five rooms and the household services in separate buildings in the yard. Mrs. Houston, who loved gardening, maintained vegetable and flower gardens at all of her houses. Of their The Governor’s Mansion in Austin (1860). Courtesy of homes only the house at the Texas Tribune. Huntsville, which is greatly remodeled, the rented Steamboat House nearby, and the Governor's Mansion in Austin are still standing. Raven Hill, Cedar Point, and the house in Independence, near old Baylor College, are gone. Surprisingly few of the Houstons' personal possessions survive.

29 The palmy days of the Houstons' life together were the years when he was in the Senate. Then they had money to spend and did not have to rely upon farming or land speculation, at which Houston was never successful. When Houston was in Texas the family was not likely to remain long in one place, but traveled about from house to house in a big horse-drawn carryall enclosed in canvas. Nearly every summer they spent time at Cedar Point. Autumn found them in Huntsville or Independence. Before 1853 Nancy Lea lived regularly with them, managing the household, a job that held no interest for Mrs. Houston. Of the fourteen slaves, about five were house servants, presided over by Mrs. Houston's maid, Aunt Eliza, also a slave, who was about Margaret Houston. Courtesy of ten years older than Mrs. Houston the Sam Houston Memorial and devoted to her well-being. Museum.

Mrs. Houston's inquiring mind led her by the late 1840s wholly away from reading novels and plays into religious studies. Her letters to Sam contained long passages on religion and reflected her great insecurity about the beliefs she professed. Often ill, often pregnant, and often idle, for she was waited upon by others, she became subject to periods of depression. The idea of hell terrified her. Circumstances surrounding the death of her close friend Frances Creath at Huntsville in January 1856 led her to conclusions that finally gave her peace on the subject of religion and strengthened her through difficult times.

The unhappy climax of Houston's long political career in 1861 and his subsequent removal from the office of governor of Texas were followed by his two final years in retirement and relative obscurity. Living between Huntsville and Cedar Point, Mrs. Houston was with her husband constantly, assuming more duties than ever previously in her married life. Sustained by religion and her children, she saw Houston decline rapidly and gave him support where she could.

30 After his death in Huntsville in 1863, the widow was in serious financial straits. She moved to Independence to be once again near her mother, who had emerged from the war with some money. Mrs. Houston rented a house and labored to hold her family together. Her condition eventually eased when the state legislature voted to pay her the unpaid balance of Houston's salary as governor. In the fall of 1867, while preparing to move with her youngest children to Georgetown to live with her married daughter Nannie, she contracted yellow fever. She died at Independence on December 3, 1867, where because of health laws she was buried at once, next to the tomb that Nancy Lea had built to contain them both.

Margaret Houston historical marker. Courtesy of Sandi Haynie Photography.

31 Tamar Morgan 12 By Sherilyn Brandenstein

Tamar Morgan, a Texas colonial landowner, was a free black woman. She reportedly arrived in the Brazoria area in 1832 as a slave. In 1834 she bought her freedom and on May 24, 1838, married Samuel H. Hardin, a free black barber in Brazoria. Around 1839 sixty-five white citizens of Brazoria County petitioned the Republic of Texas Congress to grant the Hardins an exemption from the law requiring free blacks to leave Texas. The petitioners vouched for the couple's industry, and each one's investments in property. Brazoria tax rolls indicate that by 1840 Tamar Morgan Hardin owned four town lots, 100 acres of additional land, and four slaves. She continued to maintain property in Brazoria through 1844.

Samuel H. Hardin and Tamar Morgan petition to reside in Texas. Courtesy of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

32 Frances Cox Henderson 13 By Mary D. Farrell

Frances Cox Henderson, cultural leader, church builder, and first lady of Texas, daughter of John and Martha (Lyman) Cox, was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 21, 1820. Her father recognized that his daughter had exceptional intellectual ability when she was only nine years old and arranged for his children to be educated in Europe. Frances learned to speak at least eighteen languages, was proficient in mathematics, became an accomplished musician, and wrote and translated short stories. Her book Epitome of Modern European Literature (1882) contained stories translated from nineteen languages.

In Paris, at the age of nineteen, she met and became engaged to James Pinckney Henderson, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary from the Republic Frances Cox Henderson. of Texas to the Court of St. James in London and the Tuilleries in Paris. They were married at St. George's parish in Hanover Square, London, on October 30, 1839. In 1840 the young couple arrived in Galveston, Texas, and went directly to San Augustine, where Henderson opened his law office.

Frances studied law and became proficient enough in the subject to carry on the law practice when James had to be away on state business. Henderson was elected the first governor of the state of Texas in 1845 and moved to Austin for his two-year term. His wife remained in San Augustine. One of her major

33 contributions was to establish Episcopal churches in San Augustine, Rusk, Palestine, and Nacogdoches. When the Committee on Domestic Missions in Philadelphia indicated reluctance to send a new pastor to San Augustine, the vestrymen of the San Augustine church gave Mrs. Henderson the authority to call a minister. In 1855 she went to Philadelphia and shocked Bishop Alonzo Potter by producing her credentials and insisting that she be allowed to address the clergy of the diocese, something no woman had done before. She made her point, and East Texas received a new minister.

Three daughters, Frances, Julia, and Martha, were born to the Hendersons while they lived in San Augustine. Two other children died young. In 1856 the family moved to Marshall, Texas. Mrs. Henderson was zealous in developing Trinity Episcopal Church in that city. In addition to her leadership as a church builder, she supported woman suffrage. She also shared with her neighbors the benefits of her talents and education without alienating them by appearing superior. She gave free speech and music lessons to children of the community. In addition to entertaining her husband's political and business associates, she opened her home regularly to the townspeople for parties.

In 1857 Henderson was appointed to the seat of United States senator Thomas J. Rusk, who had committed suicide. Frances Henderson went to Washington, D.C., with him. His health declined rapidly, and in less than a year he died there. His wife's primary concerns were now the education of her daughters and the threat of civil war. Her sympathies were divided, for Philadelphia was the place of her birth, but Texas was her adopted home. She decided to solve both problems by going to Europe, where the girls could have the best educational opportunities available and she could avoid the problem of divided allegiance in time of war. With income from the sale of her Texas land she was financially independent. A close friend, Ashbel Smith, helped her dispose of the property. Frances Cox Henderson. Courtesy of Internet Archive.

34 The Hendersons' youngest daughter, Martha, died in Germany at the age of eighteen. Fanny married an Austrian baron in 1864 and did not return to the United States. In 1868 Julia married Edward White Adams, an American sugar-plantation owner whom she met in France. Frances Henderson returned to the United States with Julia and her family and lived with them until her death. Her experience living on the plantation moved her to write a book about a black woman, Priscilla Baker: Freed Woman (1874). In the last years of her life she was busy as a community leader in East Orange, New Jersey. She established the House of the Good Shepherd for aged and invalid women and a laundry for older women who were able to work. She was also active in the work of the East Orange Free Library and in the support of St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Tombstone of Frances Cox Henderson. She died at the home of her daughter on January 25, 1897, and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, East Orange, New Jersey.

35 Cynthia Ann Parker 14 By Margaret Schmidt Hacker

Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive of the Comanches, was born to Lucy (Duty) and Silas M. Parker in Crawford County, Illinois. According to the 1870 census of Anderson County she would have been born between June 2, 1824, and May 31, 1825. When she was nine or ten her family moved to Central Texas and built Fort Parker on the headwaters of the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County. On May 19, 1836, a large force of Comanche warriors accompanied by Kiowa and Kichai allies attacked the fort and killed several of its inhabitants. During the raid the Comanches seized five captives, including Cynthia Ann. The other four were eventually released, but Cynthia remained with the Indians for almost twenty-five years, forgot white ways, and became thoroughly Comanche. It is said that Cynthia Ann Parker (circa 1860). in the mid-1840s her brother, John Parker, who had been captured with her, asked her to return to their white family, but she refused, explaining that she loved her husband and children too much to leave them. She is also said to have rejected Indian trader Victor Rose's invitation to accompany him back to white settlements a few years later, though the story of the invitation may be apocryphal.

A newspaper account of April 29, 1846, describes an encounter of Col. Leonard G. Williams's trading party with Cynthia, who was camped with Comanches on the Canadian River. Despite Williams's ransom offers, tribal

36 elders refused to release her. Later, federal officials P. M. Butler and M. G. Lewis encountered Cynthia Ann with the Yamparika Comanches on the Washita River; by then she was a full-fledged member of the tribe and married to a Comanche warrior. She never voluntarily returned to white society. Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors learned, probably in 1848, that she was among the Tenawa Comanches. He was told by other Comanches that only force would induce her captors to release her. She had married Peta Nocona and eventually had two sons, Quanah Parker and Pecos, and a daughter, Topsannah.

On December 18, 1860, Texas Rangers under attacked a Comanche hunting camp at Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease River. During this raid the rangers captured three of the supposed Indians. They were surprised to find that one of them had blue eyes; it was a non-English-speaking white woman with her infant daughter. Col. Isaac Parker later identified her as his niece, Cynthia Ann. Cynthia accompanied her uncle to Birdville on the condition that military interpreter Horace P. Jones would send along her sons if they were found. While traveling through Fort Worth she was photographed with her daughter at her breast and her hair cut short—a Comanche sign of mourning. She thought that Peta Nocona was dead and feared that she would never see her sons again. On April 8, 1861, a sympathetic Texas legislature voted her a grant of $100 annually for five years and a league of land and appointed Isaac D. and Benjamin F. Parker her guardians. But she was never reconciled to living in white society and made several unsuccessful attempts to flee to her Comanche family. After three months at Birdville, her brother Silas took her to his Van Zandt County home. She afterward moved to her sister's place near the boundary of Anderson and Henderson counties. Though she is said in some sources to have died in 1864, the 1870 census enrolled her and gave her age as forty-five. At her death she was buried in Cynthia Ann Parker (1861). Courtesy of Fosterville Cemetery in Anderson County. Southern Methodist University, In 1910 her son Quanah moved her body DeGolyer Library.

