THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEW WITH: Dr. Jack Jackson
DATE: June 15, 1989
PLACE: Killeen, Texas
I NTERVIEWERS: Walter and Janie Sargeant
JS: This is Walter and Janie Sargeant and the date is June
15, 1989, and we're interviewing Dr . Jack Jackson here at
Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas.
Dr. Jackson, how long have you - you're an
archaeologist?
J: Yes, I'm an archaeologist. And I've been doing work in
and around Fort Hood and central Texas since about 1980. My
speciality is historical archaeology, although I can handle
prehistoric periods.
I did my master's thesis back in 1982 on the small town
called Okay , Texas, which is now on west Fort Hood. As a
matter of fact, the site of the school is under the runway.
And the Okay store still serves the military nicely as a
storehouse and the home of the owner is used by some of the
"Follow me" truck crews over on the airport.
So, that was my first introduction to the little small
communities here.
JS: How do you spell that? Is it "O-k-a-y"?
J: O-k-a-y. Now there's an amusing story behind that.
When Killeen was first - and Copperas Cove were first formed
on the railroad, they were creatures of the railroad.
JACKSON 2
J: There weren't towns in either of those places. That
was where the railroad wanted to put towns and went through.
There had been a little town called Crossville which is
slightly to the south of present Copperas Cove.
Crossville was a small dispersed little hamlet, with a
school district and what have you. And the local postmaster
was a fellow named Phineas Henderson. He's the son of one
of the pioneer settlers here. (Do you want to turn that off?
Just punch the button and it'll go off. Make it a little
quieter.)
And Copperas Cove began to grow. Copperas Cove was too
far away from some of the farms to be convenient. Now it
was only about a 7 mile trip. But in a horse and buggy,
that's a half day! Not comfortable, not good for shopping
and very inconvenient if that's where your postoffice is!
So they applied for a postoffce further south of the
original crossroad community . And they tried out several
names on the postoffice department . None of which were
terribly successful. And finally they had a town meeting
and nominated 2 or 3 other names and Mr. Henderson, who
didn't write all that well apparently, wrote to the
postoffice department giving the list of names and "hoping
that one of these will be okay." And spelled o-k-a-y. And
some remarkable bureaucrat in Washington approved the name,
"Okay." (laughter) And typical of the Hill Country
peoples's attitude, they found that quite amusing and called
their town "Okay" very cheerfully!
JACKSON 3
J: And the - about the only sign of the old town we have
dug o ne of the sites - one of Phineas Henderson's sons, W.
Jarvis Henderson, had a house over there and Dr. Briar
actually excavated a couple of cisterns and so forth over
there. And it was very nice because Mr. Jarvis Henderson
was still alive. He was about 90. He was an extremely
clever , bright man. He had built his own tractor shortly
after the turn of the century and had patented it. Now the
patent never went anywhere because it was a small
garden-style tractor, not one of the huge steam driven
behemoths that were popular with General Motors and Ford.
It was a very small tractor, built out of parts of Model T
Ford and all sorts of other things that he could come up
with. And it was never commercial l y developed. On the
other hand, he used it for about 25 ~- 30 years and it was a
wonderful thing. We have a picture of it in our publication
on the Jarvis Henderson homesite.
And there were a number of other families that lived
around that general vicinity but it's - i t i s the - it, too,
was a dispersed rural hamlet. No real center . You have
some central place functions like church, a cemetery, a
store, perhaps a gas station later on, earlier a blacksmith
shop. That sort of thing. But none of these things are in
a small gridiron g roup. They are sort of scattered out. As
the corners of 160 acres properties come together and
scattered along a little road. And it's an interesting sort
of thing to reconstruct one of those little communities.
JACKSON 4
JS: I can imagine.
J : And there are a lot of institutions that go with a
little community like that. Traditionally lifeways like
meat clubs - everybody had cattle. A few, some peopl e had
pigs , what have you . And before the days of refrigeration
it wasn ' t really terribly practical to slaughter a whole
steer for the family. So you slaughtered the whole steer
and shared it out among neighbors and then somebody kept
records and everybody sort of reciprocated, so the next
week, "we're having something else, we 're having pork" and
another family is going to slaughter a pig . That's the way
that Okay worked.
