Unbridled Cowboy

By Joseph B. Fussell

Unbridled Cowboy is a riveting firsthand account of a defiant hell-raiser in the wild and tumultuous American Southwest in the late 1800s. At the age of fourteen, Joe Fussell hopped trains to escape from school and the authority he scorned. Joe became a roving cowpuncher across the Texas territory, tilling the land, wrangling

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donella Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781734260175

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Praise for Unbridled Cowboy

Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award, 2009

Gripping—I couldn’t put it down... A remarkably complete story about growing up in Texas.

This book has charm and vitality due to the integrity and honesty of the voice. Future generations of readers will greatly benefit...

—Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

a richly detailed, entertaining memoir ... good reading.

—Dallas Morning News

... riveting true tales of undercover work, life on the railroads, and rough justice. A captivating true life narrative of the wild west.

—Midwest Book Review

You have to read it to believe it. It’s spellbinding.

—Cowboy Magazine

It’s the language that makes this book memorable... this book takes readers back to the tumultuous time at the turn of the 19th century when the cowboy gave way to the railroader... Joe Fussell ... invokes the cowboy spirit in his language and attitude, making this story an extraordinary one.

—Texas Books in Review

... a powerful story of life and living on the trail when the West was still wild and men were as brutal and unforgiving as the land itself.

—Marshall Trimble, True West Magazine

Unbridled Cowboy

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Copyright © 2008, 2021 E. Robert Fussell

Originally published 2008 by Truman State University Press.

Reprint edition by Donella Press, 2021.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical review or other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover art: Corral Study in Black and White, Benjamin Earwicker,

Garrison Photography.

Frontis: Joe Fussell, spring 1910, age 29 years.

Cover design: Teresa Wheeler

Type: Minion Pro, Copperplate, and Charcuterie Ornaments

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(for 2008 edition)

Fussell, Joseph B., 1879–1957.

Unbridled cowboy / Joseph B. Fussell ; edited by E. R. Fussell.

p. cm.

1. Fussell, Joseph B., 1879–1957. 2. Cowboys—Southwest, New—Biography. 3. Cowboys—Texas—Biography. 4. Railroads—Southwest, New—Employees—Biography. 5. Ranch life—Southwest, New—History—20th century. 6. Ranch life—Texas—History—20th century. 7. Southwest, New—Social life and customs—20th century. 8. Texas—Social life and customs—20th century. 9. Southwest, New—Biography. 10. Texas—Biography. I. Fussell, E. R. II. Title.

F786.F87A3 2008 979'.03092—dc22

[B] 2008007799

ISBN (paper): 978-1-7342601-6-8

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-7342601-7-5

This book is dedicated to the past, present, and future descendants of Joe and Mary Fussell,

above all to their children, my aunt, Helen Fussell Johnson,

and my father, Robert G. Fussell.

To my aunt Helen’s children,

Joseph B. Johnson and Bruce A. Johnson.

And to their children, Susan L. Johnson,

Barbara Johnson Runa, Robert D. Johnson,

Kimberly Johnson Simon, and Elizabeth L. Johnson.

And to their children, Blossom L. Runa, Ashley R. Johnson,

Drake W. Johnson, Aubrey Simon, Caleb Simon,

Marlee Simon, and Jessie Simon.

To my sister, Mary E. Fussell, and her daughter,

S. Alexandra Rowbottom.

And especially to my children, Elizabeth Fussell Racine,

Robert E. Fussell, and Anna Fussell Sorensen.

And to their children, Samantha G. Sorensen,

Carter J. Racine, Kayla R. Fussell, Elizabeth J. Sorensen,

Allison M. Racine, and Sophia M. Sorensen.

Contents

Editor’s Preface

Map of places mentioned

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Chapter 1: Tyler

Chapter 2: Kerens

Chapter 3: Hell’s Half Acre to El Paso

Chapter 4: Del Rio

Chapter 5: Oklahoma, El Paso, and San Antonio

Chapter 6: Montemorelos

Chapter 7: Revenge

Chapter 8: Home and Dallas

Chapter 9: Undercover

Chapter 10: Cathouse Queen

Chapter 11: Mary

Chapter 12: Kenedy

Chapter 13: Tuxpan

Chapter 14: Yoakum to Bakersfield

Chapter 15: Winslow

Chapter 16: The Great Depression in Winslow

Chapter 17: Leading Democrat in Northern Arizona

Chapter 18: World War II and Alhambra

Epilogue

Editor’s Preface

In May 2005, I e-mailed my cousin Joe Johnson in San Clemente, California, from my law office in Le Roy, in western New York state. Cuz, I wrote, I’m editing Gramps’ book. Any suggestions? Bob. His four-word reply—Reduce Mexican body count—showed up on my screen the next day.

