Thomas
("R. T.," 1846-1931) was a boy when his home state became a
battlefield. He
first served under General Felix Zollicoffer, who in 1861 was assigned
to "preserve
peace, protect the railroad, and repel invasion" in
east Tennesee and Kentucky.
The brief military career of this Nashville journalist may be typical
of
a "civil" war. Zollicoffer was woefully nearsighted, so that when
a
skirmish brought him momentarily behind enemy
lines, he looked indignantly upon the men around him and ordered them
to "cease firing on your own
men." He was immediately shot dead, his corpse plundered for
trophies.
By that time, Thomas was
probably under General Crittendon. After the Battle of Perryville
his troop accompanied General Bragg's
thousand-mile
circuit down into Mississippi and back up to Murphreesboro,
Tennessee. In the cold, rainy days between between
Christmas 1862 and New Years, they fought the Battle of
Stones River, after which "Corporal Thomas Hail"
is reported missing
(from Company D, 4th Tennessee). He was
imprisoned at Camp Douglas, where he celebrated his seventeenth
birthday in April. Perhaps he was exchanged,
since his daughter
reports that before being released at
James City, Virginia, he was made a
prisoner
of war three more times, and wounded once. He made it across to Camp Chase in Ohio in time to be
present when his father died in the prison there in September of 1865
(the
surrender had
occurred in April). Back in Tennessee, Thomas is said to have
been the one who cared for his older brother Lafayette, incapacitated by
"shell shock." I have no further report of the young man until half a dozen years
later a newspaper in Comanche, Texas reports the arrival "from
Arkansas" of one R. T. Haile. Two years later it reports
his acceptance into the Masonic Lodge.
R. T.'s grandson
Rudolph, an old man in a Texas
nursing home, told me that R. T. had come to Texas on account of
"serious
trouble" (Rudolph
suggested
a killing). Such a
story might be in accord with the history of Texas, or so went the song:
Oh, what was your name
in the States?
Was it Johnson or Thompson or Gates?
Did you murder your wife and
run for your life?
Oh, what was your name in the States?
But the Hailes came to Texas the same way they had come out of Virginia
to Tennessee, as an extended family. At least three of Amon's
sons came to Texas after the War, and
three of his daughters were brought there by marriage--all these
were
R. T.'s aunts and uncles. Of his own generation, one brother and
three
sisters came to Texas. Unlike the
earlier migration, however, when they all stayed together and
intermarried with the same families (including cousins), the Hailes
straggling into Texas were scattered like the dust over the Cross
Timbers plains.
Still,
Rudolph's
story may help us with the discrepancy in R. T.'s name. R. T.'s daughter
Pearl, having married
into Texas oil money, entered R. T. into the Biographies of Texas. Some
of
her information on him may be valid, but she is
sometimes wrong, sometimes absurd. She gave
her father's name as Randolph Thomas. Pearl's oldest son
was the grandson
closest to R.T. He made a special trip back to the old
man's home in Flynns Lick, and left copious notes
in which he recalls his grandfather's
name as
Robert Thomas. The
name on the death
certificate I examined in Eastland County is R. T. Haile, that is
the name his sons knew him by, and it is the name inscribed on his handsome
tombstone
at
Oakland Cemetery not far from Duster, Texas, a few miles south of old
Sipe Springs.
It is just possible that "Randolph" and
"Robert" are both faithful reports. That is to say, it appears that the
initial "R" arose
only after the young man had left Tennessee. The
boy's father
had called him Tom. The 1860
Tennessee census enters the 14-year-old as Thomas. It is Thomas
Hail who is reported missing after the Battle of Stones River in
1863. As a
cattle
man on the range west of the Brazos, he was known to hands as "old Tom
Haile." The first
attestation I find for the initial "R" is that in the
Comanche Chief of September
21st, 1873." Tom Haile may actually be
one of
the many who took a new name in a new territory, or at least a new
initial.
His long trail from Tennessee brought R.T. through
Nashville,
Arkansas, settled by Virginians like himself. Here he.
married the tall and handsome Amanda Richards. Broke, of course,
the
couple had set out for the promised land in Texas. They raised
some
crops on the shares in Grayson and
Fannin
Counties up along the Red River. By the time they
arrived
in Comanche County they had three children, Henry five, Mary three, and
the one-year old Elvis Lafayette, my grandfather.
Comanche was in an area called
West
Texas by the first few
generations,
simply because it was as far west as you might care to go.
The journalist A.
C. Greene defends the designation in his remembrances of A Personal
Country
(New York, 1969). As R.T. found the Cross Timbers beyond the Brazos, it
was still far from
hospitable. It was called the
Comancherìa, for the Comanche Indians and their allies held sway
beyond the Brazos from southern Kansas to the Pecos. This
desperate stone-age people was being systematically scourged by
decimation of their buffalo herds
and the steady advance of cattlemen. But these
accomplished horesemen had acquired the white man's arms, and were
skilled thieves. One
of R.T.'s sisters, Aletha, told of her own encounter with two whom
she caught slipping away with her saddle ponies. Aletha shot
them
both dead. That act is not itself so shocking as the young
woman's coarse,
unsympathetic way of telling about it.
R. T. himself was a good story
teller. He liked to recall
how on his way out to this arid region, during a drought and without
water, he had come upon a huge fallen tree, and found plenty of water
in the crater beneath its roots. He climbed down and drank his fill.
Only upon crawling back up on the other side did he discover the
carcass of a cow in the same puddle. "Sweetest water I ever drunk,” was
his judgment. I do not think R.T. had the benefit of a classical
education, but I did come across the very
same story told about King Darius, ca. 500 B.C. A footnote admonishes
that it was
first
told about Cyrus, his father. Well, many a traveler has been thirsty,
and many a
tree
has fallen, over the centuries. Where better for man or beast to quench
their thirst?
Cattle
The free range
west of the Brazos had attracted settlers before the War.
The
famous Charlie Goodnight had arrived in Palo Pinto County as a small
boy from Illinois, and as a young man had begun to collect a herd of
his own. When President Lincoln withdrew the Federal troops,
the
Comanche Indians quickly drove most settlers out. Goodnight
himself, after
fighting for the Confederacy, returned to a
desolate West Texas. He "made the gather"
of his own stock and whatever other cattle now grazed among
scrub oak and prairie. He became a partner of Oliver Loving, an
older
business
man who already supplied the Federal troops with beef by means of
cattle
drives into Louisiana. Loving and Goodnight now instituted
profitable drives to
railheads
in Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. R. T., just ten years younger
than Goodnight, seized similar opportunity in adjacent Erath, as well
as in
Comanche
County.
Goodnight would eventually
become a close friend of Quanah Parker, the
last of the undefeated Indian chieftains, who was perhaps four years
younger than R. T. At this time, however, Quanah was on the war
path. The year of R.T.'s arrival in Comancheexperienced the
last
savage Indian rampages, scalpings and burnings of
frontier families, and finally the Indians' cruel banishment to
reservations
in Oklahoma. Such conditions help explain why Texas land was
cheap. Actually
the range itself was free, and so were, sometimes, the cattle.
R.T.
maintained herds around the Sabana River. He was able to establish the
first
bank in Comanche County, of which I have taken pictures. It was
recently
removed from near Duster and is today on display at Sipe Springs.
He
is said to have acquired a great deal of land, and to have given each
of
his seven children 500 acres. When nearby Desdemona became an oil boom
town,
he
opened a bank there, too. I know of no oil interests held by R.T.
himself.
His house still stands today, not far from old Duster.
