Frank Sanches Comes Home
Then Leaves Again
When I finally reached
the Nueces River Valley,
the man I was seeking was already dead. This valley is deeper than the Leon, up north.
But the mysterious waters of the Nueces,
carving shallow bends and then deep water holes strikes me as sister to the
sometimes ferocious lion river snaking beneath Alameda Cemetery’s
shadows.
Frank’s trail had gone cold, many months
before, far to the north in that Eastland
County echo. Blind luck
even called me to this place…connected me with another mythic Alameda-like
community.
Frank left behind a wife and five children.
My found friend’s humble earthen grave has
been desecrated, on purpose – malice and aforethought. Like the Wicked Witch of
the West, a sturdy house has landed atop my hero’s final resting place. He’s
underneath that structure’s weight. Frank’s painstakingly-carved brown rock tombstone’s
been stolen, used to prop open a door like some trash rock from the field, then
taken into Travis
County exile as some
stranger’s trite souvenir.
Texas history isn’t supposed to end like this.
This Cheaney Community pioneer’s grave is unmarked.
If you don’t count the house.
Another man along my trail south told me,
not even a week ago: “There are only two types of people in this world, those
who build and those who destroy. It has always been like that. It will always
BE like that.”
That man was right.
I talk to my deceased friend today, to the
man buried beneath the house. Frank was and is the thick bottom trunk to a
sprawling family tree stretching across America. “People that care are working
on your behalf, Frank. Folks-up-in-Years can extract justice from the Destroyers.”
Graves never answer, in my experience.
I keep talking. “I need to know what
happened here.”
Stories from within those graves can speak,
however, if you listen long enough.
Frank Sanches somehow makes my seventy-two
cent black writing pen begin to talk. What you’ll read below is a true story,
told by a circle of people who have mostly never met. All Texans of good will,
and all the folks with ties to the Leon
River Valley
connect to this Frank’s story.
If you stand under the late-1800’s wooden
Tabernacle at Alameda Cemetery long enough, I believe that any man or woman who’s
ever walked or galloped past, living or dead, will again ride up and start
talking. Start telling stories. Crazy talk, I know.
But it keeps happening.
I’m sitting at my desk
working, checking emails. I receive a note from a lady who claims to be a
long-lost descendent of Frank Sanches. He’s the man that folks in Eastland County hold out as the first permanent
Anglo settler. Believe it or not, Frank Sanches/Sanchez was a fairly common
name back in the mid-1800s. So this lady and I go back and forth with
identifying questions.
I come to know it is our Frank Sanches.
The one whose two lost
log cabins sat alone and unguarded on the east side of Jim Neal Creek in northern Cheaney.
Only a few hearthstone
rocks remain today.
Frank’s tangled story
scattered like dust, thrown into a cold autumn wind, as the Tabernacle book
left my hand. I knew he’d been there. I knew he’d left. I could walk to where
the man’s log cabin once stood. Like so many calling to me from that distant
fog, I surmised why he’d taken his family and abandoned ship (angry Comanches,
lots and lots of angry Comanches sweeping down their inherited raiding trail
along the Old Alameda Road. Not far outside Frank’s oaken front door).
As the book went to press, what happened
next was a mystery.
This is what I wrote
about Frank in The Tabernacle:
“Frank Sanches and
Jim Neal are the first Anglo men known to have settled in Eastland County.
Several explorers passed through first, but Frank and his step-son-in-law Jim
Neal were the first that constructed cabins, settled in to earn a living and
tried to make a go of it. They arrived in 1856. Their two log cabins and at
least one large corral, were about a mile and a half up Jim Neal Creek from the Leon River.
The Sanches and
Neal log cabins stood empty when the census taker rode by in 1860. After the
Indians left that country in the 1870s, the Cheaney Community would spring to
life just southeast of Frank Sanches’ first brave toehold.