When I grew up in small town Le Roy in the 1950s, my dad spoke little about his father’s life. I didn’t even learn that Gramps had written his memoirs until 1966 when I was twenty-three, nine years after Gramps died. And I only learned about it then because Aunt Helen, my dad’s older sister and cousin Joe’s mother, gave me a copy of Gramps’s memoirs, which he titled Backtracking a Texan, when I stopped to visit her and my uncle Johnny Johnson at their secluded tavern on gorgeous Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. After reading it and being shocked at many of Gramps's wild adventures, including violent murders he’d committed, I questioned Aunt Helen. She told me she believed every word not only because she knew their father to be scrupulously honest and to have an outstanding memory, but also because, she said, she was close enough to her parents’ times to understand the culture of that time and place. She added that nothing about the wild stories surprised her.

I then questioned my dad. At first he said little. But I was persistent and finally he began to make his feelings known. He agreed with Helen that their father was extremely honest and had a wonderful memory, but admitted that he had avoided the subject of Gramps with me, partly because he was not comfortable dealing with the nefarious parts of his father’s past, but also because he wanted to keep much of the truth about his father hidden from me when I was young. Dad worked very hard (maybe too hard for my taste) to train me to be a very obedient, responsible, law-abiding citizen, in part because he was worried I might take after him and lead a foolish and irresponsible childhood. Dad’s own goal, he told me, was to graduate at the bottom of his high school class, but he failed to achieve even that because, he said, a slow-witted student beat him out. But Dad’s real fear (I slowly discerned) was that I might, God forbid, model myself on my grandfather and completely destroy my life.

But Dad shouldn’t have worried about me. I was not like my father and grandfather, who had been big, rugged boys who matured early and were natural leaders with strong, colorful personalities. No, I, on the other hand, was on the small side (like my mother), a late bloomer who looked fourteen when seventeen and often felt inadequate at the prospect of competing physically with other boys my age. At an age when Gramps was roping longhorns and Dad was captain of his championship high school football team, I sat at my desk trying to solve trig and physics problems, fighting to gain admission to a top university.

Dad knew that I would live in an America that, while only two generations and a couple thousand miles from the world his father had inhabited, was culturally light-years from his father’s world. Dad knew his son and father might as well have grown up on different planets, and that the behavior and attitudes that allowed his father to survive in his world would prove disastrous for me in mine. Knowing my dad’s feelings, I waited until after his death to look into publishing Gramps’s story. I believe Gramps’s story portrays an America that was once very real but is now just a forgotten dream. And even though many men led lives similar to Gramps’s and many others have written about his era, Joe Fussell’s story is unique because there are very few people who led his type of life and wrote about it so well. I believe it’s one of only a few authentic, first-person accounts of that time and place.

While Joe doesn’t mention his brothers in his book (they were much younger than he), at least two, John and Claude, were cowboys. A 1956 Collier’s magazine article, The Vanishing Cowboy, featured his brother Claude. And when John died in the tiny west Texas town of McCamey in 1977, the local newspaper printed a long memorial and a poem entitled John Fussell, Cowboy, describing his life.

Joe Fussell was an ordinary man in that he obtained neither fame nor fortune, but he was consumed by an overpowering adventuresome spirit and an obsession to constantly move from place to place. And because of the unique circumstances existing where and when he lived, he led an extraordinary life. His childhood made Tom Sawyer’s look tame. His adolescence was dominated by a true freedom that few American teenage boys could imagine today, and none could experience. His early manhood as a cowboy and undercover Texas Ranger, especially his time spent along the Mexican border, was colorful and at times very violent. His lifestyle as a hobo and boomer railroad man is extinct today. And the strength of his feelings about issues that dominated American life during his middle years and old age—the Depression, World War II, and the Korean conflict—expressed both in his personal activism and in his prolific writings, are conveyed with a power, independence, and conviction that may surprise many today.

