Author would lure historic Texans with chili
SAN FELIPE DE AUSTIN — If you could pick three people from the annals of Texas history and have them join you for dinner one night, who would they be?
That’s the question I recently put to Stephen Harrigan, during an interview before a full house at the superb, stillnew Texas history museum in this history-laden community just east of Sealy. A modest, soft-spoken man, the longtime novelist, essayist, screenwriter and Texas Monthly contributor prefers answering an interviewer’s questions to pontificating before an audience or reading aloud from his new book.
If you’ve wandered into a Texas bookstore recently, you’ve seen the book. Chances are you encountered a blockbuster display of “Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas.” The shape and heft of a small cement block, the 900plus-page book is Harrigan’s magnum opus, a worthy successor to Ted Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star,” the standard general-interest Texas history for the past half century. “Big Wonderful Thing” has been out long enough for some readers to have finished it. What they no doubt discovered is what reluctant readers intimidated by the length would also discover: Harrigan has written a book that readers can dip into at almost any page and find vivid portraits and engaging historical moments that are worth reading for themselves alone.
When I asked him toward the end of the evening about his three imaginary dinner companions, I suppose I expected him to name Sam Houston, maybe Jim Bowie or Davy Crockett, maybe LBJ. Instead, he picked three individuals a bit less well known. Chili, strangely enough, binds his fantasy guests across the centuries.
The first guest, Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda, was so devout that when she entered the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in 1621, she slept only two hours a night on the hardest surface she could find. She ate just enough vegetables to keep herself alive and requested a habit made of coarser cloth than the one the convent required. She came by her penchant for suffering naturally. As a child she was accustomed to encountering her mother contemplating mortality by staring at a human skull. She was used to being awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of her father shuffling through the house under the weight of a 100-pound cross. “Suffering and mortification, she understood, were what led her soul into the presence of God,” Harrigan writes.
As the story goes, suffering also led her into the presence of Native Americans, even though she had never lived anywhere but Agreda, a village in northern Spain. Believe it or not, she had the ability to exist in two places at the same time. In 1650, the Holy Office of the Inquisition felt compelled to investigate.
Yes, she said. Three decades earlier, she had crossed the Atlantic and appeared “in the kingdom of Quivira and the Jumanas,” while her body remained in the convent. She couldn’t explain how her visitations happened.
The Indians couldn’t either. Years before the nun’s inquisition — the visitations were not the work of the devil, the inquisitor concluded — a delegation of Jumanos appeared at one of the missions along the Rio Grande and told the friars they wanted missionaries to come live with them in their villages to the east and baptize them as Christians. They said they had been receiving mysterious visitations from a young, beautiful woman who spoke their language. Barefoot, wearing a gray sackcloth habit and a heavy blue cloak, she told them about Christ and the Trinity and urged them to seek out the friars. Legend has it “the Lady in Blue” also bequeathed them a chili recipe. (Whether with or without beans, we don’t know.)
“In the unlikely event I ever open a chili parlor,” Harrigan writes, “I’m going to name it The Lady in Blue.”
So, the abstemious nun, absent-mindedly toying with a tiny dollop of chili in her bowl, would have a place at Harrigan’s table. She would be joined by another habitue of the 17th century, a French Texan named Isabelle Talon. Born in Paris, Isabelle had immigrated at a young age to French Canada, where she met and married her husband Lucien, a carpenter. For whatever reason, or reasons, the couple decided to join
La Salle’s great expedition to establish a French foothold at the mouth of the Mississippi. That meant sailing from Canada to France with their five children and then sailing back across the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. On the voyage, Isabelle gave birth to her sixth child.
Of course, the La Salle expedition ended in sad and tawdry tragedy — La Salle dead at the hands of his men in the wilds of East Texas, his desolate colony near Matagorda Bay wiped out in 1688 by disease or misadventure or by the Karankawas. When Spanish explorers came across the remnants of the devastated settlement five years later, they found three French bodies. One was a woman, probably Isabelle, a torn dress still draped over her bones. Her skull, distorted as a result of a killing blow from a Karankawa war club, is in storage at the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria.
Amazingly, five of the Talon children survived and for several years lived with various Indian tribes. Harrigan writes: “Her children, who would eventually return with tattooed faces to Europe or to European outposts in the New World, left no description of the mother who took them from France to what she and her husband thought would be a bright new beginning in an unknown land.”
Harrigan’s third guest also was of French ancestry, although he was born in a sod hut in Kansas in 1886 and grew up in Oklahoma. By the time Everette Lee DeGolyer made it to Texas
in 1936, he was already one of the world’s most renowned geologists and a very wealthy man. He discovered gushers in Mexico, built a Spanish mansion overlooking Dallas’ White Rock Lake, started the world’s leading petroleum-consulting firm and helped found Texas Instruments.
In addition to amassing an immense collection of rare books on Texas, this Dallas renaissance man also became one of the earliest chili scholars. He theorized the dish originated as a dehydrated mixture of beef, fat and peppers that Texas cooks packed away for traveling to the California gold fields or up the cattle trails to Kansas.
Harrigan contends DeGolyer was probably wrong about chili’s origin; San Antonio Tejanos were likely eating some version of chili long before the gold rush or the cattle drives. “But even if his scholarship was debatable,” Harrigan writes, “he did win first prize in the chili contest at the 1948 State Fair of Texas.”
So DeGolyer the oil savant would bring the chili, and since the Lady in Blue would doubtless utter a polite non merci when offered a bowl, there would be food enough for one more guest. “And why not throw in Lyndon Johnson as well,” Harrigan emailed me earlier this week, “who I think appreciated a good bowl of red despite his chronic stomach problems.”