Francisco
(“Frank”) Sanches was a Creole from New Orleans, born between 1802-1808 in Louisiana, probably of Canary
Islander/Spanish descent (he probably had coal black hair, a good thing in the Leon River
Valley). His wife was
named Jerusha Tidwell. He landed in Texas
in 1835, the year before the Alamo fell,
(entrance certificate No. 472), and lived in Nacogdoches County
for a few years. Frank began to follow the ever-moving frontier west shortly
thereafter.
By the late
1840’s, Frank Sanches was living in Navarro County.
About 1849, Walker
County’s John
Stubblefield {related to the later Coffer/Stubblefields
of the Leon River Valley?}
employed Sanches to run cattle on the open range
off Pecan Creek, near present Bynum in Hill County.
Frank then moved to Parker
County, pre-empting 160
acres on a creek above the Brazos, now known
as Sanchez Creek. From this base, he ran cattle in
Parker, Palo Pinto and Erath
Counties, as was the
practice back then.
As the frontier pushed westward, Sanches saw an opportunity to relocate his cattle operation
farther west into less crowded territory. He chose a site in the Leon River
Valley, in present day Eastland County. His homeplace along the Jim Neal
Creek was many miles from
the next family of settlers, far to the east.
Sanches scouted a cattle trail that
came to be known as the Sanches Cattle Trail across Erath County,
passing Davidson Springs at the Davidson Ranch near Tanner, then Rattlesnake Mountain, in present Eastland County.
The Sanches Cattle Trail ran south to below Jameson Peak, northwest to Mansker Lake, north to Merriman, then west to McGough Springs. In Eastland County,
it passed the old settlement of Central (northwest of modern-day Cisco), then
headed to the end of the trail in Abilene,
Texas. At this point, it
connected to the much higher traffic Western Trail going north.
The Stephenville - Fort Griffin Road largely followed this
trail much later. The Sanches Trail was later used by immigrants and government
freighting contractors who supplied the troops at Fort Griffin
and other West Texas military posts. This
trail is
believed to follow one of the
original Indian Trails (based upon archeological findings along its path), and
eventually became the Old Alameda
Road.
The Sanches cattle grazed far up and down the Colony Creek
Valley, the Leon River
Valley and out into the
grasslands extending far beyond both. It is hard to imagine that Sanches didn’t
have Indian trouble, being so isolated within their historic hunting grounds,
and near one of their major transits. A brother of Frank is said to have spoken
an Indian dialect, but if Frank shared that skill, that life-saving detail is
lost to history.
By 1860, Frank Sanches and James Neal uprooted again to McLennan County.
Not long after that, the family moved to Edwards County,
settling near a spring (now known as Sanches Spring)
near the Nueces River, in the area of modern Barksdale.
In 1867, a man named Hill who was traveling in that country found Frank Sanches dead, an arrow still lodged through his lifeless
body.
Frank
Sanches’ story while he lived in Eastland
County is largely
conjecture. Based upon circumstantial evidence, Sanches grazed his cattle in
the wild over thousands of acres, much as Fuller Milsap did to the east in Palo Pinto
County. The only recorded
corroborating story of Sanches’ Eastland
County exploits, by Kenny
in “A Comprehensive History of Texas”, reports that in 1858 the Comanches came
across a man named Peter Johnson and his eight-year-old son Ike, driving a
wagon loaded with flour and meal in Bosque
County.
The Indians
killed the father and took the little boy captive. They left the settlements
with a lot of stolen horses and cattle. When the Indians were fifty miles
away, they took the boy’s clothes
and turned him loose in the wilderness, thinking he’d die of exposure/frostbite
or be eaten by wolves. The account says that little Ike found some cows,
staying with them for heat and sustenance until he was discovered.
Mrs.
Langston, in her History of Eastland
County tells us:
Frank
Sanches was out hunting stock and stood and watched numerous droves passing
down to the Leon River for water, hoping to find some of
his stray two-year-olds. Imagine his surprise as the last yearling was nearing
him, and he was about to turn and retrace his steps homeward, to see a small
boy’s head bobbing up just behind the calf. On the child’s approach, he found that
it was a white boy who had been captured by the Indians. He had escaped and was
following the stock, hoping to reach the settlements. Mr. Sanches cared for the
little boy and returned him to his people.”
