Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  My phone rang. It was John Stambaugh calling, a distant relative. Patricia had introduced me, and we had spoken on the phone a few weeks back. Another amateur genealogist, he had written several thick volumes tracing the Adamsons and the Wilsons. One was titled Adamson and Related Families. Patricia gave me a signed copy. John sent me a letter with directions to his home in Dallas, but I never received it. We spoke again when I was in Kansas City. Several times. He would call and ask me if I was going to be arriving today, whatever day today happened to be. He wondered aloud whether he had sent his letter to Del Rio. I told him again that I lived in Brooklyn. He gave me directions over the phone. His directions were fantastic, shapeless: it’s either three or seven blocks, but I think four, and then you take a right, or maybe it’s a left. John was having a hard time remembering the code one pushes at the gate of his apartment complex, so he took my number and said he would call me back about thirty minutes later. He walked outside to check, and by the time he called me back, he’d lost the paper he wrote the code on. He wanted to go back outside and check the code again, but I insisted that I’d be able to figure it out. A lovely, generous man, he had no short-term memory. John lived, perpetually confused, in the eternal present. He planned to show me around Collin County, and he said that he had a bed and a private bathroom waiting for me.

  Quapaw, Oklahoma

  Thirty minutes later John called again. It was as if we had never spoken. What follows is a direct transcription of my side of the conversation. “Hello? Yes, John. How are you doing? Not too bad, I’m on the road, so, uh, yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. Yes, sir. You did. And we spoke yesterday. And I’ll be there tomorrow. That’s always been the plan. For Sunday. Yessir. Yessir. And I have your instructions, and I know which buttons to push when I get to your gate. That’s right. Yes. That’s right. Yes. That’s right. Yes, sir. It’ll be late in the afternoon, evening, certainly before dark. I’m not exactly sure when. Close to evening. In the evening. I think I’ll be there before dark. Great, thank you so much. I can’t wait to meet you. Okay. Bye-bye.”

  —

  I was now briefly on the trail of the fascinating Auguste Pierre Chouteau. My plan was to visit what remained of La Grande Saline, where Chouteau built his trading post on the banks of the Neosho River. I avoided Rocklahoma, where life, liberty, and the pursuit of rock give meaning to lost souls, and pressed on through Pryor. According to Grant Foreman, I was only five or six miles west of the actual wagon track of the Texas Road, but if I just turned my nose east, I would cross the ancient trace, and if I were lucky and very observant, I’d see the persistent depression left by the wagons where they came down the ferry. Then, on the east bank of the Neosho, also confusingly known as the Grand River, I would find the site of Chouteau’s old trading post.

  I followed Grant Foreman’s directions to the letter. But I came upon a lake. My edition of Foreman’s book was published in 1954. Ten years later, in 1964, Lake Hudson was constructed by damming the Neosho, thus submerging the original site of La Saline, including, as far as I was able to determine, the salt spring that had been such an important resource for many generations of Indians and the pioneers who displaced them. Arriving in the township of Salina, I marveled briefly at the T-38 Talon training jet mounted on a concrete pedestal in the front yard of the American Legion Post 240. According to the Salina Chamber of Commerce, local veterans had wanted an anti-aircraft gun, but they couldn’t find one. So they eventually settled on this T-38, located at Sheppard Air Force Base near Wichita Falls, Texas. As it happens, I spent much of my childhood watching T-38s flying through skies in Val Verde County. I probably saw this jet take off and land at Laughlin AFB, just outside Del Rio.

  I wandered around Salina. The public library was closed. I asked some teenagers pushing a baby carriage down the highway shoulder if they knew where the Chouteau memorial might be. Or the old spring. They were befuddled by my questions. There was a little creek in the town park. Maybe that was it. Never before had I seen anyone pushing a baby carriage down a highway, but today I had seen it twice, though the first time it was backpackers and the carriage was filled with gear. I pulled in to a spot next to the library, got out of my car, and walked around. In the city park I found a springhouse apparently built in 1844 by Lewis Ross, the brother of a Cherokee chief who took control of the springs that year. I’m told it’s one of the oldest buildings in Oklahoma. Presumably, it was relocated before the flood came and consumed the historic trading post and spring. Shaped like a pentagon, built of unmortared local stone, the little old structure stood in the middle of a weedy lawn, with a restored wood-shingled roof. There was garbage within and it smelled of urine.

