Grimes County Doctors: Part One... and #5 in my TOP TEN of TEXAS

Someday many years from now, one of you is going to ask this question and do a search on the Internet, and WA-LA, this will pop up… another of Cushman’s blogs that he wrote back when nobody was asking... bless his heart.

ANSWER: The Doctors of Grimes County. The question is who were the first leaders and benefactors of this land, later to become the Republic of Texas? Who were they and why did Navasota and the surrounding area have so many, when the rest of the country was deprived of medical care? And even more amazing, how did they survive such dangers and hardships?

The following study of these, men, is an attempt to finally do them justice after so many years of neglect. I think you will find their story interesting…

No account of Texas doctors would be complete without prefacing it with the quintessential proto-physician of the Texas frontier; Cabeza de Vaca (and this gives me a chance to plug Dr. Robin Montgomery’s book, which I illustrated, called March to Destiny, where his and many other great stories can be found). Cabeza de Vaca means Head of a Cow. Yes, "Head of a Cow" was a Spanish nobleman who had the misfortune of being named Royal Treasurer on an ill-fated trans-Atlantic voyage to the Spanish held lands north of Mexico.

A flotilla led by Narvaez left Cuba with hundreds of men and landed first in Florida, where they met one disaster after another. By the time de Vaca and his men arrived on Galveston island, only a few dozen were left, and they were dying off quickly. In rags and famished from days on the open sea, he and his men were glad to be taken in by the Karankawa Indians and become their servants in exchange for survival.

Over time, de Vaca found himself nearly alone, yet a venerated healer among the stone-age men that owned him. His combination of common sense, prayer and experimentation made him seem to be almost a divine- ent medicine man, and he selflessly served these primitive tribesmen for two years. Eventually he made his escape, and like most doctors since then, had to weigh the needs of his patients against the greater good. De vaca spent ten years wandering in Texas, New Mexico and northern Mexico, making a splash wherever he arrived, finding the natives were totally believing he had powers of healing, and making testimonies about that gift. So convinced were they, those healed would escort him to the next village in his path, where they would take everything in sight, in trade for doing that tribe the great service of bringing him there. The stunned villagers would shrug, get their folks healed, and then repeat the cycle. It is quite possible that no doctor in Texas has covered as much ground, or had such success and made such a name for himself as de Vaca, until the mass Media came along and made our heart doctors in Houston world famous.

Not really a trained physician, Cabeza de Vaca typified the frontier Texas doctors that would come three hundred years later. Not greatly educated, but still much more than the average citizen, who was illiterate and superstitious, and feared doctors; Men of faith and cunning who were there to do something when everyone else was wringing their hands.

Their effectiveness may have been questionable, but at least they tried. Over the years, after considerable “practice,” they made the “art of medicine” appear to be science. But as each of these stories will show, they were “great men,” or as some like to put it, not necessarily extraordinary men, but average men doing extraordinary things…

Sad but true, de Vaca went on another mission for his King in South America, only to suffer a mutiny and be returned to Spain in chains. It seems his constant empathy, mercy and healing ministry to the natives irritated his associates, who did not understand de Vaca's demands to be escorted through the jungles on a litter, a kind of man-powered vehicle known as a lectica (ancient Rome), jiao [较] (China), sedan chairs (England), palanquin (also known as palki Bengali'পালকি' ) (Bangladesh, India), Woh (วอ, chinese style known as giao เกี้ยว) (Thailand), gama (Korea) and tahtırevan (Turkey). [Thank you Wikipedia] basically an emperor's style stretcher of sorts (probably for effect, to show the natives his authority). They finally had enough and whopped him on the side of the head and sent him home, so they could resume their search for riches.

An embarassment to the Crown, and perhaps a threat because of all he knew, (after all, he had covered almost two continents and never found any gold... the justification for these excursions) so he spent eight years in prison, before his case was heard. He had been banished to Africa when finally the Crown snatched him up and dusted him off, and gave him a pension and some amount of vindication. For all is efforts to help mankind, Cabeza de Vaca is remembered mostly as the first writer to chronicle the American Southwest. In fact his writings about his adventure in South America is much greater. Alas it is still hard to ever get published... especially when your words do not feed the popular delusions of the day.

