The Story of Finding the Story... The "Coffin,"

Collectors always love to find something with a story attached to it. But the better the story, the higher the price. A lucky collector finds the unidentified item and then learns the story afterwards. The really lucky collector discovers his own family story within the story-less item he buys. This is a one-in-a-million shot.. and it has happened to me or my family several times...

The first was a pine wardrobe we purchased from fellow antique dealers in Barker, Texas. Travis and Jean Marks had gotten the old primitive from their nephew, who had purchased it at an auction in Arkansas. When we purchased it,  it was strictly because Texas collectors were looking for early primitives, and this one was just that, with around four coats of paint on it. It laid on sawhorses in the back of the shop for around a year, as we tried to remove the various layers of stubborn ox-blood and milk paint from it. Every time my brother or I got into trouble, my mom seemed to use the stripping of "the coffin" as we called it, as punishment. Finally it was restored and refinished and someone bought it. But that was nowhere near the end of this incredible story.

We did not think much about the misfortune when the man who had made a down-payment on the "coffin" died soon after. Mom made a refund to the family and then put it back up for sale. Then a lady came through one day, fell in love with it and said she had tio have it and would be back to get it.

And then we learned that she too had passed. Now we were kind of freaked out. Mom says that she does not know the reason... but WE WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO SELL THIS...

The "Coffin."

Well, we had too much invested in it, and it was too great a piece to just stick it in the house, so she had my father make shelves in it for the display of crocks and such. We began to use it, for display only, at antique shows around the state; Beaumont, Pasadena, Chappell Hill, Columbus, Round Top. Of course many serious collectors wanted to purchase the wardrobe... and we would say, "No, you do not want to buy this wardrobe, take our word for it." They would get mad, and challenge our intelligence for bringing something to a sale that was not for sale.

Anyway, while loading the coffin into the pickup truck to go to one of these shows, Reynolds, my little brother noticed some words scratched into the back of the thing and began to investigate. "Hey! there's writing on the back of it!"

My father, trying to pull it into the bed of the truck, was impatient... "C'mon Reynolds, pay attention! We're trying to load this thing, get in the game!"

So we slid the thing on in, on its back and loaded it to the brim with boxes full of glassware. It was only later that we got to fully investigate Reynold's find. Only around eleven years old, he could not have understood the significance of the words faintly and crudely carved in the back of the pine "coffin." They read;

To  J. W. Durant,

Leon County

My father immediately accused someone of playing games. None of us understood why he was almost hostile. "Who did this?" He demanded. "Russell, did you or Reynolds write that?" We were clueless about his concern. Why would we? What was the big deal?

Eventually, after he had threatened to throttle us if we had created this coincidence, he explained... "John Wesley Durant was my great-grandfather." He explained, stupefied, that he lived in Leon County when he first came to Texas, and was a Texas Senator during the Civil War. "We have his andirons and candle stand. This is a family heirloom!"

That was when I learned that things have a life. Sometimes, by amazing twists and against all odds, they come home. They come home to people who can recognize them and who have a passion for their stories. And their stories are about the people who owned them, and revealed by God who gives all things purpose.

At the end of his life, John Wesley Durant, the old Rebel nomad, left little of material value to my side of the family. We do not even have a photograph of him. I am guessing that my relatives either hid or destroyed any likeness of him to make investigation harder for the Federal authorities, as he left Leon County as a wanted man... Still, things have lives and their natural homes...

There is no telling where all this old pine wardrobe, that we called "The Coffin," had been. We had purchased this wonderful family heirloom, totally unaware of its history! It had been purchased, stripped, refinished, transported, sold to two different customers (who then passed away), and converted to a display cupboard and taken off of the market, BEFORE we discovered that it had once belonged to John Wesley Durant of Leon County!

This would have been my great-great grandfather!

Here is a rare collage of Texas Civil War Legislators... there is a Durant among them.

Probably custom-made for the Senator, and shipped to Leon County, this primitive wardrobe was probably abandoned along with all of his earthly goods during a dark chapter in his life.

Old Senator Durant, a fire-eating secessionist, was jailed for contempt of court in Centerville after a run-in with a Reconstruction Judge while defending a client, and added to his charges with an attack on a Black Union soldier, who was trying to arrest him.

A family friend, the legendary Jesse Chisholm, bailed him out of jail, paying the bond set at $1000.00. J. W. Durant jumped bond, changed from politician and lawyer to an itinerant Methodist preacher, and never returned to the middle Brazos region, where he was considered an unreconstructed outlaw and a fugitve of justice. That is when the pine "coffin" must have begun its long and mysterious journey.

