Chester William Nimitz came from a German Texas family having a long seafaring tradition. His grandfather, Charles Henry Nimitz, a former seaman of the German Merchant Marine, broke the string when he moved to the Hill Country of Texas to landlocked Fredericksburg and built the hotel that bears the family name.
John Camden West
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
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.
Unsolved Mystery: Billy the Kid
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 KidThe Cowgirl Who Passed Herself Off as a Cowboy
Samuel Dunn Houston told of his experiences on the cattle trails in the latter part of the 1800s. He had worked his way up from being a hand on the trail to being a trail boss, having previously done enough cattle drives that he felt that he had made more trips over the cow trail from Southern Texas and New Mexico than “any man in the country.” He had been engaged by the Holt Live Stock Company of New Mexico to head up a trail drive in the spring of 1888.
Continue reading The Cowgirl Who Passed Herself Off as a Cowboy
