Tales with a Texas Twist

by Donna Ingham

  She also followed her daddy around their plantation just as if she were a boy, asking lots of questions and watching everything. So she was kind of a tomboy and a bit of a daredevil.

  It’s not surprising, then, that after she married Gus and got through being a spy she took to show business better than he did—even though he was the one who had grown up in a circus. After the Civil War they traveled all over the South and even toured by riverboat with what they called the Bailey Concert Company.

  They came to Texas in 1879 and started the Bailey Circus, “A Texas Show for Texas People.” It was a one-ring tent circus that grew to have thirty-one wagons and about 200 animals—finally even elephants and camels.

  “Aunt Mollie,” as she came to be known, pretty much ran the show from the beginning, but she certainly was in charge after bad health forced Gus to retire to their winter quarters in Blum, Texas. In fact, the circus became known as the Mollie A. Bailey Show and was distinguished by three flags flying over the big top: the United States, Lone Star, and Confederate flags.

  The circus got from small town to small town by wagons in the early days, but by 1906 it was traveling in railroad cars. Mollie had her own finely appointed parlor car in which she entertained Texas governors and senators—and members of Hood’s Brigade, too.

  Yes, it seems she always retained a soft spot for veterans—perhaps harking back to her own days as a Civil War nurse and spy. For throughout her show business career, she gave all war veterans, be they Union or Confederate, free tickets to the circus.

  Arizona Bill

  Occasionally a story will come somewhat serendipitously— that is, I find it when I’m not really looking for it. A number of years ago I was browsing through a back issue of Texas Highways magazine and read a brief anecdote written by Gene Fowler. I knew it was a story I wanted to tell, so I adapted it into the following narrative. Fort Sam Houston, by the way, remains the oldest active military post in San Antonio. It was first established in 1845 as part of the Alamo complex and then officially named in 1890 on grounds that were set aside for construction in the 1870s.

  Everybody called him Arizona Bill, even though he was born in Louisiana and he died in Texas and his name was Raymond. Raymond Hatfield Gardner. And he was a storyteller.

  He said he was born in 1845, coincidentally the year Texas became a state and the year Fort Sam Houston was established in San Antonio as part of the Alamo complex. He claimed that before he could even walk the Comanches captured him off a wagon train as it was crossing Texas. He had red hair as a boy, and many of the Native People were superstitious about people with red hair. So the Comanches took really good care of him. But at some point, they traded him off to the Sioux. He said he was thirteen years old before he realized he wasn’t an Indian. It was at that point that some military men or some traders ransomed him back, as it was called, and returned him to his own kind.

  By the time he was sixteen, the Civil War had broken out, and he enlisted in the army—the Union army. He became a courier for none other than Ulysses S. Grant. Even after that war was over, he kept reenlisting and became a valued Indian scout during that period of time we call the Indian Wars. It was while the army was chasing Geronimo across Arizona that two of his officers gave him that Arizona Bill moniker, and it stuck. Word is that Arizona Bill was also a scout for General Custer, but, fortunately for him, he missed that fracas at the Little Big Horn.

  Even after he mustered out of the army all together, his life was still exciting, to hear him tell it. For a time he was a rider for Wells Fargo and a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In between times he did a little gold prospecting and a little mule trading. Then he finally just started wandering and telling stories, always accompanied by his beloved burro, Tipperary.

  I remember those itinerant storytellers who used to come through my hometown there in Brownfield, Texas. They would come in riding a burro or a mule or a horse. Oh, some might have wagons, and some just walked. They would camp out in the city park, and folks would come to listen to their stories, bringing a little food or money to offer for the entertainment. Then the storytellers would move on to the next town. And that’s pretty much what Arizona Bill did.

  In fact, he did that way on up into the 1930s. (If you’re doing the math, he’d be in his eighties.) Then he finally sort of settled down in San Antonio at Fort Sam Houston, by now on its own grounds as an active military post. Unaccustomed as he was to sleeping indoors, however, he just made himself a place out in the stables right next to Tipperary. And he still did some wandering.