Carpetbaggers could have salvaged it, and taken it to Indian Territory. It is possible that Chisholm took it as partial payment for Durant's bond, and traded it off. Or, even more romantic, he gave it to his and Durant's close friends, the Houstons, Sam's widow and children, who were dirt poor, and living in Independence at the time.

Young Temple Houston left Texas to establish his future in Oklahoma, and might have taken it with him, where he would have disposed of it during one of his legal scrapes... anyway somebody ended up with it in Arkansas and that was where Milo Marks' of Barker, Texas found it. It's fun to think about. 

Former Confederate State Senator John Wesley Durant retreated to Brazoria County, where his son in law, George Durant and daughter shared land holdings. There he avoided capture while he lived in and around Alvin where his rebel spirit would be appreciated, and he had plenty of friends to look out for him. 
 

J. W. Durant lived to old age and was ultimately buried in Alvin in 1889, leaving many descendants in Alvin who were descendants of his son, John Franklin Durant. Amazingly, his primitive pine armoire came back to some of his descendants eighty years later.

And I have other true stories like this almost as cool...

Next time, on the Brazos Current.

 

When thoughts could kill: a timely review of angry youth + guns

[Blogger's Note: I'm cut to the quick at how timely these entries have been, where I have discussed some of the most famous multiple or serial killers of the Old West, from our region of Texas. The main ingredient for all of them (and Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and many more) was their youth, in an atmosphere of bullying, in a harsh, unsympathetic, even unjust culture. Then the temptation of the gun "as equalizer" in society seemed to trump moral upbringing, religious teaching, human empathy or plain common sense. An associate recently pointed out how studies show that young adults have not really developed mature powers of reason until way into their mid to late twenties... so that is some of the explanation of what happened in Aurora...]

"Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: —
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass." ...James Allen

Many of these Confederate "Dance" revolvers were manufactured near here in Anderson, Texas, during the War Between the States and afterwards were carried by the likes of outlaw "Wild Bill" Longley.

My father used to love to quote James Allen's famous essay, published in 1902. No doubt he heard his favorite quotation from it many times from his mother: "As a man thinketh, so is he." Never was that more true, than when handguns were invented. Suddenly men could carry mortal weapons on their hips, and on a whim, no matter the size or prowess of the offender, end the life of another. A bullet was simply a thought shot out of the muzzle of a pistol.

Young men in Texas after the "Civil War" had to struggle to control their tempers as the Federal Government swooped in and turned their world upside down. Their fathers humiliated, their fortunes lost, their pockets empty, their pride decimated, it is no wonder some of them turned to their own private wars.

The ushers of "Reconstruction": Accompanied by his wife, General George Custer camped in Hempstead, Texas, which was considered a good place to quell rebellion and establish order.

Soon young rebel punks led by veteran insurgents like Cullen Baker were spoiling for revenge and harrassing Union troops mercilessly.

Since many of these law enforcement officers were black or from the North, they became popular targets of angry thoughts sent from guns. One of the first men (boys!) to make a name for himself as he foiled and frustrated Reconstruction authorities was William P. "Wild Bill" Longley, of the Old Evergreen community near Giddings. He started his notorious killing spree by shooting numerous negroes who offended him or got in his way, with a .44 caliber Dance Bros. "cap and ball" revolver. Someone actually has that pistol, serial number 4, suggesting that it was made in the earlier East Columbia Dance Bros. factory before they moved to Anderson. Legend has it that he went to Houston as a youth to get himself a firearm, and after various escapades, including the mugging of a black Federal soldier, he came home with the Dance.

Wild Bill Longley bragged that he had killed more people than his rival, John Wesley Hardin. After wandering all over Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, killing men of all colors that gave him trouble, Longley was finally apprehended and hung for killing a white man in Lee County. Tradition places his toll in human lives at 32.

This illustration from the National Police Gazette also illustrates the moral dilemma in the Victorian period, where almost any coverage of Western badmen turned into glorification.

John Wesley Hardin was a preacher's kid from east Texas, learning his hatred of negroes and Yankees from the "unreconstructed" around Polk, Trinity and Navarro Counties.

