Patrick’s ‘dangerous’ Austin wouldn’t scare this early resident
AUSTIN — Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s recent warning that the capital of Texas is “one of the most dangerous cities in America and definitely in
Texas” worried me so much that I rushed online to price one of those armored vehicles wealthy Mexican and Brazilian residents buy to protect themselves against drug-cartel kidnappings.
I discovered that I can pick one up from a company in San Antonio that combines “bespoke manufacturing” and “vehicle conversion” to outfit my BMW, Audi, Jeep or Range Rover with polycarbonate curved glass, composite armor, ballistic nylon “bomb blankets” and wheels made to run flat, among other hyper-safety features. (The company website doesn’t mention whether bespoke manufacturing can transform my 2014 Ford Escape.)
Maybe you detect a hint of sarcasm, dear reader, since Austin actually ranks as one of the safest big cities in the nation, but there was a time when Patrick’s warnings would have resonated. It was some years back.
One-time Austin resident William Alexander Anderson Wallace comes to mind. The young Virginian who would be known for most of his life as Bigfoot ventured into Texas in 1837 to avenge the death of an older brother who lost his life in the Goliad Massacre. After hanging around San Antonio for a couple of years, Wallace made his way up the trail to the brand-new capital of the brand-new Republic. There on the picturesque banks of the Colorado he discovered a ragged frontier settlement that was, in the words of biographer Stanley Vestal, “plenty dangerous.”
Bigfoot liked to hunt, for fun and profit, and he soon discovered that game was plentiful around Austin. Hunting deer,
bear and turkeys, he made a good living supplying his fellow Austinites with fresh meat. He often ventured, usually alone, into dangerous territory north and west of town.
One morning he was wandering around Mt. Bonnell, a limestone bluff bounded by the Colorado River and Cypress Creek. Along the edge of the sheer cliff high above the river, an Indian trail spiraled toward the top. It was so narrow that two people meeting each other would be unable to pass without hugging the rock face. As Vestal noted, “a single misstep might throw him far down into the river.”
Close encounter on the trail
So, here’s Bigfoot trudging up the trail, his rifle “Sweetlips” in hand, his Bowie knife “Butch” on his belt, when he rounds a bend and comes face to face with a Waco Indian. Startled, both men nearly tumble over the edge. Bigfoot realizes that if they struggle, they will fall, so he fires Sweetlips without aiming. The Indian plunges headlong into the water below.
Knowing that Indians seldom traveled alone, Bigfoot took off running back down the trail. As
he ran, a grapevine caught him under the chin and flipped him flat, nearly breaking his neck. He scrambled to his feet and kept running. A few hours later he was safe back in Austin, a sore neck his only souvenir.
Bigfoot’s encounter wasn’t unusual. Newspapers in Houston and San Antonio reported horrifying stories of so-called “Indian depredations” in and around the new settlement on the exposed and dangerous edge of the frontier. Bigfoot and his neighbors knew people who had been tortured, stabbed, scalped and murdered. Children had been kidnapped. According to Vestal, Indians killed more than 40 residents during Bigfoot’s brief Austin sojourn. He helped bury 22 of them.
Ruthless Comanche war parties weren’t the only danger. Despite the Texan victory at San Jacinto, Texas and Mexico had not yet signed a formal truce, and invading Mexican armies were constant threats. Bigfoot, who would make a name for himself as a rough and ready soldier, Indian fighter, Texas Ranger and mail carrier whose dangerous route ran from San Antonio to El Paso, was in his element.
I’m assuming crime and violence is what Patrick had in mind, but in Bigfoot’s Austin
mayhem was less likely to waylay a resident than an epidemic of yellow fever or some other contagious disease. Bigfoot fell victim shortly after falling in love with a young woman. A few days after the couple announced their engagement, Bigfoot was lying at death’s door.
As Vestal tells the story, an old French woman took charge of his treatment, a daily regimen of parched flour mixed with boiled milk, the concoction administered a teaspoon at a time. “He was weak as a cat,” Vestal writes, “and lay on the gallery day after day watching the dead carried by, hearing the dead march played until he was sick of it.”
Hair and wedding loss
During his long convalescence, his hair fell out. Embarrassed to be a newly bald bridegroom, he rode out of town and set up camp near a cave at the base of Mt. Bonnell. A friend agreed to drop by every Saturday night to collect the meat Bigfoot expected to kill and to see how he was doing.
The first week in camp, Bigfoot killed three bears. Every day he polished his egg-smooth head with bear grease, afterward wading into the river and washing his head with soap. “In time,” Vestal writes, “this treatment produced a fine soft fuzz
or down on his bare cranium, so that he looked like a young buzzard. But no hair came.”
Bigfoot continued his home remedy, and his friend continued dropping by every Saturday night. Walking up to the mouth of the cave, he’d shout, “Hello, Bigfoot, are you dead yet?”
Time went by, and real hair began to sprout. Bigfoot rubbed his head with bear grease even harder, dreaming as he massaged his scalp about reuniting with his sweetheart. The day finally came when he was ready to head back to civilization, but he had to wait until the next Saturday evening when his friend would bring his horse.
Finally, it was Saturday. The sun set and darkness fell. Bigfoot heard footsteps, and then his friend’s greeting echoing through the cave: “Bigfoot, are you dead?”
“No,” Bigfoot roared.
His friend came in, a grin on his face. “Well, then, Bigfoot,” he said, “I have got bad news for you. . . . Your sweetheart has gone and married another man.”
Bigfoot was dumbstruck at first, but then, Vestal writes, “his dander rose. ‘I’m glad she’s gone,’ he declared. ‘A woman that cain’t wait till a man’s hair grows out, I don’twant.”
If Bigfoot were with us today, he’d find Mt. Bonnell still standing tall beside the blue Colorado. Deer still scramble through the brush, but bears disappeared long ago. He’d be shocked by downtown, of course. Never one to duck a fight, he’d probably want to saunter along Congress Ave. What he would find, despite Patrick’s jeremiad, would not require the assistance of his two bosom buddies. Butch and Sweet Lips, that is.
CORRECTION: Houston attorney Dick DeGuerin, who represented Billy Joe Shaver when the country music legend went on trial for shooting a man named Billy Coker at a beer joint near Waco in 2007, tells me I got a few things wrong when I wrote about Billy Joe two weeks ago. For one thing, DeGuerin says, it was a Kershaw flip-blade knife that Coker used to stir his drink, not a Bowie knife. For another, Billy Joe didn’t get upset with Coker using his knife to stir his drink. What he got upset about was Coker wiping the knife on Billy Joe’s sleeve. According to DeGuerin, Billy Joe shot Coker with his .22 Derringer when Coker lunged at him with the very same knife.