  So it was that in 1939 he was up in Indiana when he took sick. (If you’re still doing the math, he’s in his nineties.) He checked himself into an army hospital, and while he was recovering, he befriended an army medic named George Miller. Naturally, he told George Miller all his stories. Then, when he was sufficiently recuperated, Arizona Bill checked himself out of the hospital. Before he left, though, he looked up George Miller and said to him, “Say, George, if you’re ever in Texas, be sure and come to my city, San Antonio.”

  Well, that very next year, 1940, Arizona Bill died. A local funeral home in San Antonio donated a casket, appropriately olive drab with little brass bugles on the sides for handles. He was buried in San Fernando Cemetery number two. That’s a civilian cemetery because no one could find any papers that proved he’d been in the military and was therefore eligible to be buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. And that could have been the end of his story.

  But it wasn’t.

  Ten years later, in 1950, that army medic, George Miller, retired out of the military and decided to move to San Antonio. When he got there, he remembered all of Arizona Bill’s stories, and he tried to find out what had happened to the old storyteller. Miller did find out and then made it his quest for the next twenty-six years to prove that Arizona Bill, or Raymond Hatfield Gardner, had in fact served his country and did in fact deserve to be buried at Fort Sam Houston, the closest thing he’d ever had to home, in the National Cemetery there.

  Finally, in 1976, in some dusty cavalry archives, Miller found the enlistment papers for Raymond Hatfield Gardner. So on Veterans Day of that year, Raymond Hatfield Gardner, aka Arizona Bill, was buried with full military honors in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, where he rests—we hope in peace—to this very day.

  And I like to think all that happened, at least in part, because Arizona Bill was a storyteller.

  Diamond Bill

  Although I’ve seen versions of these next two stories in more or less generic collections of American folklore, I suspect they all stem from one source: J. Frank Dobie’s collections. Certainly my own adaptations of the tall tales about the rattlesnake who fought in the Civil War and about Bigfoot Wallace’s ingenious idea for armor in his battle with the Comanches started there. So here’s how I tell them.

  This is a story that was always told by a fellow named Jeb Rider from over in east Texas. The way Jeb told it, he was just walking down to the spring one day to get a bucket of water. He said he heard something behind him but he didn’t pay much attention, thinking it was just a rustle in the leaves. But then he heard a low rattle.

  Well, sure enough, he turned around and there not six steps back on the trail was the biggest diamondback rattlesnake he’d ever seen in his life. But now when Jeb stopped, the snake stopped, and he wasn’t rattling his tail at all. As a matter of fact, Jeb said that snake only lifted up its head and looked at him as if it didn’t mean him any harm. Still and all, it was a rattlesnake, and Jeb didn’t have a stick or anything to use for a weapon. But he could look on down the trail there and see a big old dead dogwood tree. He thought if he could make it to that dead dogwood, he’d break him off a branch and then he’d have him a weapon.

  So he walked on down the trail, looking back every little bit, and sure as the world that snake was coming right behind him. But, he said, it was keeping kind of
a respectful distance—sort of like a puppy that wants to follow you home, but still he’s afraid to get too close. Jeb made it down to the dead dogwood and broke him off a branch and turned around to just lambaste that snake. But even Jeb could see that the snake was still lying there as if it didn’t mean him any harm. To tell you the truth, Jeb said, the snake was looking a good bit more cordial out of those snake eyes than some human eyes Jeb had looked into. So Jeb did something that was clear contrary to nature. Do not try this at home.

  He threw that stick away is what he did and walked on down to the spring and sat himself down on a cypress log. The snake came, too, and coiled himself up right there in front of Jeb and mostly looked grateful out of those snake eyes. Directly then Jeb started talking to the snake.

  “Now, see here, snake,” he said, “I’m just going to call you Bill. Bill was my dog. Oh, he was the finest coon and possum dog a man ever had, and Bill understood me. He did. Lordy, I miss him. Yes sir, I’m just going to call you Bill.”

