A Word Edgewise |
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A Word Edgewise |
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Last Updated 11/10/05
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Email: mjclen@our-town.com
NO BREAD FOR THE GRAVY
By Mary Joe Clendenin
“Before reading TALES OF OLD-TIME TEXAS, by J. Frank Dobie, I pictured the colonists eating wild game and cornbread, cornpone in abundance. That might be a true picture in cowboy days when ranches were started and farmers were established, but even before that, in the 1820s no grain was available.
According to a grandma tale, verified in essentials by documents,
the first corn crop raised by English-speaking people in Texas depended on a pointed
stick and a hound dog. Grandma and her family came in an ox-drawn wagon, along
with two or three other families, all bound for homesteads near the mouth of
the Colorado River, where the schooner “Lively”, commissioned by Stephen F.
Austin, was to land farm tools and supplies from New Orleans.
Grandma and her sister,
with their milk cow, walked behind the family wagon nearly all the way. In the
heavily loaded wagon was a sow. One morning the family awoke to find that the
sow had a litter of six pigs. Then the sow died and the pigs were left orphans.
At night grandma and her little sister took them into their pallet and there
the pigs were kept warm. They drank some of the cow’s milk. The weather was
turning cold, but by day the jolting of the pigs’ box in the wagon helped to
keep them warm. Every night the pigs slept in the pallet.
About Christmas the family reached the mouth of the
Colorado, but the Lively hadn’t made it. The men built a cabin, and
while they waited for the supplies(which never arrived) arrived, they
hunted.
The people ate venison for bread and bear steak for meat.
Sometimes they had honey out of trees. They had a little corn,
but they were keeping it to plant.
The Colorado River bottom was covered with a heavy growth
of reed cane. One day the dogs ran a bear into this canebrake and the boys set
it afire. The cane fire popped and roared like a gun battle, leaving the land
covered with ashes and as loose and mellow as plowed ground.
Then Grandma took a pointed stick and punched holes
in rows while her sister dropped a grain of corn in each hole. In a few days,
in the warm sunshine, the corn was sprouting, but so was a cover of the cane
coming back. The planters had neither plow nor hoe, but each morning they walked
into the field with sticks and knocked down the cane sprouts. They did that
until the corn sprouts were large enough to shade out the cane.
When the roasting ears were about to make,
bears and coons began to eat up the crop. Grandma
tied an old hound in the middle of the patch. He’d
bark and howl all night and scare the varmints away.
The family ate fresh corn,
roasting the ears in ashes. Even before it was
hard, they were making cornbread. That summer
they got farming equipment from the East.
Captain Jesse Burnam, the first settler up the
Colorado River, and his family went for nine months without bread
of any kind. He reported later that one day a man from lower down t
he country came up and told him that he had corn planted with a s
tick. Captain Burnam said, “I gave him a horse for twenty bushels
and went sixty miles after it with two horses, and loaded eight
bushels on each of them and walked back home. Before I left home
I had prepared a mortar to beat the corn in, and made a sieve of
deerskin stretched over a hoop with holes punched in it. I always
had young men about me for protection, and they would generally
beat the corn. Then we would have to be very saving and were
allowed only one piece of bread around.
Another settler, Noah Smithwick from
Kentucky stopped by the Burnam place the next year, just as
corn was ready for roasting and they were having a feast.
They boiled it and fried it, and roasted it, either by standing
the husked ears on end before the fire and turning until brown,
or by burying husk and all in the hot ashes—the sweetest way
green corn was ever cooked..
Dobbie said the Smithwick wrote down many ways
he saw people cook corn.
So, enjoy your cornbread—wheat bread, too, but it traveled slower
to Texas. Have a good day—and think two or three times before you wish to go
back to the old days. You might get your wish, just for punishment.
May the Lord keep me safe from my many silly wishes and may he keep you too.