John Camden West, Jr. was a lawyer, a judge, an educator and an author in Waco, Texas. He was born on April 12, 1834 in Camden, South Carolina from which he and his father got their names. He was 20 years old when he graduated from the University of South Carolina. He had a brother, Charles S. West, who by that time was already practicing law in Austin, Texas, and John joined him there in 1855.
Warren Angus Ferris was a surveyor and tracker. He is credited with being one of the first persons to map out Dallas County (prior to the better-known John Neely Bryan) and several other parts of Texas. He was born the day after Christmas in 1810 to Angus and Sarah Ferris of Glen Falls, New York, a family with a Quaker and Puritan heritage. He also had a younger brother named Charles Drake Ferris.
Saturday, December 29, 1950, there was a funeral in Hico, Texas for O. L. Roberts (some accounts call him William Henry Roberts) who claimed to be Billy the Kid. He had come to Hico in the late 1930s from his previous home in Gladewater, claiming to be Billy the Kid, who was born Henry McCarty and also known as William Bonney. We’ll refer to the outlaw as Bonney.
Continue reading Unsolved Mystery: Billy the KidColumbus Marion “Dad” Joiner was a familiar name to folks in the early days of the oilfields in Oklahoma and Texas. The East Texas town of Joinerville is named for him. Joiner is credited for having discovered the East Texas oil field in 1930 when his third wildcat well came in west of Henderson, Texas.
Angelina Peyton Eberly is credited with having saved Austin as the capital of Texas by preventing the state archives from being removed to another location. While her name may not be as familiar as others, her story is one worth knowing.
Texas History Notebook 