37 to the Post Oak Mission Cemetery near Cache, Oklahoma. In 1957 her body and that of Quanah's were reinterred in the Fort Sill Post Cemetery at Lawton, Oklahoma. In the last years of Cynthia Ann's life she never saw her Indian family, the only family she really knew. But she was a true pioneer of the American West, whose legacy was carried on by her son Quanah. Serving as a link between whites and Comanches, Quanah Parker became the most influential Comanche leader of the reservation era.

Tombstone of Cynthia Ann Parker at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

38 Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy 15 By Cynthia E. Orozco

Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy, rancher and philanthropist, was born on June 29, 1825, in Mier, Mexico, to Gregorio and Josefa (Resendez) Vela. Her father was a provincial governor under Spain with jurisdiction over the territory lying between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande and over the Indian tribes within. Petra was one of the few Mexican-origin upper-class women in nineteenth-century Texas. In December 1840 she married Luis Vidal, who was originally from Greece and was a colonel of the Mexican regular army. They had six children before Luis died. Already a wealthy woman, she married rancher Mifflin Kenedy on April 16, 1852, in Brownsville. Mifflin was Portrait of Petra Vela Kenedy. Courtesy a Quaker, but he accepted her faith, of Raymondville Historical Museum. Catholicism. At this time intermarriage between white men and Mexican-origin women was not common and more typically occurred among elites. The Kenedys had six children, and another was adopted. As did most women in nineteenth-century Texas, Petra dedicated much of her life to childbearing, childrearing, and the domestic support of the family and the ranch. In 1854 the Kenedys owned a flock of 10,000 sheep near El Sal del Rey in Hidalgo County. During the Civil War Kenedy established his wealth through the cotton trade and steamboating, and throughout the 1860s he was in partnership with Richard King in land, cattle, horses, and sheep. In 1869 the Kenedy family moved from Brownsville and established the Laureles Ranch in Nueces County, and in 1870 the federal census enumerated the Kenedys in Duval County. Their real estate was valued at $21,000, and their personal assets at $139,600. In 1880 Petra Kenedy resided

39 with her family at the Laureles Ranch, which consisted of 172,000 fenced acres; soon 161 workers were employed there, including vaqueros, shepherds, and laborers. Petra probably oversaw the six servants. The ranch also included more than twenty families with Mexican-origin women "keeping house," more than forty children, and a Canadian schoolmaster. Petra may have used her influence to prevent raids on the ranch. In 1882 Kenedy sold the ranch to the Texas Land and Cattle Company, apparently when Petra became an invalid for reasons doctors could not understand. The Kenedy family established the Kenedy Pasture Company in Cameron County with headquarters at La Parra Ranch, the home of their son, John G. Kenedy. But Petra and Mifflin settled in Corpus Christi. In 1884 Kenedy was among the twenty-two persons or firms whose property was valued at over $10,000. The Kenedy residence there was an Italian villa-style home. In Corpus Christi Petra Kenedy helped the church and the poor. A devout Catholic, she donated three bells for the tower and other gifts for the new Catholic church. She also made generous donations to St. Mary's Church in Brownsville. Petra died at Corpus Christi on March 16, 1885, and was buried at Brownsville. Her obituary noted that "the poor never appealed to her in vain and their wants were often anticipated."

Tombstone of Petra Vela Kenedy.

40 Zilpha Husk 16 By Mary M. Standifer

Zilpha (Zelia, Zylphia) Husk, a free black woman who resided in Houston during the period of the Republic of Texas, was born in Richmond County, Georgia. Her freedom was certified by the circuit court of Autauga County, Alabama, in November 1837. That same month her daughter Emily was apprenticed to George B. McLeskey in Montgomery, Alabama. By 1838 Husk was living in Houston, where in 1839 she received the revocation of Emily's apprenticeship from McLeskey, who then resided in Washington County.

Her residence in Texas was jeopardized by a bill approved on February 5, 1840, requiring all free blacks to leave Texas by January 1, 1842. When Congress reconvened in November 1840 it was deluged by petitions from free blacks seeking permission to remain. Among these petitions was one from Husk, endorsed by forty-one Houstonians. She stated that she had arrived in Texas in 1835 and that she worked as a washerwoman. Her plea was approved in consequence of a new law, enacted on December 12, 1840, granting the right of residency to "all free persons of color together with their families" who resided in Texas before the Texas Declaration of Zilpha Husk petition to reside in Texas. Independence (March 2, 1836). Courtesy of the Texas State Library and Husk subsequently learned, Archives Commission.

41 however, that she had actually arrived in Texas after March 2 and therefore was not exempted from the expulsion law of February 5, 1840. She consequently petitioned Congress again in December 1841, offering the signatures of fifty endorsers. This petition, along with those of four other free blacks, was apparently tabled after a House committee recommended their indefinite postponement. Altogether, she submitted three petitions to Congress; the third is undated.

Under the terms of two presidential proclamations later issued by Sam Houston, African Americans in Husk's position were allowed to remain three years beyond the 1842 deadline, provided they petition the chief justice of their county court and post a $500 bond. Although Husk apparently did not meet these requirements, she seems not to have been prosecuted. Indeed, the Harris County chief justice, Isaac N. Moreland, had previously signed her petitions to Congress. Husk was still residing in Houston in 1849, when the Harris County grand jury indicted her and Edmund Mitchell, a white man, for fornication. A petit jury found Mitchell not guilty, and the case against Zilpha Husk was subsequently dropped.

42 Rachel Hamilton Hornsby 17 By Randolph B. Campbell

Rachel Hamilton Hornsby, slave and freedwoman, was born in the mid-1830s in Randolph County, Alabama. As a slave, she belonged to Andrew Jackson Hamilton, who moved her to Travis County, Texas, in 1847. She married Nathaniel Grumbles, another Travis County slave, during the 1850s and gave birth to her first child, James Grumbles, on March 4, 1857. Since she and her husband were slaves, this marriage had no legal standing. Just before the Civil War Hamilton freed Rachel, and she found work as a hired servant in Austin. Free blacks, however, could not remain in antebellum Texas without permission from the state legislature, so she was arrested and held in jail in Austin until she could be placed under the control of a "guardian." She chose Aaron Burleson and returned to slavery as a nurse to his invalid daughter, Maggie. After emancipation, Rachel left her slave husband and, on May 20, 1870, married Robert Hornsby, a former slave of the Hornsby family in Travis County. They had five children together and supported themselves by farming. Rachel Hornsby lived to be more than seventy-five years and died sometime between 1910 and 1920. Her son, James Grumbles, lived in Travis County into the late 1930s and contributed his mother's story to the WPA Slave Narratives in 1937.

43 Josefa “Chipita” Rodríguez 18 By Marylyn Underwood

Josefa (Chipita) Rodríguez was for many years considered to be the only woman legally hanged in Texas. Most of her story verges on legend; facts surrounding her arrest, trial, and execution are scant, and many aspects of her story, including the name Josefa, cannot be verified. She is believed to have been the daughter of Pedro Rodríguez, who is said to have fled from Antonio López de Santa Anna. Chipita moved with her father to San Patricio de Hibernia, Texas, while quite young, and for many years after Rodríguez's death furnished travelers with meals and a cot on the porch of her lean-to shack on the Nueces River. When Cotton Road traveler John Savage was murdered with an ax, presumably for the $600 in gold which he had been carrying, Chipita was accused of robbery and murder. Recovery of the gold from the Nueces River north of San Patricio, where Savage's body was found in a Josefa Rodríguez historical marker. burlap bag, raised substantial doubt about the motive for the crime, but Josefa Rodríguez and Juan Silvera (who sources suggest may have been her illegitimate son) were indicted on circumstantial evidence and tried before Fourteenth District Court judge Benjamin F. Neal at San Patricio. After Chipita pleaded not guilty, the jury recommended mercy, but Neal ordered her executed on November 13, 1863. For some time she was held at sheriff William Means's home in Meansville, where two attempts by a lynching mob were thwarted. According to legend, Chipita was kept in leg irons and chained to a wall in the courthouse. There, local children brought her

44 candy and shucks to make cigarettes. At the time, she was described as "very old" or "about ninety," but was probably in her sixties.

The court records, except for a week of transcripts, were burned in a courthouse fire or lost in a flood, and many discrepancies exist in trial accounts. From these it has been determined that no list of qualified jurors existed, but the sheriff, instructed as jury foreman to produce "at least twenty qualified men," produced closer to thirty; at least three members of the grand jury also served on the trial jury; the foreman of the grand jury was the sheriff who arrested her; members of both juries had been indicted on felony charges; Chipita had little in the way of defense counsel, and her sole defense was the words "not guilty." There was no appeal or motion in arrest of judgment, and though some talk of a retrial may have occurred, none took place. Lore says that resident Kate McCumber drove off hangman John Gilpin when he came for her wagon to transport Chipita to the hanging tree. At least one witness to the hanging claimed he later heard a moan from the coffin, which was placed in an unmarked grave. Many tales have arisen as a result of the trial and the hanging, one of which claims that Chipita was protecting her illegitimate son. Other sources indicate she may have been involved in gathering information to influence the state's decision about which side to take in the Civil War and was framed as a political act. Her ghost is said to haunt the area, especially when a woman is sentenced to be executed. She is pictured as a specter with a noose around her neck, wailing from the riverbottoms. She has been the subject of two operas, numerous books, newspaper articles, and magazine accounts.

In 1985 state senator Carlos Truan of Corpus Christi asked the Texas legislature to absolve Chipita Rodríguez of murder. The Sixty-ninth Legislature passed the resolution, and it was signed by Governor Mark White on June 13, 1985.