  And then, Jeb swore, that snake nodded—just raised his head up and shook it up and down as agreeably as you please. He did. Well, after that Jeb said it got to be plumb comforting to go down to the spring to have a little quiet time and visit with Bill. He did it quite often.

  Then the war broke out. That would be the War Between the States, what we sometimes call the War of Northern Aggression, and what most folks call the Civil War. Jeb enlisted, of course, in Captain Abercrombie’s outfit, and the night before he was to move out he went down to the spring to have a little quiet time and visit with Bill. He said it looked as if Bill understood all about the Yankees, and Jeb told Bill he’d be gone for a while—he didn’t know how long—and Bill would just have to look after things there at the spring.

  The next morning, as Jeb was riding out under an old leaning elm tree that hung over the trail between his house and the spring, he said he felt something drop around his shoulders. Said it would have scared him if it hadn’t felt so natural. It was Bill.

  “So you want to go to the war, too, do you, Bill?” Bill nodded. “I don’t know,” Jeb said. “We’re going to be in camp with a bunch of Texans, and they’ve got about as much use for a rattlesnake as a mountain lion has for a lost puppy.” Still and all, Jeb thought, if Bill wanted to go that bad he might just take him and try to convert the heathens.

  So he told Bill, “If I take you now, you’re going to have to do what I tells you and stay put where I puts you. And you have to leave folks alone. If you’ll do that, I just believe I’ll take you.”

  Bill nodded, and they rode on down the trail. Sure enough, when they got to camp, most of the fellows there did think Jeb was just a plain idiot. But they left Bill alone, and Bill left them alone. Jeb sure didn’t have any trouble with anybody trying to steal his blankets, though.

  Jeb said it was a pure caution the way Bill got on with Jim Bowie—that’s what Jeb had named his horse. He said he’d look out every little bit and there would be Jim Bowie rubbing his soft horse muzzle down along Bill’s back. And for his part, Bill would go out ahead of Jim Bowie, when Jim Bowie was grazing, and scare off anything that might get in his path.

  When he first got to camp, Jeb said, about all the soldiers did was practice marching. He said there’d be squads righting and squads lefting and squads fronting into line. He’d always put Bill over at the edge of the parade field, and he said he got to noticing how interested Bill seemed to be in all the men’s movements. It was the band music that really got Bill going—and of course “Dixie” was his favorite tune. It was kind of comical, Jeb said. Bill got to where he could kind of rattle it. Yes sir, Jeb said he’d look over every little bit and there Bill would be heisting up his tail for the high notes.

  Jeb made a kind of a sack to carry Bill in. It had drawstrings at the top so Jeb could loop them over the saddle horn when they were on the trail. The time came when they crossed the Mississippi River and joined up with General Albert Sidney Johnston’s troops, and on that April morning when Shiloh broke out, they were in the battle.

  They were camped there at Owl Creek, due north of Shiloh Chapel, and Jeb’s outfit was sent out on maneuvers one day. Before he left, Jeb took Bill over and put him under one of the commissary wagons and told Bill he’d be back. He didn’t know when. Jeb asked the wagon master to keep an eye on Bill, and then Jeb was gone. He was gone all day.

  That evening then, as Jeb and his outfit were coming back, the colonel met them and said they were going to have to drive out a little bunch of Yankees that had gotten into a neck of the woods between where they were now and where camp was. So Jeb said they bellied down and got in behind the trees, expecting fire. But pretty soon they began to find those Yankees, and they were all dead, every last one of them. Well, Jeb said, they just figured someone else had gotten there first and beat them to the fight. One of the fellows in Jeb’s outfit noticed, though, that not a single one of those Yankees had a bullet hole in him anywhere. Furthermore, there weren’t any creases on the trees to suggest there had been some sort of firefight, and they thought that was pretty all-fired peculiar.

  So Jeb decided to investigate a little more closely. He went over to one of those Yankees and lifted up his pants leg. He could see—right above the boot top, right where that ankle vein goes down—two little bitty holes, not any bigger than pin pricks. Then he looked at another Yankee, same thing, and then another and another and another. That’s when he knew: Old Bill had been there.