Joe Fussell lived his youth and early manhood in an era defined by the fact that legal title to possessions—especially to land and cattle—was never clear, and there were either no established laws or no official authorities with the power to enforce whatever laws may have been on the books. Life was cheap then. Very cheap. The American Southwest of my grandfather's time was wild and virtually uninhabited, especially by today’s standards. In 1880 the population of Texas was less than 1.6 million. In 2020, it was over 29.3 million. And, of course, most of today’s world would have been unimaginable for my grandfather. Our ease of travel and communication, our obsessive consumerism, the modern roles of women, today’s relationships between the sexes, the Internet, space travel, TiVo, iPods, Viagra, and modern Vegas are among a few of today’s facts of life that would seem more foreign than ancient Rome to my Grampa Fussell.

I ponder too how Gramps would respond to the economic and political conditions of America today. I can hear him ranting, as he did during the Depression, against the financial interests that, he was convinced, dominated our nation’s economic and political world, and selfishly ruined the lives of millions of ordinary Americans, leading America to the brink of revolution and/or Communism. I also suspect that he would not be very surprised at the problems we now face on the Mexican border, but would be devastated by the cultural conflicts now dividing our nation. But I believe, based on his opinions of the problems caused by the Depression, that he would be very much in favor of efforts to uplift the middle class at the expense of the financial elite.

Books like James Michener’s Texas give a comprehensive picture of Texas history and Texans. Michener describes that state’s founders—people like my grandfather and great-grandfather—as a resolute, courageous, self-driven lot whose basic attitudes could be summarized in a series of adjectives—individualistic, aggressive, volatile, rural, egalitarian, insofar as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were concerned, and often violent. He added that the overriding characteristic of the early settlers was poverty, noting that neither the State of Texas nor the federal government paid for police and other institutions that could bring law and order to Texas in those days.

While I was putting this book together, I discovered that Bill McDonald, the Texas Ranger captain who recruited my grandfather to work undercover, is a hero in Texas. His biography, Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger: A Story of Frontier Reform by Albert B. Paine, describes how only a handful of Rangers with no resources whatsoever had to cover vast amounts of territory infested with criminals, many of whom had fled to Texas to escape established law in the East. Grampa’s work with the Rangers was typical. The biography also mentions Ranger Olds and a N. Jones (Nat B.) from Athens, Texas, both of whom are described in this book.

I also found that a great deal has been written about Hatton Sumner, the district attorney in Dallas who wanted to prosecute the man who fought with my grandfather. And I got valuable information from the clerk of Navarro County, Texas, with respect to the date of the elections involving Charlie McConnico in Kerens. That helped me get dates straight that weren’t made clear in my grandfather’s writings, and I thank the clerk for generously helping me.

In an extraordinary coincidence, I once hired a lawyer in Houston to represent clients of mine from outside Le Roy whose son was killed in an industrial accident in Texas. That lawyer, famous in Houston in part because he successfully represented families of three astronauts who were killed in a burning space capsule, was Ken McConnico, who I later learned was Charlie McConnico’s great nephew. (I was not dumb enough, as a Yankee, to chance going before a Texas jury myself.) Ken did a great job for my clients.

I was able to trace my male Fussell ancestors back to 1600. Moses Fussell, who was Joe’s grandfather’s grandfather, fought in the Revolutionary War. After the war, Moses went to Tennessee and his descendants then went to Arkansas. Family lore, according to Gramps, said the first Fussell came to America with Lafayette to fight in the Revolutionary War. But according to my research, Nicholas Fussell, the first Fussell to come to North America, actually came in the early 1600s from London, England. Perhaps another of our ancestors had fought under Lafayette. It seems as if the Fussells were drawn by an invisible force that pushed them to move west and south, which they did for over 350 years—from Scotland, to England, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, California, and Peru, where my sister and I were born in the 1940s.

In editing my grandfather’s memoirs, I recalled conversations with family members, examined the huge volume of letters he wrote to family, friends, politicians, and colleagues, and letters to the editor he contributed to various newspapers, and studied detailed, extensive records of his work history on many railroads. I searched for any records that might confirm Joe’s violent activities in northern Mexico, but after spending much time coming up with nothing from Mexican sources, a knowledgeable priest I consulted with, who was from that part of Mexico, informed me that all the records from that time were destroyed in the Mexican revolution. Coincidentally, Joe also described his involvement in that revolution in his memoir. And finally, I was reassured to learn that the experts who reviewed the manuscript for publication did not question the veracity of Gramps’s stories, but rather stated that this memoir provided a valuable view of life in that time and place.

