Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Six: Loose Ends

41 Chapter Six: Loose Ends In the summer of 1969 I drove down to Weatherford to see if I could locate Martha Sherman’s grave. Grandmother Curry had told me that Sam Sherman, her nephew (the son of Forrest and Mary D Sherman), had located the grave several years before in a Weatherford cemetery. It had been unmarked, so he bought a gravestone and had it installed. In Parker County, if you wanted to know about local history, you went to see Fred Cotten, the dean of Parker County historians. I found him in his place of business on Oak Street, across from the old stone courthouse. In this big limestone building, Mr. Cotten ran both a furniture store and a funeral home. An open door between the two establishmentsenabledhimtowaitoncustomersonbothsides,although there weren’t many customers the day I arrived. He was sitting in one of his display chairs in the furniture store, beneath a ceiling fan that stirred the humid air. He was up in years, probably in his seventies, and had a shock of fine white hair. He wore a wrinkled white shirt and baggy dress pants held up with suspenders, and a token necktie hung loose at his neck. I joined him under the fan and we talked about local history. I was surprised to learn that Mr. Cotten didn’t number himself among those who admired Charles Goodnight. In fact, he had nothing good to say about him. In his wanderings through the Brazos River country, John Graves had encountered the same sentiment, and maybe from the same source: 42 Chapter Six “Old people around that country will tell you, with some bitterness, that Buenas Noches [Goodnight] had a big mouth and took credit for much that [Oliver] Loving did. It is so. But the Comanches got Oliver Loving on the Pecos . . . and Mr. Charlie lived to tell both their stories.” (John Graves 1960: 62) Fred Cotten was very familiar with the Martha Sherman story. In fact, he’d been so touched by it that, several years before, he had gone to the trouble of locating her grave and marking it with a stone, and had paid for it out of his own pocket. He also claimed to have saved the Willow Springs Cemetery from a Highway Department project that would have run a freeway right through the middle of it. When Mr. Cotten heard about the scheme, he threatened to take the matter to the courthouse and fight to the bitter end. I’ll never know who actually paid for the small granite marker, Fred Cotten or Sam Sherman (Sam, I would bet), but I managed to locate the grave. The inscription said, “Martha Sherman. Killed by Indians in 1860. Buried at Willow Springs to be near a church.” (Erickson 1995: 57-9) What became of the Sherman Bible? Goodnight claims to have found it and says no more (Haley 1936:53), but in a letter written to the Dallas Herald, Sul Ross stated, “I found the Bible of Mrs. Sherman with her name on the flyleaf.” (Dallas Herald, January 2, 1861) Uncle Roy Sherman told Martha Sherman’s grave in Willow Springs Cemetery, Weatherford, Texas. Photo courtesy Mike Harter and Barbara Whitton. 43 Loose Ends Edith Standhardt, “A leather covered Bible which had a leather shoulder strap on it was recovered, pierced halfway by a bullet. It is not known to whom the Bible belongs now.” (Roy Sherman interview, 1963) Mrs. Charles Haydon offered yet another version: “The Indians had with them the family Bible with an arrow hole about one third through the thickness. Ross brought back the Bible, also the scalp of Grandma, and the coat that was worn by the chief, which they said belonged to Mr. Sherman.” (Haydon interview, 1965) In Mrs. Haydon’s version, Ross gave the items to Ezra Sherman, leaving us to wonder what a grieving man does with the scalp of his dead wife. In a loose file in the Texas Archives, a jumble of letters and notes from Parker and Tarrant Counties, I came across a newspaper story (no date or source listed) about Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker. It reported that Sul Ross put several items from the Battle of Pease River on display in the state capitol and then donated them to Sam Houston. Mrs. Sherman’s Bible might have been among those items. Apparently nobody knows what became of...