West Texas

Flight to Texas

      Thomas ("R. T.," 1846-1931) was a boy when his home state became a battlefield. He first served close home, where in 1861 General Felix Zollicoffer 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.

         Command reverted to 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 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 he was made a prisoner of war three more times, and wounded once. After being released at the end of April, 1865, at James City, near Williamsburg, Virginia, Tom somehow made it to Ohio, where his father was imprisoned. He reported to my mother that he had arrived in time to be present when his father died, and that he had carved his name on the coffin. It was Tom's grandson Rudolph, then an old man in a Texas nursing home, who passed on to me the dying man's last words. Rudolph spoke them in the low tone of confidentiality typical of the Hailes. "Always tell the truth Tom, to a hair's breadth." That long remembered admonition must be pronounced with the dark, almost diphthongal "Towm," and the very open "hahr's brayudth."

        While in Tennessee, Thomas is said to have been the one who cared for his older brother Lafayette, incapacitated by "shell shock." He was nineteen when he buried his father and came home to Flynns Lick. I have no further report of the young man until half a dozen years later the Comanche Chief in Comanche, Texas reports the arrival "from Arkansas" of one R. T. Haile. Two years later it reports his acceptance into the Masonic Lodge. Again, it was Rudolph who believed that his grandfather had come to Texas on account of "serious trouble," Rudolph, in that same whispered tone of "for your ears only," suggested it had been 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 appear to have come to Texas the same way they came 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, two brothers and three sisters came to Texas. Unlike the earlier migration, however, when they had all stayed together and intermarried with the same families (including cousins), the Hailes straggling into Texas after the War scattered like 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--under the name Randolph Thomas. Some of her information on R.T. may be valid, but she is sometimes wrong, sometimes absurd. Pearl's oldest son Webb Ruff, was the grandson closest to R.T. Webb made a special trip back to the old man's home in Flynns Lick, and left copious, if not quite accurate notes. 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. Incidentally, the death certificate gives R.T.'s birthplace as "Kentucky," a palpable mistake but one which probably reflected R.T.'s own, still unrevised family lore.

        It is also just possible that "Randolph" and "Robert" are equally faithful reports. The name "R.T." begins to appear only after the young man had left Tennessee, where everyone knew him simply as 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 "R.T." 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: R.T.

        By about the time R.T.'s own grandfather, Amon, died in 1867, Tom had already left Flynns Lick. His route probably took him down the Ohio, across the Mississippi, then down the Southwest Trail into the foothills of the Oachita Mountains, where Virginians had settled before the War.   He liked to recall how having grown thirsty in the barrens, 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 clambering back up on the other side did he discover that the carcass of a cow lay 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 one can find the very same story told about King Darius, ca. 500 B.C. A footnote admonishes us 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 his thirst?

        Tom / R.T. may have spent some months in Nashville, Arkansas, home of the tall and handsome Amanda Richards, his new wife. The couple set out, perhaps with help from her people, for the promised land in Texas. They passed the big plantations and followed the meandering, sandy bed of the Red River on westward. In Grayson and Fannin Counties Tom raised cotton the shares, but was soon lured south by the free range west of the Brazos. When his name turns up in the Comanche newspaper, the twenty-seven-year-old was already father of three: Henry five, Mary three, and the infant Elvis Lafayette, just one year old in 1873.

        What happened in the next few years may be the most exciting part of my story. I did not recognize this during the time of my own life when I might have extracted something about young R.T.'s career. He died in the year I was born, and the Hailes are not a story-telling family. In any case, it was still the "Wild West" when he and Amanda arrived on the scene of the so called Cattle Wars, a sometimes lethal conflict between hopeful small farmers and landless cattle drovers. R.T. managed somehow to do well at both undertakings. On the one hand, he continued his ardscrabble farming, which meant trying to raise subsistance crops while at the same time growing dryland cotton for a money crop; yet at the same time, R.T. set out to collect, grow, and graze cattle for sending to market.   By the turn of the century he had become a wealthy man. In addition to farms and financial interests near Duster, Texas he somehow acquired enough stock in the Amicable Life Company at Waco that his grandchildren thought he owned it.

       Indian attacks had begun to subside toward the end of the century. Railroads were being projected across the area called West Texas.* This new state extended hundreds of miles on westward, but for the first few generations, R.T. and Amanda had ventured about as far west as you might care to go.   The dry hills beyond the Brazos were called the Comancherìa after the Comanche tribe who had long held sway from southern Kansas all the way to the Pecos. Just at the time R.T. and Amanda arrived here, this desperate, stone-age people was being systematically scourged by decimation of their buffalo herds and the steady advance of cattlemen. But the Comanche were accomplished horsemen. They had acquired the white man's arms, and were skilled thieves. One of R.T.'s sisters, Aletha, told how she surprised two of them just as they were slipping away with her saddle ponies. Aletha shot them both dead. That act is not itself so shocking as is the young woman's coarse, unsympathetic way of telling about it.
*The journalist A. C. Greene defends the designation"West Texas'" in his remembrances of A Personal Country (New York, 1969).

Cattle

The free range west of the Brazos had attracted settlers before the War. The famous Charlie Goodnight's family had come from Illinois to Palo Pinto County while he was still a small boy, and as a young man he 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 had gone away to defend the Confederacy, then returned to a now desolate West Texas. He "made the gather" of his own stock and whatever other cattle now grazed among scrub oak and prairie. Oliver Loving, an older business man who during the War had supplied the Federal troops with beef by means of cattle drives into Louisiana, became Goodnight's partner. Loving and Goodnight now together instituted profitable drives out of West Texas northward to railheads in Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Just ten years younger than Goodnight, R.T. seized similar opportunity in adjacent Erath, as well as in Comanche County.

