Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  Henry Smith served as Texas’s provisional governor when Texas pulled away from Mexico in 1835, only to become the first of two governors who have been impeached. Another man served as acting governor during Smith’s impeachment proceedings.

  Since statehood in 1846, forty-seven persons (including two women and one governor who served two nonconsecutive terms) have been governor. But even this list depends to some extent on how you count. One person was only an acting governor when James Pinckney Henderson—the state’s first governor after Texas’s admission to the Union—left Austin to fight in the Mexican War.

  Some people count Lieutenant Governor Fletcher S. Stockdale as deserving of gubernatorial status since he served for a while after his boss, Governor Pendleton Murrah, headed for Mexico in the summer of 1865 following the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Others maintain Stockdale wasn’t really a governor, though he did get a town in Wilson County named in his honor.20

  But among those whose service as governor is not in doubt, only one man stands out as the least known: James Wilson Henderson. Better known as Smokey Henderson, he held office as governor of the great state of Texas for twenty-eight days, from November 23, 1853, to December 21, 1853. That’s the shortest term of office any Texas governor has enjoyed, by the way. His definitive biography is yet to be written and probably won’t be, but one source says Henderson came off as “earthy” and not well educated. Even so, he progressed from being a surveyor to practicing law, served as Speaker of the House and, after one defeat, got elected as lieutenant governor, the presiding officer of the Senate.

  He served under Governor Peter Hansborough Bell, a former Texas Ranger who handled his own gubernatorial security, often strolling Congress Avenue wearing a double rig of six-shooters. When Bell resigned to take a seat in the U.S. Congress, Henderson took over the reins of state. He also had ridden as a ranger, though another source says he turned down a commission offered by then governor Sam Houston.

  Smokey Henderson’s administration is marked by, well, not much. He did not raise taxes or slash budgets, that’s for sure. As one book put it, “Little of note occurred during Henderson’s brief term as governor.”

  Governor James “Smokey” Henderson didn’t stay in office long, but his portrait hangs in the capitol with all other former governors as well as presidents of the Republic of Texas. Author’s collection.

  When Elisha M. Pease took the oath of office as Henderson’s successor, Smokey returned to his law practice, then gained reelection to the legislature in 1855. He was a member of the convention that steered Texas toward secession in 1861 and served in the state’s home guard during the Civil War that followed.

  After the war, Henderson went back to the law, dying in Houston on August 30, 1880, at sixty-six. No matter the brevity of his service as Texas’s chief executive, Smokey Henderson’s portrait graces the rotunda of the capitol with all the other post-statehood governors.

  17

  A PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND…LOBBYISTS

  Hanging near the entrance on the first floor of the 1855-vintage Neill-Cochran House in Austin, an elegant piece of architecture designed by the noted Abner Cook, is an oil painting credited with doing what even high-priced lobbyists can’t always accomplish—swaying the Texas legislature.

  The significance of the piece of art goes back to the turn of the last century, when Texas lawmakers departed from their usual weighty deliberations to ponder what native plant should be designated the official state flower. It quickly became a thorny issue, literally in a way.

  Representative John Nance Garner of Uvalde thought the prickly pear cactus deserved the honor. As tough as Texas, the needle-protected plant produced a flower the future vice president considered as beautiful as any orchid. Cactus Jack’s notion of having a cactus as the state flower earned him a colorful nickname but no cigar. Garner’s proposal definitely got under Representative Phillip H. Clements’s skin. To the Goldthwaite legislator’s mind, nothing would do but to name the cotton boll—he called it the “white rose of commerce”—as the official state flower.

  However, though with all due respect, the ladies of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) took Garner and Clements both for blooming fools, as least when it came to Texas flora. The Dames argued that any real Texan realized that only one flower truly represented the beauty of the Lone Star State: Lupinus subcarnosus.

