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Chapter 15. The Wild Woman of the Navidad
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chapter 15 The Wild Woman of the Navidad In the settlers’ rush to stamp out wildness, another group of stories about sightings of mysterious, naked wild people burst into the imaginations of the colonists living in the Lavaca-Navidad area. Sightings of the wild man or woman of the Navidad captured the fantasies not just of Texans in the republic. Newspapers all over the United States picked up the thrilling story, and its progress was regularly reported along the East Coast. According to the Cavalcade of Jackson County, the periodic appearance of the wild woman of the Navidad between 1840 and 1850 “was a standing subject of speculation and supplied the headlines of newspapers throughout the United States. The creature, without a name and culture, was one of the most discussed characters in the early history of Jackson County and Texas. People lived in fear of their lives, and their property was never secure from the greed or curiosity of this wild individual.”1 The story of the feral woman was immortalized when the icon of Texas folklore, J. Frank Dobie, published the story as told by Sam Rogers. Dobie and my father were in the habit of sitting on the veranda at the home of my grandmother Mary E. Robertson Sutherland, at 1611 West Avenue in Austin, telling tales from old-time Texas, a phrase that Dobie used for the book in which he published “The Wild Woman of Navidad.”2 When the book came out, my father’s sister Alice wrote to Dobie to tell him of the living children of Samuel Rogers, and he replied that he was “surprised to learn that Sammy Rogers still has living children. I hope they inherited his sense of humor.”3 Great-aunt Mabel, who kept a copy of this letter, scratched out “Sammy” and wrote “Samuel,” obviously piqued that Dobie, in an attempt to claim familiarity with Sam Rogers, used a nickname no one in the family ever did. A number of theories circulated about these wild people and their origins. Some hinted that the Wild Woman of the Navidad might be an “Indian squaw” traveling in the company of a runaway slave. In May 1834, before the Texas Revolution, Mrs. Dilue Harris wrote the following: “We had quite an excitement and considerable fright in this month. Father and brother were in Harrisburg having work done by the blacksmith; there came a man with The Wild Woman of the Navidad 123 a letter from Mr. Smith notifying father and the men in our neighborhood that one of his Africans had run away. He had a large knife he had stolen, also a flint and steel for striking fire. The runaway Negro stayed in our neighborhood for several months. The men tried to capture him but did not succeed. Mr. Battle caught him and tied him, but the Negro cut Mr. Battle severely. He then left our neighborhood, crossed the Brazos and Colorado rivers and made his way to the Navidad bottom. It was said there was a Negro woman with him, but some said it was an Indian squaw. He was often seen by travelers , and was called the ‘Wild Man of the Navidad.’”4 Around the Navidad area, people began to notice the tracks of three human beings who had walked through the fields, the size of the tracks indicating a man, a woman, and a child. These “wild” people took yams and roasting ears of corn but otherwise caused no problem and were never actually seen. Settlers speculated that they were runaway Negroes or a stray remnant of the Karankawa, who had been run out of the region earlier. Some people thought the tracks might belong to children lost during the Runaway Scrape, who, now having “gone wild,” were too frightened to approach human society . Fear of reversion to wildness still beat in people’s breasts. Then, one spring morning in 1845, Sam Rogers went out to his fields, as he always did, and noticed the tracks of three people who had passed by during the night. He knew immediately that it had to be the “wild people.” Word of their presence in the area electrified the Alabama Settlement. Rogers carefully described what he had seen: “There were three different sets of tracks, one was quite a small track. It was not a shoe track but I think it could have worn a number four shoe. Others and myself thought it might be the track of a...