Other
sources list parties other than Sanches as responsible for finding and
repatriating Ike Johnson.
Sanches
and Neal left Eastland
County no more than three
years after their arrival. Given their homestead’s location near an ancient
Indian highway, their isolation, and their large inventory of cattle, one has
to believe that something bad happened out there in those woods, once, maybe
several times, that made them want to leave. Whether or not lives were lost,
whether children died of disease or worse, remains a mystery. Perhaps a silent
dread that such tragedy was imminent drove them away.
Whether
Sanches was still living along Jim Neal Creek in 1859 to meet Henry Mansker
(settling to his south at Mansker Lake) or John Flanagan (to his north near
present day Merriman in 1858), we will never know. If he did, his advice would
have been interesting to hear. Frank Sanches and Jim Neal voted with their
feet, and left this country, never to return.”
This is what Frank Sanches wanted us to know, after that
book’s journey was finally closed. Frank was long gone when Uncle Henry Mansker
and Mr. John Flanagan made it to our Leon
River Valley.
It’s unclear to me how so much of his Eastland County story survives, as only
two empty log cabins and a broken down corral testified to his having ever been
there.
The nice woman from the email puts me in touch with her
daddy, Calvin Vernor of Camp Wood,
Texas. Camp Wood is almost 250
miles to the south, near Leakey, not too far from Uvalde. Vernor is the great
grandson of Frank. Calvin is thankfully also a historian. Living so far away,
we’ve had to shake hands, and drink coffee over cell phones and thick envelopes
through the mail.
Calvin
Vernor is 79-years-old, and works hard every day. In addition
to his normal projects, he’s on the “restore the old Spanish mission committee”.
He knows the history of the Nueces
River Canyon.
Kind of a local historian storyteller. He’s a nice man. I enjoyed our visit.
Frank was the
first Anglo settler living in the Upper Nueces
country. The man had a knack for being first to a place, seems like. He arrived
before the army got there to protect local settlers. He ended up living there
about ten years before being murdered in cold blood. Their first homestead was
above the Sanches Springs, in what is now Barksdale. Again, pulling out a map,
you’ll be struck by the echo of his place, just above a major river/creek
intersection, like say Jim Neal Creek two miles before hitting the Leon River.
The army got there
in 1857 (this is a well-documented date), so Frank probably arrived in the Nueces country about 1856. The army reports his being
there when they rode up. There were several beautiful springs there then, that
he carved his initials into. There was a cave at Wallace Mountain,
a cave near the top, where Frank created a beautiful carving into the hard
stone containing his name, and a large, ornate Masonic emblem.
Another man
explored out that way around 1921 and chiseled Frank’s work out of the wall to
bring back to town. When he got the old carving free of the wall, it was too
heavy to carry. He went back a couple of weeks later, he said, and Frank’s
artistic mark on the earth was gone.
I think about all
the carvings into the moss-covered stone up on Button Top, a prominent rock
mountain pug nose above the Leon,
where stray Alameda
kids skipped school. The place is littered with old initials, carved into the
stone. I remember something else and smile. One of Frank’s sons, living not a
mile to the north of Button Top was nicknamed “Button”.
There are no
photographs or drawings remaining of Frank or his wife Jerusha that Calvin
knows of. Frank was a good man, a hard working man, Calvin tells me. He used
his Bible often. There were no churches down there, back then.
If you look at
photographs of the Nueces
River Valley
where Frank moved to after Cheaney, you’re quickly hit by its resemblance to
the Leon River, over against the tall cliffs and
hills rising from its seasonal waters, just to the west of Mansker Lake.
You
also find out in a hurry that their valley was also a favorite stomping ground
for Native Americans of many Nations – Lipan Apaches, Comanches, et al. Flint
points, shell beads, pottery and many other artifacts testify that Native
peoples used the Water-Game-Protected Valley trifecta of the Nueces Valley as
their Eden, just as our Leon River Valley Natives did around Mansker Lake and
tributaries leading past it.