  Salina was a disappointment, so I decided to go in search of Sam Houston’s Wigwam Neosho.

  Sam Houston suffered a long run of bad luck before he emigrated to Texas and helped the renegade Mexican state break away from its motherland. He was just thirteen when his father died and his mother loaded up her belongings and her children and moved to East Tennessee, just south of Knoxville. Three years later, feeling frustrated and persecuted and working as a grocery boy, Houston ran away to live among the Cherokee, learned their language, and was adopted as a son by Chief Oolooteka, also known as John Jolly, who gave him his Cherokee name, the Raven. In 1813, Houston joined the U.S. Army and fought with Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Jackson, suffering serious injuries while fighting renegade Creeks in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in Alabama. First he received an arrow in his groin, a terrible wound that troubled him for the rest of his life; then, after leading a foolish charge against the enemy’s makeshift fortifications, he found himself alone and caught two musket balls in his right arm and shoulder. Amazingly, he survived.

  Andrew Jackson took notice and soon assigned his new protégé to sort out some difficulties with the Cherokee, who were bound by a fraudulent treaty to move west of the Mississippi. Young Houston took his job as Indian subagent seriously and fought to ensure his Cherokee friends, already cheated by means of the treaty, were treated fairly. He failed of course, but the Cherokee loved him for trying. In 1817 he escorted a delegation of chiefs from Knoxville to Washington, where they met first with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and then with President James Monroe. Houston made his appearance in Cherokee dress and received a severe rebuke from Calhoun. Before long, Houston was compelled to defend himself before the secretary against trumped-up charges of slave running. Although he was exonerated by the president, Houston resigned from the army in disgust, and Calhoun remained his bitter enemy forever after. Houston moved to Nashville, proved himself to be a talented politician, entered Congress, fought a celebrated duel, and was elected governor of Tennessee. His relationship with Andrew Jackson grew stronger day by day.

  Everything went bad again when he fell in love with Eliza Allen of Gallatin, Tennessee, where, as it happens, some of my relatives owned a hotel at the time. The marriage was doomed before it was even celebrated, and years later Houston told a story of a raven falling dead in the road before him as he rode to the wedding. Eliza spurned him, it seems, and no one has ever advanced a fully satisfactory explanation why. Some say that Eliza was in love with another man; others that Sam was insanely jealous; the most plausible story seems to be that Eliza was disgusted by the oozing wound in Houston’s groin. Late in life, Old Sam told intimates that she had in fact pledged herself to another man. Whatever happened in private with Eliza Allen, Houston resigned his office, abandoning his adopted state and his position as political heir to President Jackson. It was a national scandal.

  Houston boarded the Red Rover and steamed down the Cumberland bound for Little Rock and the bosom of his good friends the Cherokee, whom he had unwillingly banished to the Indian territories. “The most unhappy man now living,” as he described himself, Houston ended up in the cantonment of Fort Gibson, at the confluence of the Verdigris, Arkansas, and Neosho Rivers, running a little trading post he called the Wigwam Neosho, where he was welcomed
by his adoptive father, Chief John Jolly. He found comfort in the arms of a Cherokee wife and spent the next several years engaged in furious bureaucratic warfare with the Indian and War Departments in Washington and allegedly plotting the conquest of Texas with Andrew Jackson.

  In June 1829, Jackson wrote to his melancholy friend: “It has been communicated to me that you had the illegal enterprise in view of conquering Texas; that you declared that you would, in less than two years, be emperor of that country, by conquest. I must have really thought you deranged to have believed you had such a wild scheme in contemplation; and particularly, when it was communicated that the physical force to be employed was the Cherokee Indians. Indeed, my dear Sir, I cannot believe you have any such chimerical visionary scheme in view.” Even so, Jackson asked the governor of Arkansas to keep an eye on his old protégé.

