Forgotten Tales of Texas

By Clay Coppedge and Karleigh Hambrick

From El Chupacabra to the Marx Brothers, Clay Coppedge has a talent for digging into Texas's most unusual history. Strange as they may seem, many of these Texas-sized legends are surprisingly true, like Pancho Villa's film contract and the notorious Crash at Crush, a staged train collision and failed publicity stunt that turned tragic outside of Katy. Whether fact or lore, each tale is irrefutably part of a unique and fascinating heritage that invigorates the spirit like a Texas frontier remedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781625841964

Clay Coppedge

Clay Coppedge has published four collections of his Texas history columns, a history of baseball in Texas and a memoir. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Acres USA, Field & Stream, Progressive Farmer, Texas Co-op Power and Texas Highways. He lives and writes just outside of Walburg, Texas.

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PREFACE

Most of these stories first appeared, sometimes in different form, in Country World newspaper, a division of Echo Publishing, Inc. Texas Marx the Spot, Sally Rand and Yesterday’s House of Tomorrow and The Dead Bank Robber Bounty first appeared in Texas Co-op Power magazine.

Part I

STRANGE BREW

Drugstore Cowboys

A lot of what we can say about Clark Stanley or Charlie Bigelow would come off today as a left-handed compliment or even a downright insult. Where’s the glory in being history’s best-known snake oil salesman or even the original drugstore cowboy? Stanley and Bigelow have been called both of those things and worse.

Stanley claimed to be from Abilene, but he claimed a lot of things, including a birthday that would have him living in Abilene many years before the city’s founding. His snake oil has become a phrase used now to describe anything that promises nothing short of a miracle but delivers little or nothing at all. There were no laws requiring medicine makers to list the ingredients of their products when Stanley started out openly and proudly selling the stuff. This little loophole was big enough for the likes of Stanley and Bigelow to easily jump through.

In his own curious autobiography, published in 1897, Stanley wrote that he first went up the [Chisholm] Trail when he was fourteen and lived the cowboy life for the next eleven years before he made a life-altering trip to Arizona. There he claims to have fallen in with the Moki Pueblo tribe, with whom he learned many ancient secrets, including the miraculous healing power of snake oil. He first sold his new product in Abilene, where it was such a popular item that he began manufacturing it in bulk as Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment. He hit the road, hawking his product in every town along the way. He appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where he was recruited to Providence, Rhode Island, to produce the magic medicine in a factory.

The end came in 1917 when the government seized a shipment of Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment and ran tests to see what was in it, chemistry having come a long way since Stanley first went into business. His snake oil was found to contain some beef fat, kerosene, a little bit of red pepper, turpentine and camphor. Noticeably absent from the list of ingredients was anything derived from a snake, a fact all the more troubling because Stanley claimed to slaughter the reptiles by the thousands back home in Texas in order to produce the stuff.

Another Texan who made a good living—for a while—in the snake oil business was known to his neighbors in Bee County as Charlie Bigelow. One day, a man by the name of Phil Grant (aka Dr. Yellowstone) came through Bee County selling herbal remedies. Charley Bigelow was sure enough sold on herbal remedies as a way to make money and went on the road with Dr. Yellowstone. Along the way he learned a few magic tricks, let his hair grow long and became the traveling medicine man Dr. Lone Star.

Bigelow hooked up with John Healy, who manufactured a liniment known as King of Pain, and formed the Texas Therapeutic Road Show. As the name implies, they hit the road. In today’s terms, Bigelow and Healy’s show would be considered a multimedia event: dog and pony shows, minstrel skits, singing and dancing were all used to lure the public to their miraculous Kickapoo medicines.

Bigelow and Healy exploited members of the Kickapoo and Pawnee tribes to lend credence to their products, claiming that the Indians had used these natural cures for many centuries with great results. They planted shills in the audience who were paid to buy and sample the product and then proclaim that they were immediately cured—a miracle!

It’s interesting to note that science, which revealed the deceptions at the heart of the snake oil business, keeps taking fresh looks at snake oils and especially snake venom, which has been studied as part of an effort to clone proteins to slow the growth of human tumors. Certain old-timers believe that a good snakebite, if not fatal, can cure a lot of diseases the victim might have at the time of the bite. It works like chemotherapy, they say.

For some of us, that sounds like a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Madstone Magic

There was a time when you would do anything you had to do to lay hands on a madstone. That time usually came right as you were bitten by a rabid animal—a good madstone was widely believed to be the only cure for such misfortune.

