Tales with a Texas Twist

by Donna Ingham

  “First of all,” he said, “I want to be buried standing up. I have never stooped nor lied to any man, and I don’t want anyone passing by my grave saying, ‘There lies Brit Bailey.’

  “Second of all, I want to be buried facing west. I’ve been heading toward the setting sun all my life. I don’t want to stop now.

  “And then I’d like you to put my long rifle in at my side. I’ll need a horn full of powder, too, and my bullets pouch full of bullets and wadding and flint. If you will, pack my possibles bag with my pipe and tobacco and my strikes-a-lot and maybe just a chaw of tobacco, too.

  “Finally, I’d like you to put a full jug of corn whiskey at my feet. The road may be long, and I do not know what lies along it. My rifle has never failed me yet, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to need refreshment.”

  Then old Brit died. His funeral was preached over by a Catholic priest because back in those days, under Mexican rule, everybody in Texas had to be Catholic. Mrs. Bailey did the best she could by her husband. She had them dig a shaft of a grave so they could tip Brit’s coffin in and he’d be standing up. She had the grave dug so he’d be facing west. She remembered to put in the long rifle, the horn full of powder, and the bullets pouch full of bullets and wadding and flint; she packed the possibles bag with his pipe and tobacco, his strikes-a-lot, and just a chaw of tobacco, too.

  But when it came time to put in the full jug of whiskey, she balked. Yes, by law, everyone in Texas had to be Catholic, but folks said that in secret, Mrs. Bailey was a Methodist. And the circuit-riding Methodist preacher was there at the funeral, the same one who preached all those secret sermons out under the brush arbor, so she just couldn’t bring herself to put that jug of whiskey in with Brit. That’s why he got buried without it despite the warnings from their hired man.

  “Oh, Miz Bailey,” he said. “You don’t put that jug in with Mr. Brit he’s going to come back and haunt us.”

  Truth is, after Brit died, Mrs. Bailey didn’t stay long in that saw-lumber house painted barn red down on the prairie. She gathered up the children and moved to Harrisburg—that’s part of Houston now. And this is where the story turns into legend.

  A young couple moved into the Bailey house, they say, and one night the wife was sleeping in one room and the husband was sleeping in another. (There are, of course, other stories to explain why that might have been true.) Just past midnight the wife came tearing out of her room screaming and hollering and carrying on, and the husband came out of his room, asking, “What in tarnation is wrong with you, woman?”

  She said, “There’s a man in my room. He was just crawling around on the floor, reaching out toward the bed. I thought it was you. But when I reached my hand out to touch him, it went clear through.”

  “Oh, hogwash,” her husband said, “there ain’t nobody in that room. You just had a bad dream. I guess I’ll have to sleep in there to show you there ain’t nothing to it.”

  “Go right ahead on,” she said, and he did.

  It wasn’t but a night or two later, however, that he came tearing out of that room just past midnight.

  “You’re right!” he said. “There is somebody in that room, and I know who it is. It’s old Brit Bailey.”

  Well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the room in question had been Brit’s bedroom, and, like any old frontiersman, he always kept a jug of whiskey under his side of the bed. He was back looking for it.

  That young couple moved out of the saw-lumber house, and so did everyone else who tried to live there because old Brit just kept showing up in one way or another. And even after the old house had crumbled in on itself and all that was left was just the foundation, strange things kept happening out on Bailey’s Prairie.

  At first people said they saw a light. It was about man-size, they said, kind of a yellow-orange, and it just floated along over the prairie, right there where the tree rows start. The braver boys tried to chase it, but they couldn’t catch it.

  The old-timers said, “Yep, that’s Brit all right. He must be carrying a lantern out looking for coons or possums.”

  Others said, “Huh uh, he’s still looking for that jug.”

  Then way on up in the 1930s, a hundred years after Brit died, one fellow said he was driving his car across Bailey’s Prairie, minding his own business, when all of a sudden his car just stopped.

  (It was sort of like close encounters of the prairie kind.) He said his radio came on, and he didn’t turn it on. Then his windshield wipers started going back and forth and back and forth. His horn honked and his light blinked, and then all that just stopped. He could start his car and drive on.

  Not too long after that, lethal fumes from a gas well blowout tied up traffic for a week on the highway that crosses Bailey’s Prairie. It was some of the old-timers who said, “I think they’re trying to drill that well too close to old Brit’s grave, and he doesn’t like it.” By this time, no one knew exactly where old Brit’s unmarked grave was. But, sure enough, they moved the drilling operation over twenty feet or so and never had another moment’s trouble.

  Nowadays they say all there is left of Brit is that light, and over the years it’s gotten smaller. He must be losing energy. I’m told it’s about the size of a basketball now, still a yellowish-orange, and it still floats out there right where the tree rows start. Some of the braver boys try to chase it yet, but they can’t catch it. Apparently Brit’s lost enough energy so that he can’t show up every night—or even every week or every month or every year. I’m told he shows up about every seven years, and here a while back I did the math so I can figure what might be the best years coming up because I want to see that light.

