Have two universities been ‘sullied’?
COLLEGE STATION — Among venerable live oaks and pinkflowered crape myrtle, a couple of days ago, a bronze statue of a man with a trimmed goatee and a fringe of hair pretty much had the Texas A&M campus to himself last week, unlike a few days earlier when protesters swirled around the oldest structure on campus. A scattering of pennies lay at the booted feet of this man from another era.
In Alpine, 500 miles west, a statue of the same frock-coated man looks from the picturesque campus of a small state university that bears the man’s name. A scattering of pennies lay at his booted feet, as well.
I’m guessing that most students and alumni of Sul Ross State University know only the bare essentials about the man for whom their university was named when it was founded a century ago this year. A plaque near the statue offers biographical highlights: captain in the mounted Texas Rangers … brigadier general in the Confederate Army and commander of the Texas Cavalry Brigade. . . cattle raiser and farmer … McLennan County sheriff … state senator … twoterm governor of Texas … president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.
That last position in a long and varied public career is why Aggies know Sul Ross — that and a number of hallowed traditions that have grown up around his bronze likeness. You rub “Ol Sully’s” boots on your way to exams for good luck. You leave pennies on the statue pedestal. Aggies through the years have been moved by the solemn Silver Taps memorial for recently deceased students, the military honor guard known as the Ross Volunteers marching at night in slow-mo
tion cadence to the Ross statue for the playing of Taps.
Lawrence Sullivan Ross died more than 120 years ago, which means that the man long ago evolved into myth — myth not as untruth but as the distilled essence of qualities we presume to admire. Now that the bronze image of the man has become the focus of Aggie iconoclasts, including Aggie athletes, it’s the myth that informs the movement. More than a century after his passing, it’s almost impossible to revivify the man. The only way to attempt to know Ross is to revisit stories about him. As a Texas history buff, here’s one I find particularly intriguing:
On a bitterly cold day in December, 1860, on the desolate mesquite prairie about 50 miles northwest of today’s Wichita Falls, a 22-year-old Texas Ranger captain led a company of 40 men on a hunt for a band of Comanches that had gang-raped, and tortured a young woman named Martha Sherman, nine months pregnant. She died four days later.
Accompanied by 20 troops from the Second Cavalry and 70 or so mounted citizen volunteers, the Rangers came upon a Comanche camp along Mule Creek as it flowed into the Pease River. It was not the large Indian village the Texans were expecting to find but a small scattering of lodges where about 15 men and women were breaking camp.
Sul Ross, the wiry, young Ranger captain, gathered his men around him. He told them that the first one of them to take a scalp would be rewarded with a pistol. Spurring his horse, his raised arm slashing downward, he gave the order to charge.
The Texans killed seven Comanches that day, four of them women. They also captured a 33-year-old white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker and her infant daughter, Prairie Flower. The young woman had been torn from her family 24 years earlier when Comanches raided the Parker family settlement near today’s Groesbeck in Central Texas. Married to a Comanche war chief named Peta Nocona and the mother of three young children, she lapsed into a decade of despair and bewilderment before her death in 1871. (It’s safe to say that Texans are more familiar with Parker and her son Quanah, the last of the Comanche chiefs, than they are Sul Ross.)
Ross himself captured a 10year-old Comanche boy that morning on the Pease River. He took the child with him to live on the Ross family farm near Waco, where he worked as a stable boy, not so much a slave as an indentured servant. Known as Pease Ross, he was on hand for more than a hundred Civil War battles and engagements as body servant to Sul Ross, youngest general in the Confederacy.
During Sul Ross’s notable career, the story of the so-called Battle of Pease River took various forms — Ross himself told several versions — but those who were present on that cold, gray morning likely agreed with an old Ranger named Hiram Rogers. “I was in the Pease river fight,” Rogers recalled in 1928, “but I am not very proud of it. That was not a battle at all, but just a killing of squaws.”
By the time Ross ran for governor in 1888, the skirmish had taken on mythic proportions. As Stephen Harrigan has written, “Ross inflated the killings at the Pease River into the great concluding act of the frontier, the final battle between savagery and civilization.” ( Big Wonderful Thing)
This is how Ross summarized the skirmish, shortly after being elected governor with 70 percent of the vote: “The great Comanche Confederacy was forever broken, the blow was decisive; their illustrious chief slept with his fathers and with him were most of his doughty warriors.”
Nearly three decades after the incident at Pease River, the myth had trumped the man. The contentious demonstrations on the Aggie campus in recent weeks are, among other things, an attempt to demythologize.
I tell the Pease River story because it’s interesting, not to load the dice against a Texas icon currently under siege. Ross’s defenders could tell other stories — about his bravery in battle; his service to the state in the writing of the Constitution of 1876, the post-Reconstruction document that guaranteed a weak, relatively ineffectual state government; his two terms as a popular governor, during which the Capitol was built; and his tenure as president of Texas A&M during the school’s difficult formative years.
John Sharp, the plain-spoken chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, insists that A&M might not have survived its early years had it not been for Ross’s leadership. That’s why the statue will never come down, he vows.
“It’s the totality of the man’s life for which the statue stands,” contends Aggie alumnus John Adams, who writes frequently about his beloved alma mater.
In Alpine neither the university name nor the statue have attracted iconoclastic attention, although I wouldn’t be surprised if both name and statue disappear in the not-too-distant future. They would disappear for pragmatic reasons more than for Ross’s problematic biography.
The state university, named for a man who had nothing to do with the region, is having trouble attracting students to a small town in far West Texas. A new name — Big Bend State University? — not only would forestall protest but also would be more descriptive. Big Bend State might be more appealing to prospective students looking for what the spectacular area has to offer.
What will happen on A&M’s sprawling, tradition-laden campus remains an open question, despite Chancellor Sharp’s adamant resolve. A&M President Michael Young has said he will form a Commission on Historic Representation to review statues, monuments and buildings. State Rep. John P. Cyrier, a Lockhart Republican and Aggie alumnus, wants Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton to decide who gets to decide.
Aggies senior quarterback Kellen Mond, the voice and public face of the Ross opposition, continues to insist the statue must come down. “It’s a hard thing for people to learn new things,” he said recently (as reported by the Chronicle’s Brent Zwerneman), “but it’s even harder for people to unlearn what they already know.”