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Texas Tales

published: February 19th 2010
by: MIke Cox

Thanks to digital technology and search engines it’s easier than ever today to read and admire the work of a vanished journalistic breed – the paragrapher.
    “Paragrapher” is an archaic term for someone who wrote fillers (usually one-sentence trivia items or jokes) and other short pieces for newspapers back in the day when they were produced with hot metal.
    A paragrapher (the British preferred “paragraphist”) was not a full-fledged reporter or editor, though both of those jobs required the construction of paragraphs. But reporters and editors wrote long strings of paragraphs hopefully connected with artful transitions. A paragrapher would be content with a series of unconnected paragraphs or even a page of pithy sentences for which he was paid by the inch of type. The word enjoyed its heyday, as did paragraphers, in the last quarter of the 19th century and first decade or two of the 20th century.
    Herewith, a sampling of anonymous paragraphing from early-day Texas newspapers:
    “A California physician has discovered a new disease — love madness, and has been experimenting with persons afflicted therewith, and has produced the ‘love parasite,’ or bacillus mierocus. This he cultivated to the 20th generation, and with the parasites of that generation he inoculated a number of subjects. The inoculation was invariably successful, symptoms of the disease appearing in a very short time after the operation. A bachelor, aged 50 years, on the first day after inoculation, had his whiskers dyed, ordered a suit of new clothes and a set of false teeth, bought a top buggy, a bottle of hair restorer, a diamond ring and a guitar, and began reading Byron's poems. The inoculation produced symptoms of the same nature in a ‘young’ lady of 45. She spent $5 at a drug store for cosmetics, got a lot of new hair and a croquet set, sang ‘Empty is the Cradle,’ sent out invitations for a party and complained that the ‘nice young men did not go into society.’ An inoculated youth of 17, employed in a country store did up a gallon on molasses in a paper bag, and also, in a fit of absent-mindedness, put the cat in the butter-tub, and threw some fresh butter out of the window. Finally, he sat down in a basket of eggs while looking at the photograph of a pretty girl, and was discharged for his carelessness.”
    (Originally published in Peck's Sun and reprinted in a Texas newspaper during the 1880s, this long example of a paragrapher’s work was found pasted in an old scrapbook.)
    The next item concerns former Gov. Oran B. Roberts (known as “The Old Alcalde,” he served from 1879-1883):
    “The San Antonio Express is confident the assaults of the press cannot confuse Governor Roberts, and adds: “He gets ‘off wrong’ at times, but laughs in his sleeve at the papers poking him up, well knowing that by his peculiar manipulations he will get around to the right side all in good time, and make the average citizen believe he has been there all the time, and forced the editors who had been obeying him to come to his support.’”
    Whoever wrote that then felt moved to rhyme, another example of the paragrapher’s skill set:
    “Ye Alcalde smoketh his old cob pipe,
    And quaffeth his toddy, and
    His yea is yea
    And his nay is nay,
    And his strongest oath – “You be d----d.”
    “Ye editor puncheth – but puncheth in vain,
    For ye punchee doth smile and look bland –
    As Alcalde, serene,
    He sips his poteen,
    And saith to ye scribe – “You be d----d.”
    It never got the recognition that O. Henry received for his humorous sheet, The Rolling Stone, but a funny publication issued monthly in Austin by one K. Lamity Bonner in the early 1900s, got off plenty of good barbed paragraphs in its day:
    “One of the greatest mysteries on earth to me, is how any gentleman can leave his home and business, come to Austin, pay high room rent, high table board, work all day for the State, and buy anything like a descent stack of chips and play poker all night on $5 per day. To say the least of it, such a man is not only a patriot, but a financier of rarest ray serene, of whom his constituency may well feel proud.”
***
    When the boy returned home that day he told his parents a story as horrifying as it was unbelievable.
    He had gone to San Felipe Springs, north of what is now Del Rio, to tend to his family’s goat herd. He said he arrived in time to find a pack of wolves attacking the terrified stock. Among the wolves, he continued, was a strange creature. Though running on all fours like the other wolves, it appeared to be a naked girl.
    The beautiful Devil’s River, which flows 94 miles from Sutton to Val Verde County, belongs to Texas. But the story of the Devil’s River wolf girl belongs to the world.
    The tale had become part of border country folklore even before the river got its modern name in September 1848. That happened when former Texas Ranger Capt. Jack Hays and a party of men hoping to blaze  a wagon road from San Antonio to El Paso rode up on the stream. Looking down on it from a bluff in the middle of nowhere, Hays listened as his guide told him they had reached the San Pedro River.
    “Saint Peter’s, hell,” Hays supposedly spat. “It looks like the devil’s river to me.”
    Thirteen years earlier, in 1835, an Englishman named John Dent and his pregnant wife Mollie Pertul Dent came to the San Pedro-Devil’s River and built a crude shelter. Originally from Georgia, the couple had come to that remote area so Dent could trap beaver along the Devil’s River north of present Del Rio. They camped near what would become Juno at a spot on the river he named Beaver Lake.
    All went well until one night during a thunderstorm that May when Mollie went into labor. When it became evident that she was having problems, Dent saddled up to ride to the home of a Mexican goat herder to get help for his wife.
    After explaining the situation, Dent was struck by lighting and killed. The goat herder and perhaps others rode to the lake, only to find Mollie dead. She clearly had managed to deliver her baby, but it was nowhere to be seen. Noting wolf tracks all around the campsite, the Mexicans concluded a wolf had devoured the newborn.
    A decade later, the story goes, people began to see a naked girl running with wolves. Though the boy who reported the first sighting was not believed, a couple of years later, a Mexican woman said she had seen two large wolves and a naked girl ripping into the carcass of a freshly killed goat. As she neared the creatures, she said, they ran off. At first, the girl traveled on her hands and legs, but eventually got up on her legs to keep up with the fleeing wolves.
    Soon, others claimed to have seen the wolf girl. At some point, no dates go with this part of the story, a group of vaqueros rode out and managed to capture the wolf girl in a canyon. 
    The vaqueros took her to a nearby ranch and offered her food, water and clothing – all of which she rejected. Locked in a room, she howled pitifully. Before long, other wolves answered her calls. And the howling kept getting closer and closer. Finally, a pack of wolves closed in on the ranch owner’s corralled livestock. As the vaqueros shouted and shot to drive off the attacking lobos, the wolf girl broke out of captivity and disappeared into the night with the other animals.
    The next morning the vaqueros mounted up again in search of the wolf girl, but their effort proved fruitless. Her last reporting sighting came in 1852.    
    Stories of humans raised by wolves go back a long time, all the way to the classic tale of Romulus and Remus. While that story had its origins in the days of the Roman Empire, the Indian subcontinent seems to be the locale for most wolf girl stories.
    One source says roughly a hundred wolf child stories have been reported in English, more in other languages. While the Devil’s River wolf girl legend is not unique from a world-wide perspective, it’s one of Texas’ most enduring folk tales.