I have made corrections to spelling and punctuation, but have not altered his grammar or wording unless required for clarity; in some places, I have condensed or omitted some longer rambling passages, but only when this did not affect his telling of his story.

Many who read his story will undoubtedly be appalled and thank God they live in a highly structured era dominated by law and order, compulsory education, modern conveniences, modern medicine, universal plumbing, omnipresent air-conditioning, plane travel, automobiles, the Internet, and a cornucopia of consumer goods. But many others will look enviously at the freedom enjoyed by men like my grandfather, who could run away from home and school, travel about willy-nilly, work at an endless series of jobs, settle their own disputes, and, if they were smart and lucky like Gramps, live to tell about it.

In editing my grandfather’s story, I did not soften his language and did not judge any of his actions, attitudes, or beliefs. They speak for themselves. I hope you find him and his life as fascinating as I do.

E. R. Fussell

April 2021

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me put this book together. Nancy Kress and others at Writers and Books in Rochester, New York, taught me much about writing. Laura Fitzsimmons of Batavia, New York, assisted with research. Debbie Robinson and others from the Navarro County Clerk’s office in Corsicana, Texas, verified historical details. Barbara Kabala transformed my grandfather’s typed memoirs into usable elecronic form.

Bob Bird, Esq., provided professional advice. Charles Casey provided indispensible computer assistance. And most importantly, Professor Gary Ostrower of Alfred State University was my outstanding and faithful guide throughout the entire process. I am also grateful to the excellent staff at Truman State University Press, especially Nancy Rediger and Barbara Smith-Mandell, who worked directly with me.

And finally, this entire process was dependent upon the constant support and love from my darling wife, Pat.

Foreword

In reading memoirs, I find, almost invariably, the writer seems to think he has accomplished something really worthwhile in life and wants the reading public to know about it. In this case, however, the writer hasn’t anything in particular of which to be proud, except that he finally came to his senses, and because of the kindly influence of a good woman, deviated from the path he was following, married, and reared and educated a son and daughter. That in itself is nothing extraordinary because it has been done since time immemorial and will continue to be done until the end of time.

But as I consider my incorrigibleness from the time I was large enough to throw rocks to the day I was married at the age of twenty-seven years, my lack of schooling, my desire to wander aimlessly from hell to haw river, my insatiable desire to know life in its every aspect, my personal contacts with men and women from the lowest depths to which a human being can sink to some in high positions of trust in industry and in the councils of our nation, my horning into places just to see what I could see, places from which men with no sense at all would have run as a rabbit would run from a hound dog, I marvel at the almost incredible fact that I could make such a complete about-face in my attitude towards the balance of the human race, play a fair, square game of give and take, persuade a good, patient, loyal, sensible woman to cast her lot with me, and rear and educate two children of whom the most exacting parent would be proud.

In my sixty-eighth year, I sit with my feet as high off the floor as I can get them and be comfortable, roll and smoke cigarettes, take an occasional drink of good red whiskey, and—for the lack of something else to do—live in the past. I am a habitual soliloquizer and quite frequently hear myself asking myself, Why did you do that, or that, or that? Didn’t you have sense enough to know you would have to pay, and pay, and pay, in the end? But I don’t have any satisfactory answers, just flimsy excuses.

In this story of my life, I have confined myself to facts and to names of persons and places, except in a few instances where, in relating incidents that might embarrass the persons mentioned, I have used fictitious names and called attention to that fact. Many of the people I mention in this story are, I am sure, still living, and if and when they read this story, will remember many incidents herein related. Some of them will enjoy a good laugh. Some will wish I had died in infancy with an old-fashioned case of cramp colic. Others will, I presume, pronounce me the damnedest liar unhung, saying no one human could have had my experiences and escaped a hangman’s noose or a penitentiary, or lived through it all and had the guts to tell about it, expecting anyone to believe his story.

