January 14, 1894

LIVING OVER THE PAST
For Nearly Fifty Years Mr. Alex Williams of Denton Has Been a Texan.

Reminiscences of Regan and Walker
The Admission of Texas Into the Union
Before and After the War.

Mr. Alex Williams, one of the oldest merchants in Denton, was in Dallas yesterday stopping at the Oriental. There is more silver in his head than in his pocket, though he can still walk more and stand more than an average man for all of his sixty odd years. Mr. Williams is an old-timer. He came to Texas before it was a state. He has seen it admitted into the union and grow great and prosper. He has seen the wilderness east and west and south reclaimed and made to feel the tickling touch of the plow. He has seen cities rise where nothing was, and people come from the four quarters of the earth till Texas stands to-day the fairest common-wealth in the union. He has fought Indians, and wore the gray for four years. He has lived life to the full as it is the privilege of few men to live it.

As he sat in one of the big chairs in the brilliantly lighted corridors of the hotel the other night the old man's mind went back to the past. "I came to Texas in November 1845." he began. The company, in which were Major W. H. Cary of New York, himself an ex-confederate, Hon. Walter S. Baker of Waco and others, ceased chattering politics and gave respectful attention. "There was nothing here then," continued Mr. Williams. "About all there was to Dallas was a whisky barrel and a ferry-boat, both owned and run by John Neeley Bryan. I settled in what is now Collin county, above the town of McKinney. All that section of country north of the Dallas county line to Red river and west to Mexico, now New Mexico, was Fannin county, and Bonham was the county seat. There was not a railroad in the county. Some people seem to think that the boundaries of the Fannin land district and the boundaries of Fannin county were the same, but they were not. My recollection is that the land district was bigger than the county, and its southern boundary was below the northern line of Dallas county. You know how Dallas first got its start? Well, we got to coming down here from the McKinney neighborhood to get our plow points sharpened and we stuck to Dallas. Cedar Springs was the town then, and it came very near being the county seat at one time, but Dallas beat it, and that saved your town. There were not so very many people living around here then. The Cochrans and the Coles and Bryans, Judge Burford and some others, whose names I don't recollect.

"Texas was admitted into the union in 1846, just after I came here. I think the admission was finally consummated in February, 1846. I know there had been considerable squabbling over it, and we were all mighty anxious for it to end. When it did come and the state was admitted we celebrated it in great style all through this neck of the woods. The first election for congressman took place in that year, and David Kaufman was elected from the east and north Texas district. There were only two congressional districts, and some man from the Galveston neighborhood, whose name I can't recall, was the other congressman. Kaufman was from what is now Denton county, and he is the only man who has ever been elected to congress from that town. The election was held in November. It was cold and wet. There were only three voting places in that whole section of the country. One was about ten miles from McKinney, where Gov. Throckmorton's father lived, another was up in what is now Grayson county, a considerable distance below Sherman, and the third was where the town of Lewisville in Denton county is. Despite the weather there was a good vote polled, as we were anxious to show the people of the United States how much we appreciated annexation.

In 1849 occurred the memorable contest between John H. Regan and A. G. Walker for the state senate for the district embracing all of this section. Judge Reagan lived in Kaufman county then, where he had only a short while before married his first wife, Mrs. Musick. Walker married the sister of the oldest one of your Coles here, I don't know which one it is. They had it hot and heavy all over the district. All sorts of charges were made against both Reagan and Walker. One of the charges against Walker was that he had deserted a wife and child in Kentucky and run away to Texas. This made against him and gained votes for Reagan, but Walker was too sharp for the other fellows. He sent back to Kentucky and got a transcript of the record of a court there showing he had been divorced from his wife. This knocked the desertion yarn in the head and Walker was helped by the reaction. He read that transcript from every stump and denounced the people who had circulated the stories on him.

One time during that campaign I saw Judge Reagan speaking from the top of a whisky barrel and Walker sitting on a dry goods box beside him playing a fiddle. I believe that happened here, at Dallas, and it was hard to tell whether the people were listening to Reagan's eloquence or Walker's fiddle. This sort of thing was kept up for a long time and there was a good deal of feeling about it. When election time rolled around all of us were on hand and Walker was elected. Some time after this Judge Reagan's wife died and he removed to Palestine where he has since lived. Walker is dead.
In those days Van Zandt count had a pretty hard name. It was generally regarded as a h++ll of a place. Like east Texas is to-day, Van Zandt was a political storm center and they were always having trouble of some sort of another.  The Van Zandt man was ridiculed about as much when he got into the counties west of there as the Arkansas man is when he comes to Texas.