  Jeb said they went through that neck of the woods counting dead Yankees. They counted 417 of them. Oh, he said, there might have been a few more, might have been a few less. They might have counted some of them twice.

  When they got back to camp there on Owl Creek, Bill was under that commissary wagon, but he did look plumb tuckered out, and he was gaunt as a gutted snowbird. After that, though, the fellows in Jeb’s outfit took a liking to Bill. They’re the ones who started calling him Diamond Bill. And the colonel would ask Jeb to send Bill out on patrol. No telling how many Yankees Bill flushed out of thickets too dangerous for a man to go into.

  Well, Bill and Jeb made it all the way through the war, clear up to Appomattox, but Jim Bowie didn’t. So they had to ride home on a borrowed mule. This would have been late in ’65, I reckon. When they got back to the spring, Jeb put Bill down and said, “I’ve got to go back to work.” He started fixing fence and breaking out land and doing all the things that hadn’t been done since he’d been gone, and lots of days he didn’t have time to even think about Bill.

  So it must have been maybe early in ’66 that Jeb was going down to the spring one day, and all of a sudden he saw this great big diamondback a-running toward him, in a manner of speaking. Right away Jeb was looking for a stick again, but he studied a minute and decided there was something mighty familiar about that snake. He asked, “Bill, is that you?” And Bill nodded, the way he had a thousand times before. Then he made a new motion, Bill did, sort of raising his head up and jerking it backward until Jeb figured out Bill was saying “follow me.” So Jeb got in behind Bill, who moved down the trail a little way and then cut through some tall grass until he sidled up right next to another big old diamondback.

  “Mrs. Bill?” Jeb asked, and Bill nodded. Then both snakes started making that new motion, jerking their heads back to get Jeb to follow. They moved out of that tall grass and through some low brush until they came to a clearing about the size of a courthouse square.

  Jeb said that Bill went out to the edge of that clearing, heisted up his tail, and gave the dangdest rattle a man ever heard. It must have been some kind of signal because all of a sudden, from all sides of that clearing, came squads and platoons and companies and battalions and divisions of little rattlesnakes—all of them keeping perfect time and perfect formation, squads righting and squads lefting and squads fronting into line just like old soldiers.

  Well, Bill got them all lined up in the middle of that p
arade field and gave another rattle for a signal. At that they all started advancing right toward Jeb, still keeping perfect time and perfect formation and all rattles a-going. And every last one of them was rattling “Dixie”!

  Bigfoot Wallace and the Hickory Nuts

  A Virginian by birth, William “Bigfoot” Wallace came to Texas in 1836 after hearing that his brother and a cousin had been shot down in the Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution. Legend has it that Wallace was a big man with a big appetite. Once, so the story goes, he ate twenty-seven eggs at a house outside El Paso before going into town for a full meal. But then he was known to stretch the truth on occasion.

  Bigfoot Wallace did have big feet. But they didn’t seem out of proportion to the rest of him because he was what we call in Texas a big old boy. And Bigfoot wasn’t his real name, of course. His real name was William Alexander Anderson Wallace, and he was of Scottish ancestry claiming kin to another William Wallace—that would be Sir William Wallace back in Scotland, who earned the nickname Braveheart.

  Bigfoot was something of a warrior, too, as a Texas Ranger and Indian fighter in the mid-1800s. He finally more or less retired, though, to a little cabin on the banks of the Medina River west of San Antonio, keeping himself occupied with a little farming and tracking and, from all reports, storytelling.

  His ability as a storyteller made Bigfoot very popular at barn raisings and dinners-on-the-ground and any other social gatherings in his neighborhood. Folks would look forward to his arrival and meet him with requests: “Bigfoot, tell us a story. Tell us about the most remarkable adventure you ever had with the Indians.” If Bigfoot thought they wanted just a little something extra on the story, he didn’t mind giving it to them, as he did in this story about the hickory nuts.