Jane Elkins, a slave convicted of murder, was hanged on May 27, 1853, in Dallas. She was the first woman legally hanged in the state.

45 Salomé Ballí Young 19 By Alicia A. Garza

Salomé Ballí was born in Mexico in 1831 and lived in Cameron County, Texas. She was a descendant of one of the early owners of the Santa Anita land grant, which included the McAllen Ranch. In 1848 she married John Young; they expanded the ranch and had a son before John died in 1859. In 1860, at age twenty-nine, Salomé owned $100,000 in real property and $25,000 in personal property. At that time she was one of four individuals born in Mexico enumerated in a group of 263 "wealthy Texans." Some of her contemporaries in Cameron County included J. Cabaza, Juan N. Cabaza, Juan San Román, John V. Singer, and Charles Stillman.

Salomé Ballí Young. Courtesy of McAllen Ranch.

46 Henrietta Chamberlain King 20 By Edgar P. Sneed

Henrietta Maria Morse Chamberlain King, rancher and philanthropist, the only child of Maria (Morse) and Hiram Chamberlain, was born on July 21, 1832, in Boonville, Missouri. Her mother's death in 1835 and her father's Presbyterian missionary work in Missouri and Tennessee often made her childhood lonely; as a result she became strongly self- reliant and introspective, and she maintained close attachments to her family. She attended Female Institute of Holly Springs, Mississippi, for two years, beginning when she was fourteen. She moved to Brownsville, Texas, probably in Henrietta Chamberlain King. Courtesy of UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures. 1849, for she was living there when her father organized the first Presbyterian mission in South Texas at Brownsville, on February 23, 1850. In 1854 she taught briefly at the Rio Grande Female Institute before her marriage to Richard King on December 10, 1854; they had five children. In 1854 Henrietta and Richard King established their home on the Santa Gertrudis Ranch (see KING RANCH). Their original dwelling was a mud and stick jacal, but this was eventually replaced with a house overlooking Santa Gertrudis Creek. Not only was Henrietta King wife and mother, but she also was supervisor of housing and education for the families of Mexican-American ranchhands. During the Civil War the ranch was an official receiving station for cotton that was ferried first to Mexican ports and then on to England. When King left the ranch to escape capture by Union forces in 1863, a pregnant Henrietta remained. After the house was plundered she moved the family to San Antonio until they could safely return home. Upon her husband's death in 1885 Mrs. King assumed full ownership of his estate, consisting chiefly of 500,000 acres of ranchland between Corpus Christi and Brownsville and $500,000 in debts.

47 Under Henrietta King's skillful and personal supervision, and with the assistance of her son- in-law, Robert Justus Kleberg, the King Ranch was freed of debt and increased in size. By 1895 the 650,000-acre ranch was engaged in experiments in cattle and horse breeding, in range grasses, and in dry and irrigated farming. That year King gave Kleberg her power of attorney and increased his ranch responsibilities. The ranch continued to grow, Henrietta Chamberlain King. reaching a size of 1,173,000 acres by 1925. One of the horses bred at the ranch won the Triple Crown in 1946. The Santa Gertrudis cattle developed there were a boon to the Texas cattle industry because of their resistance to disease and heat. King was also interested in the settlement of the region between Corpus Christi and Brownsville. About 1903 she offered 75,000 acres of right-of-way to Uriah Lott and Benjamin Franklin Yoakum, who planned to construct the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway. In 1904 she furnished townsites for Kingsville and Raymondville, located on the railway. She founded the Kleberg Town and Improvement Company and the Kingsville Lumber Company to sell land and materials to settlers in Kingsville. As the town grew she invested in the Kingsville Main House of King Ranch. Courtesy of San Antonio Ice and Milling Company, Express-News.

48 Kingsville Publishing Company, Kingsville Power Company, Gulf Coast Gin Company, and Kingsville Cotton Oil Mill Company. She constructed the First Presbyterian Church building there and also donated land for Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, and Catholic churches; she constructed a public high school and presented it to the town. Among her many charities were donations of land for the Texas-Mexican Industrial Institute and for the Spohn Sanitarium (see SPOHN HOSPITAL). In her last years she provided land and encouragement for the establishment of South Texas State Teachers College (now Texas A&M University-Kingsville). Henrietta King died on March 31, 1925, on the King Ranch and was buried in Kingsville. At her funeral an honor guard of 200 vaqueros, riding quarter horses branded with the ranch's Running W, flanked the hearse. Each rider cantered Tombstone of Henrietta Chamberlain once around the open grave. King. Courtesy of Mary Richardson Photography.

49 Mary Ann Goodnight 21 By Joyce Gibson Roach

Mary Ann (Molly) Goodnight, wife of Texas rancher Charles Goodnight and daughter of Joel (or Joe) Henry and Susan Lynch (Miller) Dyer, was born in Madison County, Tennessee, on September 12, 1839. She was called Mary by her husband but known as Molly to others. The first lady of the Palo Duro Canyon was at one time the only woman on the vast JA Ranch established by Goodnight and John Adair in 1877. Enshrined in the minds and hearts of countless cowboys as the Mother of the Panhandle, Molly became doctor, nurse, homemaker, spiritual comforter, sister, and mother to the hands who worked for her husband. Such a diversity of responsibility would have proved difficult on any ranch in Texas, but Molly's Mary Ann Goodnight. home counted as one of its borders a solitary canyon 1,500 feet deep, 10 miles wide and almost 100 miles long, where once Comanche Indians roamed and camped. Mary Ann Dyer knew something about the hard, frontier existence of Texas even before she married and settled on the rim of the Palo Duro. She was fourteen years old when she was brought to Fort Belknap, Texas, in 1854 by her father and mother. Molly's father was a prominent lawyer in Tennessee before he settled his family in the Eastern Cross Timbers region of Texas. Sometime after 1854 her parents died, and Molly had to take care of her five brothers. In the late 1850s or early 1860s she worked as a schoolteacher to support her three youngest brothers. During the Civil War the elder Dyer brothers served in the Confederacy. Molly met Charles Goodnight at Fort Belknap about 1864. In the mid-to-late 1860s she moved to Weatherford, Texas, to teach.

50 Molly and Charles Goodnight. Courtesy of the Charles Goodnight Historical Center.

On July 26, 1870 Molly and Charles were married in Hickman, Kentucky. They had no children. They settled down to ranching near Pueblo, Colorado, where Charles had already established a ranch. Three of Molly's brothers also worked on the ranch. One of them, Leigh, had one-fourth interest in the herds. For seven years the Goodnight-Dyer Cattle Company remained in Colorado. Molly thought Texas much more civilized than her new home. When two Coe men were hung on a telegraph pole, she was horrified. Charles did not know what to say in order to soothe his wife. He stammered, "Well, I don't think it hurt the telegraph pole." The Panic of 1873 and drought ultimately caused the Goodnights to move back to Texas. Charles received financial backing from John George Adair, who owned a large estate in Rothdair, Ireland. The two entered into a partnership. Mr. and Mrs. Adair, Charles Goodnight, Molly, Molly's brother Albert Dyer, and several cowhands moved a herd to the Palo Duro Canyon and put up a two-room cabin about May 1877. Mrs. Adair rode horseback while Molly drove a team and wagon. In a few weeks the Adairs left the enterprise to Charles and Molly. Through the years Molly established her place as wife and helpmate to the most famous rancher on the High Plains. Her first neighbor was the wife of T. S. Bugbee, and although neither saw anyone from six to twelve months, both

51 claimed that they were happy. Molly's husband designed a special two-horned sidesaddle so that she could more easily ride on the ranch. Her immediate friends were the cowboys and a few curious Indians, and she kept as pets three chickens that a cowhand gave her. While Molly's life centered on the traditional chores of ranch life, however, her interests extended to protecting baby buffalo left to die after commercial hunters ravaged the Plains. Through rescuing and raising orphaned buffaloes Mrs. Goodnight helped establish the Goodnight buffalo herd, which became well known throughout the world. Some buffalo were also crossbred with range cattle to produce "Cattalo." Molly also had a separate herd, first in Colorado under her PATM brand and later in Texas under the Flying T brand. She commissioned artist J. C. Cowles to paint the scenes around their ranch, including the home and Palo Duro Canyon. In 1887 the Goodnights moved to northeast Armstrong County. After the Panhandle became more Tombstones of Mary Ann and Charles Goodnight. thickly populated, churches, schools, and other organizations found Molly willing to help philanthropically. She helped establish Goodnight College in 1898. The small railhead town of Goodnight and a church there were named for the ranching couple. Molly died in April 1926. An inscription on her headstone reads: "One who spent her whole life in the service of others." Her presence is felt in the tales left behind, in the cultural life of the Panhandle, and in the memory of cowboys who rode the steep red cliffs of the canyon where Molly faithfully served her husband and all others who passed her way.