Madstones were (and are, for that matter) basically gut rocks, stones that form in the innards of ruminant animals like cows, horses, buffalo and deer. The rocks form when the animal ingests dirt, hairballs, rocks or foreign matter like metal while grazing on grass. The matter calcifies, much as a grain of sand embedded in an oyster turns into a pearl, and becomes in time a madstone. There is not much demand for them these days, but in frontier times the best madstones were said to come from the belly of a deer. If the host animal was a white deer, you were dealing with pure magic. Or so the belief went.

People on the frontier swore by these things; bites from rabid animals such as skunks, raccoons, dogs or coyotes were more common because the animals themselves were more common. The high incidence of success probably had something to do with the fact that most of the bites treated with madstones did not come from rabid animals.

Still, on the frontier, where rabid animals outnumbered doctors, people didn’t take any chances. If you got bit by a member of any animal species known to carry rabies, the first order of business was to secure a madstone, boil it in water or milk and apply it to the wound. A good madstone was generally porous, and the really good ones, when applied to the wound, would stick, sometimes for several hours. When they fell off, it was believed that the poison was gone, though the stones were often applied a second time.

Pharmacist and author Wayne Bethard wrote in his book Lotions, Potions and Deadly Elixirs: Frontier Medicine in America that madstones consist mostly of magnesium, calcium, chromium, nickel, copper and lead. Because of the large number of buffalo during most of the nineteenth century, these particular gut rocks were more common than they are today. They were usually secured during the field dressing process and were greatly prized. Particularly good madstones were passed down from one generation to the next. Neighbors called upon one another to borrow a madstone to cure a black widow spider bite, as madstones were believed to work on any poisonous bite.

Some frontier doctors carried a madstone or two, just in case. Doctors like Benjamin Tomas Crumley were in high demand because of their madstones. Crumley was half Cherokee and spent several years studying medicinal herbs with elders of that tribe, as well as attending medical school in Paris. The madstones and his use of them were reputed to be highly effective.

Warren Angus Ferris, a pioneer surveyor who plotted a little settlement named Warwick that was later renamed Dallas, detailed the use of the madstone in his diaries. Ferris was bitten on the leg one day by a rabid raccoon that broke into his home and tangled with two of his dogs, which later had to be destroyed because they came down with rabies. Ferris went straight to a neighbor on the Trinity River to get a madstone. He wrote that during the time the stone was attached to the bite the evaporating water could be seen as it was boiling at every tube, and I could feel a distinct burning sensation in the wound such as I would presume would be induced by a minute blister of flies.

Ferris believed that the porous nature of the stone produced a vacuum in its openings that was caused by the hot water evaporating and that the bacteria had a strong chemical affinity for something in the madstone.

At any rate, he didn’t come down with rabies.

Frontier Doctors

Becoming a doctor was a lot easier in the day of the frontier, when people weren’t as picky about their healthcare plans as they are now. You could call yourself a doctor and if your first consideration was to cause no real physical harm to the patient, other people would probably call you a doctor, too.

Dr. John F. Webber was a case in point. Born in Vermont and a veteran of the War of 1812, Webber had settled in Austin’s colony by 1826 and received a headright in present-day Travis County in 1832. Webberville, which was called Webber’s Prairie in the community’s early days, was named for him and was, by most accounts, a rowdy place. In the 1820s, Webber joined up with future frontier chronicler Noah Smithwick and two other men to form a tobacco smuggling operation to Mexico. Webber wasn’t a real doctor, but he played one in Mexico in order to avoid answering a lot of bothersome questions about what he was doing in that country. Posing as a doctor was easier than explaining his presence in the country with one thousand pounds of leaf tobacco, which had to be sold in small packages to avoid arousing suspicion.

The four men split up into two groups. Smithwick and Webber set up shop in San Fernando, where Webber advertised his medical services. Smithwick spoke better Spanish than Webber and accompanied him as he tended to patients. Smithwick later wrote of Webber: With an air of importance that would have done credit to a professional, Webber noted the symptoms, shaking his head, knitting his brows, and otherwise impressing the patient with the seriousness of his condition.

Smithwick and Webber had brought along a supply of medicine for their own use, mostly calomel, quinine and tartar emetic, a poisonous compound that was used to induce vomiting; it made Webber’s patients feel different, if not better. The doctor’s fame went abroad and he soon had a large practice, same as imposters of the present day, Smithwick wrote.

Smithwick also knew the inventor Gail Borden before Borden patented the process for making condensed milk and became known as Dairyman to the World. They met in San Felipe and later in Burnet County, where Smithwick operated a mill. Borden was looking for gold on Sandy Creek and