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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    "Rangering"
    in Hamilton County

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    The nation was barely a year away from the beginning of its cataclysmic Civil War, but in the spring of 1860, folks along Texas’ frontier had a more immediate problem on their minds – incursions by hostile Indians.

    Two weeks out of each month, 23-year-old Isaac Gann volunteered his time to serve with a home-grown ranging company in Hamilton County. The other two weeks, he tended to his farming and stock raising. While not on the state payroll as a regular Texas Ranger, Gann and his comrades-in-arms were rangers in function. In a way, they had a better incentive than money to scout the countryside, protecting their families as neighbors.

    Gann, having heard that Hamilton County had good grazing, had driven his cattle there from his home in Angelina County in 1858. He planned to have his family join him as soon as he felt it safe. But two years after he moved there from East Texas, Hamilton County was not safe. Indian raids were common, settlers losing livestock at a minimum, their lives at worst.

    On March 5, 1860, somewhere in Hamilton County, Gann had time to sit down and write his wife “a few lines to let you know that I am yet in the land of the living and I hope that you are in better health than I am.” He continued: “I have been out Rangering an taken the flux and it jerked me down mightily.” (Flux was the 19th century way of saying “diarrhea.”)

    But that was enough about health issues.

    “I want you to get someone to attend to my mares in the spring if you can,” he went on, obviously just putting things down on paper as he thought of them.

    The matter of his horses off his mind, Gann got as sentimental as he would get by noting he would “like to see you and the children mighty well.” Until then, “you must write me as often as you can.” After adding that his father Solomon, who also rode with his company, was doing well, Gann returned to his wife’s honey-do list.

    “Tell mother…to take care of what corn she’s got for I don’t expect to make much here [at the Hamilton County place] and well if anybody is attending to the place [in Angelina County], let them work the oxens and if they ain’t I want you to turn the oxens out. I want them to be as fat as they can agin we move. Send me a pair of pantaloons and a shirt as quick as you can.”

    And the list went on. Gann wanted to know where his brother and nephew were as well as his brother-in-law. He wanted his mother to write him “what the times is there.”

    “Times is very hard here,” he pointed out. “Corn is from 10 to 11 dollars [a bushel.]”

    Finally, he wrote, he didn’t know when he would be home. “So I must come to a close by remaining your husband until death,” he concluded.

    Somber as that sounded, that death lay a long way off. Gann survived his “Rangering” and also made it through Confederate military service. By the time he died on March 4, 1906, he and his wife had raised seven children (five of them living until adulthood). On top of that, the Ganns took in three of their grandchildren when one of their daughters died in childbirth.

    The oldest of those children was Vernie March Walker. She was 10 when her mother died and she and a younger brother and sister went to live with the Ganns in 1902. Eight years later she got married and would have five children. Fortunately for posterity, she acquired the letter her grandfather had written as a young home guard ranger in 1860 and later made it available for inclusion in a sketch of her family published in a history of Hamilton County.

    By 1924, when Frontier Times magazine ran a story on a birthday celebration for Mrs. Gann that included some of her recollections of early days in Hamilton County, she had 50 grandchildren, 7 great-grandchildren and 2 great-great-grandchildren. She lived on another eight years, joining her husband in death on March 3, 1932.


    © Mike Cox -
    October 6 , 2011 column
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