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Not
long after retired history teacher-tennis coach John Kniffen bought
his place on the San Saba River east of Menard
and moved to West Texas from Tyler he got an interesting telephone
call.
Though newly arrived in the county, Kniffen had already developed
a reputation as one of the go-to folks in Menard
anytime a history question comes up. But the woman on the phone had
a question for which he had no answer.
She was looking for the grave of her great-great-great grandfather,
supposedly buried somewhere in the vicinity.
“What was his name?” Kniffen asked.
“T.B. Smith,” she answered. “He’s supposedly buried somewhere along
the river,” she added.
A few folks knew of a solitary tombstone surrounded by a fence in
a live oak mott east of Menard
off what locals call River Road (FM 2092), but not Kniffen.
“My son Barry and I started walking the river toward town and before
long we found it,” Kniffen said. The white marble obelisk inside a
rusty-if-ornate iron fence bears this inscription: |
T. B. Smith
Born Jan. 14, 1833
Died Jan. 10, 1871
No pain, no grief
No anxious tear
Can reach the peace
In sleeper here |
Delighted
to have finally found her forebear’s resting place, the woman told
Kniffen the rest of the story as it had been passed down in her family.
“Smith lived somewhere down the river, within five miles of town,”
Kniffen began. “His great-great-great granddaughter said he wasn’t
all there, somewhat mentally challenged.”
One day, the second date on his tombstone, a group of rowdy cowboys
rode up as Smith walked along River Road a little more than a mile
from town. One of them had the bright idea of making Smith “dance”
while dodging bullets fired at his feet.
Surely drunk, one of the cowboys either shot too high and wounded
the hapless man or did so deliberately. Whatever happened, the others
started shooting at Smith, putting multiple bullet holes in him.
Newly incorporated in 1871, Menard
had little or no local law enforcement. And the Texas Rangers had
not yet evolved into state police officers.
Even so, the cowboys knew they had done wrong. One of them, possibly
more somber than his colleagues, knew where some Indians were camped.
And according to the story Kniffen heard, the cowboys actually got
along with them.
The woman told Kniffen the killer cowhands rode to the Indian camp,
likely on the nearby pecan-shaded river, and asked if they could have
some arrows. While it is hard to imagine any group of Indians on the
frontier being that neighborly in 1871, they are supposed to have
given the culprits a handful of arrows.
Thus equipped, the cowboys rode back to the scene of their crime and
inserted the arrows into the bullet holes in their hapless victim.
Then, they covered the body with a large flat rock.
Clearly, the story has almost as many holes probability-wise as the
unfortunate Mr. Smith supposedly suffered. But one thing is certain:
The grave is there, and there is a large, irregularly shaped flat
rock above it.
Alas,
an article written in 1967 by former Menard
newspaper editor Robert Weddle for the Edwards Plateau Historian offers
another story that seems more plausible. Better known as Tull Smith,
he built the first house in Menard
in 1864. On Jan. 10, 1871, on the way back to Menard
from a horse-buying trip, someone shot him from ambush and made off
with his new horse.
Had the killer bothered to look in the pocket of Smith’s vest, he
would have found two silver dollars borrowed only a short time before
from a rancher who lived near Peg Leg station, a stagecoach stop between
Mason
and Menard
that Smith had recently passed through. Weddle’s article does not
say whether Smith’s killer was ever brought to justice.
Revisiting the grave recently, Kniffen found five other flat stones
beneath the oaks.
“The river does not have that kind of rocks,” Kniffen said. “To get
those, you’d have to pack them down from the Luckenbach Mountains,
which are well to the south of the grave.”
Given that stones that large are not naturally occurring in that immediate
area, they may mark other graves.
Another Menard County
history buff and story teller, Carlton Kothmann, said he knew of the
grave under the trees and had always heard it had been filled by the
victim of an Indian attack. He had never heard the arrows-in-the-corpse
story told by Smith’s relative until Kniffen passed it along.
“History,” Kothmann offered in perspective, “is not what happened
but what’s recorded.” |
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