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Texas Tales

published: October 17th 2008
by: MIke Cox

One of the most romantic stories in the lore of the Old West originated at Fort Davis. The tale has been told and retold in all media. And now it’s on the internet. It’s the story of Indian Emily and goes like this:
    In the late 1860s, an Apache female fell wounded in a skirmish between cavalry troops stationed at Fort Davis and her band. The soldiers took her back to the fort, where a Mrs. Eason nursed her back to health and named her Emily. The Indian girl grew up on the post and eventually fell in love with Mrs. Eason’s son, Lt. Tom Eason.
    But the soldier married a girl of his own culture and the broken-hearted Emily returned to her people.
    Some time later, so the story goes, the Apaches planned a major assault on the fort. Emily, in an act of selfless love, slipped away from her village in the middle of the night to warn the young officer.
    As she approached the fort a jittery sentry shot her. She died in Mrs. Eason’s arms after telling her of her everlasting love for Lt. Eason and of the impending attack on Fort Davis.
    They buried Indian Emily in the post cemetery. After the Army abandoned the garrison in 1891, the graves of most of the soldiers were relocated to the National Cemetery in San Antonio. Emily, however, was left behind. 
    The story goes back to 1919, when Carlyle Graham Raht included it in his book, “Romance of the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend Country.” Raht said he got the tale confirmed by Henry O. Flipper, the first African-American graduate of West Point and a one-time lieutenant at Fort Davis.
    During the Texas centennial in 1936, the state placed a granite marker at Emily’s grave. The inscription reduced her story to 38 words, concluding that she had “saved the garrison from massacre.”
    Alas, though touching, the account of Indian Emily and her valiant death is pure folklore.
    In 1969 as a reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times, I had a hand in exposing it as such. I interviewed Franklin Smith, then superintendent of the Fort Davis National Historic Site, and asked him about the Indian Emily story.
    “All evidence points against it,” he said.
    In fact, he continued, National Park Service historians had refuted every aspect of the story.
    For one thing, Smith said, the National Archives had no record that a Lt. Tom Eason was ever stationed at the fort. Further, researchers had found no record a person by that name ever served in the U.S. Army prior to 1903.
    The park superintendent said the military kept pretty good records, better than most people would think.
    Those records also showed that Fort Davis never experienced an attacked by hostile Indians and that no attack ever had been seriously anticipated.
    Smith, who had done socio-anthropological studies of the Apache culture, also said Emily did not behave like an Apache woman in the story. “Her general behavior was, well…very un-Apache,” he said.
    Though the legend has Emily being wounded during the fight with the soldiers, according to Smith, “Apache women didn’t do any fighting except under dire circumstances.”
    Too, the circumstances of her supposed capture did not ring true.
    “Normally,” he said, “when Indian dependents were captured, they were cared for as best as the Army could. They were usually farmed out to boarding schools. They were not normally kept around the forts.”
    Smith said someone likely dreamed up the story after reading one too many Victorian romances.
    Sometime after my interview with Smith the NPS removed the piled stones from Emily’s purported grave, cut off access to the site and even took down the heavy historical marker, storing it along with other artifacts associated with the fort.
    The late Barry Scobee, one of the frequent tellers of the Indian Emily story, went to his own grave believing it contained at least some elements of truth. He set forth two pieces of circumstantial evidence in his 1963 history of Fort Davis.
    Scobee’s Exhibit A came from a military report describing an engagement between three companies of Fort Davis troops under Lt. Patrick Cusack and a party of Indians on Sept. 8, 1868. Following the fight, Cusack’s command returned to the fort with two Mexican children who had been captured by the Indians and “an Indian female child.”
    Since local lore had Emily’s death occurring in 1879 or ’80, Scobee wrote, the child brought in by Cusack more than a decade earlier could have been Emily.
    The writer offered as Exhibit B the recollection of David Merrill, the man who got the government contract to exhume the Fort Davis post cemetery. Merrill related that the military told him to dig up all the remains except for a soldier who had committed suicide and an Indian woman. He said he removed 89 sets of remains, though a later account has the number at 83. No matter the count, he did not remove the Indian burial.
    Scobee wrote that the grave had been marked by a board bearing an inscription that said “Indian Squaw—Died by Accident.” By the time the state put up the historical marker, Scobee continued, the board had disappeared. Warren D. and Herbert D. Bloys, local old timers, pointed out the grave’s location and recalled the no-longer politically correct wording of the wooden grave marker.
     As Scobee wrote: “These bits of ‘evidence’…constitute the supporting circumstances of Emily’s reality.”