  Like some others before me, I’m wondering if it might not be a good idea to take a jug of whiskey with me when I go seeking Brit. It does seem a shame for an old frontiersman like him to have gone this long without a snort. Don’t you think?

  The Babe of the Alamo

  The Texas city most visited by tourists is San Antonio, and the state’s most visited historical site is right in the middle of town: the Alamo. It started out as Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1718, and all that remains today of the original complex are the chapel—one of the most photographed facades in the nation—and the Long Barrack, housing a museum and library. The battle fought at the Alamo in 1836 has been the subject of any number of books and movies, and legends about the people who were there abound. One has to do with a little girl and a ring. The ring has made its way back to the Alamo and is on display in the museum in the Long Barrack.

  Almost everyone knows about the Alamo, even people who didn’t grow up in Texas and who never studied Texas history. What most people remember about the famous battle is that among the defenders of the Alamo, there were no survivors. Not a one of the Texas soldiers who fought there lived to tell the tale. But among the Texans at the Alamo there were survivors, and one of those survivors was a little girl—I mean a really little girl. Back in March of 1836 she was not quite a year and a half old. Her name was Angelina Elizabeth Dickinson, and she didn’t know anything about war or the reasons for war. She just knew how to be a baby and do what babies do. That, quite simply, made her adorable to the men on both sides.

  Certainly to her daddy, of course. He was a young officer in the Texas army, Almeron Dickinson, and he had brought both his wife, Susanna, and his little girl with him to the Alamo. He was so proud of that little girl—you know how some daddies are—that he carried her around with him everywhere he went, even when he met with Colonel William Barret Travis, the commander at the Alamo.

  Colonel Travis would watch her crawling around on the dirt floor, doing what babies do, and even he could not resist her baby charms. In the midst of all his concerns about being way outnumbered by Santa Anna and all those Mexican troops and about having none of the additional reinforcements he had asked for and hoped for, he sought Angelina out one day so he could g
ive her something. He took from his finger a ring, a hammered gold ring with a black cat’s-eye stone in it. He found a string in his pocket, threaded the string through the ring, tied a knot in the string, and slipped the whole business right over Angelina’s head just like a necklace.

  “If my boy was here,” he said, “I’d give this to him. But I’ll be having no further use for it, so you take care of it for me.”

  She already had a wooden doll whittled for her by David Crockett, that funny man from Tennessee who made her laugh when he would tickle her with the tail hanging from his fur-skin cap—sometimes coonskin, sometimes foxskin. And he made her bounce on her little fat legs when he played his hoedown fiddle. Oh, she charmed them all because that’s what babies do.

  If she remembered anything at all about the decisive battle going on around her on March 6, 1836, it was probably the noise: the sounds of gunfire and cannon fire, the shouts of men giving orders, and the cries of men in pain. She might remember being held close by her mother, Susanna, as they hid out in a small room in the old chapel, a room that had once been used to store gunpowder. She might even remember the leftover smell of that gunpowder. She might remember how quiet it got when the battle was over, after the Mexicans had stormed the old mission.

  She might remember being carried by her mother later from that small room into a larger one where there was a man dressed in a splendid military uniform with medals hanging off the jacket. He was wearing white gloves, and he reached out for Angelina. She did what babies do: She went to him and sat on his lap and played with those medals on his jacket. When he spoke to her, the sound of the words was soft and musical.

  “Hermosa,” he said, “muy hermosa.”

  Later her mother would tell her that this man was calling Angelina beautiful, very beautiful. And her mother would tell her that this man wanted to take Angelina back with him to Mexico.

  “I want this child,” he said. “I will give her the best Mexico has to offer: clothes, jewels, education.”

  But her mother said, “No, never!” For this man, of course, was General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the same man who had ordered “no quarter.” There would be no survivors among those who fought against him, including Susanna’s husband and Angelina’s father, Almeron.

  Santa Anna did grant Susanna and Angelina safe passage away from the Alamo, with the understanding that Susanna would be his messenger.

  “Go,” he said, “and tell the Texans the Alamo has fallen. And tell Sam Houston it will be useless for the Texans to put up any further resistance.”

  On that ride away from the Alamo, Susanna and Angelina met other Texans, among them Erastus “Deaf” Smith. This time it was Smith who reached out for Angelina, and she did what babies do: She went to him and snuggled down against the soft deerskin of his jacket and went to sleep. Smith continued to hold her and rock her once they reached Sam Houston’s camp while Susanna poured out her story of those thirteen days at the Alamo and of the brave defenders who died there.

  From that story came the rallying cry “Remember the Alamo!”

  It took the Texans into battle at San Jacinto—the battle they won, the battle in which they captured Santa Anna, the battle that ensured Texas its independence from Mexico and its beginnings as a new republic.

  And Angelina? Well, no doubt she would remember the Alamo, too, but she more than likely would remember it in terms of those men whose lives she touched with her innocence—every time she looked at that hammered gold ring with the black cat’s-eye stone in it, every time she looked at that crudely carved wooden doll, and any time she saw a man dressed in a splendid military uniform with medals hanging off the jacket.

  We remember her as the Babe of the Alamo.