  To underscore their opinion, members of the Austin NSCDA chapter rode in their buggies to the capitol and displayed for the members of the House an oil painting by a local artist, Mode Walker. The piece features a reddish-brown pitcher full of bluebonnets and primroses. The blue and pink brushstrokes still catch the eye, an artful rendering in a genre often cluttered with amateurish work. Walker’s painting clearly got the attention of the House. Oh, and the sweet-smelling bouquets of bluebonnets the Dames placed on each lawmaker’s desk also helped make their case. As one woman who was in the capitol that day recalled, when one of the Dames walked into the House with Walker’s painting, “deep silence reigned for an instant. Then deafening applause fairly shook the old walls.”

  This bluebonnet painting by Mode Walker helped sway the legislature to designate the bluebonnet as the official state flower. Courtesy of Neill Cochran Museum, Austin, Texas.

  Representative John Green of DeWitt County carried the bill making the bluebonnet the Texas state flower, and it passed. Governor Joseph D. Sayers signed the measure into law on March 7, 1901.

  So who was this artist whose work influenced the legislature as effectively as a high-powered lobbyist armed with campaign contributions, a hospitality suite and fifty-yard-line University of Texas football tickets?

  Mozelle (Mode) H. Walker, born in Dayton, Ohio, on October 11, 1868, came to Austin with her family when she was three. Her father, a lawyer named Moses Walker, fought for the North during the Civil War and following the conflict served in a unit sent to Texas on occupation duty. With Texas still under military control, General Joseph J. Reynolds named Walker as a district judge in 1869. Later, new governor Edmund Davis appointed him as an associate Supreme Court justice. When Richard Coke took over as governor in 1874, Walker got kicked off the court for political reasons and returned to Ohio with his family.

  At some point, daughter Mode returned to Austin. By the early 1900s, she was a well-known Austin artist and art teacher. Around 1905, she went back to Ohio and married Eugene Rogers in Canton. “I haven’t been able to learn anything about her Ohio years,” said Neill-Cochran Museum director Rowena Dasch, who began trying to learn more about Walker when she started at the museum in 2013. “She surely did other work, but I have not been able to locate any other of her paintings. She does not show up in any of the compendia of American artists.” The artist died in Canton on September 24, 1950, and is buried there.

  A postcard image of the capitol not long after lawmakers gathered inside chose the bluebonnet as the state flower instead of the prickly pear cactus. Author’s collection.

  While little information on Walker seems to have survived the intervening century-plus since she completed her influential bluebonnet still life, the painting has endured. Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Bremond donated the oil to the Neill-Cochran House Museum in 1985. (Located at 2310 San Gabriel Street, the house is open for tours.)

  While Walker’s painting has been credited with convincing the legislature that bluebonnets deserved official status, another oil painting is also connected to the issue. It’s a bluebonnet landscape by Julian Onderdonk once owned by Mrs. Sawnie Robertson, one of the Dames who took part in the campaign to gain recognition for the wildflower. In commemoration of Robertson’s role in achieving official standing for the bluebonnet, her granddaughter presented the painting to the governor’s mansion in 1980.

  Even though the Dames succeeded in transforming the bluebonnet into an official Texas icon, the early twentieth-century law had a loophole big enough to walk a cow through: the statute specified Lupinus subcarnosus
as the state flower even though Texas has other varieties of Lupinus. Not until March 8, 1971, did the legislature return to the bluebonnet issue, finally amending the law to add Lupinus texensis and “any other variety of bluebonnet not heretofore recorded.”

  18

  “TEX” O’REILLY STORMS THE SENATE

  On August 3, 1909, a tall cowboy rode his horse Aransas into Austin on his way to Washington to present an invitation from the people of San Antonio to President William Howard Taft, asking him to visit the Alamo City.

  Nineteen-year-old Edmunds Travis, a Tennessean whose family had moved to Central Texas in 1904, covered the story for the afternoon Austin Tribune and, in doing so, met and went on to become good friends with a man who would become world-famous as a soldier of fortune and one of Texas’s most colorful hell-raisers: Edward S. “Tex” O’Reilly. Then managing editor of the San Antonio Light and Gazette, O’Reilly planned to continue his horseback journey from the capital city via his adopted hometown of Chicago to Washington, though he only got as far as Chicago. As intended, the ride made headlines all across the nation and generated ample free publicity for San Antonio and the Light, not to mention O’Reilly.

