E.R. Bills - Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales

Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...30

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2017 by E.R. Bills

All rights reserved

Front cover: courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission and part of its Historic Resources Survey Collection.

First published 2017

e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978.1.43966.305.9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945026

print edition ISBN 978.1.62585.918.1

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Rebecca Sue Bills.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

With a box gushing refrigerated air (or warmed, seasonally depending) into a sealed house and another box flashing loud bright images into jaded heads, who gives a rats damn for things that go bump in the night? With possible death by blast or radiation staring at us like a buzzard, why should we sweat ourselves over where the Eskimo curlew went?

John Graves, Goodbye to a River, 1960

The bird known as an Eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis) is currently classified as Critically Endangered, Possibly Extinct. One of the last known photos of a living specimen was taken by Don Bleitz on Galveston Island fifty-five years ago.

For the record, Im not a birder and I dont know if Id recognize an Eskimo curlew if I saw one; but Graves was using the disappearing bird to make an incredibly profound point. Plopped down on couches in front of flat-screen TVs (or, increasingly, computer or phone screens) in sealed, airconditioned boxes, the world is too much without usand thats a dangerous existential blunder.

This book, like my previous efforts, is largely the product of an attempt to make my life less sedentary. Consequently, most of the chapters in these pages deal with little-known subjects that I discovered only by kicking around the state, still excited about bumping into people, places and history that I wasnt already familiar with.

You can hardly know a place without exploring it, and Texas, my home, is what Ive chosen to try to know and explore. Most of the stories in this volume take place in faraway Lone Star locales. But, far or near, they have wider implications. Hence, the title.

Keep readingbut do some stepping out, as well. And give a rats damn every chance you get.

E.R. Bills

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Carolyn Pettey, Yvette Benavidez Garcia, Dr. David Littlefield, Edna Snooks Collett, Jimmy Payton, Leo S. Bielinski, the Palestine Public Library, the Fort Worth Public Library and the Dallas Public Library.

ESCAPED APE CAPER

In 1936, terror gripped Leon County, particularly around the town of Jewett.

A gorilla bound for a Houston zoo had broken out of its cage on the transporting train and escaped into the forests of the Big Thicket in Polk County. After marauding through that area, it fled northwesterly.

Tracks were soon reported in Leon County.

Over the next several weeks, reports of the escaped gorilla appeared in the weekly Jewett Messenger, which recorded the sightings of the creature. It was rumored to be creeping around the counties south and southeast of Leon, and then it was reported in Limestone County, just north, luckily having passed through without incident. But then it was reported back in Leon County, roaming the jungles of Marquez country (just west of Jewett), scaring folks along the Navasota River bottoms (Leon Countys western boundary) and making its winter quarters on Buffalo Creek, just northwest of Jewett.

Several readers of the Jewett Messenger had seen King Kong at local flickershows a few years earlier, and the thought of an escaped ape in their stretch of the east Texas piney woods terrified them. But the Messengers legendary editor, Jack S. Robinson, was a picture of calm. He simply sat at his desk and chuckled.

To say that Robinson was an old-school journalist was a profound understatement. A power line was strung across poles outside his office, but he refused to install electricity. Put lights in here and the first thing you know Ill be working at night, he said. If I cant make a living working in the daytime, Ill try something else.

Robinson used a gasoline engine to turn his hand-set press and a wood stove for heat in the winter. He was also a proponent of the time-honored country weekly editorial philosophy that a rural newspapers mission was to amuse as well as inform. So when the news hit an extended slow period in the midst of the Great Depression, Robinson concocted the escaped primate to entertain his readership. The prowling gorilla was a tongue-in-cheek fabricationan elaborate hoax.

I tried to make it sound as logical as I could, Robinson later said. The story went over like a million dollars. Folks generally believe everything they read in the papers, anyway, and lots of em were scared plumb out of their wits.

For several months I let my imagination run wild, Robinson continued, and finally when I got the gorilla up as far as Leon County, things really began to pop!

But the pop became alarming.

Not long after the stories started running, folks began coming into Robinsons office with reports of sightings. The accounts became wilder and wilder; soon, out-of-towners traveling through the area were reporting runins with the fantastical beast.

Witnesses spotted the escaped ape along deserted backcountry roads. Local mothers, whose kids often walked to school, began keeping their children home. Area farmers began claiming that the gorilla had killed livestock; soon, they were having problems getting their help to go to work in the fields.

One day, a hysterical hunter burst into Robinsons office and claimed he had spotted the gorilla robbing a bee-tree and fired on the creature six times.

He was dreadfully earnest about it, Robinson later observed. I almost believed him.

And thats when Robinson began to sense that things had gotten out of hand.

Finally the general air of uneasiness began to make me jittery, Robinson said. Of course I knew what it was all about, but just the same I found myself jumping every now and then at strange noises.I wrote so many bloodcurdling accounts I got to believing them myself. So I decided for the good of everyone concerned Id let the yarn die a natural death. I just quit running the stories but never did tell my readers the story wasnt real.

Next page

1234567...30

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales»

Look at similar books to Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Bill ONeal

Texas Gunslingers

E.R. Bills

The San Marcos 10: An Antiwar Protest in Texas

Editors of Southern Living

Texas BBQ: Platefuls of Legendary Lone Star Flavor

E.R. Bills

Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror

Rhodes

Moon Texas

Williams

Texas Gulf Coast stories

Patrick Dick

A cowboy in the kitchen : recipes from Reata and Texas west of the Pecos

Docia Schultz Williams

Best tales of Texas ghosts

Charley F. Eckhardt

Texas tales your teacher never told you

Jerry Flemmons

Jerry Flemmons more Texas siftings: another bold and uncommon celebration of the Lone Star State

Steven Jent

Browsers Book of Texas History

Bryan Woolley

Mythic Texas

Discussion, reviews of the book Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburgs Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.