Motley cast of characters abound in Texas writer’s family history
AUSTIN — “I never expected to be a professional Texan, one of those writers who wear the lone star like a brand, who play up the drawl and affect pointy boots or a cowboy hat with a tailored suit,” Roger D. Hodge informs us in the early pages of his new book “Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands.”
I never did either. Despite the Native Texan label on the column, I don’t wear cowboy boots, pointytoed or otherwise. The only boots I ever owned were a handsome caramel-colored pair made by the late Ray Jones, the legendary Lampasas bootmaker. I’m sorry to say they never fit, so we use them as pointy-boot home decor at our little house in Marathon.
Boots or not, my native state fits me and fascinates Hodge, who says he never would have written “Texas Blood” had he not left the state decades ago. Now a Brooklyn resident, the former editor of Harper’s magazine and the Oxford American will be reading and signing copies of “Texas Blood” at the Texas Book Festival on the grounds of the state Capitol this weekend.
A hodgepodge of a book — I just realized the pun — “Texas Blood” is a mélange of family history, current-events reporting (hanging out with the Border Patrol, for example), memoir and travelogue. What makes it worth reading — in addition to the graceful writing style — is the motley cast of characters Hodge uncovered while tracing the various ancestral strands that led to the family ranch along the Devil’s River and to nearby Del Rio, where he grew up. Some I’d heard of, some I hadn’t; those who are well-known are cast in a new light.
Consider one Samuel Chamberlain, an adventurer, accomplished artist and author of an illuminated manuscript titled “My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue.” Born in 1829, he grew up in Boston, where he sang in a church choir, boxed in a gymnasium and described himself as a “muscular Christian.” Hodge notes that he had long blond hair and once beat up the church choirmaster.
With the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, Cham-
berlain joined a volunteer regiment and journeyed south. “Along the way he enjoyed multiple affairs of the heart,” Hodge writes.
Mustered out of the army in San Antonio, he embarked on a career as a gambler, and in his memoir describes an incident involving Texas Rangers in a San Antonio saloon known as the Bexar Exchange. Armed with revolvers and bowie knives, they “wore buckskin shirts black with grease and blood, some wore red shirts, their trousers thrust in to their high boots.”
Bloodthirsty fiends
One Ranger in particular drew Chamberlain’s attention. Staring quietly at his poker hand, he was, in Chamberlain’s words, “short, thick set, face bronzed by exposure to the hue of an Indian with eyes deeply sunken and bloodshot, coarse black hair hanging in snakelike locks down his back, his costume was that of the Mexican herdsman, made of leather, with a Mexican blanket thrown over his shoulder.”
The poker-playing Ranger was the notorious John Joel Glanton. Years earlier he had been “a young prodigy of a Texas Ranger” before becoming a killer of Mexicans and an Indian fighter who collected Apache scalps for bounty through northern Mexico and the Big Bend. He and his gang are the real-life equivalent of the bloodthirsty fiends in novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.”
In the bar, Chamberlain watched Glanton end a poker dispute with a fellow Ranger by drawing a huge Bowie knife and
nearly severing the man’s head. Chamberlain’s painting, Hodge writes, “shows Glanton standing over his victim, eyes wild, his finger pointed in warning at the motley assemblage standing near the bar. In his other hand he holds his bloody bowie knife. The caption read, ‘John Glanton settles a controversy.’ ”
Somehow, neither Ranger Glanton nor painter Chamberlain made it into our 7th-grade Texas history textbooks, though, as Hodge mentioned by phone earlier this week, they represent archetypes who are integral to the settlement of this vast and frequently violent place. Glanton would go on to meet his just and bloody demise in Arizona, hacked to death by Indians. Chamberlain, who rode with the Glanton Gang for a few months — thus his “Confession” — ended up back in Massachusetts, where he commanded an AfricanAmerican regiment during the Civil War and painted scenes from the Mexican War until his death in 1908.
Self-imposed exile
Tracing the path of his pioneering ancestors, Scots-Irish and Quakers from the Midwest, Hodge travels the old Texas Road, an ancient Indian trail that ferried traders, travelers and immigrants from St. Louis, down through Arkansas and Oklahoma and into the wild and raucous Texas Republic. He introduces us to an adopted Cherokee named Colonneh. A melancholy young man in self-imposed exile, Colonneh and his Cherokee wife Tiana “Talahina” Rogers are running a little trading post in Arkansas called the Wigwam Neosho.
Hodge suspects that Colonneh — aka Sam Houston — was plotting the conquest of Texas with his mentor Andrew Jackson even during his Cherokee sojourn. “He seems not to have spent much time selling dry goods at his trading post,” he writes.
Back in Tennessee, Houston needed a cover story to get to Texas, and in 1832, President Jackson provided one by appointing him as a presidential envoy to the Comanche and the Pawnee. In September of that year, Houston returned to the site of his trading post, encountered Washington Irving on the Texas Road — yes that Irving, of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane fame — and before the end of the year crossed the Red River.
“Texas Blood” comes to a close among haunting and spectacular pictographs in the massive limestone corridors of Seminole Canyon, along the Rio Grande near Langtry. As Hodge reminds us, those paintings, produced by an unknown Pecos River people approximately 4,000 years before Chamberlain, Houston and ourselves, are enduring reminders that the European presence in this land has been, by comparison, “as brief as a cloud of dust.”