Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION I CONS IDER MYS ELF a Texan, even though I was born elsewhere . My father was born in McKinney and grew up in Fort Worth. My mother was from Jacksboro. My father's career as a highway engineer for the United States Bureau of Public Roads took my parents away from Texas in the 1930s, first to South Carolina, where I was born, and then to Washington, DC, and finally to the Philippine Islands before they moved back to Fort Worth when I was sixteen. But three of my four great-grandfathers came to Texas before the Civil War and the fourth, a disgruntled ex-Confederate cavalryman, brought his family here from Louisiana shortly after the end of the war. In fact, one of my greatgreat -grandfathers received a land grant in Fannin County from the Republic of Texas for being here before March 2, 1836, so I qualify for membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I think my Texan credentials are as sound as Sam Houston's or Davy Crockett's or William Barrett Travis's, all of whom were born in other states. My grandmother Taylor, the daughter of the Confederate cavalryman , lived with us when I was a child, and her stories about her childhood on a series of rented Central Texas cotton farms kept my consciousness of my Texan inheritance alive while I was growing up away from Texas. VVhen we moved to Fort Worth in 1956, the Texas past she talked about so much suddenly came into focus for me, and surrounded by the scenes of my father's boyhood , I felt that I had come home. I have always wanted to write about Texas. VVhen I was seven my grandmother gave me a copy of J. Frank Dobie's Legends of Texas, the volume he edited for the Texas Folklore Society in 1924. +- XIII XIV +I devoured that book. It validated in print all mygrandmother's stories . In fact, some of the tales in it were about people that my grandmother had known and that I had heard her talk about. Dobie's uncle, Jim Dobie, courted her little sister when her family lived at Lagarto, in Jim Wells County, and Judge W. P. McLean of Fort Worth, who hunted for Moro's gold, was a family friend. I realized for the first time that books could be about real events and people, and I decided then that someday I would be a writer and write those kinds of books. During my career as a museum curator I wrote several books, but they were largely about objects rather than people. When I retired from the Smithsonian Institution in 2002, I moved back to Texas, and my wife and I built a house in Fort Davis. Kay Burnett, the widow of legendary West Texas lawyer Warren Burnett, was starting a weekly newspaper, the Desert-Mountain Times, in nearby Alpine. She asked me if I would write a column for it, saying that I could write about anything that I wanted. I have always admired George Dolan, who wrote a column called "This is West Texas" for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the I960s, and Houston columnist Leon Hale, thinking that they had the best of all possible jobs, driving around the state talking to people and getting paid for it, so I said yes. But having just retired I did not want to tie myself to a weekly deadline, and so I stipulated that I would do one column every two weeks. I then sat down and wrote two columns and sent them in, thinking that my work for the month was done. Kay ran one column one week and one the next, and I became a weekly columnist. I called my column "The Rambling Boy," after Tom Paxton's song, explaining to my readers that I would ramble around the Big Bend talking to people but that I would also ramble across Texas history for my subject matter. VVhen the Desert-Mountain Times ceased publication, the column was picked up by Marfa's Big Bend Sentinel, which is still publishing it. Most of the pieces in this book first appeared in the Big Bend Sentinel and I am grateful to that paper's publisher, Robert Halpern, for his permission to republish them, as well as to Kay Burnett for her initial encouragement . I am also grateful to...