Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Four: Martha Sherman

22 Chapter Four: Martha Sherman Mother told me stories about Joe Sherman, but he always seemed a man who occupied the shadows. He died when Mother was a small child and, for reasons that remained obscure to me until many years later, his death was shrouded in mystery. When Mother spoke of that event, her voice dropped into a hushed tone that caused me to lean forward and listen to every word. She was four years old at the time, which would have placed the event in 1916 or 1917. She heard an odd sound coming from her mother’s bedroom. Alarmed, Anna Beth broke one of Mrs. Curry’s iron rules and entered the room without knocking. Inside, she saw her mother sitting in front of her dressing table, her face buried in her hands. She was crying. Anna Beth went to her and said, “Mother, what’s wrong?” Startled, Mable turned on the child and screamed, “Get out! Get out!” Mother ran out of the room, terrified and certain that something dreadful had come over the house. Later, she learned that her grandfather, Joe Sherman, had died from a gunshot wound. It was an event that brought such disgrace to the Shermans and Currys that no one in my family ever discussed it. Fifty years after it happened, Grandmother Curry still wouldn’t talk about it with her own daughters. I would eventually piece the story back together, but without any help from my Sherman kin. Grandmother Curry and her brothers received my questions with a stiff silence, a quality my mother often referred to as 23 Martha Sherman “the Sherman Chill.” No one had ever accused the Shermans of having loose tongues. And then there was the story about Joe Sherman’s mother. Anna Beth told me that when Joe Sherman was a boy, his mother was killed by Indians. Typically, Mother omitted certain details, such as when, where, why, and what kind of Indians, making it the kind of story a boy might relate to his friends at school, who would dismiss as fiction. I was never sure of that myself until that evening in the summer of 1966, when I found the check-marked passage in J. Evetts Haley’s biography of Charles Goodnight: “On their way out to the open country [the Comanches] came to where a man by the name of Sherman had settled on Stagg Prairie, in the western edge of Parker County. . . . It was raining heavily as five warriors dismounted, drove the family out, seized Mrs. Sherman, tied her to the ground, violated her, and shot two or three arrows into her body. She lived until the next day, giving birth to a dead child.” (Haley 1936: 49-50) This was the story Mother had told me years before, only now I had a place and time: Parker or Palo Pinto County, Texas, in November of 1860. Later, armed with that information, I went to the Texas Archives in downtown Austin and began poring over crumbling newspapers, files of letters, books on frontier history, and microfilm records. I soon realized that the death of Martha Sherman, a story that had lain half-forgotten in the memory of my family, was a major news event on the Texas frontier in the winter of 1860-61. It was widely reported at the time and has been mentioned in a number of books since then. And it eventually included some important figures in Texas history: Charles Goodnight, Sam Houston, Sul Ross, Quanah Parker, and Cynthia Ann Parker. It also had a powerful effect on a two-year old boy who saw it happen, Joe Sherman. By the fall of 1860, the line of Anglo-American settlement in Texas had pushed west of Fort Worth, and Parker, Young, Jack, and 24 Chapter Four Palo Pinto Counties had become the cutting edge of the frontier. Ezra Sherman and his wife Martha had settled on land west of Weatherford, on the Parker-Palo Pinto county line, a very dangerous place to be, as it turned out. The hostile Indians, including several bands of the notorious Comanche tribe, had been resettled on reservations north of the Red River in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), but some of them grew restless for the old ways of raiding and plundering. In November, Chief Peta Nocona led a band of Comanches and Kiowas on a rampage that...