John C. McDonald Tells of Early Days in Hopkins County (TX)

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From the historical files of June E. Tuck, who does not validate or
dispute any historical facts in the article.

So many times Mr. McDonald^Òs work has been used, and most of the time he
has never gotten credit.

John C. McDonald Tells Of Early Days in Hopkins County.

Printed in the New-Telegram 1925

(If I have made any mistakes in this, or if you know any Indian history
that I have not told, write and tell me. I will appreciate it. J.C. McD.)

Nobody know how long any part of North America has been inhabited, but it
is a well established fact that when Europeans first saw the territory
that is now the state of Texas, that it had a large population consisting
of many tribes of a race that came to be known as Indians.

The first European that is known to have set foot on Texas soil was old
Cabeza de Vaca, who was a member of the expedition of de Narvaez, a
Spaniard, who set out to conquer Florida, and whose ships were wrecked in
the Gulf of Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca managed to reach the shores of Texas
in 1528, and was captured and held as a slave by the Indians for several
years. He finally escaped to Mexico and wrote an account of his travels.
While none of the tribes that he met had been named by Europeans at that
time, he described certain of their characteristics that enabled later
explorers to identify them as the same tribes that they found in later
years.

In 1540, Coronado crossed the western part of the state in search of the
fabled seven cities, and in 1685 LaSalle made his famous attempt to
settle a French colony on Matagordo Bay. DeTonti, the iron-banded
Frenchman, tried to reach LaSalle from his settlement at the mouth of the
Arkansas River, and the Spaniards sent out forces from Mexico to find and
destroy his settlement. The Spaniards established missions in East Texas
in 1690. And in 1714 St. Denis established his French trading post at
Nachitoches on the Red River of Louisiana, and soon after opened the
famous old highway, the Camino Real, or old San Antonio road, that
extended from Nachitoches via Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. During the
18th century Spain continued to explore the country and to establish
missions at various places, and as soon as Louisiana was sold to the
United States in 1803, American hunters and adventurers made many
expeditions into the territory. In 1821, Moses Austin obtained the first
contract for settling Americans on Texas soil, and from that time began
the period of American settlement that has continued to this day. All of
these explorers, adventurers and settlers left more or less records of
the natives that they met, consequently, we have a reasonably correct
history of the Indian tribes of Texas from a very few years after
Columbus discovered America down to the time the last wild tribes were
driven from the state after the Civil War.

The Origin of Tribes

When the first European explorers began to get a general idea of the
natives of Texas, they found about thirty separate tribes, some of them
related and some of them entirely distinct. All of the tribes were more
or less transitory, but all had certain bounds within which they were
usually to be found. Indians regarded land like we regard air - it was
common property - but the section which suited a tribe best was the
section in which it spent the most time and which was regarded as its
home. The names of the tribes are often spelled differently, and
sometimes the same tribe is called by different names, but the names that
I have used here are the ones that I found used most often in the old
records.

Among the tribes which inhabited Texas: The Lipans, an Apache tribe,
ranged from the Rio Grande to the Brazos, and their friends, Tonkaways,
from the Brazos to the Nueces. The Tonkaways were nearly always friendly
to the whites, and served them well as guides in expeditions against the
Comanches. The Comanches, more numerous and powerful than all the other
tribes combined, roamed the great plains from Oregon nearly to the Gulf
of Mexico. They were wild and cruel savages, but possessed a high order
of savage intelligence, and were the worst menace to the settlement of
Texas. The buffalo was their supply train, and they never entirely
conquered until the buffaloes were exterminated. Roaming the plains with
the Comanches were the Piowas, who seemed to be no kin to the Comanches
but always in alliance with them. The Carankwas, or Caranchaus, as the
name is sometimes spelled, lived on the coast from Galveston Island
westward, and were a tribe of low grade savages. They were men of
powerful build, cruel and were charged with being cannibals, and the
charge was in all probability true. They were the Indians that enslaved
Cabeza de Vaca, and who killed and probably ate most of LaSalle^Òs
colonists. Austin^Òs colonists exterminated them after the American
settlement of Texas began. The Coushattas and the Alibamas were small
tribes living on the Neches and Trinity rivers near Nacogdoches. Some of
them possibly were finally transferred to the Indian Territory, but small
remnants of each tribe still live on little reservations in their old
territory. These are the only tribes of Indians now living in East Texas.
The Apaches raided across from New Mexico, the Mescaleros from Old
Mexico, and the Wichita tribes from north of the Red River, but they were
outsiders. The remainder of the native tribes were all small and
unimportant except the great Caddo Confederacy which occupied the
territory from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the Arkansas river, and
from the Brazos river eastward nearly, if not all, the way to the
Mississippi. These Indians being the first known inhabitants of our own
section of the state, are to us of the most interest. They gave the state
of Texas and one of its counties and three of its towns their names, and
did likewise for a lake and a parish in Louisiana and a town in Oklahoma.
Almost all of the Indian relics found in our county are remains of these
people.