So Cabeza de Vaca is, hands down one of my "Top Ten in Texas" if not in the Western Hemisphere.

I think I have around four left to go...

Next time… on the Navasota Current.

Dear Blogreader; This is part of a series called my "top ten in Texas" and part one of a series about early Texas doctors. You can go back to the main page and type in "top ten in texas" or "benevolent bones" in the search button, and then click on the button to find the rest of the articles.

General Sam and the Indians Part II

Most of what I relate here, and in the previous entry, has been stolen from Dr. John Lockhart's published letters. Just a lad, He was an early day resident of Washington on the Brazos and "knew how to cipher"... and this made him an official scribe for the Republic. His complete writings can be found in Sixty Years on the Brazos.

The Waco crybaby Red Bear was not gone long when President Houston decided to send some emmisaries to the Comanches. He picked some capable men, accompanied by Aquaquash, the trusted Waco Chief and a Mexican who could speak the lingua franca of the West, and they disappeared into the Texas plains. Soon a rumor came that they were bringing the Comanches in... to Torrey's Trading Post one hundred miles north near the Waco village. Houston sent another group there to meet and officially receive them, and now considered invaluable, Young Lockhart was taken along.

But the group sent to fetch the Comanches had a little setback. They had not been in camp with the "Lord's of the Plains" long when they were beginning to perceive that they were about to be tortured and executed. But thankfully Chief Aquaquash intervened and threatened that if the Texans were harmed, he and his Wacos would go down fighting. The Comanches reconsidered, but were not real excited about a trip across the plains to meet the Great White Father. He would only ask for what they could not give.

Meanwhile the second party made their way north. John W. Lockhart's virgin eyes saw amazing things. An equally virgin wilderness. He saw a veritable petrified forest, laying down in the ground, as if some ancient atomic blast had decimated and flattened a prehistoric woodland of trees greater in diameter than any alive. Everywhere, he looked and wondered if any White man had ever seen that thing before.

It was Nature with a capital N, in its purest existence. He mused: "If these rocks, trees and shrubs were endowed with the power of sight, speech and reason, would they say, 'Welcome here,' or 'Depart thou destroyer of nature's beauty. By thy cunning hand thy destroyeth the forest and upturneth the rocks. Our solitude and quietude are gone forever. No more will the wild beast roam at will, nor will nature's flowers ornament and bedeck the bosom of Mother Earth, but rather will the White man bring the ax and plow, the reaper and the rifle, and all will be changed...'"


Interesting that young Lockhart would ascribe to the voice of Nature an Old English vocabulary. But still, his meditations are as haunting today to me as it was to him.

Finally, after days of that kind of gentle heartbreak, the little presidential peace commission straggled into Torrey's Trading Post. Old Torrey had set up an Indian kingdom, trading with the Wacos and Caddoes and Wichitas and even the Comanches, the only source for highly desired American goods near the northern plains. It was a Texas version of the Heart of Darkness. The village had no real law, or legal autority, and Torrey was the closest thing to a sheriff. No doubt Native American traditions weighed heavily on the frontier, in such a place as this, where they were the overwhelming majority. Young Lockhart, anxious to see his new Indian associates, arrived with the rest of the government delegation to find no Comanches, and the ornamented grave of Chief Red Bear, buried near the Post.

Someone, perhaps Torrey, had labeled the grave so that no one would have doubts about who laid there. A little crude fence post rail had been erected around the grave, and a curiously notched and painted timber had been planted to mark Red Bear's final bed. One wonders if he was wrapped in his favorite buffalo robe, that had given him so much security in life. A great bit of trouble had been expended to give the old cranky Waco a fit burial. There was no mention however about the great new percussion rifle President Houston had given him, nor the way he had met his demise. It is not hard to imagine that his new rifle made him a target for those who had more sinister uses for it. Young Lockhart was deeply touched by the unexpected death of the old Indian. Somehow his faults made him more lovable and his death more tragic.

After several days of swatting mosquitoes and gambling and losing with the trading post sharks, the Houston delegation gave up, and went home. Lockhart began to see a very different land before him. He suddenly realized that the buffalo they were nibbling on would soon be exterminated, and the other Indians would go the way of Red Bear. The land had already warned him, as he had passed through it.

