The Life of W.M. Arnold, Hunt Co, Texas ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Vince Leibowitz October 6, 2001 http://www.usgwarchives.net/ *********************************************************************** Greenville Evening Banner, August 18, 1932 Uncle Bill and Aunt Kate, as their friends call them, have seen the wilderness gradually disappear into the grazing lands of the Texas longhonrn, and these pastures in turn converted into one of the nation's greatest farming sections upon the advent of barb wire and bois-d' arc posts. Mrs. Arnold has lived under three of Texas six flags, as her residence is Texas dates back to the days of the Republic. When Mrs. Arnold came to Texas Clarksville, the oldest town of northeast Texas, was about 10 years old; Pin Hook, just beginning to be prentious, had barely changed its pioneer name to Paris; Bois d'arc a few years before had assumed the name of Bonham; Marshall two years before had her foundation lot sale; Jefferson had just commenced her existance, soon to boom into the metropolis of North Texas; and John Neely Bryan's cabin at the Three Forks had agreed to move west of a line running from about where Fort Worth now stands southwest across the top of Comanche Peak and on to the border, and they had just vacated this paradise of the pioneer. In February 1845 Benjamin F. Oldham and wife, Ann Dugan Oldham, left their home near Mt. Sterling, Ky., with the fixed determination to seek a home without the United States and within the young Republic of Texas. They then had one baby son, and a little daughter, Mary Catherine, about two years old. The trip was made by boat from Louisville to New Orleans, then to Shreveport, and then by ox wagon to Fannin county, now Hunt county, arriving in August, five months before the Republic ceased to exist. There was then not a single town or village within the present confines of Hunt county. At that time the total inhabitants of the county were not in excess of two or three hundred, and Catherine Arnold was one of the few hundred inhabitants and was then living with her father and mother at the Oldham homestead, a few miles southwest of the present city of Greenville on what is now the Jim Hogg highway. In 1846 the first Legislature of the State of Texas created Hunt County from Fannin and Nacogdoches counties and provided that James Hooker, Meredith Hart, Jno. W. Lane, Chas. Hobbs and Isaac Banta as town commissioners should hold an election to select a location for the county seat within three miles of the geographical center of the new county and for this purpose an election was held at Center Point, about three miles southeast from Greenville, at which place all the male citizens over 21 years gathered for the election. Mrs. Benjamin Oldham and the few neighboring women living in the vicinity of Center Point prepared a picnic dinner for the voters. The election was held by lining the men up along the opposite sides of a wagon trail. On one side stood those voting for Center Point, the location offered by Andrew McDonald, soon to be the chief justice of the county, and on the other those favoring the location, some three miles to the northwest and now Greenville, and offered by a young surveyor, McQuinney H. Wright, and his patron, Col. James Bourland, a prominent and well known man, then State Senator from the district. On this occasion little Catherine Oldham ran childish errands for the women as they prepared the meal. The vote was a tie. There were about one hundred men, according to tradition, but an old newspaper of that days says not over forty, and they were fixed in their opinions and choice. The election was adjourned and another date fixed. A second gathering was held. A heavy rain had fallen and Sabine was bank full. Tradition says that when a small body of horsemen approached the stream from the east, all plunged in, save one timid pioneer, a Center Point supporter, who could not swum and he backed down and returned home. Wright and his location won by one vote when they lined up on opposite sides of the road and counted noses. Little Mary Catherine Oldham, now Mrs. William Arnold, was present at the birth of Greenville and the organization of Hunt County. There were then no schools, but an Englishman, Law, and his wife, were near neighbors of the Oldhams, living about eight miles distant with none or but few intervening settlements. Mrs. Law was an educated woman and taught school in her home, taking a few boarding pupils. Catherine Oldham and her brother, Sidney, were the boarders. One evening Mrs. Law sent her little boy and Sidney to the brush to get some pea sticks. Little Miss Catherine wanted to go but was refused the treat. She slipped away and followed them when no one was watching and soon found to her dismay that she was lost. She wandered until she was exhausted, when she stopped to pick and eat some blackberries; and while so engaged a pole cat appeared headed her way. She ways had been told that if confronted by a wild animal to fi[x] a steady gaze at its fore feet and it would go away and not molest you. She tried this on Mr. Skunk and he behaved nicely and went away. Darkness came on and