When
a wagon full of soldiers rolled out of old Fort
Belknap early one spring morning in 1867 flanked by horseback troopers, while
doubtless armed, they were not starting out on a scout for Indians.
During
the early years of Reconstruction, despite the Army’s presence at a string of
forts from Jacksboro
on the north to Eagle
Pass on the Rio Grande hostile, Comanches and Kiowa still held sway along
the long frontier dividing the state. And even in the settled areas in the eastern
half of Texas, most men and boys toted pistols in
the near absence of civil law enforcement.
Bad as times were, however,
the fishing was good. The state’s creeks and streams teamed with fish, particularly
catfish, carp and drum. On this particular day, a party of bluecoats gladly gambled
their scalps in hopes of adding a little variety to their diet.
In
“Five Years a Cavalryman,” his classic memoir of Army life in Texas during the
years immediately following the Civil War, H.E. McConnell writes of a fishing
expedition he and some of his fellow soldiers enjoyed in Young County’s Elm Creek.
McConnell, who had served as a volunteer during the Civil War, had joined the
regular Army and gone through cavalry school at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.
With the rank of sergeant, he and several hundred other shavetails assigned to
shore up the Sixth Cavalry traveled by train to Baltimore where they embarked
on a repurposed former blockade runner to Galveston.
From Galveston,
McConnell and a portion of the soldiers went in another vessel to Indianola
on Matagorda Bay and from there to Port
Lavaca in yet another boat. At Port
Lavaca they boarded one of only three railroad lines operating in Texas at
the time for the 30-mile trip to Victoria.
The rest of their journey to Austin,
then the Sixth’s Texas headquarters, was by foot. Finally supplied with horses
in the Capital City, McConnell and his unit rode to Fort Richardson at Jacksboro.
But
that hadn’t been there long when the Army decided to abandon the post. McConnell
liked being on the frontier and managed to wrangle orders to proceed to old Fort
Belknap in Young County to prepare a report on the advisability of re-occupying
that post.
The fort had been vacant since 1861 and stood in sorry shape
when McConnell and his survey detail arrived. McConnell dutifully proceeded with
the preparation of his report, but like any good government employee, he managed
to work in a little free time.
At
dawn one day in early May, McConnell and a party of his men left Fort
Belknap in a converted ambulance. (Back then, an ambulance was a type of wagon,
not a vehicle for carrying injured people to a hospital.) They followed the road
to Camp Cooper for a couple of miles before cutting across the wildflower-covered
prairie, finally stopping at a scenic spot on Elm Creek about 10 miles from the
fort and two miles from the point where the stream emptied into the Brazos River.
Anyone imagining that the soldiers broke out fishing poles and started
digging for worms would be wrong. Though some folks back then did fish with hook
and line, a desire to get the most fish in the most efficient way possible often
trumped sportsmanship. McConnell and his party busied themselves unloading a large
seine belonging to one of the soldiers.
Then the soldiers peeled off their
blue jackets, shucked their heavy boots, rolled up their yellow-striped trouser
legs and waded into the creek with their net.
“We
proceeded to fish and with fine success,” McConnell wrote more than two decades
later. The first sweep of the seine brought up a variety of sizable fish from
the murky green waters of the creek.
But
on their next drag, suddenly the water swirled as something big and mean tangled
in their net. It took the combined strength of the tough horse soldiers to land
their catch—a long-nosed, thick-scaled alligator gar. The big fish, a throwback
to prehistoric times, tore their net in several places before the soldiers could
dislodge it.
The
soldiers threw it back, but every time they dragged the net, the gar ended up
in it. Knowing the gar was too tough to eat, at the suggestion of one of several
reservation Tonkawas who had joined them on the fishing trip, they broke off its
nose in the sand before throwing it back in the creek. That, as McConnell put
it, prevented “further mischief.”
By the time they stopped for lunch,
the cavalrymen had not only filled two barrels with carp (which they called “buffalo
fish”), catfish and turtles, they’d covered the floor of their wagon with flopping
fish. Their prize catch was a 46-pound yellow cat measuring more than four feet
long. In all, McConnell said their seining netted some 500 pounds of fish.
Their
creaking wagon sagging under the load, the tired soldiers made their way back
to Fort Belknap that afternoon.
The normally detailed-minded McConnell did not elaborate in his book, but surely
skillets soon sizzled.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" November
12 , 2009 column |