And Okay had a small school, what have you. Generally
speaking , people who lived out to the west across the d ivide
where there were both plenty of water , plenty of wood and a
relatively small area of arable land, were settled first by
mostly Anglo - early Anglo settlers.
They didn 't go out on the black waxy prairie t o the
east of here because it was too t ough to plow and there was
no wood to speak of and very little surface water. So it
was tough for them to make a living out there.
Now, they settled these little places out here along
the creeks in this rather broken country that we now look at
as being only good for cattle. And they made a very good
living there. As a matter of fact, those folks survived the
depression in Bell and Coryell County much better than the
city folks or the people who were cash crop farmers living
JACKSON 5
J: out on the black waxy prairies because they kept to a
lot of the traditional ways and continued to a high degree
old fashioned traditional subsistence-based farming rather
than ·cash crop, let's grow nothing but cotton even though
we can't eat it.'1
So a lot of them did very well through the depression,
much better than some of the other f olks. Ivhereas the -
once the railroad came through and it started through - this
place Temple, for instance, is a railroad town. It is the
only reason for Temple. Temple did not exist at all before
the railroad. There was the city of Belton. It was the
only major urban city in the area other than Gatesville.
Gatesville was an old ex-army fort - Fort Gates and it was
the seat of Coryell County and Belton was the county seat of
Bell County.
Well, the railroad started through here about 1876 and
the city fathers of Belton refused to pay the railroad to
come through their town. So in a fit of pique the railroad
senior engineer bought some land out in a farmer's field
some miles from Belton, named it after himself - Temple -
and built the railroad through there, by-passing
Temple [Belton]. And a little later on, another railroad
came through and crossed at Temple and that made Temple the
major city in this area of the State because of the railroad
crossing.
And Belton eventually became sort of the suburb of
Temple. As a matter of fact, it was a larger city than
Temple within 10 years of that fateful decision.
JACKSON 6
J: And a number of other little towns suffered similar
fates because o f the railroad. Salado was a major
industrial center pre-Civil Wa r. The Roberts family -
Robertson, I'm s orry, Sterling S.C.Robertson, son of the
empresario of the Robertson Co lony, founded the town, built
his house there. An interesting sidelight. It was much
more prestigious to have a sawn wood house in central Texas
at that time. He built it in 1857 o r '58, somewhere around
there. So he had all of the lumber for that house brought
by oxcart from Houston and he built his slaves quarters of
native limestone. (laughter) And it took several years to
build the house, mostly because of this extreme
transportation problem, getting milled lumber. But the
house is still there and Mrs. Robertson, who is, I think,
the fourth generation, still lives in the house and this
July 4th they're erecting a bronze statue o f Colonel
Robertson at Salado College. It's one of the earliest of
the major institutions - predates the University of Texas by
a good number of years. And it's just a ruin now, but
they're going t o - at that site - they're g o ing to dedicate
this July 4th, the statue o f Colonel Robertson.
But Salado was a maj o r t own that didn't grow because
the railroad never went through there. There are a number
of other towns that are in the 2 counties that have
completely disappeared and their replacement along the
railroad was part of - that happened allover Texas, it's
not unique here. But the whole settlement pattern changed.
JACKSON 7
J: And you can almost drive through the small town and
tell whether it's a creature of the railroad or not.
Because if it's an organic rural hamlet that just grew up,
it's sort of meandering, with streets that go this way and
take off that way and sort of follow the terrain.
If it's a railroad town engineers made and it is
4-square lined up in a grid pattern, very precisely. And
the main downtown section faces the railroad station as it
should! ( laughter)
JS: That's true, though. I've never thought of it that
way, but it is true.
J: Well, it's an artifact of towns being laid out by
engineers for the railroad with little consideration of the
poor folks who're going to live there.
WS: Getting back to this Austin - Stephen Austin book,
where Austin is now. A big tract of earth, with a treaty
with Spain, did that encompass this part of the State, or
not up this far?