He had already killed four men by the age of 15. Hardin later reminisced that he hung around Brenham a lot in his early days, which seemed to be a Southern criminal hot spot and thus an early staging area for rebel malcontents. [Navasota had burned to the ground after a Confederate munitions warehouse explosion and was just a post-war disaster scene] Federal troops camped on the eastern edge of Brenham, and established their own safe zone known as "Camptown." It was an irresistible target. For three years the occupying army skirmished with the townsmen of Brenham, (who were no doubt reenforced by Texas' most able gunmen!) even burning down the incessantly agitating town newspaper and a whole city block with it. Many of the future legendary gunslingers and gamblers of the West converged in Brenham during those days, (1866-1869) as Hardin recalled seeing and gambling with Phil Coe, Ben and Billy Thompson, and King Fisher, all of whom led bloody trails and died violent deaths. And not far from Brenham, Hardin and Longley once met at a Lee County gathering, and all bets were that they would have immediately locked into a mortal bloodbath. Six foot-two Longley was about 19 and Hardin around 17. They gambled some inside of a corn crib, and the ever clever Hardin took Longley to the cleaners. After going to the local horse races together, they surprised everyone including themselves, and parted with no gunplay. If only they had killed each other, over 70 lives could have been saved.

Also the son of devout Christians, Longley confessed to killing a young fellow who stared at him too long (probably scared to death!) while he was trying to sleep, but Hardin supposedly topped that by killing a man in a next-door hotel room for snoring. ( He later defended himself indignantly, that all accounts about his evils had been exaggerated and that he had only dispatched one such snorer). Only after the "State Police" were disbanded and the Texas Rangers were reorganized did the crime wave in Texas begin to diminish. After a legendary outlaw round up, both of them were found hiding out of state and brought to justice. Fearless and cunning, both had since turned to posing as law abiding citizens, even assisting the local peace officers in Louisiana and Alabama in making arrests! Both had even killed suspects in the line of duty. Arrogant and verbose, Longley wrote widely circulated editorials from his cell, recalling that he had been unsuccessfully strung up by vigilantes once before, and fuming at the injustice that he got the death penalty while Hardin only got 25 years in prison.

Just 28 years old, Wild Bill gave a touching speech, thanked an old Lee County sweetheart for a flower she pinned on his lapel, and then was hung in Giddings before a massive crowd of 4000 well-wishers. In the end, he admitted his wrongs, admitted that his kind of law would never do in a civilized society, and agreed that he was getting what he deserved. But he had failed to make his case, as he was buried just as he had lived, just outside the boundaries of respectable society, and outside the boundary of the town cemetery. Even paupers and those of ethnic origins were treated with more respect. His family did not attend his hanging or his funeral. Someone once put a large chunk of petrified wood over his grave, which has disappeared.

Hardin took advantage of his incredible popularity and studied law books and, in between prison escape attempts, became a lawyer. He was released early from Huntsville Prison as a reformed man, by adoring Southerners who considered him a folk hero. He had gotten away with around three dozen murders, killing perhaps a half-dozen of the despised Reconstruction era Texas State Police, various town deputies, bounty hunters in Florida, and even faced down Abilene Marshal Wild Bill Hickok. Hardin kicked the dust off of his feet and moved out west to El Paso, where he resumed a life of gambling, debauching and bullying, until a frightened deputy whom he had threatened put an angry .45 caliber "thought" into the back of his head. No charges were filed.

The only safe place to contain Wild Bill Longley's thoughts was the grave.

Diamond Six II : The forgotten legacy of Democrats

The book Diamond Six inadvertently demonstrates the truth about the Democratic Party: it has been built on manipulation of minority groups, especially blacks, and has always taken advantage of their inexperience and lack of information. If you are white, you probably already know this. You either hate it like I do, or you think it is “the way things are.”

This is a blog, so I’ll do my best to make this concise. I’m not going to read you the book, and you probably will never find a copy of it. It was written in 1958 by a third generation Texan and reflected the typical arrogant, unreconstructed Southern mentality, and yet because of that, the author was willing to spill the beans on his own family history that tells us a great deal today. Diamond Six not only reveals a great deal about the political and racial climate in Montgomery County Texas, but can serve well as a textbook example of the environment that all of us lived in for nearly one hundred years. And that environment, one of racism, race oppression, inequality, and lawless and violent persecution of blacks was a DEMOCRATIC controlled environment.

After Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, successfully drove slavery into the ground at the point of a gun, and only with the loss of three hundred-thousand American lives, he was assassinated by a conspiracy of Southern Democrats. Lincoln’s model for reconstruction of the South after the War Between the States was bastardized and finally abandoned. Because after the Civil War, Southern Democrats led a war of terrorism against the Federal occupation in the South, and against black enfranchisement which was started there.