Nevertheless, there are many men, high in the business world, men holding responsible positions, men honored and respected for their integrity, who could, if they only would, ’fess up and relate, in part at least, experiences very similar to some of mine. Many an old peace officer and puncher in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona will, when reading of my experiences along the border, say, He certainly has been there and had plenty of experiences because one not familiar with the country and conditions could not give such a graphic word-picture. Many an Old Rail will have a severe attack of nostalgia and head for some switch shanty.

1947

Chapter 1

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Tyler

According to stories handed down from generation to generation, the first Fussells came to America with Lafayette, settling in Virginia after the Revolutionary War, later migrating to Tennessee. My paternal grandfather migrated to Arkansas in 1850. What was left of the family after the Civil War and the damn Yankees stopped killing, maiming, and starving them moved to the piney woods of East Texas to, as Grandma Fussell was often heard to say, keep her younguns from becoming alligator bait or turning to frogs. My father was the youngest in his family and too young to fight in the Civil War, but five of his brothers fought for the Confederacy and one, Uncle Dave, was killed.

I know little of my mother’s family but, according to the story they tell, my great-great grandfather came to America from someplace in central Europe, finally settling near Charleston, South Carolina. His name was Baltzegar. The old gentleman was, in all probability, a Hessian and settled in South Carolina after his bosses, the British, got a good beating in 1776. Anyhow, Grandpa Baltzegar was born in Orange County, South Carolina, on July 26, 1817. He later migrated to Alabama, married, reared a family, then moved to Texas in 1872 or thereabouts and settled in Smith County.

If, after I was old enough to understand, I hadn’t seen correspondence from friends and relatives of both sides of the house in both Arkansas and Alabama, I might have wondered if they hadn’t left their former places of residence about three jumps ahead of either a sheriff or an angry mob. Prior to, and at that time, Texas was a very popular place. A large percent of the immigrants were in a hurry, traveling fast—shirttails flying in the breeze. They craved to be between the Sabine River and the Rio Grande where the six-shooter ruled and made all men equal, and where extradition to former places of operation was unknown.

My father, Robert Gordon Fussell, was born in 1854 in Arkansas. He moved to Texas with his family in 1866, but left and went out on his own in 1870. He was from all accounts a harum-scarum, uneducated, irresponsible youth with an insatiable desire for adventure. He had many occupations—freighting with ox-teams to Dallas and Fort Worth before the railroad was laid, making two trips with trail herds to Dodge City, Kansas, and at least one to Abilene, Texas, and hunting buffalo for their hides and fighting Indians on the plains. But in 1877, after seven years in the West, he drifted back to Smith County, Texas, where he met and, in 1878, married my mother, Martha Aurelia Baltzegar. When they married, Father had nothing more than a change of clothes, a pony and saddle, my mother, and no place to take her. Grandpa Baltzegar staked them to a fifty-acre sandy-land farm, a team of mules, a milch cow, a sow and pigs, a few chickens, and his blessing.

On September 24, 1879, with the assistance of Dr. Jones and Ole Aunt Ann (an old Negro lady who had been with the family since before the Civil War), I made my appearance, and as Ole Aunt Ann used to remind me, I’ve been raising hell ever since. Father agreed most heartily with Aunt Ann, but Mother contended, of course, that I was not a bad boy, just headstrong and venturesome and that someday I would settle down and become a good man. I was the oldest of eight who survived childhood. After me came all four of my sisters and then my three brothers. The oldest of those brothers, John, is fifteen years younger than I.

According to Mother, my first indiscreet act was, while still crawling, to escape her watchful eye, crawl off the porch onto the ground, and fight with the house cat for possession of a rattlesnake. When she found me, the cat had the snake by the head, I had it by the tail, and we were having a nice game of pull-away. Mother claimed that from that day until the time I ran away from home at the age of fourteen to escape school and parental control, I was the most unmanageable brat she’d ever seen.

Whenever I was punished, I retaliated by either throwing rocks at everything and everybody that came near me, or leaving the cow-pen and horse lot gates open to let the stock mingle together, or getting to the spring first on wash days to muddy the water. It seemed that every conceivable form of punishment except murder and mayhem was tried on me, all to no avail. They even fed me quinine, washed down with unsweetened black coffee. But even that didn’t faze me.