J: No, no. The Austin Colony was south here. This was
originally part of what was Milam County, or the Robertson
Grant, or sometimes called the Tennessee Company Grant.
Basically, some entrepeneurs from Tennessee got together and
sent a representative to Mexico to get a deal like Stephen
F. Austin had gotten. They were successful and it was that
corporation that had Sterling Robertson as their agent in
Texas. And it was a rather large grant. It was an
empresario grant, never terribly successful. They had an
JACKSON 8
J: awful lot of trouble settling it . As a matter of fact ,
the capital of the place was called Nashville, appropriately
enough , is a total black spot on the Brazos River south of
here. And it's never been dug . There's nothing there at
all. It's along the highway, too .
WS: Were the early people here Germans?
J: Wel l, all right, ethnic i ty. The earliest folks to come
in here are old- line Anglo families - generally from the
Appalachian region of Tennessee, North Carolina , so forth.
Mostly subsistence farmers . They tended to pick and settle
in the Hill County along the creeks, looking for a spring,
what have you. They weren't interested in - they wanted to
run a few cattle, raise a little corn , what have you , have
plenty of wood.
The second wave - there is a group of Wendish. The
Wends are a Slavic speaking minority from prussia, came from
the Speval area. They did not speak German although their
neighbors called them Germans . They spoke a, what some
people (don't let a Wend ever hear you say it) would
consider, a dialect of Polish.
they're concerned .
It's Wendish as far as
And the big issue for them leaving was the Pruss ian
government had - was forcing them to conduct their Lutheran
Church services in German rather than Wendish. And rather
than do this , a great many of them left and came to the
United States . Now their original colony - some went to
Australia , too - but their original colony in Texas was down
in Lee County. The name escapes me at the moment .
J ACKSON 9
J: But there are 2 secondary settlements after the fi rst
generation, second generation Wends went out looking for
more land. There was a heavy Wendish population in and
around Copperas Cove and there is another one over by a
little town called The Grove. It's just the - well, The
Grove is in Coryell County just to the east of the Fort Hood
boundary. And the Wends were there fairly early, before t he
railroad .
Once the railroads came through, the black waxy prairie
began to be settled. There you get a heavy mix of central
European emigrants in the 1880s and 1890s . A lot of Czechs,
a lot of Germans, a lot of - and Germans from several
different states. They didn 't necessarily at that time
consider themselves Germans . If you look back in the 1870s'
and 1880s' census you often find that they would state that
they were Saxons or they were Hess i ans or wha t have you .
They would not put down Germans. Because there were some
very strong feelings of ma ny of them, even though Germany
had been made by Bismarck, a lot of the people left because
of Prussian domination and Bismarck and would not , on a bet ,
be called German . They - but there's a large German
speaking area. It's mostly been abso rbed now to a great
extent . But you can hear a little bit of the - and you can
look at the houses, the older houses and see a l ot of German
influence in the older houses.
Terry Jordan, the Geographer at the University of
Texas, likes to drive people ac r oss the line and look at the
JACKSON 10
J: difference of the Hill Country cemeteries with their
rather characteristic southern scraped-earth look and then
the rather formal Roman Ca thol ic and Lutheran cemeteries on
the other side of the line.
There's a readily discernible difference in the
organization even in the cemeteries . And certainly the
churches. Because if you - well, you can look at a good
dozen of the small farming communities across on the black
waxy prairie and you find that they organized around a very
large Roman Catholic or Lutheran church with a very f ormally
laid out set of graves and so forth and a very formal
cemetery - very ornate church. Whereas the Hill Country
churches tend to be Baptist, very plain, almost little boxes
with no clergy to speak of and to f o llow an entirely
different cultural pattern.
The characteristic town over on the side of the black
waxy tends to be a railroad town gridded off very carefully,
whereas if a little town survived out this way, they tend to
be sort of messy little critters. (laughter)
WS: Were they original land grant sections, or weren 't they
surveyed that way, do you know?
