While I’ve got murder on my mind…

I thought this would be an excellent and relevant time to talk about... murder... or that aspect of Navasota, since I used the town as a comparison to the Hollywood community. You see, as rare as violent death is now, Navasota at one time was probably the murder capital of Texas. We are lucky they just call us the Blues Capital of Texas! I guess it all started when a bunch of mutineers hid in the bushes and assassinated La Salle, murdering him right around here somewhere. So important was La Salle, or at least his murder here, that we are the only place in America to sport two statues of the French explorer.

When Ranger Frank Hamer came here, after being hired as City Marshal by a desperate City Council, there had been hundreds of killings, many unsolved murders, unexplained deaths, and all kinds of race violence that ended in the largest evacuation of blacks this State had ever seen. Baptized in fire, after serving the City of Navasota for almost three years, Marshal Hamer went on to become one of the most feared and respected lawmen of the American West. We do not have a record of how many he might have killed while commissioned by the City Council, but be he is believed to have killed 21 outlaws in his career, including two killers who took out almost a dozen people, Bonnie and Clyde.

I have often wondered why so many prominent families left Navasota after the turn of the Twentieth Century. I have come to believe that part of the reason was the dark and bloody memories that could not be erased while living here. Not only was killing, shooting people, stabbing and lynching a social norm, but it shaped the character of some our most famous citizens. It took a really hard constitution to stomach such a place. Or worse, a scarred heart. Today we call them sociopaths. Even sadder is how the violence seemed to follow those who left here.

Navasota native Virgil "Ned" Garvin, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, (2.72 ERA, 13 shut outs) had anger issues...

Two famous men who left Grimes County to become quite famous for their meaness were blues singer Alger “Texas” Alexander and Virgil “Ned” Garvin. Garvin was a professional baseball pitcher, who came to the peak of his career while Navasota was entering an era of near genocide. In 1900 an all out war of extermination had been waged by the “White Man’s Union” on elected black officials (Republicans) and any whites (Populists) who were allied with them, including the County Sheriff. We’ll never know just how many were killed. Certainly there were newspaper reports of some of them, but many killings were undocumented. The sheriff was smuggled off after receiving crippling wounds, bundled up in a wagon bed, saved by a heavily armed State Militia sent by the Governor. He never came back. The violence led to a huge reduction in the black population, mostly from relocation.

A veritable ambassador for his hometown, that same year Navasota’s most accomplished baseball hero ever, shot a Negro in Milwaukie because he was displeased with a shoe shine job. When interviewed about it, he explained “Texans don’t like niggers anyhow.” That seemed to satisfy his detractors, even up north.

I am not making this up.

The next year, while still pitching for the Chicago White Sox, Garvin stabbed a guy in Chicago during an argument in a saloon. He was never prosecuted for either assault. After all, Virgil Garvin was just doing what he had been raised to do. And he was a damn good pitcher.

Violence, especially when racially motivated, had always been pretty common fare around here. Navasota raised its children like wolf pups. Only the strongest survived. Kill or be killed. Local white citizens had first taken up arms to threaten, kill or whatever necessary, the black population, right after the Civil War. In 1866 hundreds of Confederate veterans met an angry black mob in the bottoms near Millican and shot it out with them, killing scores of freedmen.

Killing was often the solution for disagreements in those days. So it is no surprise that in 1902, Garvin shot his own friend, merely because he refused to show fear and believe that the drunk hurler would plug him. After shooting the idiot, and settling that question, he then took a few shots at a policeman who tried to apprehend him, placing at least one bullet in his shoulder before running away.

He became known to baseball fans as the “Navasota Tarantula,” but did not learn much from this experience, other than professional athletes can get away with almost anything. At the time the Navasota Tarantula was leading the White Sox bull pen with an incredible 2.21 ERA. Still his coach felt some social pressure and finally fired him, saying he had “shot himself out of a job.” One shoe shine boy, and at least one drinking friend short, Garvin paid his fine and was traded to Brooklyn.

But his violent streak was not over. In 1904, while playing for the Brooklyn Superbas, Garvin, now called the “Demon Texan,” pummeled a man while staying at the Hotel Kensington in New Jersey. The hapless broken –nosed insurance salesman had insisted on reading his newspaper, rather than talk with him. I guess Garvin was just like Gus in Lonesome Dove, and he did not tolerate rudeness in a man. He was so enraged, he went off and left his wife in the hotel. Somebody had to clean up the mess.

But life has a way of getting you back. Even though Virgil Garvin was one of the most successful pitchers of all time, rating in the top one hundred pitchers of all professional baseball, with a very low earned run average, he could not win games. His own teammates did not rally for him. He has been called “the hard luck pitcher of all time.” Because of his strange luck, he played for six different teams over his seven year career. Traded around until he ended up on the west coast, he died quite young of tuberculosis at age 28, in 1908.

But at least Virgil Garvin is not known to have actually killed anyone, although he probably tried. The other famous Grimes County resident was more successful at settling scores. Texas Alexander, born in nearby Leon County but raised in Richards, grew up in the same mean world, only his people were usually the targets of white anger and subsequent vigilante oppression.

“Texas” found a refuge in his music, which took him all over the United States, even to record in New York. He often performed on the streets with Blind Lemon Jefferson in Dallas, and was one of the very first blacks in Texas to make it as an entertainer. But Texas had very bad luck with women… and the men who loved them. He came home one night a little too early, and had to kill his wife... and her lover … with a HATCHET! Of course he had to go to prison for that. And like Leadbelly, he sang so sweetly and earnestly he was released, even after a double murder, a rehabilitated man. Next to ball players, blues men were held in the highest regard.

