Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Nine: Joe Sherman

64 Chapter Nine: Joe Sherman History has cast a bright light on Cynthia Ann Parker and Martha Sherman, but has had very little to say about the two-year old boy who stood in the rain that horrible day in November 1860, watching as his father tied a rag around the scalped head of his dying mother. Joe Sherman seems to have been a shadowy figure from the very beginning, a man who moved through life like a coyote, casting backward glances to see if he was being followed. Though he qualified as a genuine Texas frontiersman and pioneer, he made no effort to record his adventures and seemed content to take his past with him to the grave, leaving it to others to write the history books and figure out who he was, if that’s what they wanted to do. If he ever bothered to write a memoir, my branch of the family never saw evidence of such. It has taken me forty years to assemble a hazy pattern of where he was and what he did—family stories, bits of stories, county records, newspaper files, and a reference here and there in a book. And I’m sure that’s the way he wanted it. My cousin Mike Harter, a historian by training, helped fill in some of the blank spaces, based on his memory of conversations with his mother and other family members: “After Martha’s death, Joe was sent to live with her mother in Limestone County. She doted on him as she grieved for her daughter, and mothered him until she died when he was about 65 Joe Sherman seven. Her death must have been a big shock to young Joe. He was sent to live with Martha’s brother, Jeremiah Johnson, the family patriarch of the Hawkins clan. He was something of a tyrant and I’m under the impression that Joe Sherman hated him, or hated being a slave on his farm. At the age of thirteen, Joe took off with some outlaws. That is believable to me because it would have been about 1871. Reconstruction was in full bloom. E. J. Davis was governor and lawlessness was abroad in the land. I’m under the impression that he roamed with them for a while but left them after something really bad happened. He returned to the countryside west of Fort Worth, where Jim Loving took him under his wing.” (Harter letter, July 13, 2004) No one in the family seems to know exactly what kind of trouble Joe Sherman got into. Mother said only that if he hadn’t married a strong Quaker woman, he might have become an outlaw. It might have had something to do with gathering unbranded cattle, a common though shady practice after the Civil War, or it might have been something more serious. An 1891 letter to Joe Sherman from his aunt Sarrah Clinesmith (Martha Sherman’s sister) hints that she may have known something of his past: “Dear boy, have you quit being wicked? Are you trying to live a Christian [life] so when you leave your friends on earth, you will meet those dear friends you have in heaven? Your poor mother, killed by the cruel savage, said she wanted you all raised in the love and fear of the Lord so you would meet her in heaven.” (Clinesmith letter, 1891) Sometime around 1871 or 1872, Joe Sherman returned to Palo Pinto County and came under the good influence of one of the pioneering families in the area, the Lovings. Palo Pinto County seems to have been an incubator for famous Texas cattlemen and included the names 66 Chapter Nine Charles Goodnight; George Slaughter and his illustrious sons, John, W. B., and C. C. Slaughter; and the Loving clan—Oliver and his sons, James C., Bill, George, and Joseph—all of whom carved their names deeply into the tree of frontier history. It also produced a large crowd of lesser known cowboys and ranchers who would eventually make their way west to Crosby County, Joe Sherman among them. A Texas historical marker in Palo Pinto County states that Oliver Loving was the first trail driver of Texas cattle. (Palo Pinto Historical Commission, 1986: 379) When I first encountered this claim, I was skeptical about it, as I had supposed that old Shanghai Pierce down on the Texas coast had...