The Raven's Honor

by Johnny D. Boggs

  He manages to dam the tears, and straightens, hating himself. “It was always the damned whiskey.”

  Oo-loo-te-ka stares beyond him, perhaps seeing that scene from all those years ago. “I remember our warriors were outraged. You had struck me, a vile insult. They wanted to tear you apart.”

  “You stopped them,” Houston says.

  “I stopped them with the truth. I told them … ‘The Raven is troubled.’ I told them … ‘But he is my son and still I love him.’”

  Sniffling, he manages to say, “I love you, too. And …”

  He cannot look at his father any more. He remembers Tiana.

  * * * * *

  She will save him, too, before he even meets Margaret. He loves her. And he leaves her … but not because she has betrayed him as Eliza has done. Not because of any star, any sign from Unetlanv. But for his own glory.

  * * * * *

  “Even before you married, Tiana knew you would wander away,” Oo-loo-te-ka says. “So did I. Eventually, the dark cloud was blown away. Your path, your true path, was no longer blocked. And you had to help your people. You went back to see Jackson, the Great White Father. Once more, you saved me. You saved your people.”

  “And I deserted you. I deserted Tiana. Because of Jackson. What he wanted.” The truth chills him. “For what I desired in my heart. Glory. Fame. Immortality.”

  Oo-loo-te-ka’s head shakes sternly. “No, Son. Jackson did not send you to Texas. Unetlanv did. He told you to go, to find your true place. Tiana knew you would not be hers forever. You were the Raven. You had to wander.”

  “She remarried,” Houston says.

  His father frowns. “Whose name is not worth remembering.”

  Houston brushes away his tears. He remembers hearing of Tiana’s death of pneumonia in 1838. He had cried then, too.

  “I failed at everything I tried,” Houston tells his Cherokee father. “And now, all that I accomplished, all that I fought for, is laid to waste.”

  He cannot fight back the bitterness. “I am no hero. I was a drunk, a coward, a fool … but never a hero.”

  “You were a hero to me, Son. You were a hero to many, white and red. No one is perfect. You stumbled, you fell, but you survived. You lived your life with honor.”

  His head lifts again. “Did I, Father?”

  “Yes. All is well, my Son. All is well. You always return to us when you are in need. Do you know what you need now, Co-lo-neh?”

  He does. He feels the chill. He asks, “Is dying hard, Father?”

  “I wouldn’t know, ol’ hoss.”

  Houston straightens, suddenly aware that he and Oo-loo-te-ka no longer sit inside the Town House. They stand on the banks of a great river, surrounded by the mountains of Tennessee. A waterfall cascades. David Crockett rises on a rock in the middle of the river.

  Cupping his hands over his mouth, Crockett shouts, “Let’s go huntin’! I’ll show you how to skin a b’ar!”

  On the far side of the river, Tiana kneels at the bank, washing her midnight-colored hair. She wears her wedding dress. Soapy water drips from her black braids. She smiles at him. … Jackson is there, too, holding hands with Rachel, Old Hickory’s wife, best friend, companion, champion … Tears almost blind Houston when he sees his mother, his brothers, his sisters. Muk-wah-ruh, the great Comanche chief, gallops a pony underneath the waterfall, singing a fine song in a boisterous voice. Deaf Smith rocks in a chair. Gunter, the Cherokee scout from Horseshoe Bend, launches a canoe.

  Looking back at Oo-loo-te-ka, Houston says, “I am frightened, Father.”

  “There is nothing to fear, Son.” Oo-loo-te-ka says. “All is well. You have made it so.” The old Cherokee’s chin juts out, a signal, and Houston turns back.

  He sees himself now, lying on the sofa in the downstairs room of the Steamboat House. The minister. His mother-in-law. All are there. Jeff fans the withered old man, the old man that is Sam Houston. The gold ring on Houston’s pinky reflects the fading sunlight. He touches the ring on his own finger. He sees his other slaves. He watches his children, some with heads bowed in prayer, others sobbing, Nannie reading a poem she has written for her father. Mostly, he focuses on his wife, his best friend, the love of his life. And he feels that, yes, perhaps Unetlanv did send him away from the Cherokees. To find Texas. To find his destiny. But, mostly, to find Margaret.