J: No, it wasn't. Most of this part of Texas was not done
in the formal section method. Most of Texas was done in the
Spanish method. As a matter of fact, read in varas. A vara
is officially fixed in Texas as 33.3 inches. And •..
WS: How do you spell that vara?
J: V-a-r-a. And it's a Spanish unit of measure and when
JACKSON 11
J: they granted a league, which was normal for a man and
his family, that's measured off in varas, it's 5,000 on the
side, makes pretty good sense. It happens to be 4,180 s ome
acres. That's a league. A labor - again a Spanish term
is a hundred and seventy seven acres and it is 100 varas on
a side, as I recall.
But a surveyor could lay that out almost any way. And
a l o t of the early surveys were laid out along streams,
long, narrow strips along streams - the very early ones. In
other words, you? the Brazos from here to here and you
expected to farm up next to the river and then use the back
portion of your grant for the cattle. The presumption was a
farmer got a labor and ranchers got a league. In fact,
there were many, many grants from multiple leagues usually
to Mexican politicians or people like that.
And the - you can really make a good living with about
5,000 acres. When Texas took over , first class head rights
- that is if you had been in Texas during the Revolution in
1836, you were entitled to a first class right, if you were
a married person. The Republic granted those and second
class head rights were not as good. They were a half-league
and third class head rights were 360 acres , as I recall.
Don't hold me to that figure. And finally we got down to
what was called a pre-emption grant. Now a pre-emption
grant was 160 acres and anybody could find unclaimed land
for almost any reason, no matter what your credentials. Put
in stakes and claim 160 acres, as long as it was public
domain.
JACKSON 12
J: So the pattern is for early big grants and then down to
160 acres. The 160 acres does in a way relate to the old
Anglo-Saxon section of 640 acres. It's a quarter section.
That's pretty traditional.
WS: Seems as though it would have been quite a hodgepodge
to get these meshed t ogether when ...
J: Oh , it's a terrible hard hodgepodge. As a matter of
fact, one of the projects that I'm pursuing currently is
trying to get into t he computer al l of t he orig inal land
grants that covered Fort Hood with the ownership of the
property acquisition so that I can reconstruct all of this
business .
Because people sold off sections, surveyors weren't too
good. Some things were surveyed bigger than they should
have been and there are - the fact that it is a complete
hodgepodge - a real puzzle, and not nice along north-south
gridirons , makes surveying in Texas considerable more of a
challenge than it is in the mid-west where everything was
done on a township arranged basis. It also makes research
and titles, so forth, in Texas, a singular skill (laughter)
because it's a mixture of Spanish, Mexican and early Texas
stuff and the federal government, you see, never owned, or
had possession of any of the public lands of Texas. Because
when Texas joined the united States as a Republic, Texas
retained all of its rights to the public lands. So the
federal government never had anything to do with it. Now,
it happens out in west Te xas that they did - the State
finally did go to a township arranged basis. So much of
JACKSON 13
J: the flat Llano Estacado in west Texas was surveyed that
way. But not this part. A real hodgepodge.
JS: How about - you're an archaeologist and how does that
fit in with Fort Hood and - first of all, I wish you would
tell your background as you told us earlier so we can have
that on tape.
J: Okay. I - the reason that I'm at Fort Hood is there
are about 35,000 archaeological sites recorded in all the
State of Texas and approximately 2,300 of them are on Fort
Hood. Fort Hood has all those recorded archaeological sites
simply because it's one of the few places in the State that
has been nearly one hundred percent surveyed by
archaeologists. The Army has been conducting archaeologic
surveys for about 10 years.
They had 2 archaeologists working here plus a loaner
fr om A & M last summer. They lost the loaner from A & M and
they lost their - one of their archaeologists, a guy who
used to run the lab, to a reduction in f o rce. Money saving.
And Dr. Briar, who was a civil servant and used to sit at
this desk, found a better job with the federal government.
Well, I was loaned to them on a c ontract from the University
of Texas to last October to run the lab because I had been
up here working with Dr. Briar before. And since January I
have been doing the whole thing. (laughter)
While they go through their rather tedious business of
recruiting, they mayor may not see fit to hire me. We've
been negotiating along that line for some time. But I'm
still an employee of the University of the State of Texas,
JACKSON 14
J: so I speak unofficially and not for the united States
Army .