52 Elizabeth Williams 22 By Robert S. Duncan

Lizzie E. Johnson Williams, schoolteacher, cattle dealer, and investor, was born on May 9, 1840, in Cole County, Missouri, the second of the seven children of Thomas Jefferson and Catharine (Hyde) Johnson. About 1844 her family moved to Texas; they lived in Huntsville, Lockhart, and Webberville, where Thomas Johnson taught school, before settling on Bear Creek in Hays County. Lizzie received her basic education at the Johnson Institute and earned a degree in 1859 from the Chappell Hill Female College in Washington County. She began her career as a schoolteacher at the Johnson Institute, a private coeducational school founded in 1852 in Hays County by her parents. Before establishing her own primary school in Austin, she taught at Lockhart, Pleasant Hill Elizabeth “Lizzie” Williams. School (at that time south of Austin), Parson's Courtesy of Larry Chenault. Seminary in Manor, and Oak Grove Academy in Austin. In 1873 she purchased a lot in Austin, where she later resided in a two-story home and conducted classes on the first floor. She later kept books for cattlemen and invested in cattle and land. She was teaching in Austin as late as 1880. Through her bookkeeping and her acquaintance with prominent cattlemen and investors of the day, including George W. Littlefield, William H. Day, and Charles W. Whitis, she recognized the profits to be made in cattle. On June 1, 1871, she registered her cattle brand under the name of Elizabeth Johnson. Two days later she made her first real-estate transaction by purchasing ten acres of land in Austin from Whitis for 3,000 gold dollars. She achieved legendary status as an early Texas "cattle queen" and is thought to be

53 the first woman in Texas to ride the Chisholm Trail with a herd of cattle that she had acquired under her own brand. Before her marriage to Hezekiah G. Williams on June 8, 1879, the couple signed a premarital contract allowing her to retain control of her financial affairs and keep her property separate. Although much of the land she eventually acquired was originally owned by her husband, she was thought to have been the controlling influence in his business dealings. She presumably assisted her husband in his attempt to take the county seat away from San Marcos after the Hays County Courthouse burned in 1908. The couple built a town called Hays City on their ranch in Hays County, but their colonization scheme failed and the town ceased to exist. Hezekiah ostensibly conveyed all of his property to Lizzie on July 30, 1896, but the document he had signed was not officially recorded and filed until seventeen years later, when he was in poor health. After her husband's death in 1914, Lizzie grew increasingly reclusive and eccentric. She also had a reputation for being miserly. Because she sometimes appeared to be impoverished, Austinites were startled to learn after her death that Lizzie Williams had amassed almost a quarter of a million dollars. Her holdings included property in Travis, Llano, Hays, Trinity, Culberson, and Jeff Davis counties. She died on October 9, 1924, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin.

Tombstone of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Williams.

54 Myra “Belle” Starr 23 By Leon C. Metz

Belle Starr, also known as the "Bandit Queen" and the subject of much speculation in innumerable stories and popular publications, was born Myra Maybelle (or Belle) Shirley on February 5, 1848, on a farm near Carthage, Missouri, one of six children and the only daughter of John and Elizabeth (or Eliza) (Hatfield) Shirley. Within a few years, the Shirleys moved into Carthage, where they were living when the Civil War started. Young May, as the family called her, probably attended Carthage Female Academy and a private school, Cravens, in Carthage. Her father became a prosperous innkeeper and slaveholder. Sympathizers with the southern cause and supporters of Confederate irregulars such as the raider William Clarke Quantrill, the Shirleys were apparently pleased when their oldest son, Myra “Belle” Starr. Courtesy of John (or Bud), joined a squad of bushwhackers Terry Wright. in bloody reprisals along the Missouri-Kansas border. Whether his death in this activity influenced Belle Shirley's direction in life, as some have speculated, is not certain. By 1864, after Carthage was burned, the family had migrated to Scyene, Texas, near Dallas. There in July 1866 Cole, Jim, Bob, and John Younger and Jesse James, Missouri outlaws who had ridden with Quantrill, used the Shirley home as a hideout. Belle Shirley's relationship with Cole Younger is the subject of many stories, some of which claim that her daughter Rosie Lee, often called Pearl Younger, was his child. He denied it; the likely father was a desperado named Jim Reed, whom Shirley had known in Missouri. She and Reed married on November 1, 1866. Rosie Lee was born in 1868.

55 For a while the Reeds lived in Indian Territory at the home of outlaw Tom Starr, a Cherokee. After Reed was charged with murder, they went to Los Angeles, probably where their son James Edwin (Ed) was born on February 22, 1871. They returned to Texas when Reed's murder charges caught up with him later that year. After their return, Reed became involved with the Younger, James, and Starr gangs, which killed and looted throughout Texas, Arkansas, and Indian Territory. Accounts differ as to Belle Reed's participation in these activities. At least one claims that she disapproved of Reed's actions; more suggest that she operated a livery barn in Dallas where she sold the horses Reed stole. At one point, however, she more than likely moved her children to live with her relatives. There are apparently no records that Belle Reed was ever involved in Myra the “Outlaw Queen” Starr. murder, the robbery of trains, banks, or stagecoaches, or in cattle rustling. Reed robbed the Austin-San Antonio stage in April 1874, and though there is no evidence that Belle Reed participated, she was named as an accessory in the indictment. Jim Reed was killed by a deputy sheriff at Paris, Texas, in August 1874; the story that Belle refused to identify his body in order to prevent the sheriff from claiming the reward is apocryphal.

In 1878 Belle Reed appears to have married Bruce Younger, perhaps in Coffeyville, Kansas. If that relationship existed, it soured, and she married Sam Starr in the Cherokee Nation on June 5, 1880. Belle and Sam Starr were later charged with horse Myra “Belle” Starr (1880). Courtesy of Terry Wright.

56 stealing, a federal offense, and Belle received two six-month terms at the House of Correction in Detroit, Michigan. After this experience Belle Starr came to be known as the Bandit Queen. In 1886 she was again charged with horse theft. This time, because of her legal skills, she was acquitted, but in the meantime her husband and an Indian policeman had shot each other to death. Belle Starr subsequently took several lovers, including Jim July (or Jim Starr), Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French. She survived all but two of the men she lived with. On February 3, 1889, while Starr was living in the Choctaw Nation, near the Canadian River, an unknown assassin killed her from ambush with a shotgun. Although many killers have been suggested, two men remain the primary suspects in the murder. One, Edgar Watson, could have killed her for threatening to turn him in to authorities for murder. The second was Belle Starr's son, Ed, whom she had recently beaten for mistreating her horse. No one was ever convicted. Belle Starr was largely unknown outside the Cherokee Nation, Dallas, and parts of Arkansas when she died. Soon, however, newspaper reports of her death were picked up by Richard K. Fox, the publisher of the National Police Gazette. When he published Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James (1889), a twenty- Tombstone of Myra “Belle” Starr. Courtesy five-cent novel based loosely on her of Terry Wright. life, the legends began. Belle Starr was buried at Younger's Bend, a remote place on the Canadian River where she often lived. Her daughter later erected a headstone engraved with a bell, a star, and a horse, purchased with earnings she made in a brothel.

57 Angelina Dickinson 24 By Katherine L. Massey

Angelina Dickinson, called the Babe of the Alamo, daughter of Almeron and Susanna (Wilkerson) Dickinson (also spelled Dickerson), was born on December 14, 1834, in Gonzales, Texas. By early 1836 her family had moved to San Antonio. On February 23, as the forces of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna entered the city, Dickinson reportedly caught up his wife and daughter behind his saddle and galloped to the Alamo, just before the enemy started firing. In the Alamo, legend says William B. Travis tied his cat's-eye ring around Angelina's neck. Angelina and Susanna survived the final Mexican assault on March 6, 1836. Though Santa Anna wanted to adopt Angelina, her mother Angelina Dickinson. Courtesy of the refused. A few days after the battle, mother Daughters of the Republic of Texas and child were released as messengers to Library. Gen. Sam Houston.

At the end of the revolution, Angelina and her mother moved to Houston. Between 1837 and 1847 Susanna Dickinson married three times. Angelina and her mother were not, however, left without resources. For their participation in the defense of the Alamo, they received a donation certificate for 640 acres of land in 1839 and a bounty warrant for 1,920 acres of land in Clay County in 1855. In 1849 a resolution by Representative Guy M. Bryan for the relief of "the orphan child of the Alamo" to provide funds for Angelina's support and education failed. At the age of seventeen, with her mother's encouragement, Angelina married John Maynard Griffith, a farmer from Montgomery County.

58 Over the next six years, the Griffiths had three children, but the marriage ended in divorce. Leaving two of her children with her mother and one with an uncle, Angelina drifted to New Orleans. Rumors spread of her promiscuity.

Before the Civil War she became associated in Galveston with Jim Britton, a railroad man from Tennessee who became a Confederate officer, and to whom she gave Travis's ring. She is believed to have married Oscar Holmes in 1864 and had a fourth child in 1865. Whether she ever married Britton is uncertain, but according to Flake's Daily Bulletin, Angelina died as "Em Britton" in 1869 of a uterine hemorrhage in Galveston, where she was a known courtesan. William B. Travis ring from the siege of the Alamo. Courtesy of the Texas General Land Office.

59 Jenny Bland Beauchamp 25 By Judith N. McArthur

Jenny Bland Beauchamp, temperance reformer and writer, was the second president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Texas and the first to undertake vigorous guidance. She was a resident of Denton and the wife of Rev. Sylvester Allen Beauchamp, a Baptist minister; they had six children. Mrs. Beauchamp had no previous leadership experience when she took over as president of the WCTU in 1883. During the four years that she held office she organized local unions in more than twenty counties, despite the meagerness of funds to defray travel expenses. Her attempt to defend families against the destructive effects of alcohol led her to a parallel concern for child welfare and social conditions affecting children. Jenny Bland Beauchamp. Under WCTU auspices she organized a rescue home in Fort Worth for girls; a similar one for bootblacks later became the Tarrant County Orphans Home. Jenny Beauchamp initiated the WCTU tradition of petitioning the state legislature for specific social reforms, and under her administration the organization lobbied successfully for a state orphanage at Corsicana. A year after she visited Rusk Penitentiary and launched a petition drive to have juvenile inmates separated from adult criminals, the legislature authorized the Gatesville State School for Boys.

During the final year of her presidency, Mrs. Beauchamp traveled more than 5,000 miles lecturing and organizing for temperance; by the close of her

60 administration Texas had 1,600 WCTU members, organized into about 100 local unions. Jenny Beauchamp was elected to a fifth presidential term in 1888 but declined to serve because of ill health. Like her husband, she was also an active worker in the state prohibition movement in the 1880s. She was a member of the platform committee at the 1886 state convention and the following year served as a delegate to the national convention in Chicago. She also wrote one of the first articles on woman suffrage published in Texas. She contributed material on the legal status of women in Texas to The History of Woman Suffrage (1887) and published poems and prose. She wrote Maplehurst; or Campbellism not Christianity (1867) and Our Coming King (1895). She died on February 20, 1914, in Columbia, Missouri.