What resulted was a lawless, murderous takeover of the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups, county by county, that resulted in black disenfranchisement throughout the South and other parts of America as well. In Diamond Six, Confederate veterans put on their sheets and attended a swearing-in ceremony in 1867 of Reconstruction appointees, many of them black, and summarily executed the fifteen new public servants, the ten military guards “protecting” them, and the judge who did the swearing in. Wesley Smith, hero of the book, and aware of the plan, was a block or so away, distracting a Federal Army officer whom he liked, so that he would not be killed.

These Texas Democrats reasoned that General Phil Sheridan had rewritten the laws, and they just unwrote them. The book makes no apologies for the massacre, and admits that some of the men under the sheets were Diamond Six cowhands. Soon the Democratic Party was spreading this form of control by violence and intimidation all over the South.

This event really upset me when I first read about it, and it still does. And not just the event, but the callous telling of it. Over the years I have mulled it over, and finally begun to believe that the event actually happened, even though you cannot find any other record of it. A Democratic run Press failed to record much of the outrages of this era. I realized that it might be true when I began to study the happenings next door in my own Grimes County.

Grimes County was almost 50% black right after the war. Many slave owners from coastal counties had removed their slaves into the interior of Texas in case of a Federal invasion. Many plantations from other states had sent their considerable equity in human flesh to central Texas, a region considered safe from the reach of the Abolitionists. After the war blacks, now freedmen, had no place to go and no way to get there. They hunkered down and made a place right here.

As Confederate veterans were disenfranchised, Grimes County was soon being run by a black or Scalawag government. Black and white Republicans were able to amass a political majority for a couple of decades, and by the 1880’s, white Populists moved in and partnered up with the black Republicans. By 1899, the Confederates and their sons, Yellow Dog Democrats, finally responded with a plan that changed that for about sixty years. The leading citizens arranged something called the “White Man’s Union,” which handpicked the nominees to run on the Democratic ticket. Of course, no blacks would ever be nominated. Then they set out to exterminate the elected officials in the County. Yes, I said exterminate.

Little has been recorded from this period, but we know that members of the White Man’s Union, some fifty strong, invaded the Sheriff’s office with Winchesters after their successful election and began to try to assassinate the Sheriff. They did kill his brother in a deadly shoot out in downtown Anderson, and managed to wound Sheriff Garrett Scott bad enough that he had to be carried out of the County in a wagon bed… after a violent siege, with a military escort. The research done on this period has only revealed the names of a few of the black elected officials that were murdered. But one startling fact tells us much more of the carnage. The murders had their effect, as census records reveal that thousands, perhaps as much as 50% of Afro-Americans left Grimes County between the 1900 census and the 1910 census.

The White Man’s Union, the gatekeeper for the Grimes County Democratic party, proceeded to rule the County, either directly or by shear momentum for the next sixty-plus years. This kind of thing happened in many counties, until blacks were eventually intimidated to give up their freedoms, and their participation in the political system, county by county, state by state. This began the infamous “Jim Crow” years throughout the South, when Democrats assured blacks they would take care of them, and insisted they were really their benefactors, and as long as the black population behaved, there would be no trouble. But there was trouble and many blacks were hung for insubordination or alleged crimes without the benefit of the legal system. Farmers suddenly had an evil edge over their workers, who had few rights and no recourse. This was a completely Democratic inspired and instituted system.

Then after WWII, there began to be movement to enfranchise blacks again. After all, they had fought in our wars, shed blood for our Country… In 1963, in the blink of an eye, an old time Texas Democrat aligned with John F. Kennedy who was running for President. Lyndon Johnson, a full blooded Jim Crow politician and the blue collar champion in Texas, partnered up with the Northern liberal Democrats ruling the Democratic vision and delivered a stunning upset for the Democrats. Johnson spent the rest of his political life, as Vice President and then President, instituting the Kennedy vision of America. The Kennedy regime wanted Civil Rights for blacks, and they wanted them ASAP. The movement took off and through the campaigning of Martin Luther King and other fearless black leaders, the right to vote and to be treated as equals was finally made possible, county by county. That Democrats were in power during these historic days turned out to be an important fact in the minds of black Americans. Yet these new rights came with a price... as President Johnson drafted and sent record, disproportionate numbers of black soldiers into the jaws of Viet Nam; A war escalated by the Democrats and today shrugged off as a pointless mistake. His "Great Society" was a noble ambition, but it was built on the premise that tens of thousands of the best and brightest young black men be sent on a one-way tour of Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile the fact that many Republicans supported the Civil Rights movement has been lost on blacks today. Just as Lincoln had given them freedom, (forget all those dead guys) Kennedy and Johnson had given them full Citizenship. But actually, since Democrats were the dominant Party since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, some twenty five years before, It seems to be a miracle that they were seen as the heroes. In a more realistic characterization of the events as they happened, Democrats, who had been in control of the Country for two generations, finally got around to doing the right thing. When it served their interests; They saw votes, ands lots of them. Importantly, eighteen-year-old black men could not vote in those days.