  “I had a wonderful time on that 1,700 mile ride,” O’Reilly later recalled. “When I reached Chicago I learned President Taft was at a baseball game. So I rode my horse onto the diamond and dashed up to him. The amazing thing was he recognized me, remembering me from the days when I commanded his bodyguard in the Philippines.” (It’s actually only 1,240 miles from San Antonio to the Windy City, but he may have wandered some.)

  Born in San Saba in 1880, O’Reilly would fight in ten wars under numerous flags, a consummate soldier of fortune. In addition to his Spanish-American War service with the U.S. Army in Cuba and action in the Philippines and Shanghai during the Boxer Rebellion, he would later fight in Venezuela, Honduras and Nicaragua. He rode with Pancho Villa in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and fought with the Spanish Foreign Legion in North Africa.

  “Tex” O’Reilly rode on horseback from San Antonio to Chicago to invite President Taft to the Alamo City. On the way, he passed through Austin and became friends with young newspaper reporter Edmunds Travis. Author’s collection.

  Travis and O’Reilly—less than a year after the San Antonio journalist rode through Austin with the message for the president—would take part in an episode on the floor of the Texas Senate that, while it nearly erupted in bloodshed, amounts to one of the strongest stands for freedom of the press in the state’s history.

  By 1910, Travis had already helped to cover two regular sessions of the legislature and several special sessions. That summer, Governor Tom Campbell called a fourth special session of the Thirty-First Legislature.

  “The Legislature was a lot more important in those days than it is now,” Travis recalled years later. “I suppose we didn’t have so many news services as we’ve got now, but it was quite an honor to record its proceedings.”

  Back then, literally everything the legislature did got news coverage, and the lawmakers were not always pleased with the way things came out in the papers. That year, a cloud of scandal hung over the capitol dome. Speaker of the House Austin M. Kennedy, a former newspaper publisher from Mexia who first gained election to the lower chamber in 1898, was suspected of misdeeds in office. On the Senate side, members expelled one of their own for accusing some of his colleagues of playing poker with lobbyists and assorted other ethical issues. Travis had written about all that, but it was the Speaker who reacted to Travis’s coverage with enmity.

  “Kennedy just hated my guts,” Travis said, laughing. “There were a lot of rumors around about him getting rake-offs on furniture for the Speaker’s quarters. He had a secretary that would buy this furniture at a discount and he’d split it with her. [Then called a stenographer, the woman had been on the House payroll at $120 a month (around $2,500 in today’s dollars) even though she had not moved to Texas until the sixth week of the special session.] Anyhow, he decided to meet those rumors head-on. So he demanded an investigation.”

  Being Speaker (albeit having been elected to the post by only a six-vote majority), Kennedy appointed a three-member committee—two of them close friends—to conduct the probe.

  “So I began writing up that investigation as a whitewash,” Travis said. “That made old Kennedy hate me worse than ever.”

  A report that would clear the lawmaker was imminent, but Kennedy made a mistake when he addressed the committee. He gave out advance copies of his speech to all the statehouse reporters but Travis, which turned out to be the worst political blunder he ever made.

  “He made it very pointed that I was not to have any copies of his speech because I hadn’t treated him right,” Travis said. “Well, the result of that was that I attended this session and the other newspapermen didn’t. I sat there and took notes on it. And he launched into a tirade in the course of which he mentioned rumors that they hadn’t gotten into at all and accused the governor of instigating all these charges against him.”

  At the end of the speech, one of the committee members, John T. Briscoe (uncle of future governor Dolph Briscoe), stood up and said, “Gentlemen, we’ve heard things here today that we don’t know a thing in the world about. I move we reopen the investigation.”

  Travis’s report of this speech—though Kennedy literally begged him not to publish it—created the final movement to oust the Speaker. That came by a vote of seventy to forty-eight on March 13, 1909. Even so, while no longer its presiding officer, Kennedy remained a member of the House until he died in office in 1914. Despite Kennedy’s grudge against Travis, worse trouble soon developed in the upper chamber.