  Sitting beside the dying old man, Margaret reads the Bible, and although her eyes glisten with tears, Houston understands that, yes, all is well.

  All is well.

  “What must I do?” he asks.

  His Cherokee father answers, but Houston no longer sees him, or Crockett, or the waterfall, or the others. Even the river has vanished. He stares at the most beautiful light he has ever seen, brighter, more stunning than the sun, and is embraced by a warmth, a strength, a kindness.

  “It is easy, Co-lo-neh,” Oo-loo-te-ka’s voice tells him. “Say good bye to those you love. And step into the light.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  July 25, 1863

  She was reading from John 14—“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.”—when Houston called out in a firm voice, “Texas!”

  Margaret closed the Bible, and quickly moved beside him. She found his hand, gripped it.

  “Texas,” he said again, but softer this time, yet she felt his fingers tighten against her hand. She squeezed back. In a voice that warmed her, he spoke one more word.

  “Margaret.”

  His fingers relaxed, his head sank deeper into his pillow, and he exhaled a final breath. Yet he appeared to be smiling. He looked at peace.

  All around her, the children, the slaves, the Reverend McKinney, even Margaret’s mother, cried harder.

  The clock began to chime. It was 6:15 p.m.

  “Is Papa …?” Maggie started. “Is he …?”

  Somehow, Margaret could smile. “Yes, my darling children. He is with our Lord.” She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “My gallant hero,” she whispered, “you have earned your rest … and your reward. I love you.”

  Blocking the tears, she ran her fingers through his white hair.

  “I don’t want Papa to be with Jesus,” Temple wailed. “I want him to be with us.”

  “He will always be with us.” Margaret held out both hands. Temple took one. Nannie took the other.

  “Join hands,” Margaret said.

  Maggie found Temple’s other hand, and the Reverend McKinney took Nannie’s. Other hands locked together … Houston’s children, Nancy Lea, all the slaves.

  Rain began to fall.

  “Let us pray,” Samuel McKinney said, but Margaret’s head shook.

  “Reverend,” she said, “if you don’t mind, I will lead us.”

  She did, praying not for Sam Houston’s soul—for that had been taken care of years earlier—but for her children.

  “Amen,” she said, because her husband had always preferred short prayers. Now, she reached to his hand, and touched the ring on his pinky. She tugged, relieved as it slid off with little effort. It should not have surprised her. Houston had been lying on this couch for weeks, and he had lost much weight.

  As far as Margaret knew, the ring had never come off his hand—certainly not in their twenty-three years of marriage. She brought it closer, and found her reading glasses hanging on the ribbon across her chest. He had told her of the tiny gold band, but, until this moment, she had never read the inscription herself. Her heart swelled and she smiled as she lowered the ring and her eyeglasses.

  “Children,” she said, “this is the ring your father was given by his mother when he went off from home as a young, young man. There is an inscription inside. It was your father’s creed. It was what drove him. It is what, I pray, will
drive each of you … and me. I want you to read it now.”

  “Can I read it, Mama?” Temple said.

  “Of course.” Smiling, she placed the slim band in her youngest son’s tiny hand.

  The boy brought it up and said, “It says … ‘This is my Daddy and he was …’” Temple sobbed. “‘A really good person … and he loved … we loved him … and will … miss … him … very, very much.’”

  Temple dropped the ring into Margaret’s hand and, bawling, buried his face against Nannie’s shoulder as his big sister swept him into her arms.

  “Yes,” Margaret said. “That’s what it says, Temple.”

  Maggie sniffed. “What does it really say, Mother?”

  She handed the ring to her daughter, and Maggie raised the ring, but quickly lowered it.