One of my earliest recollections was making a trip to Tyler with Father in a buggy drawn by two small mules. I remember that when we approached the railroad tracks a small narrow-gauge locomotive, about big enough to heat all the water needed for a one-chair barbershop, came puffing and wheezing along. I’ve often wondered who was more frightened, the mules or me. They became unmanageable and ran away. Father deftly maneuvered them to avoid an accident and finally brought them to a stop at a hitching rack in front of Bergfield’s saloon. He took a couple of drinks to steady his nerves and the runaway incident was promptly dismissed from his mind.

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When I was six, Grandpa Baltzegar and Father sold their farms, and moved to Tyler. Grandpa and family soon afterward moved to Powell, Navarro County. Father found work buying cattle for a butcher, and I started school where I made friends with boys who later became my partners in crime in devilish tricks we played on various Tylerites. By the time I started my second term, I was wise to the ways of the town boys and anxious to take an active part in their devilment.

My friends’ fathers had typical jobs for residents in small east Texas towns like Tyler at that time. Will Thompson’s father was a stockman and operated a butcher shop. The Smith boys’ father ran a drugstore. The Alstons’ father was a deputy sheriff and jailer. My father was a cowboy, and my leanings were like father, like son. I had a horse and rode quite a bit. When not riding or in school, I practiced incessantly with a lariat. I devoted almost all my spare time to practicing on boys, horses, dogs, calves, hogs, fence posts, or anything that stood upright, and I soon became very adept.

Our house was only a few blocks from the I&GNRR (International and Great Northern Railroad) tracks and, while still in grade school, I developed a yearning to help, against their wishes, the switchmen switch their cars. However, I paid dearly for my persistency. Many times I left that yard at full speed with a switchman trying his very best to kick my rear end up between my shoulders. But I was not deterred, and I wanted revenge for what I thought was unjust treatment. Those being link and pin days, I conceived the idea of stealing and hiding, in Duke’s lumberyard, all the links and pins I could find. If a string of cars was standing, but not stretched, on a track, with the coupling pins rested loosely in the draw heads, I’d go between the cars, remove the coupling pins, and hide them, usually under a pile of lumber. With two couplings to a car and a string of twenty cars, forty coupling pins had to be replaced when the switchmen wanted to move that string of cars. The result—much work for me and much more work for the switchmen because they had to first find the pins, and in many cases the links too, and replace them before they moved the cars.

Such cussedness continued until one day the yardmaster, a long gangling West Virginian, called me up and offered to compromise our differences by letting me hop as many trains as I wanted if I’d leave the pins and links alone. I know now what I didn’t then: that those switchmen could have watched the wheels of those cars cut me into a thousand pieces and never bat an eye. But I turned the yardman down. I did not particularly care to hop moving trains after I had experienced the first few thrills. And most important, the idea that I was forbidden made me determined, at any cost, to prove to those switchmen I would do just as I pleased. However, if the switchmen had, in the beginning, explained in a nice quiet way the dangers to both them and me—instead of chasing me, throwing rocks, cursing, and (if they caught me) kicking the seat out of my pants—I would not have dealt them the misery I did. In fact I developed, when a very small boy, the idea that I would repay in kind: that if anyone kicked me on the shin, I would in retaliation kick him on both shins. On the other hand, I would return kindness with kindness. I have followed out that plan throughout my life and have derived much satisfaction in dealing with both classes—the considerate, kindly disposed, and the opposite.

My recollection of my third school term is vague except that my teacher was Mrs. Roberts and that her mode of punishment was to send a disobedient scholar to the cloakroom. I was a frequent visitor there and had a good many naps on the cloakroom floor.

By the time I was ten, I’d been in so much devilment and knew so many boys whose reputations were questionable that Father sent me to Powell, Texas, to spend a summer on Grandpa Baltzegar’s farm. Father was afraid that if I stayed in Tyler I would end up in jail or be killed. The time I spent at Grandpa’s was uneventful except I got to go fishing and go on picnics, and soon after my arrival I found an old cap and ball pistol of Civil War vintage, and plenty of caps, balls, and powder. I forthwith purloined the outfit and went hunting. The only game in that country were birds, rabbits, squirrels, and an occasional coyote. I shot up all my ammunition without killing anything and was, of course, homesick. I wanted to go back to Tyler where I could stir up some excitement.

