Frank Sanchez and Calvin Vernor

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 10^th (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 32^nd 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…

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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.