Charles Goodnight (1836-1929) At Loving's grave in Weatherford

Goodnight would eventually become a close friend of the last of the undefeated Indian chieftains, Quanah Parker, who was about the age of R.T. By this time, Quanah was on the war path. The year of R.T.'s arrival in Comanche saw the last savage rampages, scalpings and burnings of frontier families. In retaliation, the Indians were cruelly banished 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 in 1918 , 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.

Evlis Lafayette Haile(1872-1931), called "Fate"--the name of the French hero is accented on the second syllable to this day in Tennessee and Texas--died in the year of his father's death, just shortly after I was born. A picture of him as a boy may suggest willfulness,

as does, no doubt, the professional photograph of the young family with their first child (b. 1894). But little can be inferred from these studio images, for which the subjects were required to remain motionless. Laura appears so prim and ladylike. It was hard for her grandson to imagine her shooting a panther from off her front porch, as she reported. That remark stuck in a small boy's memory. He saw that panther, of course, on the large porch with its porch sweing. Only years later did I realize that the panther could not have actually been on any porch at all, but that Laura had probably shot from her front porch, just at the door of a house I had never seen.

Still, it was enlightening for me to try to envisage my gentle grandmother confronting such a beast, even at a hundred yards. I knew Laura Ann as a proper lady with the late nineteenth- century virtues of modesty, reticence, humility. True, she had a set to her jaw when she insisted on "the right thing to do," and she was an astute domino player. I think she did not play cards, and found a subtle rascality in calling them "the devil's picture book." I was impressed by the regimens in her life, how she had arranged her daily Bible readings so as to complete both Testaments once each year. I loved to watch her at night, when before going to bed she took down her tresses to brush them before the big mirror of her dressing table. They fell well below her waist and were still a rich brown, only streaked a little with white.

Well, Fate was a hard worker. You have to say that for him. His main business was cattle, but with his boys he raised cotton and grain, too. I myself have gathered nuts from his 80-acre "pecan bottom" on the Sabana, I have picked peaches in the orchard, and grapes from the arbor behind his elegant house, about a mile out of Gorman. He is said to have built it himself, and he certainly did lay down its specifications of "a double floor," heavy timbers, etc. Here he is (ca. 1920) with his younger sons Rudolph and Ardys. Two older boys were no longer living at home. The little girl is his first grandchild, Betty Joe. She was beautiful. Fate spoiled her. She was a fine pianist. She declared at an early age that she intended to "marry a millionaire," and she did.

Fate was remembered as a hard man, hard on his boys, hard on the land he worked together with them, and very obviously one of that generation who promoted the erosion which eventuated in the Dust Bowl. He raised cotton on soil so thin today that grass must struggle to grow. Laura Ann has told me she had to throw her own body down over her sons to "keep Fate from whipping them." He is quoted as having said of his daughter Gladys, who died of a ruptured appendix, he would have "no sawbones cutting" on a child of his. I feel I know Fate from a story my father told. As a very young fellow Frank had been entrusted with "making a trade," one of the most treasured capabilities of that place and time, inherited no doubt from Virginia and Tennessee. Fate had sent him off to trade for some horses for the remuda, and Frank came riding home very proud of his negotiation and of the animals he was leading behind him. When his father rode out to meet Frank, to inspect the newly acquired horses, the first question was of course addressed to what kind of trade his boy had made. Frank told him, looking for praise. On the contrary: "'y God ye've ruined me," Fate said. I take the story not only as limning Fate's personality, but as revealing also something of the economics in which my own father grew up. Fate died at a young fifty-nine. Here he is toward the end of an apple.

Fate's sons liked to recall him as fast with a six-shooter. They say he would let them toss a quarter into the air, unholster his pistol and shoot the coin out of sight while it was still overhead. I would guess that the example here may have been set by Fate's own father, the one who did encounter Texas as the "wild west". One recalls that peculiarity which had so struck the polite Englishman Francis Baily when he observed that the

spirit of servility to those above them so prevalent in European manners, is wholly unknown to [Anericans]; and they pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or the frowns of men in power.

That potential probably crests here in Fate's generation. But in his lifetime the population of America had become more urban than rural, and the economy of the late 19th century was now industrialized.

Fate's was still an agrarian life, or what I earlier called "land-capitalism." But now the men folk did have money at their disposal. Fate bought a new car every year, he sent his younger sons to college. Rudolph was a star football player, suffered the rest of his life from injuries received on the playing field and in several air crashes. He operated an airport in Austin, was a "barnstormer," also gave flying lessons. The youngest, Ardys, spent his life in the peacetime U.S. Army. The two older boys, on the other hand, were too savvy to go to college. Erin / Aaron was shrewd. They called him "the Dealer." Perhaps that was because he was good at cards, or maybe because his Ford dealership in town burned during the Depression.

As we look back, Fate and R.T. are the first of our fathers who come into view, and they tempt us to form a judgment. Shall we assume that they were following a tradition handed down from Amon and from the Nicholases before him? Or perhaps we are seeing in these two men merely the temper of their own times? These, after all, were the fellows called upon to make the transition from agrarian life, which had prevailed for a quarter millennium on these shores alone. Theirs was a world now dominated by business and industry, its social integration ever farther removed from the easy ways which struck Francis Baily.

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