in a country where houses were few and far between and the wilderness was untouched she spent the night and slept at the root of a tree. She remembers vividly how the owls hooted that lonely night to a little girl of six years as she nervously turned in her uncomfortable bed scared beyond expression. Toward daylight she heard the crowing of roosters in the distance and by following the course and direction of the sounds came upon a small clearing and fences and rescued herself while many searchers had failed to find her during an all night effort. Benjamin F. Oldham was treasurer of Hunt county, 1848-1849. He made a trip once each year to Austin on horseback and carried the State's money with him in his saddlebags. Returning from one of these trips he filled his saddlebags in Austin with oranges, and brought them to his children, the first they had ever seen. Mrs. Arnold remembers them yet with a twinkle of delight in her eye. She recalls when a wee tot, the Indian coming to her father's home when he was absent. She refers to them in the language of the frontier as tame Indians. Her mother was scated out of her wits and the leader of the band that had returned to hunt on their old familiar grounds remarked "white squaw scared heap" and rode away leading his band back into the brush. This was probably "Black Cat" chief of the Shawnee band, who lived for many years near the present site of Wolfe City on the north bank of South Sulphur and was always the friend of the whites. In 1861 Catherine Oldham was present to witness the departure from Greenville of the boys in Gray the first company under the leadership of Capt. Featherstone; and when I asked her if she knew Uncle Bill, she then said, "No," Uncle Bill protested and tried to aid her memory, but she was positive. He observed, "Well I knew you, I had seen you at your cow lot several times before then when I was buying yearlings from your father." Evidently Uncle Bill got the first impression, at least he remembers the milk maid and he was not then buying milk. In 1857 William Arnold, then 20 years, came to Hunt county from Kentucky with his parents, William and Rebecca Arnold and for the intervening seventy years made his home at Greenville. Uncle Bill thinks he remembers the first courthouse but he never saw it. This courthouse of logs was replaced in 1853 by a frame building erected by Louis W. Moore, then Chief Justice of the county under a contract with the Commissioners' Court for a small sum of money and the old log building. This accounts for the different stories about the first courthouse being of logs and that it was a king of boxed or puncheon affair, the timbers running up and down. I finally found the old orders that settled the controversy. Mr. Arnold helped Parson Stillwell, a Protestant Methodist preacher, make the brick for Greenville's first courthouse, and was his helper as the preacher laid them in the walls of the simple square plain brick structure erected n 1858. Since then four others have been built, one of them on side street and three on the square. Uncle bill was a hunter in his early years in Hunt county. He brought with him from Kentucky a fine rifle originally a deer and bear gun in his family, but used by him for squirrel hunting in Barren county, Kentucky, and soon to become a deer and turkey rifle in Texas. When asked about bear hunting he related the story of what started out to be a deer hunt in the thickets of Hell Creek, now politely called Brushy Creek, in western Hunt county, but which turned out to be a bear episode. In the thick brush that gave the creek its early name, Uncle Bill heard the frantic squeal of a shoat. He thought his deer dogs were after the hogs, and made his way with all possible haste, his trusted rifle in his hand, to the scene of trouble. He suddenly arrived to his consternation faced a big [b] lack bear about the size of the famous show elephant, Jumbo, with the shoat in its arms. He says that it took him six months to get out of that thicket although by the watch it was only sixty-three seconds, he never thought once of his rifle until he was half way back home. This he says was his only bear hunt and it was entirely satisfactory from his stand point. He never saw the bear again, in fact he never sought another encounter. Mrs. Arnold has a bear story of her own that is as moving as Captain Bill's. There lived on Wolfe Creek, about three miles east from Greenville, in the pioneer days, Uncle Ben Anderson and his wife, Prudence and their large family of children. There were several boys, Nathan, afterwards Captain Nathan Anderson of Hunt County Company in the Civil War, Jim, Louis, Marck, and others. Uncle Ben and Aunt Pridence were staunch Methodists and had erected a brush arbor for a Methodist Meeting. There were then no churches and everybody went out to Uncle Ben's to hear the circuit rider expound on the doctrines of sin and redemption, and Catherine Oldham with the rest. The meeting was going good one Sunday morning n the early fifties when two half grown bear cubs that the Anderson boys kept for pets "got loose" and attended services. The meeting was suddenly adjourned without the benediction. Just