Franciscan friars
built an unsuccessful Spanish Mission, San Lorenzo
de la Santa Cruz
in 1762 at Camp Wood. It was abandoned. Later in 1857,
the U.S. Army carved an army post near the old mission’s fallen ruins, using
the friar’s original spring for drinking water. Today the small town of Camp
Wood in Real County boasts about 800 folks, a five store strip mall, a drug
store with a soda foundation (“serving great floats”, their website says) and a
movie theater (with three movies a week).
The Camp Wood
army post was tasked to protect the vital San
Antonio – El
Paso Road from Indian attacks. Camp Wood
was abandoned by the army for a time in 1857, then brought back to life until
1860 by John Bell Hood, of Hood’s Texas Brigade fame. Union troops later fled
the place en masse trying to make a
break back to the North in the spring of 1861. Confederate forces moved into
their abandoned digs and set up shop.
After the War of
Northern Aggression (Civil War) concluded, army soldiers and Texas Rangers
periodically used the camp, it was said.
Bill
Badger, writing for the American
Military University
about Camp Wood (“Camp Wood, Texas
– A Military History, 1857 – 1861”) tells us that Frank and Jerusha moved up
the Nueces River Canyon
to be closer to the army.
The army reports
that the Frank Sanches Family were the first permanent settlers in the Upper Nueces
Canyon…being there when
the army arrived. Frank raised maybe 200-300 head of cattle. Their original
place was three miles upstream from the army camp.
Calvin knows of no
visible remains of their first homestead.
Frank built his
family a cedar picket house (straight cedars, sharp arrow-like points in the
air, driven vertically into the ground). I wonder if his Cheaney home was a
picket house too, much like the oak picket Blair’s Fort, built a few years
later to his southeast in Desdemona. Calvin tells me that Sanches Springs in Barksdale, Texas
still runs, but not full-out like it used to. There’s a swale under the
farm-to-market road, running east to west from Hamilton Hollar toward Frank’s
homestead that always made me believe a non-vanished spring fed its erosion,
before the time of wells, runaway mesquite trees and stock tanks.
Frank originally moved
to Nacogdoches
from a village outside New Orleans.
His parents got off ship at New
Orleans after arriving from the Canary
Islands about 1790. Frank was born in a settlement near New Orleans about 1814.
On July 22, 1835, he
entered the Republic
of Texas with his friend
Andrew Rojas. His entry certificate says he was a citizen, a man of very good
moral habits, industrious, a lover of the constitution and the laws of that
country (Texas),
a Christian, and unmarried without a family.
Frank married Jerusha
Tidwell on Feb 13, 1844
(a widow with two children). Jerusha is a Hebrew name, meaning “wife”. Their
marriage license was also issued by the Republic of Texas
(I have copy) in Nacogdoches.
The 1850 census
shows Frank and his wife Jerusha having two children together, and that they lived
next to Frank’s friend Andrew Rojas in Navarro County.
Son Joel Mack (nicknamed “Button”) was born in 1851. Also in 1851, Frank had a
cattle ranch on Pecan Creek in Hill
County, north of the
present town of Bynum.
A daughter they named Winnie was born there. Winnie later married W. R. Webb.
That’s how Calvin ties to Frank and Jerusha.
Frank then ran
cattle on the open range farther north and was taxed for a 160 acre place in
Parker County (southwest of Weatherford) on a creek named Sanchez (spelled with
a “z”). I pass a green TxDot sign taunting “Sanchez Creek Estates” every time I
go west down Weatherford’s Ranger
Highway toward Alameda, Cheaney and beauty.
Calvin tells me
that Frank’s bride Jerusha (pronounced Ja-roo-sa) was a doctor for the army. A
soldier’s diary from the camp backs him up. Calvin doesn’t know how she got her
medical training, but she was definitely considered a healing frontier doctor
for that country. Perhaps her Cherokee mother or her French father taught her
the medical skills she possessed. She is known to have used native plants in
her practice, giving credence to Native training by her Cherokee Nation mom.