61 Carry Nation 26 By James C. Martin

Carry Nation, prohibitionist, daughter of George and Mary (Campbell) Moore, was born on November 25, 1846, in Garrard County, Kentucky. There was a history of mental illness in her mother's family, and the child was often cared for in the slave quarters when Mrs. Moore's mental state left her incapable of managing the household. Carry was a semi- invalid for much of her childhood. She was raised in Kentucky and Missouri, while her father moved the family restlessly from county to county. From 1860 to 1862 the Moores lived in Grayson County, Texas, until drought forced them to abandon farming and return to Belton, Missouri. There on November 21, 1867, Carry married Dr. Charles Gloyd. They became the parents of a daughter, but Gloyd's alcoholism had destroyed the marriage even before the Carry Nation (1874). Courtesy of child's birth, and he died shortly after Carry's the State Historical Society of parents forced her to return home. She then Missouri. enrolled in Warrensburg Normal Institute and, after receiving a teaching certificate, taught school in Holden, Missouri, for four years. In 1877 she married David Nation, a lawyer, newspaperman, and sometime minister in the Christian Church.

The Nations moved to Texas in 1879 and settled on a cotton plantation on the San Bernard River near Houston. After they failed to make the plantation a success, Carry supported the family by managing a hotel in Columbia. The eventual sale of the plantation enabled them to buy a hotel in Richmond, which

62 Carry ran with sporadic assistance from her husband, who practiced law and corresponded for the Houston Post. As a child she had undergone a dramatic conversion at a revival meeting, and during her stay in Texas she had numerous mystic experiences. She came to believe that she had been elected by God and that she spoke through divine inspiration. After the Methodist and Episcopal churches barred her from teaching in their Sunday schools, she started her own weekly class in the hotel. David Nation also became involved in the Jaybird- Woodpecker War after he denounced the Jaybirds in an article for the Houston Post. To escape assaults and intimidation, the Nations moved in 1889 to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David became pastor of the Christian Church.

In Kansas, as in Texas, Mrs. Nation was known for her charity to the poor. Having been a drunkard's wife herself, she was especially moved by drink- related poverty. But her fanatical views and eccentric behavior made her unpopular, and the abrasiveness of her exhortations to righteousness provoked the Christian Church to expel her from membership. In 1892 she joined the Baptist minister's wife in Medicine Lodge in organizing a local chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and was appointed jail evangelist. In the name of home protection she began a crusade against alcohol and tobacco that lasted the rest of her life. Claiming the justification that saloons were illegal in prohibitionist Kansas, she wrecked "joints" and berated persons who sold liquor. In 1900 she adopted the hatchet as her tool of destruction. The sale of souvenir hatchets and earnings from nationwide lecture tours allowed her to pay the fines that resulted from more than thirty arrests. She propagandized through several short-lived publishing efforts, including The Hatchet, The Home Defender, and The Smasher's Mail, and in 1904 she published her autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation. Although she was a national leader of the extremist Carry Nation (circa 1900). element of the prohibitionist

63 movement, she never had the unqualified support of the WCTU or of any other national organization.

David Nation, whom she reprimanded for his bland pulpit oratory, divorced her in 1901. In her later career Carry became more and more of a public performer, even appearing on the vaudeville circuit as the "Kansas Cyclone." On college campuses, including the University of Texas in 1902 and 1904, undergraduates enjoyed deluding her into believing that prominent members of the university community were dissolute drunkards. She undertook a last major lecture tour in 1908 in the British Isles and was poorly received. Declining physical and mental health forced her into semiretirement on a mountain farm in Boone County, Arkansas. In January 1911 she collapsed during a speech in Arkansas and was taken to a hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, where she spent the remaining months of her life in mental confusion. She died there on June 2, 1911, and was buried in Belton, Missouri. See also PROHIBITION, PROGRESSIVE ERA. Carry Nation preparing to lecture. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

64 Bettie Munn Gay 27 By Melissa G. Wiedenfeld

Bettie Munn Gay, prominent member of the Farmers' Alliance and women's rights advocate, daughter of Mary Ann (Talbert) and Neill Munn, was born on December 24, 1836, in Monroe County, Alabama. While she was a small child her parents moved to Texas, and by 1844 her stepfather, Reddin Andrews, was teaching school in Rutersville. In 1851 Bettie Munn married Rufus King Gay in Fayette County, where they lived briefly. Gay served Bettie Munn Gay at home in Columbus. Courtesy of four years in the Civil War, Beth B. Nolen. after which he returned to a 1,700-acre farm in Colorado County to settle with his wife and their only surviving child, James Jehu Bates Gay, who later became a prominent Populist. Gay died in 1880, leaving his wife with a farm to manage and a mortgage to pay. In addition to managing her farm successfully, Bettie Gay participated actively in the Farmers' Alliance, the Socialist party, and the Baptist Church.

She played a large role in the Farmers' Alliance, although her only official position was as a delegate from Texas to the national Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union meeting in St. Louis in 1892. As early as 1888 she wrote to the editor of the Southern Mercury, the official newspaper of the Texas Farmers' Alliance, urging alliance members to boycott high-priced coffee. In 1889 she wrote again, urging a revival of the alliance. The same year Nelson Dunning included a chapter

65 on "The Influence of Women in the Alliance" by Bettie Gay in his Farmers' Alliance History and Agricultural Digest. Gay recommended education as a way women could improve their status in society. In 1894 and 1895 she continued to express herself on women's rights, including suffrage, in letters to the Southern Mercury. She believed that women were better Tombstone of Bettie Munn Gay in Columbus. informed in political economy than many men and that it was up to women to reform the world with their votes. Accordingly, she also worked for prohibition. She died in 1921 and is buried in Columbus, Texas.

66 Mary Elizabeth Lease 28 By Sherrie S. McLeRoy

Mary Elizabeth Lease, lecturer, writer, and political agitator, daughter of Joseph P. and Mary Elizabeth (Murray) Clyens, was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1853. Her father and two brothers were killed during the Civil War, and she subsequently hated the Democratic party, which she considered responsible for the war. In 1868 she graduated from St. Elizabeth's Academy in Allegany, New York. Shortly after her graduation she moved to Osage Mission, Kansas, to teach at St. Anne's Academy. In 1873 she married Charles L. Lease, a pharmacist's clerk, and moved to Kingman County. They lost their farm there and in 1874 moved to Denison, Texas, where four of their five Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease. children were born, while Mary took in washing Courtesy of the Kansas and studied law, her notes pinned above the Historical Society. washtub. Charles took a job at Acheson's Drugstore.

Through the influence of Mrs. Alex (Sarah) Acheson, Mary joined the temperance movement and began her career of political agitation. She was a naturally gifted speaker with an ability to make the mundane seem dramatic. She probably made her first political speech before the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Charles appears to have attempted to augment his fortunes by buying and selling lots in the infant railroad town. By the fall of 1883 the Leases had moved back to Kingman County, Kansas, though they continued to have real estate dealings in Denison for several years. In 1885 Mary was admitted to the Kansas bar and began her activist career in earnest, a move that resulted in her divorce from Charles in

67 1902. She made her political debut in 1888 at the state convention of the Union Labor party, ran for office on its ticket, and soon joined the Farmers' Alliance, or Populist, party. She was referred to as the "People's Joan of Arc." In that party's 1890 campaign she made more than 160 speeches and claimed credit for the defeat of Kansas senator John Ingalls. She opposed big business and stated flatly that "Wall Street owns the country." After she allegedly told Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell," she said a newspaper had made it up, but that it "was a good bit of advice."

In 1892 she traveled the West and South with Populist presidential candidate James Weaver, who noted that the laboring people "almost worshipped her." The next year she pursued a race for United States senator and was vice president of the World Peace Congress in Chicago. She was also appointed president of the Kansas Board of Charities, but had a falling-out with Governor Lorenzo Lewelling over political appointments. Lewelling had been elected to office by a Populist-Democratic coalition. Mary Lease opposed the coalition and refused to support "fusion" appointments. Lewelling tried to remove her from office, going as far as the Kansas Supreme Court, but failed. But despite her victory over Lewelling, she did severe damage to her party by refusing to align with Democrats. The Lease-Lewelling controversy, along with other inner tensions, weakened the People's Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease. (Populist) party, and they were defeated in the 1894 elections at all levels of government.

In 1895 Lease wrote The Problem of Civilization Solved. She moved the next year to New York City, where she wrote for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the

68 New York World, campaigned against the Democrats, and, before fading from the political scene in 1918, lectured for the New York Board of Education. While in New York, she also worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography. Though she was raised a Catholic, she became a Christian Scientist as an adult. She belonged to the Daughters of Isabella, the Knights of Labor, the Prohibition Lecture Bureau, and the Citizens' Alliance. Mary Lease died in Callicoon, New York, on October 29, 1933.

Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease statue by Babs Mellor in Wichita, Kansas. Courtesy of Keith Wondra Photography.

69 Belle Burchill 29 By Amber R. Konzem

Belle M. Burchill, teacher, reformer, suffragist, postmaster, real estate and oil developer, was born in Watertown, Jefferson County, New York, on August 3, 1847. She was the daughter of Augustus Murray (1794–1854) and Maria (Phelps) Murray (1810–1880). Burchill moved with her family to Deerfield, New York, by 1860. In the mid-1860s she moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where she taught school for seven years. She married George S. Burchill (1840-1895) on April 8, 1874, in Bloomington, Illinois. Immediately afterwards, the Burchills traveled by stagecoach to Fort Worth, Texas, and arrived the same year. Burchill gave birth to three children—Clara, Edna, and Carl, and adopted Belle M. Burchill. Courtesy of the one child, Lillie B. Of the three Burchill siblings, University of Texas at Arlington Edna was the only surviving child; Clara and Libraries. Carl died in infancy.