    For a story teller, killing off a legend is a mighty hard thing, almost as tough as putting down a good horse with a broken leg. Fortunately, a story does not have to be true to be engaging. 
***
    Eight-year-old Viola Helen Anderson did not grasp that the U.S. stood on the brink of a financial crisis that would come to be called the Panic of 1906. All the San Angelo girl cared about was that her daddy had died.
    On a cold, rainy day that winter, a big load of merchandise arrived at the March Brothers General Store on Beauregard. That’s where her father worked and no matter the weather, he insisted on supervising the wagon’s unloading.
    Richard Anderson took a cold which developed into pneumonia. Back then doctors called it the galloping consumption. He died on Jan. 16 and they buried him in Fairmount Cemetery.
    “He was a kind and gentle man and we really depended on him,” Helen remembered a lifetime later, “but Mama and I had to keep going, and we did.”
    While Helen attended school, Minta Gafford Anderson supported them in the midst of a growing money shortage by sewing and taking in boarders.
    Across the state, Lizzie Gafford Kincaid and her husband Jim -- Helen’s aunt and uncle – struggled to keep their dry goods store open in the little town of Lindale, north of Tyler. They sold everything from candy to coffins.
    “Mama and Aunt Lizzie were very close,” Helen said, “but Mama didn’t have much use for Uncle Jim, who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Mama’s family’s farm in Mississippi had been destroyed by Yankees and more than 40 years hadn’t dulled her memory.”
    When school let out for the summer, the new widow and her daughter packed their big trunk and took the train to East Texas. While her mother spent time with her sister, visiting, sewing and helping with the canning, Helen made friends with the daughter of the man who owned the hotel adjacent to the railroad.
    Behind the hotel, Helen and the other little girl laid rocks on the ground to make the outline of an imaginary house. Finding scattered pieces of broken china, they used those to set an imaginary table.
    “A train coming in would mean a meal was about to be served at the hotel, so we’d scoot in and collect all the food we wanted from my friend’s mother,” she recalled.
    When her friend could not play, Helen spent time in her family’s store playing solo hide-and-go-seek and freely helping herself to the candy bins.
    They stayed in Lindale most of the summer, finally making the long train ride back to San Angelo in time for the start of school.
    Back in West Texas, Helen missed her friend and their simple playhouse, her aunt and uncle and the candy in their store.
    One day in October, Helen happened to take her time coming home from school. She only hurried when she walked through the old cemetery, where they had been digging up graves to make room for a new high school. Jumping over the open graves, she tried not to notice the coffin handles and shoe heels in the piles of dirt.
“Mama was a little put out with me when I finally got home,” she recalled.
Then Helen noticed a large wooden barrel in the middle of their small kitchen. She assumed it held sugar.    
    “Mama made a lot of preserves, but I couldn’t understand why she would need a whole barrel of sugar,” she said. “Mama pried the boards off the top and I scrambled up on a chair to look inside. All I saw was peanuts.”
    The arrival of a barrel of peanuts seemed even more incomprehensible. Her mother could barely afford the basics, certainly not a luxury like goobers.
    “I was still puzzling over it when she fished inside and pulled out an apron,” Helen said. “Her next thrust produced a sack she handed to me. It was my favorite candy. Mama told me to help her and my first dip brought out a comb and brush Mama said I could have.”
    Finally, Helen understood. Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie had sent them a treasure chest in a 55-gallon barrel. It held assorted notions and knickknacks, clothing, buttons, lace, powder jars, writing tablets for school, pencils, dime novels, fruit, preserves, sweet potatoes, ribbon cane, and persimmons – a veritable general store packed in peanuts.
    “Every October we got our barrel from Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie,” Helen recalled. “Mama never had much money, but the October Barrel wasn’t charity. It was just understood back then that people had to help people. I don’t know how many times Mama got called out in the middle of the night when someone was sick, dead or having a baby.”
    Of course, Minta did things for her sister, too. She even sewed for her Yankee brother-in-law.
The last October Barrel came in 1916.
    “By that time,” Helen said, “I was married and pretty soon after that barrel came, my husband got a job with a newspaper in Fort Worth and we moved. Not long after that, Uncle Jim and Aunt Lizzie sold their store and came back to the San Angelo area.”
    Helen never understood why her aunt and uncle chose to ship the barrel in October instead of before Christmas, but she knew what it meant to a widow and a fatherless girl.
    For the rest of her long life, especially when the days got shorter and the weather turned cooler, my grandmother remembered the October Barrel and what it taught her.  
SLS