The Army hired her officially as their doctor at the camp. Calvin told me that
she removed lots of arrowheads from local settlers during their time down there.
I copied this from
the “1491 Days in the Confederate Army”, by W.W. Heartsill:
”June 10th (1861): At 4 o’clk this morning F. M. Marshall was
violently attacked with an Apoletic (sic) Fit, and in thirty minutes in spite
of medical aid he expired. This last unexpected death of one of our number, in
addition to the one we heard of yesterday and the victim to day is
(unreadable)…messengers of the other’s death, has cast a gloom over our Camp
such as was never witnessed before; so soon, in less than two months, two of
our number are ushered into Eternity. At 6 o’clk Marshall is buried with Military honors,
beneath the wide spread boughs of a large live oak, not far distant from Camp.”
Remember that oak
tree.
Calvin tells me, “When
the North and South got to fighting, the army left and suggested that the
Sanches’s leave too. But they didn’t. The Army left in 1861. Calvin is said to
have told his departing Army neighbors, ‘I’m staying, y’all come back soon’.
Calvin shares that
Frank and Jerusha got along great with the Lipan Apaches coming up the canyons
from Mexico,
though the Indians stole horses and cattle from other area settlers. Perhaps
Jerusha provided medical help to the Lipan, he wonders. Perhaps the family’s
black hair kept them safe, I wonder, remembering blond-haired savagery closer
to home. The Lipan Apaches and the Comanche Nation were then sworn Plains
enemies.
The Comanches
frequently attacked Frank while he was out working his stock. He always managed
to get away into the trees where arrows are less effective, and escape to home
and safety. Frank lived six more years after the Army left before the law of
averages caught up with him.
Calvin speaks to
me through a static-filled cell phone, more quietly this time, that when Frank
didn’t come in from working cattle that night, Mrs. Sanches got some men and
went looking for him. They found him fallen over dead with several arrows in
him, just above where the town of Vance is now, twelve miles above Camp Wood.
That was September 1867.
“At the time Frank
was killed by the Indians, there was hardly anybody here at all except him, his
wife and five kids and maybe a few other settlers,” Vernor said.
I think about the
long now-secret trails Frank and Jerusha traveled during their love together,
sad that their longing to live together until old age reward never came to
pass.
They took Frank’s
body home, traveling in fear of another sweeping Comanche attack, I’m sure.
They rode down the lonely Upper
Nueces Valley,
passing beneath the shadows of Bullhead
Mountain, Hog Pen Mountain, Turkey Peak and Meridian Mountain
to their home.
Frank was buried
under that same sprawling oak tree in the Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery with a good stone marker Frank
had carved himself, with a beautiful chiseled border. He was real good with a
hammer. Mrs. Sanchez had his name cut into the stone after he died. Frank was a
32nd level Mason, another echo back to the Mansker Lake Community.
The Masonic emblem is said to be visible yet on Frank’s tombstone-in-exile, in
some house in Austin, Texas.
There came a time
much later when the area around the town of Camp Wood started developing: about half the
new folks were good people, about half were said to be outlaws.
Another echo.
Some guy wanted to
build his new house in 1927 on the Camp Wood Army Post Cemetery spot where
Frank and Army soldiers and I’m sure other pioneers are buried, so he did. That
construction desecrated between 12 and 25 graves, it is thought. The house is still
standing, lived in I am told by a Church
of Christ minister.
Unlike the heroes
and heroines of Alameda,
Cook, Gregg and so many other Leon
River Valley
cemeteries, Frank was not able to rest in peace. The headstone that marked
Frank’s grave in the Camp
Wood Army
Post Cemetery
for over 140 years vanished.
Frank left blank a
space for the specifics of his demise, to be inserted later. I have a photo of
the stone. It would take your breath away, as it is a moss-covered brother to
the brown rocks that litter Alameda’s
lonely hillside. It shows that Masonic emblem, carved by Frank’s industrious
hand.
