In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 14 Getting Rid of Wildness The years of the Texas Republic (1836 –1845) were the years that transformed people into Texans. They wrote their origin myths, established their government, schools, and religion, and increased their families. But before they could establish “civilization” in Texas, there was another battle they had to fight. It was not enough to create the foundations of civilization; they also had to rid Texas of the vestiges of “wildness,” the reminders of savagery, the last threat to their security. For them this meant getting rid of the Indians. samuel rogers One of the best descriptions of these years, full of irony and without the selfrighteousness of John Henry Brown, comes from the memoirs of my greatgreat -grandfather Samuel Rogers. Sam Rogers was born June 18, 1810. At nineteen, he married fifteen-year-old Mary White, daughter of Jesse White, one of the original leaders of the Alabama Settlement. The next year Sam and his wife were part of the huge migration to the Alabama Settlement, but the hardship of the wilderness and the fevers of the Texas coast were too much for Mary, who died in 1833, when she was only nineteen, leaving two children in the care of her relatives. Sam Rogers was grief stricken: “Death came and took from me the one that made even the wilderness of Texas with all its privations and hardships a paradise. I did not want to record this, yet all is uncertain and how fleeting were all earthly enjoyments. Give me submission and let me confidently believe that the hand that wounds will make alive. After the death of my wife, I gave up housekeeping. My two children were taken by their grandmother [Mary White]. Catherine, my oldest, was nearly four years old; William, my son, was about two. My home then for some time was at Cox’s Point on the bay where I was in the employ of Major George Sutherland.”1 During the war with Mexico, Rogers married his second wife, Lucinda Hardy. Like other women in the Runaway Scrape, her health suffered from Getting Rid of Wildness 117 the experience, and in 1850 she died at a young age. The next year, when Sam turned forty, he married fifteen-year-old Mary Evans. Mary was born in Alabama the year before Texas independence. She and Sam went on to have nine children. Two of them died at age sixteen, but all of the others lived. The three youngest were daughters, and it was they who looked after their father and mother until their parents’ deaths. These daughters married the three Sutherland brothers, grandsons to George Sutherland. In 1929 Lizzie Laura Rogers Sutherland described her father in the following way: My father had a wonderful collection of books. His education being limited, he would sit for hours reading to improve it and was ordained a Methodist preacher. He was not a member of the conference but went as often as he could to preach in nearby churches and schools and to help with Camp Meetings. There is still a school house standing [the Rogers Chapel] with its seats made of split logs in or near by his community. In those days there was only a few doctors and unless a person was seriously ill my father was called upon to visit the sick. His homemade pills would generally have a good effect. I have been told he was sent for and rode a mile in a terrible hurry as a child was choking to death. He found the child had a sweet potato peel in the roof of his mouth. If my father had enemies he did not know of it but could number his friends by the hundreds. Having a bunch of cattle he would kill a beef and go to each neighbor in his little buggy taking all some of this meat. I can remember at one home of a little boy whose mother had passed away, the father was having a hard time making a living for his three children. He came to my father’s house and asked him to give [the little boy] a home which my father did for several years until the boy was older and could find work. In the later part of his life my father lost his hearing and had to use a trumpet to be able to carry on a conversation.2 Samuel Rogers’s autobiography, written down by his youngest daughters...

Share