A 19th CENTURY WOMAN OF INFLUENCE
Jane McManus Storm Cazneau was born in Troy, New York, in 1807. After a failed marriage and being named as Aaron Burr’s mistress in his divorce, she came to Texas in 1832 with her brother Robert McManus in an attempt to improve the family’s shrinking fortune. Although she received a contract to settle families in […]
SANTA ANNA: A PARADOX
Some call his era the “Age of Santa Anna.” He was known as a brave soldier and a cunning politician. Over his forty-year career, he served multiple times as a general and eleven times as president of Mexico. He thought of himself as “the Napoleon of the West,” yet historians say he was among the […]
A Way Station on the Rio Grande
The Chihuahuan Desert hugging the Rio Grande in far West Texas was a killing field for Spanish explorers, Apaches, Comanches, white scalp hunters, and freighters daring to travel between San Antonio and Ciudad Chihuahua. Apache and Comanche raids into Mexico—killing hundreds, stealing thousands of livestock and capturing women and children—resulted by 1835 in the Mexican […]
A Medical Charlatan
By the time John Romulus (changed to John Richard) Brinkley came to Texas in 1933, he had amassed a fortune and become famous for transplanting goat glands into his male patients. A natural salesman with a smooth voice and plenty of confidence, Brinkley had been performing his $750 “restorative” operation at his clinic in Milford, […]
Last Hand-Operated Ferry on U.S. Border
Named for the ebony trees in the area and for the tiny town hugging Texas’ southern border, this ancient crossing on the Rio Grande serves as the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry between the U.S. and either its Mexican or its Canadian neighbor. For years before Spain began issuing land grants on the Texas side of […]
Millions in Silver Hauled Across Texas
Hundreds of freight wagons, each drawn by six to eight mules, and brightly colored Mexican carretas, each pulled by four to six oxen, formed dusty weaving trains on the Chihuahua Road from the silver mines of northern Mexico to the port town of Indianola on the central Texas coast. The trail across Texas opened in […]
John R. Brinkley, Medical Charlatan
By the time John Romulus (changed to John Richard) Brinkley came to Texas in 1933, he had amassed a fortune and become famous for transplanting goat glands into his male patients. A natural salesman with a smooth voice and plenty of confidence, Brinkley had been performing his $750 “restorative” operation at his clinic in Milford, […]
Margaret Hallett, Legendary Pioneer Texan
The story that places Margaret Leatherbury Hallett in early Texas merits being called a “legend” because not every part of her saga meets the truth test. Born on Christmas Day 1787, she was the youngest daughter of a prominent Virginia family and probably the feistiest. At eighteen she fell in love with John Hallett, a […]
Black History Month–Part I
In celebration of Black History Month, I plan to write a series highlighting the often-brief stories of black men and women that made their mark on Texas history. Estevanico (often called Esteban and Esteban the Moor) was captured in 1513 in Morocco when he was about thirteen years old and sold to a Spanish nobleman. […]
Angelina Eberly, Innkeeper/Cannoneer
Famous for firing the howitzer that started Texas’ “Bloodless War,” Angelina Eberly was really a smart businesswoman. Born in Tennessee in 1798, Angelina Belle married her first cousin Jonathan C Payton in 1818 and began a journey that ended in 1825 in San Felipe de Austin, headquarters of Stephen F. Austin’s colony. The couple operated […]