Frank’s
tombstone was used as a back door stop from 1927 to when the property was sold
in 1945, when it was moved to the front of the house until 2005, then ended up
in Austin as a souvenir.
The F. M. Marshall
I told you about was the first burial at that cemetery. The cemetery has been
there since 1861 (a twin to Alameda,
as there could be unmarked Alameda
graves dating back as early as 1859, based upon our settlement timeline, or
Natives likely before that.)
The Camp Wood
Army Post
Cemetery graves were interred
farther apart than cemeteries of modern times, he told me. A Captain Cunningham
was one of those buried there. “I know the location of the Captain’s grave as
was told to myself when I was young and an old timer was old,” Calvin told a
reported once.
The house sitting
astride those fallen Texans was recently remodeled and added on to. This is
some long-ago heresy against our past.
In October 1867,
Frank’s widowed wife Jerusha filed to have his estate administered (I have a
copy). The Letters of Administration list 16 cattle brands as his (like the multiple
cattle brands of Schmick and Mansker stock at Alameda).
Frank was
Jerusha’s third husband. Jerusha means wife. All three of her men had been
killed by Indians.
I ask Calvin about
Jim Neal, Frank’s step-son-in-law for whom one of our creeks is named. He
recognized the Neal surname. Thought Jim Neal was a prior son to Jerusha,
before she married Frank. The Neals grew up in that Upper Nueces
Canyon, also, he told me.
Jim Neal’s son was murdered, but I didn’t get the details. The Neals have
descendants in Arizona
today.
Frank left behind
a loving wife and family – three boys and two girls who were industrious like
their parents. Jerusha was still a medical doctor who walked for miles to
deliver a baby or treat the sick. She passed away in 1884 from “cancer of the
face”, at 75 years of age, buried with a marked tombstone in the Vance Cemetery
as its earliest resident. Her cancer is thought to have been brought on by all
those years in the sun, walking to cure her neighbors’ ills.
The State of Texas has erected a historical
marker to her at Barksdale.
The three Sanches sons
continued to ranch and did some irrigated farming (Frank never farmed). After a
time, the only remaining child in the canyon was the youngest daughter, Winnie,
who married W.R. Webb.
There are thought
to be more than 1,000 descendents of Frank Sanches walking in this world. The majority
are in West Texas and Arizona. “The children changed their name
from Sanches to Little before 1900,” Vernor said. “Other descendents are Webb,
Hicks, Handley, Vernor and some others.” Little means the same as Sanches in
Spanish, I was told, but it also seems to come from the Latin “santus”…holy.
I wish you could
see Mr. Vernor’s notes to me, scrawled on photocopies from newspapers and
books, on index cards, on stray pieces of paper – not pretty, but the message
was passed and received…a treasure chest about a great man named Frank Sanches,
who in my mind, is today at last closer to home.
His hand-carved tombstone
still needs to come home, however.
And the house atop
his hallowed remains needs to be carefully removed.
This afternoon it
will soar to near 100 degrees, at the lonely Alameda Cemetery Tabernacle. This
part of one man’s tale is over, for now. Frank Sanches rides away…
------------------------------------------------------------
This story was roughed out to get the facts
down, not for publication (at least until Frank’s final resting place plot line
has been completed, and until proper citation can be undertaken). Based upon
the Army records, it will now be possible to more accurately reconcile the
dates of Frank’s life, which are currently all over the map. Many thanks to
Trisha Mayes; Mr. Calvin Vernor; the Uvalde Leader News; “The Images”, a book
by Wanda Handley; the Real County historical website; www.campwood.com/history.htm;
the County of Nacgodoches, Texas; Bill Badger, writing for the American
Military University about Camp Wood (“Camp Wood, Texas – A Military History,
1857 – 1861”); “1491 Days in the Confederate Army,” by W.W. Heartsill; Allen Stovall,
“Headwaters of Neuces River”, a book; and the City of Camp Wood.