JS: Do you see much Indian influence in your research?
J: Oh, well, yes, the Indians made a very good living
here. So about half of those sites are , in fact, Indian
sites. We have sites that date back to the Pleistocene and
we have real wooly mammoth elephants that come out of the
creeks around here. We haven't yet found where the Indians
were cooking one, but ... (laughter) we keep hoping. But we
have found dart points of that time period.
And there are plentiful, and very impressive sites
around here, mostly because the tops of all of these hills
are cretaceous limestone containing very good dirt nodules
and, of course, in stone technology good chippable chert is
the prize industrial material .
WS: How do you spell that word?
J: C- h-e-r-t . What most people would call flint. I'm
being persnickety and calling it chert.
As a matter of fact, the peculiar people who are
fascinated with stone technology - the Nappers - had a
national convention down in Florence because the stone from
this area is considered so fine for flint napping and that's
a - that's one of the reasons the place was heavily
populated. And it's a rather interesting study to see just
exactly where they did live, and how they lived and so
forth . My specialty is historical archaeology, but most of
my training at the University, I'm afraid, was in
prehistoric archaeology because we had more of those.
And I'm almost run down at the moment unless you've got
JACKSON 15
J: a question .
WS: I was just wondering . The Indians were not too hostile
in this area , were they, with the white man?
J: Well, I'm afraid that's not entirely true. There was a
good deal of hostility and that's the reason for Fort Gates
in the first place .
WS: How far is that from here?
J: Fort Gates sits right at the north end of Fort Hood,
just across the Leon River.
WS: Are there monuments and stuff there yet?
J: Well, of sorts, yes . As a matter of fact, I have an
1859 issue belt buckle piece from a Pony soldier that was
recovered on the Post. Obviously one of the guys had been
at Fort Gates. Fort Gates didn't last very long. It was a
palisaded army post of almost the variety you see in the
movies. Not quite, because the movies have their own
version . But it was a palisaded army post with cavalry and
George Pickett among others, served there as a young fellow
and chased Indians. And, yes , there were massacres right
here on what is now the Fort. There were several fights of
one sort or another.
The hostile bunch were the Comanches. They were
fearful ones. As a matter of fact, my own great great
grandfather lost his hair to the Comanches just about fifty
miles from here. Up in Mills County. And had every - all
the family been with him along on that trip, I might not be
here. (laughter)
JACKSON 16
J: The two children were ca~tured, everybody e lse along
was killed. Two brothers had been left at home to mind the
ranch and the eldest brother was away from home establishing
his own house and I'm descended from the eldest brother. He
led the rangers to - they go t the two kids back and raised
them.
WS: Was there a trail, or something that they were ever
using that - they were using the Fort there?
J: Yeah. The trail is a ve r y natural one. It comes down
from Waco and it follows the Balcones Fault because where
the Fault line is - IH 35 is the trail. The trail had been
there all along and it's perfectly natural because you can
follow by keeping the hills on your right and the trackless
~rairie on your left . You know where you are, and there are
fairly frequent streams coming down so you can water your
horses and there are landmarks along the way. It comes
right on down and that's the reason for Waco, which was
originally Tory's trading post. That's the reason for
Belton. That's the reason for Waco. That's the reason for
Austin . That's the reason for Georgetown. They all line up
and they go directly to San Antonio.
WS: The Fault was that straight?
J: Yes. And that's why IH 35 continues to follow that same
basic route. And the evidence that route was used by
Indians long before it was used by the white men.
WS: You spoke earlier of a divide. In a sense, you meant
between the rolling country and the ... ?
JACKSON 17
J: Well, that is the divide. That is the divide. The
Fault line. But there's - you have the Balcones Fault and
to the south and east of the Balcones Fault, you have dark ,
black, waxy soils with a high clay content. And they are
very deep. They are very rich. They're almost impossible
to plow unless you've got heavy equipment. Motorized
equipment. Then you have the Fault area where it's broken
and then you ge t to the high plains.
