Traces of Tx (today)

[Shakey Jake]

Per TSHA:
On this day in 1934, celebrated Depression-era Texas outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were killed in a roadside ambush arranged by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer outside of Gibsland, Louisiana. Riddled by some 167 bullets, the bodies were taken to Arcadia and later put on public display in Dallas before being buried in their respective family burial plots.

[Shakey Jake]

Today's entry comes from the T of T Facebook group:
Fiddler extraordinaire Sam Savage (1861-1951) was not only a great fiddler but had an amazing life story. Buried in the Staggs Prairie Cemetery just north of Mineral Wells, Sam Savage was a rancher, farmer, and champion fiddler. At the age of five, he survived a Comanche Indian raid on his father's farm in Parker County and lived in captivity with the Comanches for a time.
The attack on Bolin Savage's homestead occurred on March 2, 1866, and was followed by a raid on his brother's farm. Both Bolin and James Savage were killed. Sam Savage, his brother, and a cousin were taken captive by the Indians. A posse headed by Parker County Judge A.J. Hunter failed to overtake the Comanches. The children were discovered by trader John Fields in November 1866 and were ransomed for the sum of $414 at Fort Arbuckle, Oklahoma.
Sam Savage lived until the age of 90 to relate his experiences of life with the Indians. In a very short time, he and the other children adapted to their situation, learning the language and the use of a bow and arrow. In 1911, Sam Savage and the trader who rescued him, John Fields, held a reunion during which many of the old tales were recounted.
Sam Savage married Arizona Pierce in 1881, and they lived in Palo Pinto County until their deaths.

[Shakey Jake]

RIP to the great Tina Turner, shown here singing at Fort Worth's Skyliner Club in 1964. The Skyliner was on "Thunder Road," the stretch of the Jacksboro Highway between Tiffin Hall's Mexican Inn & the Skyline Drive Motel in north Fort Worth. This strip had eighteen restaurants, six liquor stores, seven nightclubs, and ten motels. Tina Turner was 83 years old. What an amazing performer she was!

[Shakey Jake]

"These balmy days, I often recall my ideas of Texas before I had the pleasure of mingling with its people ------ of becoming a Texan myself. I regret to say that I had accepted Phil Sheridan's estimate of the State ----- an opinion that still prevails in too many portions of our common country. After living in Texas for ten years I paid a visit to my parents beyond the beautiful Ohio. The old gentlemen sized me up critically, evidently expecting to see me wearing war-paint and a brace of bowie-knives.
'So, young man, you're living in Texas?'
'Yes, paw.'
'Fell kinder t'hum 'mong them centerpedes, cowboys 'n other varments, I s'pose?'
"Y-y-yes, paw."
'Well, Billy, you allers was a mighty bad boy. I kinder cackalated as how you'd go t'hell some day; but, praise God, I never thought you was bound fer Texas!'"
----- William Cowper Brann, writing in "The Iconoclast," 1897. The next year, Brann was shot to death on the streets of Waco by a man named Tom Davis after Brann went after Baylor University and its administrators in the pages of the Iconoclast. He managed to kill Davis in the gunfight.

[Shakey Jake]

The Texas Quote of the Day:
"I've done made a deal with the devil. He said he's going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won't put all the fires in hell out."
---- Red Adair, famous oil-well firefighter

[Shakey Jake]

Per T of T Facebook Group:
Nettie Featherston in Childress in a 1937 photograph taken by Dorothea Lange. Nettie was the wife of a migrant farmer. She and her family were trying to get to California when they ran out of money in Carey, Texas, in 1937. A local cotton grower took pity on them and hired them to harvest his cotton. They were living in this small shack near Childress when Dorothea Lange drove up, talked with Nettie and took photos of her. Lange recorded the desperation in her face and in her voice. Nettie eventually moved to Lubbock and never made it to California, although several in her family did. In a 1979 interview, she said:
“Oh, it was terrible. And when you didn’t have hardly nothing to eat, and your kids would cry for something to eat and you couldn’t give it. We was living in a little old two-room house. And we cooked with blackeyed peas until I never wanted to ever see another blackeyed pea. I just prayed and prayed and prayed all the time that God would take care of us and not let my children starve…
“I must have said, ‘Well, if we’re dead, we’re just dead.’ That’s all I can remember because I don’t remember talking to her [Dorothea Lange].
“I never once thought about living this long [81 years in 1979]. Well, I just didn’t think we’d survive. You want to know something we’re not living much better than we did, as high as everything than we did then…
“Seems like I’m not satisfied. I have too much on my mind. It seems like I have more temptations put on me than anyone. Course, that’s what the Bible said, that’s the way we’d be tried out. And every time I ask God to remove this awful burden off of my heart, he does.”
Can you imagine living in this small shack in Childress back then? I would imagine it was not well insulated and the winds must have blown cold and bitter through it back in 1938.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1889, the Texas Spring Palace opened in Fort Worth. This fair, promoted by Robert A. Cameron, immigration agent for the Fort Worth and Denver Railway, was designed to attract settlers and investors to Texas. Cameron wanted to advertise Texas by displaying all the natural products of the state under one roof. The completed Spring Palace, built in record time (thirty-one days) by the Fort Worth Loan and Construction Company, served as an educational, cultural, and entertainment center for Texas residents and guests throughout June. A second fair held in the building in 1890 ended when a sudden fire destroyed the place on the night of May 30.

[Shakey Jake]

Wow! Just found this picture on the UTA digital library of Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and the Wild Bunch taken in Fort Worth. Here's the description:
The Wild Bunch - Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh), Ben Kilpatrick (Tall Texan), William Carver, and Harvey Logan (Kid Curry), ca. 1900 [photographed by John Swartz, 705-1/2 Main St.

[Shakey Jake]

It seems I post a lot about Fort Worth. I spent five years there going to TCU and an apprenticeship in woodwind repair. Anyway, came across this picture of the Fort Worth Benevolent Home. It was established by Womens Christian Temperance Union in Fort Worth's "Hell's Half Acre". I posted about this area of Fort Worth earlier. It was just north of downtown and was an area for gambling and prostitution. The Fort Worth Benevolent Home was established Fort Worth’s notorious red-light district, where children lived precariously with their mothers or eked out a living on the streets. By 1891 the joint women’s groups had established the Fort Worth Benevolent Home in a former brothel. That year Reverend Isaac Zachary Taylor Morris (1847-1914) was transferred to Fort Worth’s City Mission and joined their efforts. Here is a picture of children in front of the reclaimed brothel. The home eventually morphed into the Gladney Center for Adoption soon after Edna Gladney was appointed the seventh superintendent of the home. She received no salary for the position. There was a second home established in Fort Worth after Gladney appealed to Amon Carter and received funds to establish a larger facility at 1315 West El Paso Street. More can be found about Gladney here: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ent ... ney-center

[Shakey Jake]

Per T of T Facebook group:
The Texas Quote of the Day:
"Not until I had made several trips [about 1915] from San Antonio to the Big Bend was I trusted by the local people. The credibility I finally achieved was threatened when I started filing stories with the San Antonio Light newspaper, 350 miles away, by carrier pigeon. The people of the Big Bend thought I was sending intelligence about smuggling to the authorities. I finally was "cleared" when Wayne Cartledge, owner of the Castolon Trading Post, read aloud my news story in Spanish before releasing the bird.
One pigeon, shortly before this episode, had set a record for carrying the longest story, a full 8 1/2 x 11 inch page although he took 10 hours and 15 minutes to get to San Antonio, by no means a speed record."
----- W.D. Smithers, Chronicles of the Big Bend, 1976