Lyndon Johnson had learned in his experience in Texas; give a poor, uneducated underclass a little improvement and hope, and they will be loyal for life. Johnson had brought electricity to the Hill Country and became a savior of sorts to the (mostly white) people of central Texas. He would win every election after this idea was established; This guy will get us stuff. Not that what he did was wrong, it just began a new era of bargaining for votes by promises of tangible prosperity and a government that takes care of the “little guy.” It was the shrewdest political play in American history.

Luckily for Democrats, most "little guys" are not big students of history.

Republicans, shell-shocked at the events playing out during the '60's, watched as the "Party of Lincoln" became the Party of Stinkin’. Having been fighting Roosevelt and his Socialistic legacy for years, Republicans could not see any justification for spending money the government did not have to appease any segment of society, no matter how worthy. This could only mean spiraling taxes and eventual financial ruin. But Democrats had cleverly found a political honey hole, and they OWNED it. Somehow, up until now, every time Republicans would protest the irresponsible superfluous printing of money, the robbing of Social Security to pay for government excess, the unfair taxation of upper middle class, who were suddenly on a program that intended to skim off as much as half of their annual earnings, they were called racists, lacking in compassion, selfish and un-American. And blacks listened to the same bastards that had oppressed them for one hundred years, and voted for whom they were told to, just like they had in the Jim Crow years.

The same devils that had taken away their rights, murdered them and threatened them and kept them down were still in power. The only thing that had changed was that blacks began to vote, but as they were instructed by black leaders and labor leaders, who demonized the REPUBLICANS! Any black person who bothers to study history will find that this is true.

Democrats systematically oppressed black people for one hundred years, and yet bargained for complete and enthusiastic loyalty, all for a Civil Rights movement that took nearly ten years and BOTH houses of Congress to even make a dent in the American Psyche.

Blacks since then have been hard to impress as a group, and have ignored the truth about who actually put them in the high places first. Clarence Thomas in the Supreme Court. General Colon Powell, Secretary of Defense. Condi Rice, Secretary of State. All placed by Republicans. Up until the most recent Administration, there were few blacks assigned to such positions by the Democratic Party.

The Party of Lincoln is the friend of whites and blacks, and always has been. Black politicians who choose to be Republicans should not be demonized because they do not choose the same path that Democrats, who have traditionally controlled blacks or their votes, insist they must. The distrust or fear that blacks have towards Republicans is unfounded, even contradicted by history, and is just another manipulation of blacks by Democrats.

A few years ago I approached a friend and local black politician about helping him get elected to a local position he wanted. At the local level, party affiliation has little to do with national party platforms. The terms Democrat or Republican are just ways to give order to a Two Party System. I explained to him that he could win easily, if he would break with tradition and run as a Republican. There was a formidable white opponent in the Democratic Primary, who would beat him, and I urged him to skip that step and run as a Republican and meet him in the General Election. I knew he enjoyed considerable approval from the town, and a lot of the voters were white Republicans, who would support him. But they could not help him until the General Election, as they would be voting in the Republican Primary. He thought about it, but the idea was unthinkable. He did not want to leave his “constituency.” He could not wrap his brain around me, a white guy, asking him to be a Republican, offering to use my abilities to get him elected, and promising that there were others like me. He did not want to believe it.

Perhaps he just did not believe me, but he got beat in the primary just as I told him, and went down in flames, because he would rather go down in disappointment as a Democrat than soil his blackness by running as a …. Republican. I would say that it was he that had racist attitudes, and not me. Winning and serving his people was second to maintaining his identity. When people like him finally wake up, and perhaps Herman Cain will be the catalyst, we will finally have a color-blind society, and both white and black will finally be “reconstructed.”

And the stubborn legacy of Diamond Six will finally be buried.