But the Fault area is rather broad where you have all
this broken hill country . And then you get up to the high
plains which are about a thousand feet higher .
WS: How far would you have to go to get to the thousand
high plains?
J: Oh, about a hundred miles. Out towards San Angelo.
You get up on the high flat out there. And it's a - I wish
I had a geological map of Texas but I don't.
WS: Well, I was - it's just new to me.
J: Yeah. Well, that's just - that strip just runs all
through the strip in this part of Texas and the early
sett l ements - towns - kind of line up along that.
WS: Were they able to get water pretty much in this country
by shallow wells - a dug well type of thing, or not?
J: Depends on where. They look for springs first and
then, failing springs, they get a small dug well, 20-30 feet
deep, yeah. That was another problem out on the black waxy.
You get out there and real tough digging and water is very,
very deep and not very good. Tends to have a lot of nasty
JACKSON 18
J: smells to it. A lot of minerals.
JS: Well , we were talking earlier about the town of Okay
and the origin of its name, how about the town of Ding Dong .
Do you know the significance of that and how it got that
name?
J: I have no idea how they arrived at that name. I think
it's a wonderful name. (laughter) Gra'Delle Duncan knows
that town very well, I think she lives there.
little about Maxdale down the way.
I know a
JS : I think we have a few minutes, about 5 minutes. Would
you mind telling us about that?
J: Well, okay . The - there was a settlement along there
made by Mormons . Earlier on. And the local folks did not
care for the Mormons. And as a matter of fact, they
practically massacred them, and the ones they didn't
massacre they ran off. There is one early case where one of
the Mormon fellows was trying to entice a local daughter
away to multiple marriage, etc. He was killed by vigilantes
and his body burned and the mountain - I think it's McNair,
Mc-something Mountain is named after that incident because
that was the guy who was killed. It's down that way .
The valley of Maxdale was the McBride family after the
Mormons. The McBride Cemetery is down there, not far from
Ding Dong. Maxdale was a postoffice and they wanted, I
think, McBride's Valley or something of the sort, the
closest they got to it was M-a-x-d-a-l-e which means
basically the same thing.
JACKSON 19
J: But there is a lovely dogtrot log cabin erected by a
Mr. Reese who was a veteran of San Jacinto down there at
Maxdale just across the bridge, just on the border of -
belongs to the State of Texas now. It's part of a ranch
that belongs to the Texas youth Council and the - they have
been kind enough to cover it up with corragated iron now so
that it doesn't completely rot down. And in their wonderful
far-sighted fashion, they are using it for a cattle barn.
(laughter) Until I squealed on them to the Texas
Antiquities Committee. (laughter) But Maxdale's very
interesting. It's a nice little town. It's one of those
organic towns that is a dispersed hamlet, but there's some
very nice traditional houses down there. And, you know, it
might be fun to just sort of drive through there.
JS: Well, we appreciate your time. We've enjoyed it very
much and thank you, Dr. Jackson.
(TAPE CONTINUES)
J: Oh, about fifty miles north of here, around Goldplate.
Mills County. The Rigg's massacre was here on Fort Hood. I
don't know too much about that.
JS: What were they - farming there?
J: Yeah.
JS: Cotton?
J: Cotton is after the railroad. Basically you need a way
to market cotton before you can grow it because you can't
eat it.
WS: That brings up a question I have. How did they clear
JACKSON 20
WS: the land for this cotton after the railroad, because
that was after slavery?
J: Well, that's one of the great advantages of the black
waxy. There's no trees out there. Just grass. You can get
out there with a big gang plow and plow from here to the
horizon!
WS: They must have used mules then - big teams of mules.
J : Well, big teams of mules. They actually used - some of
them used oxen, big teams of oxen. Because - steam tractors
came in pretty soon. Big steam tractors. So that in the -
you have those available in the ' 90s. Huge!
WS: We have almost a replica of one of those down at the
Institute.