Upon arrival in Fort Worth, Burchill, a school teacher since the age of fifteen, founded a private school by 1875 for privileged white students. In 1876 the school was sold to the city and became the first free public school in Fort Worth. At the urging of Burchill, the public school student body comprised students who had previously attended private schools. Burchill’s school and various other schools in the area were eventually brought together as the Fort Worth Independent School District. She held the post of principal and teacher at the school until her appointment as Fort Worth’s second female postmaster in 1881.

Burchill’s first term as postmaster (she refused the title “postmistress”) began on May 25, 1881, following her appointment by President James A. Garfield,

70 Republican from Ohio. The appointment ended on October 18, 1885, after she was relieved of her duties by the incoming president, Grover Cleveland, Democrat from New York. Upon the election of President Benjamin Harrison, Republican from Indiana, in 1888, Burchill was reappointed as postmaster and served from July 18, 1889, until February 7, 1894. She was again relieved of her duties upon the return of Grover Cleveland as president of the United States.

Burchill had three major accomplishments during her years as postmaster. Her first accomplishment entailed relocating the post office which had been housed in a building between two busy saloons in the “Hell’s Half Acre” section (often referred to as “The Acre”) of Fort Worth. The original location was considered a dangerous and raucous place for upstanding women. The new site on Main Street between Third and Fourth streets was considered safer and was nearer the center of the town. Her second major accomplishment involved the initiation of free home delivery of the mail in 1884. Prior to this, mail recipients were required to obtain their letters and parcels directly from the post office. During her second term in office, she again moved the post office from Main Street to the Board of Trade building located at Seventh and Houston streets. Burchill also lobbied for funding for a new and bigger post office building. The building was approved but did not begin until Burchill’s replacement, Ida L. Turner, took office. Burchill’s third major accomplishment as postmaster resulted in the hiring of the first African American mail carriers.

A dedicated Republican, Burchill came under frequent attack from the political opposition. According to the March 27, 1883, edition of the Fort Worth Daily Democrat, Burchill was arrested for improperly “retaining mail, and other ways violating the rules of the department” after an opened piece of mail addressed to another person but returned to sender was found in her desk at the post office. An official inquiry was made. Burchill denied the accusation and pled “not guilty.” As reported in the Daily Democrat on March 31, 1883, she was “honorably acquitted” and received “thunders of applause by the spectators” for a matter that “appeared like a put-up job.”

Burchill was also instrumental in the creation and supervision of an orphan’s home in 1887. Originally created for the local “bootblacks”—homeless boys from the North— the boys home was quickly expanded and renamed the

71 Benevolent Home of Fort Worth. The Benevolent Home operated under the auspices of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) which appointed Burchill and her friend, Delia Krum Collins, as superintendent and secretary, respectively. The Benevolent Home later became the Tarrant County Orphans Home and eventually accepted both boys and girls in need of assistance. It operated in one form or another until 1976. Burchill retired from the Benevolent Home in 1899.

An active member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Texas Equal Rights Association (TERA), Burchill was a supporter of abstinence from alcoholic beverages and a supporter of woman suffrage. During the 1894 TERA executive committee meeting in which Mrs. Rebecca Henry Hayes, president of TERA, was voted removed from office and Mrs. Elizabeth A. Fry installed as her replacement, Burchill disagreed with Hayes’s position of declining a Texas visit by Susan B. Anthony and was among two executive committee members absent but represented by proxy. Burchill later attended the 1895 convention at the Texas State Fair. In 1896, the last year of activity for TERA, Burchill was installed as vice-president. After the demise of TERA, Burchill’s equal rights/suffragist activities faded with TERA. Her connection to WCTU continued as evidenced by her association with the Benevolent Home until her retirement from the home. At that point Burchill’s active political reform efforts appear to cease. Her love for her “boys,” however, never faded.

In 1909 Burchill and her daughter, Edna, became business partners and purchased a tract of land southeast of Fort Worth between the Orphan’s Home and Polytechnic Heights. The property was developed into a residential housing subdivision called the Burch-Hill Addition. Lots sold for $200 to $250 each, and a variety of financing options were offered. The homes were predominantly ranch-style single- story houses. In addition to her real estate Belle M. Burchill. Courtesy of the venture, Burchill also sold mineral rights University of Texas at Arlington leases for oil speculation. Libraries.

72 Belle M. Burchill died at her home on April 23, 1937, after succumbing to a lingering illness. Well-respected and admired, Burchill’s pallbearers were Judge Irby Dunklin, William Bryce, Carroll S. Moore, Charles Fain, Leon Gross, and C. W. Connery. Honorary pallbearers included the only three surviving original mail carriers hired by Burchill—Zeb Wallace, J. E. Pulliam and S. B. Mims. Other honorary pallbearers also included Eddie Francisco, Frank Rawlings, Douglas McDavid, and Jimmy Buster Brown —once bootblack and orphan boys to whom Burchill had once provided food, shelter, and an education. Burchill was buried in the family plot in Oakwood Cemetery in Fort Worth. Fort Worth Press Woman’s Department editor Edith Alderman Guedry eulogized Burchill as a woman who “never failed to attract attention.” Burchill Tombstone of Belle M. Burchill. was known to maintain her “Victorian dignity” and was frequently seen wearing a bonnet and black gloves from the “old era.” Guedry considered Burchill “a link between early Fort Worth and modern Fort Worth” which certainly described Belle M. Burchill.

73 Ellen Lawson Dabbs 30 By Melissa G. Wiedenfeld

Ellen Lawson Dabbs, physician, early women's- rights activist, and reform writer, the daughter of Col. and Mrs. Henry M. Lawson, was born in Rusk County on April 25, 1853. She attended school in Rusk and Upshur counties. After a brief teaching stint she enrolled in Furlow Masonic College in Americus, Georgia, from which she graduated first in her class. She returned to Texas and taught school for five years before meeting J. W. Dabbs, a merchant from Sulphur Springs. Dabbs, a widower, had four children from his first marriage; the marriage of J. W. Dabbs and Ellen Lawson produced five more children. After the birth of her children Mrs. Dabbs attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Keokuk, Iowa, and a school of midwifery in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Ellen Lawson Dabbs. In 1890 she returned to Sulphur Springs, where she practiced medicine and acquired an interest in a newspaper. In 1891 she moved to Fort Worth, where she wrote in support of various reforms. She eventually became a writer for the National Economist, a National Farmers' Alliance newspaper based in Washington, D.C., and in 1892 she served as a delegate from Texas to the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union convention at St. Louis. That same year she was also a delegate to the state Woman's Christian Temperance Union convention and presided as the state chairman of the Woman's Southern Council.

Ellen Dabbs helped organize the state's first suffrage society, the Texas Equal Rights Association, and served in 1893 as corresponding

74 secretary and a member of the publication committee. The following year she helped found a local auxiliary in Fort Worth and was elected corresponding secretary. She addressed the Dallas chapter on the need for the moral influence of women in politics and legislation and defended women's rights in the Dallas Morning News. In 1893 she organized the Texas Woman's Council (later the State Council of Women of Texas) at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, for the purpose of bringing women's organizations concerned with philanthropy, social reform, education, literature, and the fine arts to an increased awareness of one another's activities. During her second term as president the council became a state affiliate of the National Council of Women, and Mrs. Dabbs was the presiding officer in 1895 when the Texas Woman's Council laid the cornerstone for a permanent women's building on the state fairgrounds in Dallas.

75 Lucy Parsons 31 By Carolyn Ashbaugh

Lucy E. Parsons, radical activist and prominent figure in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket riot, was born in Texas, probably in March 1853. Contemporary newspapers consistently identified her as a Negro; she claimed that her dark skin came from Mexican and Indian ancestors. She furnished a variety of Anglo and Spanish maiden names on different legal documents, but her true parentage is unknown, and she may have been born a slave. The circumstances of her early relationship with Albert R. Parsons are also speculative. Despite Albert's claim that he first encountered Lucy on her uncle's ranch in Johnson County, they probably met during Reconstruction in Waco, where Lucy was apparently well known and Albert worked for black suffrage and for a time edited a Radical Republican newspaper. Although no marriage record has ever been found, Albert and Lucy Lucy Parsons. Courtesy of the claimed to have been married in Austin in 1871, Library of Congress. and they moved to Chicago together in 1873. After Albert was blacklisted as a printer for his role in the 1877 railroad strikes, the couple operated a dressmaking business at home. They had two children. Lucy and Albert Parsons became disillusioned with electoral politics and by 1883 began to call themselves anarchists. Both were outspoken atheists. They joined the International Working People's Association, which advocated the forcible overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a society based on the exchange of goods among autonomous communes and trade unions. The IWPA advocated racial and sexual equality and secular education for both sexes, positions Lucy Parsons supported all her life. In October 1884 the IWPA began to publish the Alarm, edited by Albert Parsons. To this newspaper his wife contributed articles on child labor and lynchings of blacks. Her article "To Tramps, the

76 Unemployed, Disinherited, and Miserable," in which she advised the poor to learn how to use explosives as weapons against the rich, was widely distributed as a flyer. By 1885 Lucy was a well-known radical speaker, and on April 28, 1885, she led a protest march on the newly opened Chicago Board of Trade.