  “I can’t … read it … Mother.” She returned the ring to Margaret, and put her balled fists against her teary eyes.

  “It’s all right.” Margaret smiled, first at her children, and then at her husband.

  “It is one word.” Looking at her husband, at the ring, she found the strength she needed. Strength she drew from him. She returned the ring to Mary Willie to be passed around the children.

  “Honor,” Margaret said. “It simply reads ‘Honor.’”

  THE END

  Author’s Note

  Union prisoners of war at the Texas State Penitentiary made the coffin for Sam Houston, and carried it in the rain to the Steamboat House, where services were held in the upstairs parlor. Afterward, the cortège proceeded in the rain (a sign, according to folk tales, that the deceased is going to heaven) the few blocks to Oaklawn Cemetery, where Sam Houston was buried—and where he rests today.

  Yellow fever would claim Margaret on December 3, 1867, in Independence, Texas. She had requested to be laid to rest beside her husband, but burial had to be immediate during yellow fever outbreaks, so she was interred next to the crypt that held her mother, who had died on February 7, 1864.

  At some point, perhaps after the funeral, while alone in the Steamboat House in Huntsville, Margaret wrote in her family Bible:

  Died on the 26th of July 1863, Genl Sam Houston, the beloved and affectionate Husband, father, devoted patriot, the fearless soldier—the meek and lowly Christian.”

  Houston’s true epitaph, however, had been inscribed on the inside of that small gold ring his mother had given him back in Tennessee in 1813.

  * * * * *

  In the summer of 2014, on a combination boys baseball and magazine trip, I took my son Jack to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas. Researching an article on Sam Houston for Wild West magazine, I met with Michael C. Sproat, the museum’s curator of collections, and director Mac Woodward.

  I told them of my long fascination with the story of Sam Houston and his legendary honor ring, and Jack and I left Huntsville with a couple of cheap souvenirs: plastic orange wrist bands emblazoned with one word in white letters: Honor.

  The next day, our trip took us to La Porte, where Jack and I saw the actual ring at the San Jacinto Museum of History.

  This must have made an impression on Jack. Over the next year, he wore that bracelet practically all the time, night and day. He slept with it. He showered with it. About the only time it came off occurred during Little League baseball games when an umpire would point out a rule prohibiting players to wear jewelry. He’d bring it to me, and I’d slip it on my wrist until after the ball game.

  “If Jack can remember what that ring means,” I told friends, “then I did my job.”

  This is a novel about the last years of Sam Houston’s life, and most of it is taken from Houston’s life. I’ve even used his own words, or close proximity, when possible. Yet this is fiction, and I’ve moved a few events around for the convenience of narrative. I made up stuff. Washington, Texas, reportedly became commonly known as Washington-on-the-Brazos after the Civil War, but it’s Washington-on-the-Brazos here to avoid any confusion with Washington City, aka Washington, DC; likewise, Houston City got its ‘City’ surname tacked on to avoid confusion with Sam Houston the man. I also borrowed heavily from stories and memories involving my own father, my father-in-law, my grandmother, my mother, as well as from conversations with Bill O’Neal, the state historian of Texas and author of the invaluable Sam Houston: A Study in Leadership (Eakin Press, 2016); artist Thom Ross of Lamy, New Mexico; historian Paul Andrew Hutton, journalist Ollie Reed Junior, and novelist Max Evans, all of Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the late Robert J. Conley, Cherokee historian, novelist, and a good friend.

  Much help came from Sproat, who let me hold a letter from Andrew Jackson to Houston, and Larry Spasic, president of Sam Jacinto Museum of History. David Marion Wilkinson of Austin, Texas, pointed me to the right sources when I ran into stumbling blocks, read the first five chapters, offered plenty of suggestions—and much-appreciated critiques—and his novel, Oblivion’s Altar, helped spark an idea that became The Raven’s Honor.

