Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

8. NOAH SMITHWICK, BLACKSMITH AND MEMOIRIST

+8+ NOAH SMITH W ICK, BLACKSM ITH AND M EMOIRIS T AF EW W E E KS AGO, a friend of mine who teaches a Texas history course at TeU sent out an Internet request for suggestions for supplementary reading for his students. Most of his respondents suggested scholarly monographs that were in-depth explorations of subjects that were touched on lightly in the textbook, which is what most college course supplementary reading is, but for some reason I thought of a book I haven't picked up in years: Noah Smithwick's Evolution ofa State, first published in 1900. Smithwick was by no means a scholar. He was a blacksmith, and he subtitled his book Recollections ofOld Texas Days. That is exactly what it is, a memoir of his life in Texas between 1827 and 1861. It was a fairly ordinary life. Smithwick was neither exceptionally brave nor exceptionally lucky, and if he could avoid trouble , he did. But he had two outstanding qualities: he had a gift for friendship, and he wrote with verve and gusto about the things that happened to him and his friends. He also had a sense of humor, and he had been polishing some of his stories for fifty or sixty years before he set them down. Here's a sample: the town ne'er-do-well was hanging around Smithwick's blacksmith shop in Burnett, staring into the white-hot forge. He remarked on how hot the forge must be. Smithwick said, "Oh, that's not half as hot as you'll have to stand when you go to hell, and that will last forever ." "That's all a lie," the man replied. "If hell is half as hot as that, a dead man wouldn't last a minute there." Actually, Smithwick didn't exactly set these stories down, he dictated them to his daughter, because he was ninety years old and blind when he finally got around to writing about his life. Smithwick came to Texas from Kentucky when he was nineteen and set up as a blacksmith in the capital of Austin's colony, San Felipe, which he describes as "twenty-five or perhaps thirty log cabins strung along the west bank of the Brazos," and he stayed there until 1831. His account of life at San Felipe during those years is absolutely the best in print. His descriptions of the characters who hung around the town and their entertainments are unvarnished, to say the least, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas would probably not approve of them. San Felipe was largely a bachelor society, and a great deal of alcohol was consumed. People made their own fun. A popular form of entertainment was a dinner at which each guest was expected to offer a recitation or a song, and at which the flowing bowl circulated freely. One of Smithwick's friends was Judge Robert M. Williamson, known as "Three-Legged Willie" because his right leg was withered below the knee and he wore a peg leg strapped to his kneecap. Williamson was much in demand at these dinners because he could produce a one-man minstrel show, imitate a country school spelling bee, and parody revival sermons. Smithwick recounts that early one morning following such a dinner he heard a voice under his window calling, "0, Smithwick, here's a man \vith a broken leg." He went outside to find Williamson with his peg leg splintered , the result of a fall. He helped the judge into his shop, fired up his forge, and stapled the wooden leg back together with iron clamps. Dances were another form of entertainment, especially when families with marriageable daughters began to arrive in the colony. As there was only one fiddler available, his instrument was often supplemented. Smithwick describes one dance at which the fiddle could scarcely be heard over the clomping boots, so the rhythm was picked out by a man hitting a plow clevis with a hammer, and another at which the fiddler was absent, so the music was supplied by the plow clevis and a second man scraping a cotton hoe with a clasp knife. There was a certain group at San Felipe who thought themselves more refined than Smithwick and his friends, and they used to complain that society in Texas would improve when "the better sort" finally got there. Smithwick tells about meeting an old...