  The Yellow Rose of Texas

  Some say her ghost still wanders the San Jacinto battleground near present-day Houston, but the so-called Yellow Rose of Texas spent only a couple of years in Texas during her lifetime. During those years she got caught up in the Texas Revolution in ways that have become legend.

  She’s the sweetest little rosebud,

  That Texas ever knew;

  Her eyes are bright as diamonds;

  They sparkle like the dew;

  You may talk about your Clementine

  And sing of Rosalee,

  But the Yellow Rose of Texas

  Is the only girl for me.

  Those of us of a certain age were all singing that song in the mid-1950s. Singing along with Mitch Miller. A lot of people think Mitch Miller wrote that song, but he didn’t. No, that song has a long history dating clear back to the Texas Revolution, and the words have changed some over the years.

  Consider the original lyrics, first written as a poem in the mid-1830s and later adopted as a military marching song. This version contains racial language common to the time period; though the author is unknown, he may have been African American.

  She’s the sweetest rose of color

  This darky ever knew;

  Her eyes are bright as diamonds;

  They sparkle like the dew;

  You may talk about dearest May

  And sing of Rosa Lee,

  But the yellow rose of Texas

  Beats the belles of Tennessee.

  These words were written shortly after the Texans won their independence from Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto. Legend has it that the Yellow Rose was a heroine of sorts in that battle and that she fought with the principal weapons any female in that era had: her womanly wiles.

  Here are two things we know with some certainty about a woman named Emily D. West: One, she was a freeborn black woman from New Haven, Connecticut. Two, on October 25, 1835, she signed a contract with James Morgan in New York City to work, probably as a housekeeper, in Morgan’s colonial hotel in New Washington in what was then Mexican Texas.

  From there history and legend mingle to create the fascinating, if not entirely substantiated, story of Emily West—or Emily Morgan, as she came to be known. Tale tellers and even some historians and folklorists wrongly assumed that, because she was black, she was a slave (or, at best, an indentured servant) and had therefore taken the name of her master. We’ll just call her Emily.

  The legendary Emily was described at the time as a golden-skinned mulatto or quadroon; as such, she might well have been called “high yellow” in her day.

  There’s a yellow rose in Texas

  That I am going to see;

  Nobody else could love her,

  Not half as much as me.

  She cried so when I left her

  It liked to broke my heart,

  And, if I ever find her,

  We nevermore will part.

  Emily was said to be beautiful and intelligent, and she was credited with being fiercely loyal to Texas and the cause for independence.

  April 18, 1836—The Alamo had fallen just over a month before; Colonel James Fannin and his men had been massacred at Goliad only a few weeks before; and Texans were running for the border during what was called the Runaway Scrape, in fear that they would be killed or captured by Mexican general Santa Anna and his troops. But Emily was still there in New Washington, about ten miles from Buffalo Bayou. Actually, on that particular day, she was at Morgan’s Point, at the mouth of the San Jacinto River.

  Her employer, Colonel Morgan, was in Galveston as a commandant, guarding Texas refugees and government officials who had fled to his fortifications there from Harrisburg ahead of the Mexican army. Santa Anna, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, arrived in New Washington on that April day with a contingent of 1,000 soldiers. Legend has it that the comely Emily caught Santa Anna’s eye as she helped load supplies on a flatboat at the wharf with the grace of movement that befits a dancer. After his troops finished sacking and burning New Washington, he gathered her up as a spoil of war, along with a mulatto boy named Turner.


  Young Turner was a printer’s apprentice of above-average intelligence, and Santa Anna tried to bribe him to go find Sam Houston and his men and come back to report the Texans’ whereabouts. But, so the story goes, Emily took the young man aside and convinced him instead to warn Sam Houston of Santa Anna’s approach. Thus, indirectly, Emily first acted on her loyalties to the Texian cause.

  The fastidious Santa Anna traveled with the finest furnishings: silk sheets, crystal stemware, even a mounted sterling chamber pot. He had an octagonal red-and-white-striped, three-room, carpeted, silk marquee tent. Once they reached San Jacinto, he had that gaudy thing set up on a rise so he and Emily would have a romantic view overlooking the bay.

  By now Santa Anna knew that the Texans were nearby and had perhaps even seen their two six-pound cannons, the Twin Sisters. But he must not have been very worried or impressed. He was likely much more interested in what awaited him inside that tent. Fancying himself quite the lady’s man, he no doubt spent much of his time strutting around like a banty rooster in all his finery trying to impress his female “guest.”

  For her part, Emily would have had little choice about being with Santa Anna. She was his captive. She did have a choice, however, about prolonging their tryst by charming him—perhaps with stories, perhaps with music, and certainly with her youth and beauty, her primary weapons in this decisive battle of the Texas Revolution. On the morning of April 21, she likely served Santa Anna breakfast.

  Sam Houston, meanwhile, watched the camp and noted the activities of the Mexican troops. Because of young Turner’s report, Houston knew that Emily was at the campsite in Santa Anna’s company. He was hoping, no doubt, that Emily would keep Santa Anna distracted all day. About four o’clock in the afternoon, Houston gave the command to attack. The cries went up: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”