Butterfield Stage Across Texas
The famous Southern Overland Mail Route, better known as the Butterfield Stage in romantic Wild West movies, actually operated its twice-weekly mail and passenger service for less than three years from September 15, 1858 until March 1, 1861. Two trails from the east started from St. Louis and from Memphis, Tennessee. When the trails met […]
Bose Ikard, Black Cowboy
More than a quarter of the cowboys in the 19th century were black and Bose Ikard became one of the most famous frontiersmen and trail drivers in Texas. Born on a Mississippi slave plantation in 1843, Bose Ikard moved to Texas when he was nine years old with his master Dr. Milton Ikard. The family […]
Ex-Slave Becomes Community Leader
Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1845, Nelson Taylor Denson moved, at age eleven, to Falls County in East Texas with his master. Denson, who had been educated by his master, developed high regard for Sam Houston after hearing Houston speak when he visited Marlin in his campaign for governor. Denson admired Houston’s devotion to […]
Emma Edmondson–Union Spy
Born in 1841 as Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson, the future spy grew up as the youngest of five children on her family’s farm in New Brunswick, Canada. To please her father, who apparently wanted a son, Emma dressed and worked on the farm like a boy. When she faced an unwanted, arranged marriage in the […]
Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy
At the beginning of the Civil War, 17-year-old Marie Isabella (Belle) Boyd hardly fit the image of a daring spy. A tall, slender blonde with a hooknose and protruding teeth, Belle had graduated Baltimore’s Mount Washington Female College and enjoyed the luxury of a Washington debut. Family stories abound of the lively, oldest child of […]
Sally Skull: Legend in her Lifetime
Chroniclers say the tiny, hook-nosed, blue-eyed Sally Skull rode a horse like a man, cursed like a sailor, shot like an Indian, and spoke Spanish like a Mexican. Stories abound of her five husbands–she may have killed one or two, and number five may have killed her. Sally grew up early, and she grew up […]
Woman Hanged in Texas
In 1985 the Texas legislature passed a resolution to absolve Josefa “Chapita” Rodriguez of the murder for which she hanged on November 13, 1863. Chapita Rodriguez lived in a lean-to shack where the Cotton Road crossed the Aransas River, north of San Patricio. She offered meals and a cot on her front porch to travelers […]
Houston’s Civil War Hero
A handsome, redheaded Irish saloonkeeper lead a group of forty-six Irish dockworkers in a Civil War battle that Jefferson Davis called the most amazing feat in military history. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Richard “Dick” Dowling, owner of three popular Houston saloons, joined the Davis Guards, and soon became the company’s first lieutenant. […]
BIG THICKET–FOREST WONDERLAND AND CIVIL WAR HIDEOUT
Opinions vary as to the parameters of the Big Thicket in Southeast Texas. Early Spanish explorers believed this vast wilderness of yellow pine trees five and six feet in diameter towering over dense growth of ferns, cactus, orchids, and carnivorous plants spread from the Old San Antonio Road all the way to the Gulf of […]
LINDHEIMER: FATHER OF TEXAS BOTANY
If you have heard of the Texas prickly pear cactus, the Texas yellow star daisy, milkweed and loco weed, or the Texas rat snake, you may be surprised to know all five derive their scientific name from Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer—a botanist who scoured the wilds of Texas in the 1830s and 40s to discover several […]