J: Huge, ugly machines! (laughter)
WS: This one down there had been modfied with a gas engine.
Apparently they left the smoke stack on it and everything so
it looks like a steam engine.
J: Well , they were monstrous. And - but you needed steam
drills for wells, and you need those big tractors or
tremendous teams of mules to plow that stuff. They used to
joke about it. They called it "3 day soil." Three days
from too wet to plow to too hard to plow. (laughter)
WS: In other words you had to do it all in three days, you
mean?
J: That's right. You had to do it all in 3 days after a
rain because there was - although it retains moisture very
well it - and soaks up a lot of rain, the top part of it
JACKSON 21
J: gets hard as a rock very quick. And if you're trying
to do that with an old fashioned hand plow and one mule,
forget itt
WS: Well, did the fertility go out pretty fast, then, with
the cotton crop? It didn't last too many years, or ... ?
J: Well, no, there's some areas the black waxy is still
growing cotton like crazy.
WS: Not too much fertilizer used?
J: Well, they use some chemical fertilizer. If they don't
rotate cotton, it's pretty tough. Not as tough as wheat,
but c o tton is a good strong crop. As a matter of fact, the
little town I live in is still a cotton town - one of the
few towns in Texas that still has a gin.
Killeen, I live in Huto.
WS: Where?
I don't live in
JS: I guess I've heard of that one. (noise in tape) •..
following is an account of the Indian Massacre.
J: Actually the best account is a published acount that
came out in 1912 in Hunter's Magazine written by the girl
who was captured, or at least dictated by her to her
daughter. The girl who was captured was Rebecca Jackson.
And she gave an eye witness account of it. There are also
several letters in the Texas Indian Paper related to it, and
what have you.
The basics of the story are these. Joshua Moses
Jackson and his family - his wife Lydia and his daughter
Louisa and an infant son and 2 other children, Joshua Jr.
JACKSON
J: and Rebecca were meeting some neighbors at a ..
END OF TAPE I, SIDE 1, 45 MINUTES.
SIDE 2.
22
J: .. He had been a resident of Texas since, oh, some time
around 1848, or '4 9 . He lived up near Jefferson , Texas -
had a mill and was a justice of the peace in Harrison County
and had decided, for one reason or another, I suspect
because of the smell of the oncoming Civil War, to move
farther west.
And he established a place right on the frontier in
1856 or so. Up o n Pecan Bayou, near the Colorado River,
just a little bit south of Goldplate, near the little town
of Regency. He left that morning two teenage boys at horne,
Javin and Jethro and his older son, John Thomas Jackson was
living down in Lampassas.
Well , the family was attacked by Comanches and in the
wagon on the way to meet the other families - the other 2
families were the Kings and the Kincaids . And the -
everyone was killed except for Rebecca who was age 9 and her
brother Joshua who was age 7, as I recall. And they were
kept with the Indians for 3 days. As the Indians headed
north. The word got out, of the massacre, pretty soo~and
the rangers mounted a search for the Indians. The rangers
found the children. The children had escaped from the
Indians during the night and hid out and were walking back
alone. And they were turned over to John Thomas Jackson and
he saw to it that they were raised as part of his family.
JACKSON 23
J: The homestead was abandoned after that, and it remained
abandoned up 'til the '30s. I have a photograph taken by
one of my uncles, of the cabin. Perhaps the most amusing
thing was a legend that grew up about the gold that Joshua
Jackson had buried near the cabin. Nobody knew where he
buried it because he only told his daughter Louisa about it.
And people dug for that gold for 75 or 80 years, and finally
the poor soul that owned the property razed the cabin and
had a stock pond dug where the cabin had set to stop the
trespassers because they hd been digging for the Jackson
gold ever since. To my knowledge it's never been found.
(laughter)
WS: You haven't had any evidence of it.
J: No, I haven't had any of it and I suspect that there
wasn't very much of it in the first place, but somebody may
turn up a few 1850 gold pieces up there some day.
(laughter)
JS: Well, thanks again, Dr. Jackson.
END OF TAPE I, SIDE 2, ABOUT 5 MINUTES.