And Father let me spend time with him too. He was working in Kerens, eight miles away, where he was buying up fat cattle and sending them to Fort Worth and Kansas City. I wanted to stay and work with him all summer. I got just enough experience punching cows to convince me that a cowboy’s life was the one for me. I had wild daydreams of living in the great open spaces astride a good cow horse, a lariat hanging from the horn of my saddle, a six-shooter on my hip, a carbine stock forward suspended from my saddle, and all the other trappings of old-time western characters. I was going to make John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson, and others of their ilk look like pikers.

I started my fourth term in school with Miss Theresa Kayser, the most lovable, sympathetic teacher I ever knew. She had the knack of winning the confidence of her pupils, and instead of feeling dread towards her, all of her pupils loved and obeyed her. As for me, I learned more, was a more obedient pupil, and got more pleasure in attending school that term than in all my other school experience. I have often thought in later years that if I could have continued my schooling with Miss Kayser, I would probably have forgotten all those wild thoughts about being a cowpuncher, and my life might have been entirely different. She had a way of teaching a mess of ornery brats whether or not they wanted to learn. What a pity we don’t have more teachers like her.

My broader education began with the dismissal of school about the middle of May 1891, when I was eleven. Mother’s sister and brother-in-law, Aunt Sally and Uncle George Hurst, lived on a farm about five miles north of Tyler. To get me away from town and evil influences, I was sent to Aunt Sally’s for a time until they could send me to Texarkana, Texas, to spend the summer vacation with some of Father’s relatives. About the third day after my arrival on the farm, Uncle George equipped Philip (my cousin about my age) and me with hoes and a bag of cottonseed and instructed us to replant some cotton. After about two hours’ work, we hid our hoes in Shamberger’s calf pasture and went out to explore the woods. By the time we returned for our hoes and sacks, the calves had eaten most of the seed and chewed the sacks so much they’d become practically useless. Uncle George went on the warpath and whipped Philip and me. I, of course, swelled up like a poisoned pup and the next morning hit the road for home.

I waited for someone in a wagon or buggy, figuring I’d talk him into giving me a ride to town. The first person to put in an appearance was a long-legged, stooped-shouldered, cross-eyed man I’d known since we’d first moved to Tyler, Bill Rogers. Bill was driving a yoke of oxen pulling a wagon loaded with stove wood. I asked for a ride to town. He asked how come I was so far from town, afoot and alone. I related the story truthfully, but he denied me a ride because I was running away from Uncle George. I walked the five miles to town, either just ahead of or just behind Bill and his ox-team, never getting out of hollering distance. I didn’t forget Bill’s inhospitable attitude towards me and a couple of days later I had the satisfaction of putting a few drops of high life on his oxen and watched them stampede down the street, spilling his load of wood.

When I arrived home from Uncle George Hurst’s and announced my intention of not returning, preparations were hurriedly made for me to spend the rest of the summer with Uncle Bill and Aunt Belle Aiken who lived eight miles west of Texarkana. The bushes around Texarkana, on both the Texas and Arkansas side of the line, were full of relatives. I, like most town-reared boys, felt a little superior to my country cousins. But I soon found, to my surprise, that insofar as a good clean understanding of the whys and wherefores of nature was concerned, and good clean living (except for boys’ harmless pranks), the country boy was far superior to the average town boy. All in all, I learned much and spent an enjoyable summer hunting rabbits, squirrels, birds, etc., with an old muzzle-loading shotgun, riding the milch-calves, fishing, fighting wasps and yellow jackets, helping to rob bee trees, plucking geese to make a feather bed, learning to swim, chew tobacco, plow, and do many other things the average town boy could not do.

And I got my first experience at a camp meeting. I had often heard my parents, relatives, and others talk of camp meetings, so I had a rather vague understanding of what they were like. After the crops were laid by, the men of Uncle Bill’s community set a day to meet at Red Springs, erect a big arbor, arrange seats enough to accommodate everybody, and lay out a campground. Arrangements were made for an evangelist. The people brought their whole families and camped on the grounds the whole time the meeting was being held.

My parents and all my relatives on both sides of the house were Methodist and naturally Uncle Bill, Aunt Belle, and the whole family were all set to attend that camp meeting from beginning to end. All my life I had been taught to believe in that old hellfire and brimstone stuff and had been,