It's nice to know, after so much senseless tragedy in the making of our country,that there were young people like young John Lockhart, feeling so much poetic anxiety over the inevitable changes and sacrifices that were to come. I hope what we have done, was worth it.

"

Part III: What does Navasota mean? NABASOTO!, Do you still care?

Back to the origin of the name “Navasota.”

First of all, note the one lasting evidence in the Navasota Valley of all these early European adventurers. Bones. Lots of them. French bones, Spanish bones, and some buffalo bones. And no doubt a few Native American bones.

Joutel, the priestly scribe who accompanied La Salle and buried his bones, told of a southwestern tribe called the “Nabedache,” one of many tribes that met with La Salle’s party during their ill-fated march across Texas rivers. One historian offers that these were the ancient “salt people,” from one of several possible “San Pedro” communities in South Texas, yet associated with the Caddo Confederacy. During La Salle’s visit, they were ranging in East Texas, but they were nomadic salt traders and ranged all over Tejas, probably basing their operations from the prolific salt springs near present day Salado. And this may be all we know about them.

One possible candidate for kinsmen of this Texas tribe is the Yaqui Indians, who are an extraction of the Aztec-Tanoan family, and who may have once ranged from northern Mexico into South Texas. Their homeland in northwest Mexico is a valley whose river leads to the Rio Grande Valley, the ancestral trading destination of the Nabedache. If we look for traces of the Yaqui, indeed we have a nearby tributary of the Brazos called “Yegua” Creek, perhaps a related word. Yagua was a name of a Calusa village in Florida. They too were probably kin linguistically to the Yegua tribes here. Yaguara is the Native American word for Jaguar, who were once native here and the king of all animal spirits in the ancient Mexican pantheon.

It is postulated that centuries before, sea going Caribbeans came to a site called Poverty Point in Louisiana, and spread their gens and languages and panther cult on the Gulf Coast in all directions. The Yaqui speak a language called Yoeme/ Yuma and were most likely a part of a larger group we know as “Yuman” culture. They were fierce and never really tamed, finding refuge deep in Mexico in canyons with no names. They gave the Navajo tribe, an unrelated and isolated language group who arrived from far away in the Canadian Rockies, their name, meaning “prickly pear town”. So it is in the English - Yoeme dictionary where we find some cognates for Navasota worth considering. Ironically, or amazingly, Navas + Ota means “prickly bones” or skeletons. This possible translation may just be a coincidence, but is fascinating never the less, given the history of the area. Not only had European adventurers left many of their bones here, but Native Americans had slaughtered legions of buffalo along the banks of the Navasota for eons. Soto ote means to make pottery. Soto i = pot or kettle. Coincidentally, The red clay banks of the Brazos and the Navasota rivers made clay digging convenient and pottery making possible. The “muddy Brazos” and her little sister, the Navasota River were in fact the domain of one of Texas’ few pottery making tribes, the Caddo, who were famous for their earthenware.

Even the early Texans established a brick making operation here during the Republic years. So in another Yoeme phrase, Nava-soto would mean something like Prickly Pears and Pots! Or, more to our understanding, [where one can find and eat] “potfuls of cactus” This is exactly how native Americans named things, by the apparent characteristics. And as far as Native Americans were concerned, Nava Soto meant Wal mart! We cannot dismiss the importance of the possible relation of Navasota to the Yoeme word Navaho... Before you object too loudly, check out the massive prickly pears growing in the area. There are two different species.

Early naturalists traveling in Texas noted that this very area was where they first came upon old friends once observed in the Arizona territory... that is prickly pears, the ancient symbol of the Aztec empire. The presence of a these two major natural resources at the junction of the Navasota and Brazos rivers, had been historically important for thousands of years. The cactus may have been planted by the ancients on their timeworn trails through here, as a territorial marker. So PERHAPS the name Navasota stems from the Native American language of northern Mexico and connotes something to do with cactus, or pottery or both. Or even more interesting, the name meant an ancient killing field, a place where the ribs of great beasts and trespassers poked through the grass in profusion. That’s not bad for starters. And there is much much more!