The Caddo Confederacy

This confederation was composed of the Caddos, Adaes, Bedaes, Keechies,
Nacogdoches, Ionies, Anadarkos, Wacos, Tehuacanies, Towash, and Texas or
Tejas as it is sometimes spelled, with possibly another small tribe or
two. They had made some advances toward civilization and had more settled
habitations than most of the tribes. They tilled the soil in a limited
and crude way, and had developed a tribal society that was above the
other Texas Indian. They were timber dwellers, and although their mounds
and relics are to be found along nearly every stream in the timbered part
of this country, I have never heard of a single relic of them being found
on the prairie. I once held to the belief that some of the mounds in this
county were built by the Mound Builders, a pre-historic people who built
great mounds all the way down the Mississippi and its tributaries from
the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and while there are some of the
largest mounds in the county that have not yet been opened, the ones that
have been opened indicated Caddo origin. The largest mound of which I
have any knowledge is on Mr. Alex Brice^Òs land in Sulphur Bottom. It
covers about an acre and has not been explored, consequently no one knows
what it contains. Mr. J. D. Higdon opened a large mound on the Ham
Sickles land on White Oak and found it to be a burial mound with one
Indian buried in a sitting posture, a practice common with the Caddos and
their associates. Mr. Higdon has an interesting collection of relics
taken from this mound.

The main headquarters of the southern division of these tribes on our
first historical acquaintance with them, seems to have been near
Nacogdoches, and that of the northern division seems to have been west of
Texarkana; but in later years, after the migration of the Cherokees, they
had a large village at or near Shreveport. This last was in all
probability not an old village as it was built near the Caddo Lake, and
the Caddo Lake was not there until 1811. The great earthquake that sunk
the Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and the St. Francis Bottoms in Arkansas
also sunk the Caddo Lake.

The Caddos were, as stated, agriculturists in a limited way, but they
were also great hunters. Every fall, as soon as the buffalo came south,
they went to the prairie to get a supply of meat and robes. In late years
after they had been pushed back by the Cherokees, they traveled the long
distance from Shreveport and made their base camps on the Sabine River
south of Greenville. The whole families came and the women dried the meat
and prepared the robes while the men did the hunting. The main highway
that they traveled to these camps passed through Hopkins county and was
known as the Main Caddo Trace. (All Indian roads were called traces.) It
started from their village at Shreveport and swung in south of Jefferson
through the north part of Harrison county, then northwest and entered
Hopkins county near Cornersville. From there it extended due west to
Reily Springs where it turned northwest again to about Tazwell and went
out of the county near Palestine school house. This highway is the only
relic of these people that has written itself into the permanent records
of the county. It was the landmark by which all of Col James Riley^Òs
surveys of land were located. The field notes of all of them read further
on or so many miles north or south of the Main Caddo Trace. This is the
way that Haskel Dickerson and I traced its route through this county, and
Capt. W. S. Mitchell told me how it ran in East Texas.

An old timer once told me an interesting bit of history relative to these
annual hunts. It is a known fact that South Sulphur and North Sulphur
bottoms above their junction were in the old days some of the best bear
hunting territory that could be found. All of the country on both sides
of these bottoms was prairie which was the grazing grounds for hundreds
and even thousands of deer and buffalo. These animals would go into the
bottom for water or for protection from northers and the bear had an easy
living. This old timer told me that when the Indians came in sight of the
Black Jack Grove that they would send a detachment of their best hunters
to Sulphur Bottom to get a supply of bear meat and meet them at their
camps on the Sabine. They had traveled light and this meat was their
supply until they got to killing buffalo. These people were very numerous
about the end of the 17th century, and it was their great chief who gave
protection to the remnants of La Salle^Òs colony. It was he who welcomed
Col. DeLeon and Father Massenet and asked them to establish a mission
among his people , and it was among them that the first mission, that of
San Francisco de los Tejas, was established. But the days of the Caddo
Confederacy was numbered. The white man had been slow in taking
possession of their hunting grounds, but a great tribe of their own race
was destined to crowd them out.