  Young Travis, besides working for the Tribune, also “strung” for some of the state papers, including the San Antonio Light, where O’Reilly entered the picture again. The Light had dispatched a man to Austin to “muckrake” the Senate, a Philadelphian named R.M. Johnson. Rather than prowl the halls of the capitol in search of legislative malfeasance, the Light journalist spent most of his time ensconced in his room at the Driskill Hotel, emerging only to wire scandalous tales about the antics of the Texas solons to his editor at the Light.

  The Light being well read if not well liked, it didn’t take Johnson long to offend a sizable cross-section of the Senate, many of its members known to pack guns. Evidently unaware of the firepower in the upper chamber, on August 25, 1910, the reporter actually walked the six blocks from his hotel to the capitol. As Travis put it, “One day he made the mistake of coming up on the Senate floor and they mobbed him.…It was a terrific scene for a while.”

  A mounted Austin policeman galloped up Congress Avenue to quell the battle. While no shooting broke out, Senate members voted to bar the Light from the floor. Seeing that as a clear violation of the First Amendment, the Light denounced the move in page-one editorials, declaring that the Light would be restored to its rightful seat at the Senate press table.

  The war-toughened O’Reilly would personally be overseeing his newspaper’s restoration. The tall Texan came to Austin—this time by train—and proceeded to give his bruised statehouse reporter shooting lessons. Man had flown in airplanes, was beginning to give up horses for automobiles, could communicate by telephone and benefit from rudimentary X-ray technology, but with many Texas senators discreetly concealing handguns under their coats, an element of the old Wild West still remained.

  Travis sat on the other side of the rotunda covering proceedings in the House when he heard a commotion coming from the east wing of the capitol. O’Reilly and Johnson had shown up at the statehouse, ascended the steps to the second floor and were about to barge their way into the Senate, no matter that august body’s resolution prohibiting them from the floor. When O’Reilly saw Travis, he gave his Austin correspondent his marching orders.

  “O’Reilly’s instructions were that he and I and Johnson were to make a grand entrance into the Senate,” Travis said. “And I said if we try to do that we’ll proba
bly all get killed. Those senators were mad as the dickens at the Light and Johnson.”

  “‘Well,’ O’Reilly said, ‘you don’t have to go if you don’t want to, but I’m going to take Johnson in.’ Old Johnson was quivering all over. I never saw as good an imitation of a bowl of jelly,” Travis laughed.

  O’Reilly packed four guns, one on his hip, one under his shirt, one in an armpit holster and one in his left pocket. Assuming all were six-shooters, O’Reilly carried twenty-four votes in support of the Light. So O’Reilly, a legislative friend named (Ralph Ray) “Railroad” Smith and Johnson prepared for their entrance.

  The tall Irishman appointed to restore the Light thrust one of his guns into Travis’s hand. Travis handed it right back to him. “He said, ‘If you don’t take this gun, you can’t go in with us,’” Travis recalled more than a half century later.

  The senate chamber as it looked about the time a heavily armed “Tex” O’Reilly burst in to assure the San Antonio Light’s access to that body’s proceedings. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.

  To O’Reilly, Travis countered, “Oh no, I wouldn’t miss it. But I’m not going in there carrying a gun. I’ve got more respect for the Senate than that, and, besides, it would just give somebody an excuse to shoot me.”

  The ad hoc freedom of the press delegation then opened and walked through the heavy wood and opaque glass doors into the Senate. A tense standoff developed that could have gone either way. But O’Reilly’s sixgun diplomacy and the cool nerve of the unarmed Travis paid off. The Senate agreed to let Johnson and other representatives of the Light stay in the chamber, under the condition that Johnson would leave Austin “in a day or so.” Showing his good faith, the next day, Johnson disappeared. Just to make sure the Senate abided by the agreement, O’Reilly “stood guard” for the Light and Travis for the remainder of the twenty-four-day special session.