On May 1, 1886, both Parsonses led 80,000 people up Michigan Avenue in Chicago, inaugurating a general strike for the eight-hour day. Three days later seven policemen and several citizens were fatally wounded during a confrontation in Haymarket Square. Eight anarchists, among them Albert Parsons, were tried and convicted of conspiracy to murder, though the prosecution openly acknowledged that none of the defendants had thrown the bomb that had caused police to fire on the crowd. Lucy Parsons's "To Tramps" was submitted as evidence to demonstrate the alleged conspiracy. Seven of the eight were condemned to death. After the verdict, Lucy undertook an extensive speaking tour to arouse public opinion about the Chicago trial and to raise money for an appeal. She was closely watched by police and arrested and jailed in Columbus, Ohio. Despite her efforts and those of many well-known individuals, both in the United States and in Europe, Parsons and three of his companions were executed on November 11, 1887. Lucy Parsons believed that working class revolution would eliminate not only poverty but racial and sexual discrimination as well, and she devoted the remainder of her long life to the cause of revolutionary socialism. The Chicago police considered her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" and broke up her meetings for thirty years after the Haymarket trial. She published books and pamphlets, traveled and lectured extensively, contributed to publications for social change, and published the newspapers Freedom (1892) and The Liberator (1905–06). She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and later was associated with the Communist Party, U.S.A. Lucy Parsons died in a fire in her home in Chicago on March 7, 1942. She was buried next to the Haymarket monument in Lucy Parsons. Courtesy of Waldheim Cemetery outside Chicago. the African American Intellectual History Society.

77 Elisabet Ney 32 By Emily F. Cutrer

Franzisca Bernadina Wilhelmina Elisabeth Ney, one of the first professional sculptors in Texas, was born in Münster, Westphalia, on January 26, 1833, to Johann Adam and Anna Elizabeth (Wernze) Ney, a Catholic stonecarver and his wife. Ney enrolled at the Munich Academy of Art in 1852 and, after her graduation two years later, moved to Berlin, where she studied with Christian Daniel Rauch, one of the foremost sculptors in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Under Rauch's tutelage, Ney developed a classical style in the German tradition, with a tendency toward realism and a faithfulness to accurate scale. Through Rauch, she also became acquainted with Berlin's artistic and intellectual elite and sculpted her first works, among them portraits of such luminaries as Jacob Grimm and Alexander von Humboldt. During the late 1850s and 1860s Ney led a peripatetic life, traveling around Europe to complete portraits of intellectual and political leaders. Among her Painting of Elisabet Ney by best-known works from this period are portrait Kaulbach. Courtesy of the University of North Texas busts of Arthur Schopenhauer, Giuseppi Libraries. Garibaldi, and Otto von Bismarck and a full- length statue of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

On November 7, 1863, in Madeira, Ney married Edmund D. Montgomery, a Scottish physician and scientist. They left Europe in 1871 and settled briefly in Thomasville, Georgia, where their two sons were born. In 1872 Ney moved with

78 her family to Texas and purchased Liendo Plantation in Waller County, where Ney, for much of the next twenty years, managed the plantation while Montgomery busied himself with his scientific work. After visiting Austin at the invitation of Governor Oran M. Roberts in the 1880s, Ney decided to resume her artistic career. She built a studio (now the Elisabet Ney Museum) in the Hyde Park area of Austin in 1892 and began lobbying notable citizens and the state legislature Elisabet Ney working on a bust of William J. Bryan for commissions. During the next in her art studio. fifteen years she completed a number of portrait busts as well as statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, now in the state Capitol, and a memorial to Albert Sidney Johnston, in the State Cemetery. Copies of the Austin and Houston statues are also in the United States Capitol. One of her few ideal pieces, a depiction of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, was also a major project during her Austin years; the marble is now displayed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art. In addition to her sculpting, Ney took an active role in artistic and civic activities in Austin, where she died on June 29, 1907. Four years later a number of her supporters founded the Texas Fine Arts Association in her honor.

79 Mariana Folsom 33 By Tony Black

Mariana Folsom, Universalist minister, lecturer, and reform activist, was born on July 30, 1845, in Pennsylvania, probably in the Borough of Sunbury, Northumberland County, the daughter of merchant S. N. and Susan O. Thompson. The family moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, sometime between 1857 and 1860. After her high school education in Mount Pleasant, Mariana received a degree from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Although of Quaker background, she became a Universalist minister. In 1871 she married Allan Perez Folsom, who listed himself as a crockery merchant in 1880, an abstracter in 1898, and a lawyer in 1900. By 1879 Mariana was a state lecturer of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, living in Marshalltown, Iowa. The family probably Mariana Thompson Folsom moved to Texas in late 1884 or early 1885 handbill for a lecture. Courtesy of following a 1884 lecture tour there; the the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Folsoms lived in San Antonio and Edna before settling in Austin between 1898 and 1900. They had four children. Mariana Folsom was a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and asked Lucy Stone in 1885 for assistance in establishing a state suffrage society. The resulting Texas Equal Rights Association was established in 1893. Mrs. Folsom also corresponded with Susan B. Anthony and Elisabet Ney; she arranged for the latter to appear before a Texas House of Representatives committee and request the ballot for women. She was also a member of the Universal Peace Union and the state Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She died January 31, 1909.

80 Mary Eleanor Brackenridge 34 By A. Elizabeth Taylor

Mary Eleanor Brackenridge, clubwoman and advocate of women's rights, daughter of John Adams and Isabella Helena (McCulloch) Brackenridge, was born in Warwick County, Indiana, on March 7, 1837. George W. Brackenridge was her brother. She spent her childhood in Indiana and, upon graduating from Anderson Female Seminary in New Albany in 1855, joined her family, who had moved to Jackson County, Texas. She remained in Jackson County until 1866, when she and her mother went to San Antonio to live with George. John A. Brackenridge had died in 1862.

In San Antonio, Eleanor became a champion of civic and social betterment. She was active in the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Mary Eleanor Brackenridge. the Texas Mothers' Congress, the Order of the Eastern Star, and the Presbyterian Church. She was a firm believer in prohibition and a strong supporter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She founded the Woman's Club of San Antonio and served as its president for seven years. Under her guidance the club turned its attention from literary subjects to such issues as the need for police matrons, female probation officers, industrial and vocational education, and the general welfare of women and children. She made a study of the state's legal code and published a pamphlet entitled The Legal Status of Texas Women in 1911.

In February 1912 Brackenridge was elected president of the newly organized San Antonio Equal Franchise Society. The formation of this society stimulated

81 interest throughout the state, and delegates from seven Texas cities met in San Antonio and organized the Texas Woman Suffrage Association in April 1913. Eleanor Brackenridge held the office of president for one year and then became honorary president. Though no longer an active officer, she continued to support the movement, and when the Texas legislature granted primary suffrage to women in 1918 she was the first woman in Bexar County to register to vote (see WOMAN SUFFRAGE).

She was one of a group of citizens instrumental in securing the establishment of a state-supported college for women, the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Woman's University). In 1902 she became a member of its first board of regents, and she served in that capacity until her death more than twenty years later. As a regent she took an active interest in the affairs of the institution and often assisted students in financial need. She urged the legislature to give the woman's college adequate support Mary Eleanor Brackenridge and H. P. Drought and sometimes chided its members campaign for Women’s Suffrage. Courtesy of for failing to vote for requested the San Antonio Express-News. appropriations. In 1916 a dormitory was named in her honor.

Eleanor Brackenridge traveled widely, often to places not readily accessible to Americans in her time. She was also one of the first women in the nation to serve as a bank director. She was a member of the board of directors of the San Antonio National Bank and the San Antonio Loan and Trust Company, institutions founded by her brother.

Neither Eleanor nor George ever married. They shared the same residence, Fernridge, until George died in 1920. After his death Eleanor continued to live at Fernridge, where she died after a cerebral hemorrhage, on February 14, 1924.

82 When reporting her death, the San Antonio Express called her "in many respects the foremost woman citizen of Texas." She was buried in the Brackenridge family cemetery near Edna in Jackson County.

Fernridge at the University of the Incarnate Word.

83 Betty Eve Ballinger 35 By Elizabeth Hayes Turner

Betty Eve Ballinger, cofounder of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, was born on February 3, 1854, in Galveston, one of four children of Harriett Patrick (Jack) and William Pitt Ballinger. Her maternal grandfather, William Houston Jack, fought at the battle of San Jacinto and later became a lawyer and a statesman for the Republic of Texas. Her father received the first license to practice law issued by the state of Texas; Ballinger, Texas, is named for him. Betty was raised in the Ballinger home, the Oaks, at Avenue O and Twenty- ninth Street in Galveston. She received her education, along with her sister Lucy (Mrs. Andrew G. Mills), in the French school of Miss Hull in New Orleans and later in the Southern Home School in Baltimore. In the spring of 1891 she and her cousin Betty Eve Ballinger. Hally Ballinger Bryan Perry decided to form an Courtesy of Lela Parris Koch. organization dedicated to the perpetuation of the memory of the heroes of San Jacinto. Their interest in this pursuit was aroused by the recent discovery in an old Galveston cemetery of the neglected graves of two Texas patriots, David G. Burnet, first president of the Republic of Texas, and Sidney Sherman, a veteran of the battle of San Jacinto. After reading Henderson K. Yoakum's History of Texas (1855) in the Ballinger library, the cousins planned to solicit support from other women of Texas whose husbands or ancestors had helped the republic achieve and maintain its independence. To this end Hally's father, Guy M. Bryan, president of the Texas Veterans Association, introduced the women to Mary Smith (Mrs. Anson) Jones, widow of the last president of the Republic of Texas, and to Mary Harris Briscoe, widow of a Texas patriot. The organization was approved, and on November 6, 1891, seventeen women assembled in Houston

84 to form the Daughters of the Lone Star Republic. Ballinger was chosen a member of the Executive Committee that drew up the organization's constitution and by-laws.