The Cherokees

When the first white men settled along the Atlantic coast they found the
great tribe of the Cherokees occupying the vast extent of territory in
Tennessee, the Carolinas, North Georgia and North Alabama. They were
intelligent savages with whom the white settlers were sometimes at war
and sometimes at peace. Their intelligence was sufficient for them to
take up many of the white man^Òs ways and by the beginning of the 19th
century they had adopted fire arms in place of bows and arrows and had
found it easier to trade for the white man^Òs pottery than to make the
ancient pottery of their fathers, and had almost forgotten the art. White
men sometimes intermarried with these Indians, and it was among them that
General Sam Houston made his home for awhile when he was a young man, and
also in later years after he had resigned the office of governor of
Tennessee.

The Cherokees made a brave fight to retain their ancestral homes but the
tide of white immigration was irresistible, and during the first years of
the 19th century they were pushed across the Mississippi into
northeastern Arkansas. After the great earthquake of 1811 they decided
that the Great Spirit had condemned the country and they moved south to
the Arkansas River, some settling as far south as the Lost Prairie just
east of Texarkana. But they were not to rest here, the white settler
wanted Arkansas too, and in 1817 the United States made them a grant of
land north of the Arkansas River and told them to move to it. At that
time it was believed by the people of the United States that the
Louisiana purchase included the watershed of the Red River which would
have made the line of the United States territory run about two miles
south of Sulphur Springs along the ridge south of Rock Creek. A great
many Cherokees had already settled in this strip believing that they were
in the United States territory, but when the treaty of 1819 made Red
River the line and cut them off in Spanish territory they did not
seriously object, because they had been moved so much that they were
willing to try a new nation. Also, in the winter of 1819-20 a large body
of Cherokees which lived east of Texarkana, under their chief Bowles,
moved to the Three Forks of the Trinity where Dallas now stands and
attempted to make a settlement. This territory, however, was considered
by the other Indians as common hunting ground, and after three years of
wars with the other tribes, they moved to what is now Cherokee county. In
a short time they and a number of their associate tribes, the Delawares
and others, had occupied a territory bounded on the west by the Neches
River, on the east by the Angelina, on the south by the old San Antonio
road, and on the north by the Sabine. This division of the tribe tried
for many years to get the Spanish and later the Mexican government to
give them titles to this land. They received many promises but no deeds.
This state of permissive occupancy continued until after General Lamar
came to the presidency of Texas in 1839.

These Indians took land wherever it suited them and built better houses
and cultivated more land than the Caddos. The locations of these villages
were permanent and they had many highways that served their purposes. The
main highway from their villages north of Red River to their villages in
Cherokee county crossed the Red River north of Clarksville, crossed the
Sulphur at the old Armstrong crossing, continued south about seven miles
east of Mt. Vernon and about seven miles east of Winnsboro, passing
between Carter and Ogburn and between Pine Mills and Speer it turned
southwest and passed a short distance east of Quitman. At or near the
Sabine river it forked, one prong passing by Tyler and on southwest, the
other missing Tyler to the east and extending towards Nacogdoches. This
road was later used by the white settlers and was at one time a mail
route between Clarksville and Austin. Another fork of this trace left the
main road at or near the Sabine and extended northeast to the villages in
Hopkins county. Another of their main highways began at Clarksville and
came southwest crossing Hopkins county from the northeast corner, by Old
Tarrant, and out of the county near its southwest corner. This was the
road used in passing to their villages on the Trinity. Where the land is
not cultivated this road may still be traced by an occasional mesquite
tree. The Indians carried the mesquite beans as food. It is sometimes
referred to in the old minutes of the Commissioners court of Hopkins
County as the Salmon Trail, because it crossed White Oak west of Sulphur
Springs near a deep hole of water that was called the Salmon Hole. This
water hole was so named because a man named Salmon lived close by. Judge
T. J. Tucker told me that his grandmother remembered seeing long lines of
Indians pass by on this trail riding single file. In all probability this
is the route traveled by the Cherokee warriors on their way to fight
their great battle and avenge themselves on the Wacos and Tehuacanas for
stealing their horses.

