Andrew Jackson Sowell was a native Texan born August 2, 1848 in Seguin, Texas to Asa Jarmon Lee Sowell and Mary Mildred Turner Sowell, one of about thirteen children born to the couple. He was named for an uncle of whom it is said fought in many major battles of the Texas Revolution including the Battles of Gonzales, Concepcion, the Grass Fight and others. The uncle was serving with the garrison of the Alamo but happened to be away on assignment with Byrd Lockhart buying cattle for the garrison when the Mexican seige began out or he would have died there. The uncle took part in the Council House Fight, the Battle of Plum Creek, the Battle of Salado Creek and served in the Mexican-American War. A large contingent of the Sowell family had come to Texas from Tennessee as a group around 1829, settling along the Blanco River.
Asa J. L., the father, was born in Tennessee in 1822 so A. J. was about seven years old when the family group came to Texas. He did not have as extensive a military career as his brother but he and other brothers served in Matthew Caldwell’s Gonzales Rangers. Asa and Mary Mildred Turner married in 1844. Their fathers had both served under Andrew Jackson in the southern theater of the War of 1812 though the Turners had not come to Texas until about 1840. Asa and Mary’s brother Calvin are noted for having helped Prince Solms to guide German settlers to the New Braunfels area to settle. According to the Gonzales County Historical Commission, he served as as a district clerk and later as a judge. Asa died at the age of 55 in 1870. His wife Mary died three years later and both are buried in Seguin.
A. J. was married to Mary Lillian Tinsley on February 15, 1872. She had been born in 1856 in Gonzales county to Captain F. G. and Sarah A. Tinsley. Her grandparents had come to Texas as colonists under Green DeWitt. Captain Tinsley and members of the Sowell family had taken part in the battle at Gonzales in which Mexican forces tried to take the legendary “Come and Take It” cannon. Mary Lillian’s grandfather was also a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
A. J. had joined the Texas Rangers a little over one year prior to his marriage, enlisting in Captain Baker’s Ranger Company at the age of 22. Most biographical sketches state that he took part in the campaign against the Wichita Indians in 1870 and 1871. During his years with the Rangers, he served as a scout, a trailer and fought in battles with the Indians. After leaving the Rangers in the early 1880s, he turned his attention to farming and writing about certain people and events in Texas history. Sowell included his own experiences in some of his books.
The books he wrote are as follows:
- “Rangers and Pioneers of Texas” (1884). This book is also sometimes referred to as “Raiders and Pioneers of Texas” in biographical sketches. An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from July 17, 1949 had a short excerpt from the volume. It quotes an anecdote about Jim Bowie and the famous hunting knife he was known to carry. Sowell’s grandfather John Sowell was a gunsmith in Gonzales. In the story, A. J. Sowell recounted a visit by Bowie to his grandfather Sowell’s shop. Some time earlier, Bowie had cut himself in an Indian fight using a version of the knife. It had no guard between the wooden handle and the blade and during an altercation, his hand had slipped down past the handle, resulting in a bad cut. Bowie had an idea for a guard that would keep the user’s hand from slipping down to the blade and carved a pattern out of wood. He asked the elder Sowell if he could make a metal one like it, which Sowell did. Bowie was satisfied and Sowell asked him if he could name the knife. Bowie consented and Sowell named it the “Bowie knife,” according to the tale.
- “Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas” (1890). This volume was a well detailed and researched account of the early days in Texas. According to a 1986 newspaper article by historian Mike Cox, one printing was 844 pages long but most of the early unsold copies were destroyed in a fire. Since the fire, there were later reprints, which sold out. Surviving copies were selling at high prices 40 years ago. Cox noted that celebrated author J. Frank Dobie personally lauded the work and complimented Sowell by referring to him as a “chronicler.” Cox added the account of an event in which Captain Jack Hays sent four Rangers out to look for Indians in 1844. At a riverside out of San Antonio, they decided to take a break. Two of them took off their clothes, rode their horses into the water and went swimming to cool off. Sure enough, a group of Indians surprised and attacked them. The two swimmers were wounded but managed to survive by hiding in some driftwood. They escaped and made their way back to the fort thinking their partners had been killed. The story unfolded that all four Rangers had managed to survive, including the two embarrassed and sunburned swimmers. This book also includes an account of the Cow Camp attack on Hondo Creek near D’Hanis in which three young men aged 12 to 22 were attacked at their camp. One young man was killed, another was captured and the third escaped on horseback to tell the story.
- “Life of Big Foot Wallace” (1899). This may have been his most widely circulated book. It is a respected account of the great Ranger. According to a Houston Post article in 1941, the book included many stories about Wallace, including one incident in which the Ranger took one of his wounded men away from an army surgeon because the doctor did not believe in and would not apply prickly pear cactus poultices to his man’s wounds. Sowell had also commented that rattlesnakes were so large and numerous that Rangers chasing bandits occasionally might reign up when the bandits would try to escape through patches of prickly pear and how some of the bandits died of rattlesnake bites.
- “History of Fort Bend County” (1904). A history of the county.
- “Incidents Connected with the Early History of Guadalupe County Texas” (date unknown). A History of the county.
A. J. moved to Center Point, Kerr County, in 1899 and lived there for the rest of his life. His wife Mary Lillian died of consumption three years later in June of 1902 while in Del Rio. Two of their daughters had also died of the same illness, one of whom had died in Uvalde only two months earlier. Mary Lillian is buried in Uvalde alongside her daughter Emma Henrietta.
A grandson recalled that A. J. would sit on his front porch and talk about his books and his experiences. Sowell was in the process of writing an article on the Texas Rangers for a San Antonio newspaper when he died at Santa Rosa Hospital in Bexar County. After a funeral at his home, Sowell was buried in Center Point Cemetery in Seguin.
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