The first annual meeting of the Daughters took place on April 20, 1892, in Lampasas; at that time the organization was officially named Daughters of the Republic of Texas. The next year Ballinger delivered the keynote address to the Daughters, in which she explained the purpose of the DRT. The future of Texas, she said, "is in the hands of her sons [who,] dazzled by the splendor of the present...have forgotten the heroic deeds and sacrifices of the past. But it is Founding place of the Daughters of the Republic not so with woman.... of Texas. Surrounded by the history of the family life, it is her duty to keep alive the sacred fire of tradition....Daughters of the Republic of Texas, our duty lies plain before us. Let us leave the future of Texas to our brothers, and claim as our province the guarding of her holy past." These were the words of a woman born in the antebellum South, where cultural proscriptions confined "ladies" to the traditions of family, children, domesticity, and church. Ironically, however, such women's organizations as the DRT, whose purpose was to perpetuate domestic values, encouraged women to participate in the future of Texas primarily through emphasis on improvement in education for Texas children and the maintenance of historic sites such as the Alamo and the San Jacinto battlefield. In the twentieth century, Miss Ballinger (she never married) no longer believed that the future of Texas should be left in the hands of the men alone. Between 1891 and 1912 she fulfilled her duties as a guardian of tradition, but also helped to form new women's organizations, each of which brought women more and more into public life.

85 After the initial organization of the state DRT, she organized and presided over (1891–93) the Galveston chapter of the DRT, named for Sidney Sherman. The group's first task, not surprisingly, was the removal of the remains of Burnet and Sherman to a new cemetery in Galveston, where in 1894 a twenty-three- foot stone obelisk was formally placed as a memorial. A dedication ceremony attended by 1,600 dignitaries and citizens marked the occasion. Betty Ballinger also served from 1895 to 1899 as DRT chairman of the Stephen F. Austin Statue Fund, the purpose of which was to commission Elisabet Ney to produce statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin to be placed in Statuary Hall at the Capitol in Washington. The project was completed in 1903.

By 1912 Betty Ballinger had become a staunch supporter of woman suffrage. Her interest in various women's associations, including other hereditary- patriotic organizations, led her to seek membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Texas Society Colonial Dames. She contributed to her church (First Baptist Church of Galveston) by serving as president in 1892 of the Woman's Aid Society, and to the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten by becoming a charter member in 1898, by serving on the board of directors, and by taking up the duties of corresponding secretary in 1912 and 1921. She was also a member of the board of trustees of the Rosenberg Library. In the same year that the DRT was established, Betty, her sister Lucy, and Mrs. Maria Cage Kimball founded the Wednesday Club, one of the first women's literary clubs in Texas and an early affiliate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Although initially organized for the study of Shakespeare, Balzac, Hugo, and other literary giants, the club had turned by 1912 to "sociological" topics: "Women in Industry," "Modern Educational Movements," and "Woman Suffrage." Miss Ballinger was an active member from the club's inception through 1929. She acted as delegate to the first state general convention of women's clubs in Waco in 1897 and served as president of the Wednesday Club from 1909 to 1911.

Until the Galveston hurricane of 1900 her life interests revolved around those women's organizations that filled the leisure hours of the ladies of "polite society." Although she would have claimed that these groups were of noble purpose, in fact, all but one (the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten) did little to ameliorate conditions of poverty in the city, nor did they seek to bring about reform either within the city or for women. But a change in the city's fortunes

86 transformed women's private and organizational lives. The storm of 1900 brought the worst kind of social disorder. In its wake, however, emerged the Women's Health Protective Association, the most effective of all the women's associations. Though it was organized to give decent burial to the victims of the storm who were not cremated, the WHPA remained active from 1901 to 1920 as a progressive reform association. Its members worked to revegetate the island, to enact updated city building ordinances, to institute regular inspection of dairies, bakeries, groceries, and restaurants, to eliminate breeding grounds for flies and mosquitoes, and to establish medical examinations for schoolchildren, hot-lunch programs, public playgrounds, and well-baby and tuberculosis clinics. Betty Ballinger quickly became involved in the WHPA, which she served as corresponding secretary in 1909. This shift to reform activities no doubt influenced her to take an active interest in the suffrage movement. At the age of sixty-eight she and a number of younger women spoke before an audience of 150 people for the right of women to vote. She served as the first vice president of the Galveston Equal Suffrage Association in 1912. Her ability to develop from a Southern lady to a progressive activist helped open the way toward greater public roles for women in the future of Texas. Betty Ballinger died on March 23, 1936, in Galveston.

Memorial tombstone of Betty Ballinger in Galveston. Courtesy of Patti Zapalac Photography.

87 Hally Ballinger Perry 36 By Nancy Baker Jones

Hally Ballinger Perry, cofounder of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and a grandniece of Stephen F. Austin, was born in Galveston on January 10, 1868, the third of four children of Laura (Jack) and Col. Guy Morrison Bryan. Her father was a member at various times of both the House and Senate of Texas, speaker of the Texas House, and a member of the Thirty-fifth Congress of the United States. After Hally's mother died, the Bryan family moved to the Oaks, the home of Hally's aunt and uncle, Harriet Patrick (Jack) and William Pitt Ballinger. Hally attended Hollins Institute in Virginia, then returned to Galveston when she was seventeen. In 1891, with her cousin Betty Ballinger, she founded the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to encourage historical research, Hally Ballinger Perry. to promote the celebration of Texas independence day on March 2, and to honor the memory of the people who fought to establish the republic. She served as secretary for an early executive committee of the DRT but thereafter chose not to hold office. She was, however, an honorary life president.

On November 3, 1909, Hally Bryan married Emmett Lee Perry, a half cousin, and the couple moved to Bay City. They had no children. After her husband died in 1921 Hally moved to Houston, where she lived for the next twenty- seven years. She traveled in Europe and Latin America as well as in the United States, and in 1940 she organized the Pan American Round Table of Houston. She served on the State Library Historical Commission. She was also a member of the Texas State Historical Association, the Delta Kappa Gamma Society, the American Association of University Women, the Texas Folklore

88 Society, and the Philosophical Society of Texas. After moving to Alpine in 1948, she became a member of the board of directors of the Alpine Community Center and a member of the Presbyterian Church. She also founded the local chapter of the DRT, which is named in her honor. After her father's death, she and a cousin became executors of the Stephen F. Austin papers, and she presented the papers to the University of Texas at Austin. In response, the university established the Hally Bryan Perry Fund for historical research in 1954. Hally Perry died in Alpine on June 27, 1955, and was buried in the State Cemetery in Austin.

Tombstone of Hally Ballinger Perry.

89 Teresa Urrea 37 By Frances Mayhugh Holden

Teresa Urrea (Niña de Cabora, Santa Teresa, Teresita, La Santa), healer and political figure, was born Niña García Noña María Rebecca Chávez on October 15, 1873, in Rancho de Santana, Ocoroni, Sinaloa, Mexico, the illegitimate daughter of Tomás Urrea and Cayetana Chávez. Her father was a well-to-do rancher and political liberal; her mother, a Tehueco Indian in the employ of Don Tomás, was only fourteen when she had Teresa. Accounts of Teresa's childhood differ somewhat, but she apparently attended school briefly at age nine and learned to read. An old Indian woman named María Sonora, who is said to have been a curandera, taught Teresa about curing various ailments with herbs (see CURANDERISMO). Teresa Urrea. In 1880 Urrea moved his family to Cabora, Sonora, in order to escape political reprisals from the dictator Porfirio Díaz. During her first few months at Cabora, Teresa fell into a cataleptic state that lasted three months and eighteen days. After recovering she began performing healings by laying her hands on the sick and disabled. Word of miraculous cures spread rapidly, and within a short time thousands of pilgrims made the journey to Cabora. Many of those seeking relief for their ailments were poor Indians, and Teresa, who asked no money to perform healings, became a symbol of hope for the downtrodden. Her simple message of justice inspired a series of rebellions in 1891, the best known of which was an uprising of Tarahumara Indians in the village of Tomochi. Although no direct evidence has been uncovered implicating either Teresa or her father in the rebellions, Díaz ordered the two deported in 1892. They lived briefly in Nogales, Arizona, before settling in nearby El Bosque,

90 which became a mecca for thousands seeking cures. Among those who came were also a number of political revolutionaries, and Nogales and El Bosque became centers for forces plotting the overthrow of the Díaz government. In 1895 the family moved again, to Solomonville, Arizona, but remained there only eight months before moving to El Paso, Texas.

On August 12, 1896, a month after the family arrived, a group of sixty to seventy exiled Yaqui and Tomochi Indians, calling themselves "Teresitas," stormed the Mexican customhouse at Nogales. The Díaz government blamed the attack on Teresa, and the Mexican ambassador to the United States demanded her extradition. Teresa published a statement in the El Paso Herald on September 11, 1896, denying any involvement in the incident. After surviving at least three different assassination attempts, Teresa moved with her father to Clifton, Arizona, away from the volatile border area. On June 22, 1900, she married Guadalupe Rodríguez, a Yaqui Indian who worked in the copper mines near Clifton. The following morning Rodríguez went on a rampage and was arrested. The court found him insane and sent him to an asylum; the couple were divorced in 1904. Shortly after her marriage, Teresa went to San Francisco. She continued to perform reportedly miraculous cures that were widely reported in the press. Promoters Teresa Urrea. Courtesy of induced her to undertake a tour to a number of the Special Collections at large cities, including St. Louis and New York, the University of Texas at El where she entered and won a beauty contest. After Paso Libraries. discovering that the promoters had unscrupulously been charging those who came to see her, she terminated her contract, returned to Arizona, and eventually settled in Clifton. During these years she had two children of unknown paternity. She died in Clifton in 1906, apparently of consumption, and is buried there beside her father.

91 SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

38. “Spanish Laws for Texas Women: The Development of Marital Property Law to 1850” by Jean Stuntz

39. “The Meaning of Participation: White Protestant Women in Antebellum Houston Churches” by Angela Boswell

40. “The Texas Building and the Women’s Fair Exhibit Association of Texas” by Jeffrey A. Zemler

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