In Red River country the white settlers and the Cherokees seemed to get
along very well together, the whites often settling near Cherokee
villages for protection. Henry Stout, who later lived and died in Hopkins
County, settled near a Cherokee village where Clarksville now stands,
being the first white settler of that place. But the southern Cherokees
did not get along so well with the colonists. There was such a large body
of them and they were commanded by so able a chief that they were a
constant menace to the white settlements. Their chief, Bowles, was a
half-breed and a man of ability. He was the son of a Scotch trader, and
an Indian woman. He had been born in North Carolina and had seen the
Cherokees pushed back until he had become suspicious and resentful.

When the Texans decided to fight for their independence from Mexico they
realized that when the men left home it would place their families
entirely at the mercy of this tribe. They also realized that should the
Cherokees decide to join Mexico in the war the results would be
disastrous to the Texas cause. Titles to their land was what the
Cherokees wanted and Mexico had sent agents among them promising this
reward if they would join them in the war. Consequently Governor Henry
Smith sent General Sam Houston and John Forbes of Nacogdoches to make a
treaty with them. General Houston, always a friend of the Cherokees, made
a treaty with them, promising them titles to their lands if they would
remain neutral. But before the treaty could be acted upon by the
convention the war was on and it remained as it was until the meeting of
the first congress. In the meantime the conduct of the Indians had been
entirely unsatisfactory and when the treaty was brought up for
ratification it was rejected. This treaty is the basis of the rumors that
we sometimes hear even yet of the Cherokees going to sue for the entire
counties of Cherokee and Smith.

During the war Mexico had agents constantly among them trying to incite
them to attack the Texans, and they probably would have done so had it
not been for General Gaines. General Gaines was the commander of the
United States forces in Western Louisiana, and while his sympathies were
with the Texans he could not attack a foreign nation without orders. It
was believed by many the real purpose of General Houston^Òs famous
retreat was to get across the disputed line into Louisiana and get Santa
Anna to follow him there which would give Gaines an excuse to turn his
American regulars loose on him and chase him across the Rio Grande. But
if this were true, the battle of San Jacinto rendered it unnecessary. But
the Cherokees were a different proposition. They were United States
Indians, and there was a feeling both in Texas and United States that the
American government should be responsible for them. Consequently General
Gains sent Bowles word the if he attempted to take part in the war,
American troops would at once be sent against him. Bowles did not dare
disregard the warning, but it was generally believed that he had his
warriors mobilized ready to attack the Texans should Santa Anna win the
decisive battle which all knew was soon to be fought.

After independence was established and General Houston^Òs treaty had
failed of ratification, the Cherokees were allowed to remain in their
settlements, but Mexican agents were among them all the time and much
stealing and good many murders were charged to them. The first president,
General Houston, was their friend, but when General Lamar came to the
presidency he told them that they must move, peaceably if they would, but
by force if necessary. He offered to pay them for their improvements if
they would go peaceably, but refused to recognize their claims that they
owned the land. The Cherokees decided to fight and mobilized their
warriors. Lamar called out the Texas troops and on the 15th day of July,
1839, Texans numbering about 500 men under General Kelsey H. Douglas as
brigadier general and Colonels Thomas J. Rusk, Edward Burleson and
Landrum attacked Bowles forces of about 800 braves in the northeast
corner of Henderson county, a few miles west of Mineola , and defeated
them. The next day they overtook them again in the southeast corner of
Van Zandt county and defeated them again, killing Bowles and scattering
his followers. Some of them went to their reservation north of Red River,
some of them to the Cross Timbers and some to Mexico. When General
Houston made his treaty with Bowles he gave him a sword, a high silk
hate, a plush vest and a sash. Bowles had on all of this regalia when he
was killed. His sword was given to Capt. Robert W. Smith who later gave
it to the Masonic Lodge at Henderson. They used it as a tiler^Òs sword
until the Civil War broke out when they gave it to Col. James H. Jones of
Henderson. He carried it through the war and gave it back to the lodge,
and in 1891 or 1892 it was presented to representatives of the Cherokee
nation and is now in their archives at Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

