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Too
bad Eleanor Jane Hobbs didn’t put more of her recollections down
on paper, but at least she wrote what she did.
On Aug. 31, 1914, her 84th birthday, Mrs. Hobbs wrote a five-paragraph
letter to the editor of the Elgin Courier. Many decades later,
retired Austin police
officer Norris McCord, who grew up in Bastrop County, discovered
the letter plus another she had written and provided them to the
Elgin Historical Association for inclusion in “Elgin,
Etc: Stories of Elgin, Texas,”
a book the organization published in 2008.
Mrs. Hobbs’ letters are at once compelling for their description
of frontier Texas and frustrating in that they don’t go into more
detail.
As
she explained in her first letter, she came with her family to Texas
from Dallas County, Ala. in 1839 when she was seven. They lived
at a couple of places in Bastrop County before the family bought
property on Piney Creek. A few years later, the family settled near
present Young’s Prairie.
Moving from place to place sounds routine, but in the late 1830s
and early 1840s, little about life could be taken for granted.
“After we came back to Mike Young’s [Young’s Prairie], Levay Williams
was killed and scalped by Indians,” Mrs. Hobbs wrote. “I watched
over his body while the men dug his grave.”
At the time, she would have been about 16. And back then, that was
practically grown.
“I was married July 1, 1847 to W.R. Hobbs,” she continued, “who
was then a Texas Ranger and served under Captain Jack Hays on the
Texas Frontier.”
She doesn’t say in her letters, but William Right Hobbs joined the
Rangers on Sept. 15, 1845 and served under Capt. D.C. Cady. When
the Mexican
War broke out in 1846, he was in Hays’ regiment of volunteers,
the Rangers the Mexicans referred to as “lost Diablos Tejanos” (the
Texas Devils.)
The couple married after Hobbs came back to Bastrop County from
his service in Mexico.
“When Mr. Hobbs [he was seven years older than her] would go to
Bastrop, I was left alone and as it took him all day and till late
at night to make the trip,” she wrote. “I would leave the house
while he was away and stay on top of the corn in the crib for fear
of the Indians.”
But Indians didn’t pose the only danger back then.
“Many times I saw buffalo and wild cattle feeding out of the brush
and watched bears catch our hogs,” she continued. “Our nearest neighbor
was Dickie Townsend, four miles away.”
In 1852 the couple settled on what came to be called the Hobbs place.
At the time, their land lay in Bastrop County, but when Burleson
County was organized, that part of Bastrop County went to the new
county. Later still, it became part of Lee County.
“So we lived in three different counties and lived at the same place
and in the same house all the time,” Mrs. Hobbs wrote.
When the Civil
War broke out, Hobbs joined the Confederate Army, but due to a medical
issue received a surgeon’s furlough.
By the Mrs.
Hobbs wrote the two letters published in the Courier, she was the
only survivor among her five siblings. She had come from a big family
and raised a big family.
“I have fourteen
children and 49 grandchildren,” she wrote. “I have divided all I
have among my children and have never regretted it, for all have
an outstretched arm of welcome wherever I go among them.”
Mrs. Hobb’s second letter was published Sept. 24, 1914.
Her husband
had come to Texas at 17, she said.
“He has been in many battles and skirmishes with the Indians and
had much hard fighting to do and has helped in [the] rescue of several
children who had been captured and made prisoners,” she wrote. “He
was out…after Indians and was taking a dispatch to headquarters
and had to run for his life,” she wrote. “The creek was on the rise
and that was all that saved him; they ran to the water’s edge and
shot arrows across at him.”
Again, she mentioned the wildlife that had once been plentiful in
Central Texas.
“I have seen herds of buffalo, deer and wild mustangs grazing near
our home and have stood in my door and seen 25 or 30 run by not
50 yards from the house, which was a pretty sight,” she wrote. “Bears
were plentiful and Mr. Hobbs used to hunt them often. One evening
his hounds treed two bears up one tree, he killed them and brought
them home and we certainly had some eating as I think bear meat
is fine. While we lived near the Yegua [Creek], he killed alligators,
panthers…and various other kinds of animals.”
Hobbs lived until Dec. 21, 1902, dying at the age of 79. His widow
lived on until Feb. 16, 1920. Both are buried in Lawhon Springs
Cemetery near their old homestead in Lee County.
© Mike Cox
- November
30, 2011 column
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