  Of course, Jackson did want Texas for the United States, and in the end Houston was both the hero of the Texas Revolution and the new republic’s first elected president.

  Over the next few years Houston spent much of his time drunk or on the road. He seems not to have spent much time selling dry goods at his trading post. In December 1831, on his way to Washington on Cherokee business, he boarded a riverboat bound for New Orleans and happened to meet Alexis de Tocqueville, who first spied Houston high atop a riverbank, mounted on a magnificent white horse, like Napoleon. The story of Houston’s rise and fall in Tennessee seemed to confirm Tocqueville’s growing conviction, bolstered by a recent meeting with Davy Crockett, that in a democracy “it’s singular how low and how far wrong the people can go.”

  Three months later, in Washington, D.C., a congressman named William Stanbery defamed Houston on the floor of the House, suggesting that he had sought a fraudulent contract for Indian rations. Houston sent him a note that Stanbery refused to accept. Ten days passed, and then Houston recognized Stanbery on Pennsylvania Avenue and gave him a thrashing with a hickory cane he’d cut at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. At one point during the struggle, Stanbery got his pistol out and fired it point-blank at Houston’s heart. It misfired and the beating continued, ending with Houston grabbing Stanbery by the ankles and delivering a dramatic kick to the groin. The House of Representatives itself convened a trial, charging Houston with violating the principle of congressional privilege, which protected speech uttered on the House floor. The trial became another national sensation; President Jackson loaned Houston money to buy a new suit, and Francis Scott Key was engaged as Houston’s lawyer. Houston, with great dramatic flair, presented his own arguments on the floor. Young ladies called out to him from the galleries and actors offered him laurels. Houston lost in the House but won in the court of opinion; his national reputation was rising again, and his thoughts turned to Texas.

  Houston needed a cover story, and his dear friend President Jackson provided one by appointing him as a presidential envoy to the Comanche and the Pawnee. In September, Houston returned to the Three Forks, where he met Washington Irving. By December, he had crossed the Red River into Texas.

  By 1854, Houston had served two separate terms as president of Texas, gone to Washington as a U.S. senator, and made a serious bid for the White House. He spent much energy that year doing all in his power to prevent passage in the Senate of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he saw would not only set the nation on a course toward civil war but also represented yet another betrayal of the eastern Indians, in whose removal he had reluctantly participated. (He had failed to protect his brother Cherokees in Texas from the genocidal attentions of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, Houston’s successor as president of Texas.)

  When his eloquence before the Senate failed to kill that bill, Houston confided to a friend that in the election of 1860 he feared that the Free-Soil Party would unite with the abolitionists to win the presidency. “Then will come the tocsin of war and the clamor for secession,” he predicted. “What fields of blood, what scenes of horror, what mighty cities in smoke and ruins—it is brother murdering brother.” He envisioned a military dictatorship over the vanquished South, “in a sea of blood and smoking ruin,” and assassinations and anarchy in the North.

  —

  Driving south from Salina, I stopped at a restaurant called JL’s Barbecue and, upon leaving, eavesdropped on a family’s conversation as they debated whether or not to go “do Walmart.” A little boy, about nine or ten years old, waited impatiently, while his elders weighed the pros and cons. His floppy grown-out Mohawk had faded from red to brownish pink. I began to see large signs every few miles advertising concealed weapons certification courses. They were huge banners mounted in fields between poles. At Flat Rock Creek a man wearing a bright yellow T-shirt fished, while a friend or perhaps a complete stranger picked wildflowers nearby. Cattle grazed happily in electric-green fields.

  I pulled in to Wagoner, which became Indian Territory’s first incorporated town in 1896, and spotted an information center along the roadside. A homemade sign on the grounds advertised tree work, yard work, and seasoned firewood, we deliver. The info center was a beige galvanized-metal building with a reddish metal roof. There were some picnic tables out front under some shade trees. I stood next to a table and wondered who might eat here, on a busy thoroughfare called South Dewey Avenue, across from a Walgreens and a Pizza Hut. There was some kind of mall visible on the far side of a large parking lot and a McDonald’s sign on the horizon. The woman inside was named Patty Stewart, and she was just closing up. She handed me some brochures and commenced a sales pitch about the glories of Fort Gibson Lake.