  Sproat and I agreed on the two best biographies of Sam Houston: The Raven, Marquis James’ Pulitzer Prize winner first published in 1929 (I own a well-read, ripped, battered but cherished paperback library version from 1971 that I picked up in a Denver suburb) and Sam Houston by James L. Haley (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

  I also frequently turned to Sam Houston: The Great Designer by Llerena B. Friend (University of Texas Press, 1954); Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston by Marshall De Bruhl (Random House, 1993); Sam Houston: A Biography of the Father of Texas by John Hoyt Williams (Simon & Schuster, 1993); Sam Houston with the Cherokees, 1829–1833 by Jack Gregory and Rennard Strickland (University of Oklahoma Press, 1967); Sam Houston and the War of Independence by Alfred M. Williams, originally published in 1893; and The Life of Sam Houston by Charles Edward Lester, originally published in 1855.

  Likewise, Sam Houston’s Wife: A Biography of Margaret Lea Houston by William Seale (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); My Master: The Inside Story of Sam Houston and His Times by His Former Slave Jeff Hamilton, as told to Lenoir Hunt (State House Press, 1992); From Slave to Statesmen: The Legacy of Joshua Houston, Servant to Sam Houston by Patricia Smith Prather and Jane Clements Monday (University of North Texas Press, 1995); The Personal Correspondence of Sam Houston: Volume IV, 1852–1863, edited by Madge Thornall Roberts (University of North Texas Press, 2001); Sam Houston’s Texas by Sue Flanagan (University of Texas Press, 1964); and Sam Houston: Hero of San Jacinto (Texas State Historical Association, 2016) proved helpful.

  Other sources included David Crockett: The Lion of the West by Michael Wallis (W. W. Norton, 2011); The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo—and the Sacrifice That Formed a Nation by James Donovan (Little, Brown, and Co., 2012); The Battle of San Jacinto by James W. Pohl (Texas State Historical Association, 1989); Ashbel Smith of Texas: Pioneer, Patriot, Statesman, 1805–1886 by Elizabeth Silverthorne (Texas A & M University Press, 1982); Rip Ford’s Texas by John Salmon Ford and edited by Stephen B. Oates (University of Texas Press, 1987); Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition by Thomas W. Cutrer (University of North Carolina Press, 1993); The Life of Andrew Jackson by Marquis James (Bobbs-Merrill, 1938); American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2008); Andrew Jackson and the Creek War: Victory at the Horseshoe by James Wendell Holland (University of Alabama Press, 1968); Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T. R. Fehrenbach (American Legacy Press, 1983); Texas Culture, 1836–1846: In the Days of the Republic by Joseph William Schmitz (The Naylor Company, 1960); Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas by Jeffrey Stuart Kerr (Texas Tech University Press, 2013); Galveston: A History of the Island by Gary Cartwright (TCU Press, 1991); Texas: The Dark Corner of the Confederacy: Contemporary Accounts of the Lone Star State in the Civil War edited by B. P. Gallaway (University of Nebraska Press, 1994); the online edition of The Handbook of Texas; and vari
ous issues of the Texas Monthly, Wild West, True West, and Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

  I cannot give enough credit to the staffs at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum and the San Jacinto Museum of History, plus Horseshoe Bend National Military Park near Daviston, Alabama; Star of the Republic Museum in Washington, Texas; Texas Governor’s Mansion and Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin; Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville; Fort Gibson (Oklahoma) Historic Site; Tennessee State Museum in Nashville; Historic Washington (Arkansas) State Park; and the friendly Texans in Brenham, Goliad, Gonzales, Nacogdoches, Salado, and San Antonio.

  And one final big thank you to Hugh Hennessey of Dallas, for putting Jack and me up on our research-baseball road trips.

  This novel could not have been written without all their help.

  —Johnny D. Boggs

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  About the Author

  Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of two Western writers to have won seven Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, Legacy of a Lawman, West Texas Kill, both in 2012, Return to Red River in 2017, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing,” in 2002) as well as the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (2002) and Ghost Legion (2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’ narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe. His website is www.JohnnyDBoggs.com.