Moss Bluff Rebel: A Texas Pioneer in the Civil War

Chapter 2 Character

Chapter 2 Character entrepreneur william b. duncan built a respectable portfolio of assets centered in Liberty County on the southeast Texas gulf coast during the quarter-century between formation of the Republic of Texas and the beginning of America’s Civil War in 1861. Cotton and cattle anchored trade in the area, with harvested cotton hauled on wagons and river barges to the port of Galveston and from there to markets as far away as New York and Liverpool. That same British explorer who sketched the Gulf of Mexico shoreline used tax records to list Galveston’s main exports in his 1843 report back to London. “The exports from Galveston have principally been cotton, buffalo-hides, ox-hides, buffalo-ropes, deer-skins, staves, moss, and sundries.” No railroads rolled in Texas until the late 1850s and even then, they were incapable of handling large cargos. Southeast Texas ranchers moved their cattle to market via barge from Galveston or in herds they drove east across the coastal plains. William Duncan became a skilled cattle wrangler; he knew the lay of the land along the gulf coast and traded profitably in the beef supply chain across southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. Complementing his cattle business, Duncan was a real estate investor with a healthy appetite for risk. Trading cattle generated more cash than he needed for working capital to buy stock and finance expenses on his drives to market. Rather than squirrel money away under his pillow or in gold bars locked in a New Orleans bank, he put it to work in land. By 1860, Duncan owned 4,197 acres in five counties. His personal property in Liberty that year included six hundred head of cattle, eight horses, and three slaves, which when added to the land for tax purposes totaled a twenty-first-century inflation-adjusted $184,944. Duncan also paid property tax in 1860 in Refugio County, showing he spread his economic pursuits along much of the Atascosito Trail. The Texas pioneer cattleman practiced investment diversification long before modern financial planners gave it a name. A4950.indb 11 A4950.indb 11 10/17/08 8:54:07 AM 10/17/08 8:54:07 AM 12 Chapter 2 When not at work, Duncan spent his days hunting along the lower Trinity River basin and the wildlife-rich coastal plain of southeast Texas. Hunting was good in the biologically diverse bottomland hardwood forests and other wetland habitats along the Trinity. They were home to a bountiful variety of fauna and flora, including more than six hundred plant species, four hundred species of vertebrates, two hundred species of birds, and seventy-plus species of butter- flies. He also enjoyed card games in town when he wasn’t working. Gambling of all sorts was common entertainment in frontier Texas; in fact, one historian says, “A fever for gambling ran in the blood of the age.” Duncan clearly enjoyed it because he won more money than he lost most of his life. During the games, he and his cronies exchanged news, rumors, and fish stories amid acrid smoke from their pipes, cigars, and cigarettes and occasional sips of whiskey. From the frequency with which Duncan mentions the purchase of tobacco and spirits, he savored both on an almost daily basis. The handsome Duncan married twice before the Civil War. He wed his first wife, fifteen-year-old Eliza C. Gillard, on August 9, 1848 when he was thirty. Born of Irish immigrant parents, Eliza’s birth name was Catherine Lamb. After her natural mother’s death, infant Catherine’s father returned to Ireland, leaving the baby in a New Orleans orphanage where Dr. Edward Joseph Gillard and his wife, Emma DeBlanc Gillard adopted her. Before her death from pneumonia on November 11, 1856—the day after her twenty-fourth birthday—Eliza bore Duncan three children: Emma (see figure 3), born July 10, fig. 3. William B. Duncan, his first wife Eliza Gillard Duncan and first child Emma Cassandra, ca. 1852 when Duncan was thirty-four years old and heavily involved in his professional life as a cattle drover and public service as a Liberty County elected official. Courtesy Julia Duncan Welder Collection, SHRL, Liberty, Texas. A4950.indb 12 A4950.indb 12 10/17/08 8:54:07 AM 10/17/08 8:54:07 AM Character 13 1849; William, named for his deceased grandfather and...