So you see, things are not so bad today, no worse than in the early 1900’s. Our celebrities and athletes have always enjoyed a double standard, even the license to kill.

Diamond Six

You guys have probably figured out by now that I am a voracious reader. I hated to read when I was young, and now I can’t read enough. When growing up, my scholastic abilities were so non-evident that I was sure to be headed to a life of hard work and hard time. Then when I realized that I could learn… even understand, reading has been like a great seductive trail leading to wisdom and something far more useful… COPING WITH THE CRAZY WORLD AROUND ME.

That was, until I read enough to see that gaining and assimilating knowledge was hopeless, and just an addiction and delusion. The more I know, the more I realize the less I know... So as I share my latest read with you, it is not with an overview of comfort and resolve, but a growing suspicion of the whole process. But I have another reason to tell you about this book, as it helps illustrate the other subject I promised you... how traditionally Democrats have enjoyed overwhelming support from the Afro-American vote, even though they were originally their worst oppressors. The story of Wesley Smith is a fitting springboard for much I have to share on that subject, a great deal of which is covered in my book (unpublished) called The Light of Day.

Diamond Six is about Sheriff Wesley Smith, a former neighbor to Grimes County, the region where I have spent most of my adult life. When he came to Montgomery, Grimes and Montgomery Counties were just about to be split up, and young Wesley had been recruited, so the story goes, to serve in the Texas Rangers and fight Comanches over in... Navasota, my town. When I first read the book about him I was shocked at the history his biographer, his grandson, told of this area which was not recorded anywhere else. I dismissed the book, some twenty years ago as an unreliable family legend gone amuck in the imagination of a starry-eyed grandchild.

I have probably read the book four or five times since. I could not leave it alone. It was first recommended to me by Elliott Goodwin, one of the town’s acknowledged historians, as our history, albeit sealed in secrets of dark ways long since buried...

In a nutshell, Diamond Six is about a young Kentuckian who migrates with his brother to Texas to avoid prosecution for the killing of their father’s murderer. On their way they meet an "honest" gambler who GIVES them six diamonds as a token of his esteem. This is just the first extraordinary windfall of Smith's serendipitous life. But by the time they enter “The youngest nation on earth,” in 1844, They have a price on their heads and have used their guns to resist arrest and have even fired upon a border patrol of the United States Army.

And it gets much worse. They are soon caught up in shooting scrapes, Wesley is even commissioned as a Ranger, and he soon parts with his strife-weary older brother. Then the young fugitive successfully inspires a conspiracy among his fellow Texas Rangers to murder two bounty hunters from back home who are seeking to capture him and his brother, and the ten thousand dollar reward for their hides.

Serving as a part-time Ranger, and full-time farmer and later as a Lieutenant in the Confederacy, Smith kills untold Indians and Yankees, and because of his amazing luck, stumbles upon a Federal gold shipment during “the War of Northern Aggression” which, as fate would allow, he and his cronies successfully retrieve after the war, making all of them millionaires by today’s standards. With gold taken from the Federal Government. Of course, this was seen as justice and rationalized by the writer, who no doubt grew up in the largess of this wealth.

Often taking the law into his own hands, Wesley Smith, according to his own grandson, kills over sixty men, (not including Mexicans, Indians and Yankees) yet very few while working as a peace officer. It seems he was later elected Sheriff of Montgomery County in the 1880’s because he was so greatly feared and it was assumed it was expedient to just give him the badge, and let him and God sort it out. This was far more productive than arguing with such a prolific killer about legalities which he was bound to confront, doing his thing, which his grandson insisted was always justified. And this kind of logic was pervasive in the West. The Daltons and Earps and many other famous gunmen were all basically criminals-cum-lawmen.

The first time I read Wesley’s exploits, I shook my head and hoped it was not true. But there was the problem of his grandson, writing the book and claiming it was a true story. Why would a man make such claims, which could only establish his progenitor as lifetime criminal, if not a killer and a thief, unless it was truth. Yet even more paradoxically, the grandson failed to ever mention those facts of history that could be proven today. William Fielding Smith got a nationally famous novelist to edit his book, yet neither ever seemed to feel the need to mention that Wesley Smith had introduced and developed an important agriculture crop to Montgomery County, one that became an important local industry, that being tobacco.

True, by the end of the book you cannot imagine Smith without sporting one of his cigars, but we are never told that he had a cigar factory in Willis, or that Willis grown tobacco became a highly coveted product, winning international tobacco awards. There were eventually eight cigar factories in Willis, and Smith grown and made cigars were famous in Texas, much more famous than the dangerous man that produced them. The operation was finally reduced to oblivion when Congress passed laws that lifted import tariffs on Cuba, who immediately blew away all the competition.

By the end of Sheriff Smith’s life, his tobacco dynasty had been trounced, much like his ante-bellum cotton kingdom, and all that was left was his sizable cattle operation, which had been overseen by a couple of dozen unreconstructed confederates who served as his personal posse and jury and executioners for scores of rustlers. And when the old sheriff died, so did the alliance, the secrets, and the dangerous ground they protected. Strangely, when William Fielding Smith sat down to resurrect his family’s legacy, he ignored the obvious and strained at the radical, almost unbelievable legend of his grandfather. One that might well have been better forgotten.

Like me, I suppose the grandson could not resist the attraction of a great story.

And now after many readings, I am finally looking at the story through a different lens. It cannot all be a lie. Perhaps a lot of it is second hand, and distorted and unreliable. But in all of it there is the ring of truth. So I want to share some of the amazing parts of this “true story” that have haunted me for two decades, and introduce you, if not to the world of Sheriff Wesley Smith, to the muddy memories of his devoted grandson. And the sinister politics behind it all. Next time.