  “We have more shoreline than Michigan, you know.”

  Is that right? I said. That’s a lot of shoreline.

  “That is a lot of shoreline,” she repeated. She asked if I’d been to Tulsa, and I told her I was planning to spend the night there, visiting friends.

  “Go see the aquarium,” she said. I told her I would.

  I asked about Chouteau, and she confirmed that the lake had inundated the old trading post. “A lot of their burial grounds ran through that—what was it, a kind of stream?—and kind of a swampy area,” she decided, “so they had to either move them or leave them. Their burial grounds were kind of humped up.” I realized she was talking about the Indians and their burial mounds.

  I told her I was following my family’s route down the Texas Road, and she began to chatter about Native Americans, the cotton gin, “all kinds of military stuff.”

  “This was a great farming community,” she said. “There are five marinas here.”

  Is that right? I said.

  “Here’s a map of the lake.”

  I asked about Sam Houston and his wigwam.

  “Oh, we know it was near Okay,” Patty said, and she gave me directions. “That takes you right to Okay. They have parts of the bridge still there, and they swear it was there, his general store. I think his wife is buried at Fort Gibson.”

  Patty said she needed to close the shop because she was off to get her hair done.

  “Here are some coupons,” she said. “Would you sign in, please? And here’s some more coupons. And this is a gun from the Vietnam era, if you’re interested in that.”

  I thanked her and made to leave.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “Well, Roger, you come back.”

  —

  I followed Patty’s directions, taking a left on Fifteenth Street, passing the industrial park with its large Unarco sign, and John’s Jewelry with its more than six thousand patterns, to Route 16. I saw the Clover Leaf Lodge, of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and more stock ponds. A longhorn cow with one horn sticking up at an odd angle chewed its cud next to a fence. Sweet little baby calves romped behind her in the field.

  Okay, I learned, was the home of the Lady Mustangs, and a sign told me that “God is the only one in a position to look down on others.” A worthy sentiment from the Okay Christian Fellowship Church. I saw no sign of Sam Houston, so I pulled in to an Easy Ma
rt where I met a young woman in a tan clerk’s uniform smoking outside. Her name was Jody, and she was on break. I told her I was looking for the place around here where they say Sam Houston had his cabin. I thought the word “wigwam” might be too obscure. I asked if she knew anything about that.

  “No, I sure don’t. I know the lake’s down that way.” The folks around here were sure proud of their lake. “Um,” she asked, “who’s Sam Houston?”

  I told her that he was the first elected president of the Republic of Texas and that he lived here in the early 1830s with his Cherokee Indian wife.

  “Wow,” she said. “You might go back up here to Martin’s fish restaurant. They’re older and have been here for quite a while. They might know.”

  I turned around and did as she suggested. Martin’s was just about half a mile back up the way I had come. It advertised itself as “Okay’s Floppin’ Little Fish House.” I went inside and asked a gray-haired woman behind the counter if she knew anything about Sam Houston’s wigwam. She told me I should ask Richard, because he was born and raised here. “I’m just his mother.”

  After a slight scramble out back in the kitchen a woman came up. She had dyed hair, very dark, with a wide gray stripe along her part. Her name was Susan Martin. I repeated my question.

  “Uh-huh, just down the way, there’s a big stone.” She told me her husband’s grandpa had lived up north, came down here and met his wife, went home, and then came back. “Ended up,” she said, “he was the fish man. Right over there on the Verdigris River. Everybody came to him to buy their fish. And that’s why we ended up here. His grandpa ended up purchasing most of this land. Now the land that is still in our family, you can still see the wagon tracks. You can see it. We do think there is a hanging tree in their front yard.”

  Really?

  “Well, yeah, because we kind of like had a few ghost experiences. So we do think, it’s not far behind that building, you can still see the wagon tracks.” She continued, “Okay was actually the first settled place here in Oklahoma. Fort Gibson became a township first, so they got the glory of that. But a lot of famous people lived around here. My husband’s sister lives over there where the tracks are.”