Depending upon where you may have heard of Sally Scull, you might get the impression that she was a Texas Civil War heroine, a “black widow” husband-killer or just about anything between the two. You may also see her name spelled Skull as well as Scull, but for this purpose, we will use the latter. She had a reputation for being able to shoot as straight with her left hand as with her right. She usually carried two six shooters, often wore mens’ clothing and had a rough vocabulary that she used freely, and often.
XIT Ranch
(image credit: tshaonline.org)
The XIT was once one of the largest ranches in Texas, comprising 3 million acres along the Texas-New Mexico border in the Panhandle area of the state. In 1879, the State of Texas was looking for funds with which to build the Capitol building. The Texas Legislature appropriated the remote Panhandle acreage to a syndicate led by Illinois natives John and Charles Farwell in exchange for an agreement to build the Austin structure. The original cost of the Capitol building was projected to be $1,500,000 but wound up costing about $3.7 million with the syndicate funding all but about $500,000 that the state picked up.
Continue reading XIT RanchClyde Barrow, Jailbreak in McLennan County
While living in Waco, I would occasionally drive past the old McLennan County courthouse. I had seen the feature film Bonnie and Clyde when it was on its first run. However, I assumed that both Bonnie and Clyde had escaped from the jail at the McLennan County Courthouse in the midst of their short crime spree. Years later I learned the details about how Bonnie had helped Clyde and two others escape.
James Buchanan Gillett, Texas Ranger
If you are looking for a good book about Texas history, Six Years With the Texas Rangers is very well written and quite interesting, first published in 1921. Though James B. Gillett was a Ranger for only six years, these were some of the six most important years for the post-Reconstruction Rangers in the Frontier Battalion.
Continue reading James Buchanan Gillett, Texas RangerWWII Prisoner of War Camps in Texas
At the outset of the war, foreign prisoners of war were not a major consideration for the federal government, but as the war progressed, tens of thousands of foreign prisoners needed to be placed all over the United States. At the height of the program, Texas had some three dozen prison camps. They were located from as far north as Dalhart, as far west as El Paso, in the northeast to within a few counties of Texarkana to several on the Gulf Coast. In all, it is estimated that the United States held between 400,000 and 500,000 prisoners with roughly 20% of them held in Texas camps. The Geneva Convention provided that prisoners be moved to areas that were close to the climate where they were captured. Accordingly, many of Texas’ prisoners of war were German prisoners who surrendered in North Africa and Texas was deemed to be an appropriate site for them.
Texas History Notebook 