People began to pour into the state soon after her annexation to the United States. They came in droves from the north, Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas, and from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on the east. I regret to say that not all of them came of their own accord. Some had important engagements with the district judges back there which they forgot to attend to and opposite their names on the dockets are the three well known letters, "G.T.T." Gone to Texas. Many sought this as an asylum to repair grevious losses of one sort or another. We received them all gladly. The man who came from a penitentiary had no questions asked him so long as he behaved himself and attended to his own business. When he got smart and wanted to run the whole country we dug up his past and fired it at him. There were no railroads in this and of the state and all travel was by private conveyance or stages. It was a long, tedious journey from the old states and as most of the immigrants hit the northern end of Texas first they usually stuck here. The counties of Denton, Grayson, Collin, Titus and others were created between 1845 and 1849 and after 1849 the legislatures organized counties at the rate of ten at a time. The most thickly settled portion of north Texas, then as now, was in the district traversed by the Houston and Texas Central. We were on the main roads and were little molested by Indians which were playing the wild around to the west of us in the country now embraced in Tarrant, Wise, Jack, Montague and around in there.

"I did not see much of the Indians till I got back from the war in 1866 and went to Denton county where my folks had moved in 1863 and where we are living yet. In 1867 and 1868 the Indians used to play the wild around in our neighborhood. They would come down in bands or squads and steal all of our horses and cattle. One night in the early part of 1868 I was standing in my door with my family. I saw a whole drove of stock and cows go by, but paid no attention to it, thinking some of the neighbors had got scared of the Indians and were rounding up what they had. The next morning everybody in that whole country had lost his cattle. The Apaches had cut around town and stolen everything in sight. The thing got so bad at last till we organized a sort of volunteer military company to protect our homes and things. We put them a little distance west of town where the Indians usually came and kept them there all winter. Major Jerome C. Kearby of Dallas and his brother, Senator Gallatin Kearby, now of Van Zandt, were members of that company. About all the people in town did was to furnish them guns and ammunition. They killed all the game they could eat and all the Indians they could much after 1870. They commenced getting civilized and preferred getting drunk to stealing horses.

Reverting to Dallas again, Mr. Williams said: "The Cochrans were here when I first came. John and Arch were little children then. We never called them Cochran like you do, but Cawhorn.' That's the way the name was pronounced by every old settler in these parts and I never heard their names called anything else till about the time of the war. Cochran's branch out here was called 'Cawhorn's branch, and by no other name. When I used to see John running wild around here I never did think that little red-headed chap would be a candidate for governor. He used to have enough to take care of himself and he's got it yet.

"The Coles were living here, too, and they were one of the first families.

"When the war came on I was a secessionist. I had been in the south and could not help it. I hated to go against old Sam Houston, but I did. We were all for Wigfall for the senate around here and when he was elected, after a long contest by a very narrow majority, we all celebrated. And then we all went into the war and did the best we could and failed and came back home again and went to work to build up Texas."
"What state are you from, Mr. Williams?" queried Mr. Baker.

Mr. Williams stroked his beard a moment or so and then said: "I'm from Arkansas; now laugh." and the party did.

Mr. Williams went on to say that he was born in the mountains of southwestern Arkansas in the Ozarks, and had come all the way to Texas in a wagon.

Mr. Williams is still actively engaged in business, keeps his own books and goes regularly once a year to New York to purchase his goods. He never drinks ice water or eats ices of any description and has never been confined to his bed two days successively in his life, save when wounded once. He believes in the moderate use of stimulants and always takes his without any water on the side. He does not use tobacco, though he was an inveterate smoker up to a year or two ago. When he had modestly told these things of himself he added that he had always voted the democratic ticket like he takes his liquor - straight.

"Then, of course," added Mr. Waller Baker, "you voted for Hogg two years ago?"

"No, sir," promptly responded Mr. Williams, "I didn't. I voted for George Clark." To demonstrate further that he knows the genuine all-wool-and-a-yard-wide democracy when he sees it.  Mr. Williams said he had been taking The Galveston and Dallas News for more than forty years, and he believes it is the greatest paper in the south.

Mr. Williams left for home on the noon train yesterday.