what happened to the Anderson boys was never related. Uncle Bill is the last of our trail drivers. In the spring of 1861 he left Hunt county in charge of 300 steers belonging to Matt Waters, afterwards, Captain Matt Waters, of the Civil War, bound for Leavenworth, the wild and wooly. He had several cow boys and an ox wagon. They made the trip in good time, about thirty five days in a rainy season, fording every stream and swimming many, and without stampedes until they got to Parson, Kansas, when the whole three hundred wild Texas steers took a scare and stampeded down the main street of the town to t a stream and then up [its] course, but with the road, for several miles Capt. Arnold says he expected all the sheriff's force and police of the county to be after him, but he escaped. Waters went on ahead to sell the cattle and meet him in Leavenworth. In the meantime, the first guns of the Civil War had been fired. They sold their cattle and were [walking] down the main street of Leavenworth, when they overheard from a group of men on the sidewalks "there goes a bunch of damn Texans now." Water suggested they hunt a clothing store, which was done and the whole outfit emerged minus leather breeches and other typical western Texas cress and arrayed in the garb of typical western Yankees. They started for home, but intended to buy a heard of sheep to bring back to [Texas], and stopped at Greenfield, Mo., for that purpose, but bought no sheep. A short time after their arrival at Greenfield, a detachment of Yankee soldiers surrounded the home of General Collee in plain view of their hotel and took him prisoner. Their hostess of the hotel warned them to get out of town at once. She knew they were from Texas and being a southern sympathizer, was friendly. When she warned them "they stood not upon the order of their going, but went at once," leaving word and direction with the hotel lady by the boy with the wagon could follow them. He came up with them late that night. Reaching Texas several weeks later, they joined Capt. J.G. Stevens Company, D, 13th Dismounted Texas Cavalry and marched north to join the army in Arkansas. The company was a large one and was divided at Fort Arbuckle in the Indian Territory into two companies "D" and "I" and Matt Waters was made Captain of Company I. Captain Arnold saw service in Arkansas, and in Louisiana with General Polgnac at Mansfield. He was made deputy forage master for his regiment in 1863 and saw much service over southwest Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas. He took part several years ago as captain of his local camp of Confederate Veterans in the dedication and unveiling of the monuments erected at Mansfield, La., to General Dick Taylor and the wife and daughter of his old general, the daring and efficient Frenchman, Polgnac. When asked how old he was, Uncle Bill drew himself up and said, "Not old at all, Sir. I am ninety-five years young. I was born in 1837." But Uncle Bill ran true to masculine form when he asked what year he and Aunt Kate were married. He said, "Why it was the year the grasshoppers were so bad," but his wife said, "Oh, pshaw, Mr. Arnold, it was October 31, 1867." Men were never good historians in so far as personal dates are concerned, only the main facts in their memory. We men must have an alibi on occasion. As Mrs. Arnold was relating some of her experiences to the narrator of this story about two years ago, she was busily engaged with her quilt scraps and the patching on a star pattern quilt, making quilts at eighty-six after the evening meal for pastime. To our expression of surprise that she should be so engaged Uncle Bill with becoming pride, "I want to show you her prize quilt made in 1871." Over his wife's protest he went into another room and disordered a bed by stripping off the quilt to show it to me. Upon it were pieced tulips, roses, vines, leaves, and bunches of grapes. It was exhibited in either 1875 or 1876 at the Dallas Fair and took a ten dollar first prize. The trip was made from Greenville to Dallas in a two horse wagon lone before railroad days. The family camped in Dallas and spent several days seeing and enjoying the Fair. I am not an expert judge of needlework and quilts but those Dallas judges of yesteryears evidently knew quilts. This same quilt has been shown many times since in needle exhibits and has always been accorded first place. Uncle Bill to my expression of surprise that his wife was still making quilts, said she has always been a quilt maker. She replied, "Yes because he has always been losing them for me. He lost eleven for me on one camp hunt." This may sound rather natural to some people who may read these lines and remind them of their own camp hunts, lost quilts and indignant women folk. Mrs. Arnold has another quilt "The Wreath of Roses," that is also a prize winner and it looks the part. She made it in 1873. This splendid couple representing the best type of Texas pioneers are facing life's westerning sun and are contented and beloved by their children, grandchildren and hosts of friends and heighbors. *********** L.L. Bowman, "Life of W.M. Arnold," Greenville Evening Banner, August 18, 1932.