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. She had graduated Baltimore’s Mount Washington Female College and enjoyed a Washington debut. Family stories abound about the lively, oldest child in the family of eight siblings, growing up as a tomboy climbing trees and […]
Rabbi Henry Cohen
In 1888, Rabbi Henry Cohen, a wiry little man, barely five feet tall, with a booming British accent, arrived in Galveston to serve Temple B’nai Israel where he remained for the next sixty-four years. He wore black, tuxedo-type suits, white bow ties, and starched white shirts with stiff cuffs on which he wrote his appointments […]
AIRSHIP FLIES BEFORE WRIGHT BROTHERS
Residents in the East Texas town of Pittsburg house in the local museum a full-size replica of the Ezekiel Airship, which many old timers declare flew almost a year before the Wright brother’s claim to fame at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Burrell Cannon, a mechanical genius and part-time Baptist preacher, inspired by the first and […]
John Steinbeck Quote
This comes from Bruce Louis Dodson, an expat in Sweden.
TEXAS’ LADY CANNONEER
Texans love stories of pioneer settlers and heroes. Angelina Eberly fits the bill. Born in Tennessee in 1798, Mrs. Eberly married her first cousin, made the journey to Matagorda Bay on the Texas coast in 1822 and finally, with the help of several slaves, opened an inn and tavern in the new village of San […]
Philanthropic Madam
Mystery surrounds Miss Rita’s early life. Raised in a prosperous, but unnamed Oregon family in the early 1900s, she left home to dance for a time with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo before she joined the vaudeville circuit. During her first, brief marriage, it’s unclear why she became a prostitute. When the Great Depression […]
The Battle of Plum Creek
Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, maintained a harsh anti-Indian policy. Like many of the folks that elected him, Lamar claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. In January 1840, three Comanche chiefs entered San Antonio seeking a peace agreement that would recognize the borders of Comancheria—their […]
Buffalo Days
The buffalo represented big business in Texas for about four years beginning in 1874. The new southern transcontinental railroad made it possible to ship hides to eastern markets, and a New York brokerage house recognized an international demand for the hides. As in all booms, there were entrepreneurs ready to meet the demands and turn […]