These battles broke the power of the resident tribes in East Texas. Most
of the Indians gave up the fight and went to the Indian Territory; a few
continued to reside about the country; and quite a number of the remnants
of the defeated tribes formed a large village just south of where the
Texas & Pacific Railroad crosses Village creek between Arlington and Fort
Worth. The scattered settlements in East Texas suffered considerable from
them for several years, but from this time on East Texas was a white
man^Òs country. The settlers along the Red River suffered a great deal,
and it was mostly from raiding parties that crossed from the Indian
Territory. Further west the war continued until some years after the
civil war, but East Texas, except the strip along Red River, was not
molested except in a few instance. One of the instances occurred in April
of 1841. A man named Ripley who had a large family had settled on the old
Cherokee Trace about seven miles east of Mount Vernon. One day while he
was from home the Indians attacked his home and killed all of his family
except two young girls who hid themselves in the woods. A small posse of
men in the immediate neighborhood followed the Indians to where Sulphur
Springs is now located and found where they had washed the scalps at the
springs where the old Spring Lot used to be and laid them on stones to
dry, the bloody rings being still visible. They followed them out to
where Mrs. Lanier lives now and found where they had painted their war
signs on the rocks. The men were so few in number that they returned home
and Gen. Edward Tarrant, then of Bowie county, organized a company of
sixty-nine men and started out to find and punish the marauders. He had
information that their village was somewhere on the upper Trinity, and on
the 24th day of May, found the village between Fort Worth and Arlington
as above described, and attacked it. In this battle John B. Denton, for
whom Denton county and town was named, was killed, and Henry Stout was
severely wounded. Most of the warriors were away on a buffalo hunt at
this time and Tarrant realized that should they return, his small force
would be no match for them, and retreated back toward home. As soon as
Tarrant reached home he began the organization of a larger expedition. He
collected between 400 and 500 men, and Gen. James Smith of Nacogdoches
raised a regiment of militia to co-operate with him. These two forces
were to meet in the Cross Timbers in Wise county and jointly attack and
destroy the village. But when Smith arrived at King^Òs Fort where the
city of Kaufman now stands, he found that the Indians had attacked it the
night before, and he immediately took up their trail. The trail led to
the village in question and Smith resolved to attack it alone. He divided
his forces in order to attack from two sides simultaneously, but when his
men rushed in they found the village deserted, the Indians had discovered
Tarrant^Òs forces and had escaped. Smith^Òs men destroyed it and it was
never re-occupied.

So far as I have been able to learn no white settler was ever killed by
Indians in what is now Hopkins County. When the Hargraves settled at
Sulphur Bluff in the latter part of 1842, the only white man in the
county was a man named John Bivins who lived east of Sulphur Bluff on the
land that is now owned by Mrs. Bonnie Harris. Bivins disappeared and it
was supposed that he was killed or carried away by Indians, but no one
ever knew for certain what became of him. A number of thieving parties
came into the western and northern parts of the county after it began to
be settled and gave the people some real scares, but no casualties
resulted. It is related that a party of them came to Blackjack one time
to steal a fine saddle horse that a man there owned. But the man was
expecting them and had fastened the horse up in a stable that they could
not open. So, for sheer meanness they shot an arrow through the crack and
killed the horse.

Rev. David Anders in his memoirs, mention chasing Indians by where
Sulphur Springs now stand and by the Black Jack Grove twice in 1837 and
twice in 1838, but does not mention any specific battles as being fought.

Delta county had some pretty bad Indians battles but I do not know of a
war party that ever crossed South Sulphur. Mr. O. B. Briggs relates the
story of a battle that was fought where the McCombs farm is now located
in the southwestern part of Delta county in the late 30's, and states
that Ab Neathery, Wiltshire Bailey, Capt. Barker, Merret Branom, Mansel
Matthews, Henry Stout and others took part in it. Rev. David Anders
states that the Indians got so bad on North Sulphur in 1838 that the
people had to build a fort which called Lidy^Òs Fort. The Indians killed
a man named Davis, and when the whites attacked them they took refuge in
the Jernigan Thicket. They were routed out from there and took refuge in
the Black Cat Thicket in Hunt county. Here they were again routed and
driven from the country.

I sometimes hear of a great battle between the tribes that was fought
somewhere in this section, but since I have been unable to get any
definite trace of it, I think this tradition must have reference to the
great battle between the Cherokees on one side and the Wacos and
Tehuacanas on the other, and which was fought near where Waco now stand.

Many of the first settlers of Hopkins county were Indian fighters, some
of them famous, but most of their Indian fighting was done before they
came to this county. Nearly all of the north half of the county was
settled by people who first lived in Red River county for awhile, and it
was there the larger part of their experience was gained. (The end)