Rewriting over the last couple of days has been centered around the earliest date and most likely route for the First People’s arrival in Texas. I’ve looked into the Beringian Corridor through the ice when the two glaciers began to pull apart and found that archeologists are struggling to find evidence for a date early enough to explain earlier, solid dates below Beringia. (by the way, Beringia was more than a land bridge, it was a continent the size of Texas). The earliest date of artifacts in the corridor is 14,200 years ago. So I considered the alternative hypotheses for early arrival. There is a good one that has moved from marginal to wide acceptance by archeologists and geneticists – The Kelp Highway. This explanation points out that the ancient Beringians that were holding up in South Beringia, on the Pacific Coast during the harsh Last Glacial Maximum, where they learned the ways of coastal existence, developing a taste for kelp. Traveling south (around 17,000 years ago) from the corridor would have stalled people migrating through different ecosystems, while the Pacific Coast offered the same environment all the way to Tera del Fuego. At any time the people could have followed a river into the interior and where they might decide to follow the herds they found. I rechecked the date of the earliest habitation at Gault (near Austin) by emailing some of the principle diggers and this morning I find that there were people there at 16,500 years ago. And there are other early American sites, like Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania at 16, 000 years ago. These very early people used a dart point (a five-foot shaft launched by a spear-thrower) called the Western Stemmed that pre-dates the Clovis, and guess what? The Gault authorities won’t identify the pre-Clovis as Western Stemmed, but they do say that they resemble each other. So, if there were people living a little south of us – they must also have frequented the Bosque River, that was much, much larger then.

It’s been so long since I submitted the manuscript that new research has come along and the rewriting will have to include the new research. Trying to keep the summary of the First Texans and how they got here brief, I have to resist so much new material – like dogs. Morphological differences between dogs and wolves so subtle that the exact time that dogs became domesticated is vague, some time after 50, 000 years ago. We do know that dogs were domesticated from a now-extinct species of Eurasian wolf. The linage is complicated because dogs kept breeding back with wolves. It’s not until 11,000 years ago that dogs stabilized into five lineages, one of which became the Siberian dog , from which the American dog originated. It is supposed that this dog was brought to America with the First Peoples sometime around 24,000 years ago, though the first actual dog grave wasn’t until 10,000 years ago. These dogs are now all but extinct, being mostly replaced by European breeds – and this is weird, among the survivors of the First Dogs – is the chihuahua. This is all very interesting but it doesn’t help shorten my story about the First Texans.

Jennifer Raff. Origin: A Genetic History of the Americans. New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2022.

I have worked on a history of the Native Peoples along the Bosque River for decades – the working title is When the Bosque Ran Clear. I sent the manuscript to A&M Press and they responded a couple of days ago. They didn’t say no. The editors are divided, one says we can publish the book if you do these things; the other says this manuscript is loaded with problems and we can’t think of publishing it unless you do these major changes. It amounts to re-researching some points and rewriting huge portions of the narrative. I’m retired and should be able yo do this – I”ll post tidbits from this effort as I go.

In late August of 1898, “A tornado struck the south side of Alarm Creek . . . blowing down many trees, tearing the Alarm Creek school in half, throwing people from their wagons, and picking a mule straight up that has yet to be found.” Erath Appeal

Perhaps the oldest liveoak tree in Stephenville is located on Vine Street and is familiar to to those who walk the Bosque Trail. It’s one of those giant, stately trees that in other Texas towns are often the site of treaties or historically important gatherings. But, written accounts of early Stephenville being rare, this tree has no such recorded pedigree. Broken crockery around its base testify that this tree was a witness to historical activity between the Bosque and the square where the first log cabins were built. But the tree, estimated to be around 350 years old, may not last the year. The Stephenville City Council has decided to build itself an office building whose earthwork and parking area intrude dangerously close to the Senior Tree’s root system. Residents have asked the city to preserve the tree’s space without much response. Joe Carter, www.seniorstree.org 1 650 464 8432 will be hosting nightly discussions (5:30-6:30) each night leading up to the City Council meeting on September 6 at his home – 244 North Vine Street. We are hoping enough people show up at the City Council meeting to have an influence on the Council’s decision on the tree.

In late August of 1878, The sheriff of Comanche , with the help of state troops, arrived in Stephenville and “arrested a portion of our best citizens for reasons unknown to us. It is a matter of astonishment.” Waco Examiner

On August 27, 1883, residents of Stephenville reported sounds resembling cannon fire. The stage driver from Cisco said that people all over Eastland County were talking about how strange it was to hear thunder on a clear day. The noise was the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa exploding with the force of many hydrogen bombs. The violent eruption sent dust and gasses into the stratosphere where it circled the globe, cooling the earth that winter. In January of 1884, the Stephenville Empire reported that Erath creeks were frozen several inches and oats were killed in the field. As powerful as it was Krakatoa was ten times less than the history-changing Tambora eruption of 1815, known in the Northeastern states as “The Year without a Summer.”

Fort Worth Gazette; John T. Carr. Texas Droughts: Causes, Classifications and Prediction. No. 30. Austin: Texas Water Development Board, November, 1966; Nathalie Schaller, et. al. “Climate Effects of the 1883 Krakatoa Eruption: Historical and Present Perspectives, Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zurich (2009) 154(1/2): 31-40.

This week in 1891, B.H. Caraway, lost control of his herd of 1500 cattle near Sephenville during a thunderstorm and destroyed several barbed-wire fences – “but not a single head was lost.” Stephenville Empire

1883: around the 25th this month, Professor King, a Baptist preacher and schoolteacher at Carleton, was tied up while 98 of his sheep were clubbed to death. He was warned that this was cattle country. Stephenville Empire

During the week of August 20th, heavy rains washed the bones of a mastodon from the bank of a creek north of Stephenville. Some of the bones were brought to the office of the Stephenville Empire where someone identified them as Mammut americanum. The mastodon, a browser rather than a grazer like the more common mammoth, had been in the area for three million years, until the Pleistocene ended around 12,800 years ago. The mastodon’s head was carried horizontally to scoop up vegetation with the tusks. When both tusks are found one of them shows more wear showing that they were right or left tusked.

Bjorn Kurten and Elaine Anderson. Pleistocene Mammals of North America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980

A man named Dalton lived along the Bosque River a few miles from Stephenville. Toward the end of the Civil War, a posse arrested Dalton for the murder of his wife. Arriving in town, the party found that citizens had gathered and were waiting. Without a judge or anything like an official court, the citizens were asked to consider the evidence, then a line was drawn in the Stephenville square, one side for guilty and the other for innocent. Most people stepped to the guilty side and Dalton was taken to the hanging tree close to the square.

Sherri Knight. Vigilantes to Verdicts: Stories from a District Court, Stephenville: Jacobus Books, 2009.