Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838–1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

30. To McKinney’s Landing

The Reminiscences  213 15. A person with one black great-grandparent. In the Slave Schedule connected with the 1850 U.S. Census for Bowie County, N. D. Ellis is listed with 38 slaves and James N. Smith with 37, but none fitting the description. 16. Withenbury is referring to the large bend immediately above Spanish Bluff that has since been reoccupied by the river, as shown on contemporary topographic maps. Ross made the cutoff in a May 1842 voyage by the Relief. 17. See the article on “Spanish Bluff” in the Handbook of Texas Online. Spanish Bluff is shown on Jacob De Cordova’s 1867 Map of the State of Texas and continues to appear on contemporary topographic maps. 18. Possibly Frederick Siedikum, Bowie County Surveyor, whose name appears on many documents on file in the Texas General Land Office and who prepared the first map of Bowie County in 1841. The Bowie County tax rolls indicate that Siedikum acquired property in the Ellis headright by at least 1846. 30  To McKinney’s Landing • McKinney’s Landing was the landing of Collin McKinney1 located in his headright in northeast Bowie County in an area that was called Hickman’s Prairie. It had been a keelboat landing and was a steamboat landing of modest importance . McKinney was born in New Jersey in 1766, and the family migrated to Kentucky, where McKinney married Annie Moore in 1792, with whom he had four children and, after her death, Elizabeth Coleman in 1805, with whom he had six children. McKinney was the oldest person (70) to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 and served in the First, Second, and Fourth congresses of the Republic. He was a prominent member of the Disciples of 214  Red River Reminiscences Christ and a lay preacher. When Withenbury met him in 1842, he was aged 75. McKinney last appears in the Bowie County tax rolls in 1846, after which he brought his family to Collin County, where he died in 1861 at the age of 95.  A fter leaving Spanish Bluff, the first place of which I shall take note is McKinney’s Landing, in Bowie County, Texas, and I would not dwell here for anything which occurred on this trip to the profit of the Relief; for, in consequence of the low stage of the water, we were unable to do much freighting business, and our principal reason for stopping at all was to procure fuel and provisions; the former we generally supplied ourselves with at night, on which occasions all our axes were brought into requisition, and the crew went grumbling to the work of wooding from the standing timber. But as there was a wood-pile at McKinney’s, and any number of anxious looking individuals standing on the bank watching our approach, Captain Ross ordered the boat landed. And now, before she touches the shore and the rush on board takes place, I must go back a little and tell my readers that we have Judge Smith2 and his fiddle with us. He is making a pleasure trip as the guest of the boat, and he has been with us long enough already to get both his fiddle and himself in tune. Oh, how I wish all my readers knew the old Judge as well as the crew of the Relief did; for then they could see him wherever his name occurred in these lines, just as “Uncle Joe” and myself can see him before us whenever his name is spoken or thought of, and I would not then find it necessary to attempt to describe this almost indescribable man. But I will not dwell upon his pe- The Reminiscences  215 culiarities here, but content myself with the bare introduction I have given him and hold myself in readiness to speak of him occasionally , as I am chronicling the remaining incidents of this time consuming trip. When the bell sounded as a signal for landing, everybody came out to look at the place. The clerk left his books, the cook his kitchen, the bar-keeper left his bottles, the chambermaid her washing tub; and Jim Berryhill, our Indian steward, ran up to Captain Ross and said: “Cap’en, do, for God’s sake, try and get some beef here, for you know we’ve not had a bite since we left Shreveport, and old man McKinney is a Kentuckian, and...