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16 If the early direction of a life is resolved by the character-shaping coalescence of ancestry, environment, and upbringing, its ultimate course must still depend upon choice, subject only to the random interference of mere chance. The actions of maturity are not ruled by the lottery of heredity and childhood . Somewhere a choice has to be made and, like all who reach their middle years, Sam and Tom Ketchum made theirs. A study of what is known of their formative influences furnishes some insight into the character of these men without explaining what it was that led them, in their prime years, to stake their lives on their six-shooters. They came of old Anglo-American stock. The first of the line is believed to have been Edward Ketcham, from Cambridge, England, who brought his wife, the former Mary Hall, and their four children to Ipswich, Massachusetts, circa 1630. It is definitely known that an Edward Ketchum, who was born in 1758 and lived in North Carolina, where he married Mary Reasor in 1791, was a direct ancestor of the outlaw brothers. By the middle of the 19th century the Ketcham/Ketchum family tree had sprouted branches in New England, Virginia, Illinois, Tennessee, and several other southern and mid-western states. Their story is essentially a reflection in miniature of the great theme of settlement and migration.1 Peter Reasor Ketchum, grandfather of the future outlaws, was born in Virginia about 1800. He was living in Alabama when his son Green Berry Ketchum was born on November 10, 1820, the first of eight children. In 1825 he took his family to Christian County, Illinois, where Green Berry married Temperance Katherine Wydick, a native of Kentucky, on January 27, 1842. Tempa, as she was called, was the daughter of German immigrants, not quite eighteen years old. A story survives that, as a young girl, the only English word she knew was“cornbread.” It is unlikely to have been literally true, and may have been more in the nature of a family joke. The first of the clan to penetrate the frontier country of Texas was Jacob Ketchum, a brother of Peter. Others were close behind. Peter Ketchum’s second son, James, a twenty-four year old native of Illinois, reached Guadalupe County, east of + 2 ∂ “I COULD KILL A BUZZARD A-FLYING” “I Could Kill a Buzzard A-Flying” 17 San Antonio, in 1846 with his twenty-two year old wife Mary Ellen., originally from Kentucky, and their baby daughter Elizabeth. A second child, George W., was born a few months later; he was followed by three more girls and another boy. In 1848 several further wagonloads of Ketchums settled in Caldwell County, just to the northeast of Guadalupe County. Besides Peter, senior, there were Green Berry and Temperance with their baby daughter, another Elizabeth, as well as most of Peter’s other children—Peter, Jr., Lavinia, Chester Van Buren, Margaret, and John N. Almost at once sixteen-year old Lavinia left the family home to move to Fannin County as the bride of Reuben C. Smith.2 By the time Green and Tempa Ketchum cast their eyes on the fine grazing lands near the historic but long deserted Spanish mission of San Saba, 150 miles to the north, they had added two sons to their household. These were Green Berry, junior, but always called “Berry,” born October 24, 1850, and Samuel Wesley, whose advent occurred on January 4, 1854.3 San Saba County covers nine hundred square miles of uplands and valleys near the geographical center of Texas. “The timbered uplands,” wrote Commissioner of Statistics A.W. Speight, “are more or less undulating, and marked by narrow valleys along the streams. The bottoms and narrow uplands are more or less densely covered with mesquite, post-oak, cedar, elm, live-oak, wild china and hackberry, about tine tenths of the area being timbered. In the valleys bordering on streams the pecan and cottonwood attain a large size, but much of the timber [here] is scrubby and suitable chiefly for fuel and fencing.”4 Speight was writing in 1882, but, away from the farms and cattle ranges that had been established during the past twenty years, the face of the land had not changed much since the late 1850s. The main difference was the people: there were far more of them—5325 in 1880, compared with 1425 in 1870 and a few hundred in 1860.5 Richland Creek rises in western...

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