Setting the Record Straight: Fort Worth and the Historians

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Every town, if it stays around long enough, accrues its share of local lore masquerading as history. In the case of Fort Worth this lore is rooted in its proud claim of being the "City where the West Begins." That title is at the heart of Fort Worth's image of itself and the explanation behind it goes back to the city's beginnings as a small army outpost on the north Texas Indian frontier. The full picture has been filled in with a collection of assorted tales and local lore repeated and rehashed so many times they are practically canonized today—that is, they are beyond critical examination. They have even slipped into the authoritative and recently revised New Handbook of Texas. The accepted lore includes stories of rugged dragoons, visionary land barons, bloodthirsty Indians, an outpost on the edge of civilization, and famous visitors stopping over for a look-see. The historical errors need to be exposed and corrected, but it is not enough to debunk them; what is also needed is an explanation of how they came to be accorded such near-mythical status in the first place.

Let's start with the name itself. There has long been a misconception that the post on the Trinity River began life as "Camp Worth," a designation which was soon changed by army orders to "Fort Worth." Such exceedingly humble origins, if anything, make its subsequent rise to gateway of the north Texas plains even more amazing. The trouble is, Fort Worth was never a camp in the army's scheme of things. Both names honor the memory of Brig. Gen. William Jenkins Worth, yet there is an important distinction in military lexicon between a camp and a fort. A fort is a defensive strong-point intended as a permanent or semipermanent structure, often part of a defensive line. A camp is an unfortified and purely temporary cantonment without defensive pretensions, often devoted to training and instruction (for example, Camp Bowie). Although Fort Worth began life as a humble outpost in 1849, its founders no doubt believed that it would be the site of an armed garrison for some time to come because it was part of a major defensive line guarding the frontier.

The confusion in names derives from the fact that there was a Camp Worth in Texas at the same time, and closely connected to the outpost on the Trinity. Both were named for the hero of the Mexican War who was ordered to Texas in 1848 to help secure the state's long and porous western frontier. Camp Worth was established on the outskirts of San Antonio in February 1849 as the cantonment for the Eighth Infantry Regiment, while the town itself became headquarters for the Eighth Military Department, incorporating Texas and, for a time, New Mexico. The officer for whom Fort Worth was named died of cholera three months after coming to San Antonio. Just two weeks later Maj. Ripley Arnold and Company F established a new outpost on the bluffs over the Trinity River in north Texas, naming it Fort Worth. We know this because Simon Farrar, a civilian who was with Arnold at the time, stated in a letter he wrote to a local historian many years later, "In honor of that grand old hero [we] named the point Fort Worth."¹ Farrar was the only man present that day who left a written record of the event.

Likewise, Major Arnold's first dispatch from the site, dated June 11, 1849, is datelined "Northern Frontier Texas, Fort Worth West Fork Trinity River² All subsequent correspondence between the garrison on the Trinity and regimental headquarters that survives in the National Archives today is datelined Fort Worth.

The origins of the misunderstanding are to be found in a dispatch sent out by Eighth Military Department headquarters on October 17, 1849. The culprit was Maj. George Deas, assistant adjutant general to Maj. Gen. George M. Brooke, commanding. In a routine order to all post commanders, Deas listed the "military stations on the North Western Frontier of this Department," including "Camp Worth (West Fork of the Trinity) [sic]."³

The error only stands out when read in the context of the whole series of correspondence between Fort Worth and headquarters contained in the National Archives' Records of the Adjutant General's Office.⁴ It entered local lore, however, not through some obscure adjutant's efforts, but through the works of two popular historians, Nevin O. Winter and B. B. Paddock. Writing in Texas the Marvelous (1916), Winter says the post was first called Camp Worth and renamed Fort Worth a few months later. His error was compounded by Paddock, whose deep roots in Fort Worth, as symbolized by his four-volume History of Texas: Fort Worth and the Texas Northwest (1922), make his version of events a favorite among local historians who came along later. Paddock says, "The post was first called Camp Worth in honor of Brigadier General William Jennings [sic] Worth," a statement that is remarkable for getting both the name of the place and its namesake incorrect!⁵ Paddock's work was the first, and until 1953, the only popular history of Fort Worth, and while he was no founding father, he lived in the city from 1873 until his death some fifty years later and knew many of the early pioneers personally. From Paddock and Winter the quick-working historians of the Fourth Estate picked it up and disseminated it to subsequent generations of Fort Worth citizens. Thus we can see the multiplication of a historical error as it passes from one source to another.

Strictly speaking, the place they named Fort Worth was in the army scheme of things nothing more than an "outpost"—the military designation for a way station or stopover serving a larger post beyond the pale of civilization. Outposts allowed a major post to defend a larger area than otherwise by providing spartan accommodations for men and animals on long-distance scouts. Troops from the larger post were normally rotated in and out of the outpost on a regular basis. In the case of Fort Worth, it was an outpost for Fort Graham, some sixty miles south on the Brazos River. Several posts in Texas during these years began life as outposts; most were closed down without fanfare when the frontier moved on. Fort Worth's true military origin was generally overlooked until Oliver Knight used it (without explaining the significance) in the title of his 1953 volume, Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity. It seems more likely that Knight was casting about for a catchy hook than striving for scrupulous historical accuracy when he titled his book, but he nonetheless captured the essence of Fort Worth's humble beginnings. Unfortunately, the technical difference between a fort, a camp, and an outpost is a fine point lost on most readers, as indeed it is on most historians outside the field.

There is a related misconception in local lore that the north Texas region was a trackless wilderness at the time Ripley Arnold established Fort Worth. This is far from true. The Twin Forks area was part of Navarro County in 1849. The northeastern part of what became Tarrant County had permanent settlers living there four years before the fort was established. There were several communities within a radius of fifteen miles (an easy day's ride), including Dove (near present-day Grapevine), Crowley and Bear Creek (both in present-day Euless), and Alton (in present-day Denton County). All of these communities were isolated but by no means cut off from civilization.⁶ The 1850 Census shows 104 households in Tarrant County, which hardly makes it an empty land.⁷

Travel into the Twin Forks region was by means of a well-used military highway running from Austin up to the Red River. It passed through Fort Graham on the Brazos River, which is where Ripley Arnold started his march north, and "skirted the western edge of the Cross Timbers" in eastern Tarrant County as it approached the Twin Forks.⁸ This "Military Road," as it is designated in contemporary sources, had brought adventurers and would-be settlers into north Texas since the early years of the Republic, including Jonathan Bird in 1841 and trader Ed Terrell in 1843.

Jonathan Bird, on a mission that prefigured Ripley Arnold's, had hoped to parlay a temporary military appointment and the provisions of the Military Road Act of 1840 to secure twelve hundred acres of free land for himself as part of a settlement near the Dallas County line. The center of that settlement was to be a small stockade given the grandiose name "Bird's Fort." Ironically, it looked more like a traditional fort than the later Fort Worth, although it never had a military garrison or a role in frontier defense. This was the first attempt at Anglo-American colonization in present-day Tarrant County; it was abandoned after less than a year when the Republic refused to support their land claims and sufficient settlers could not be enticed to come.⁹

Capt. Ed Terrell's dream of establishing a trading post atop the Trinity bluffs also came to naught, although the rough-hewn log structure he built there was still standing when Ripley Arnold came five years later.¹⁰ Before the arrival of the dragoons in 1849, no one had succeeded in putting down roots where the West Fork and the Clear Fork of the Trinity River came together. The purpose of Fort Worth, therefore, was not to wrest the Twin Forks region from the Indians but to provide encouragement and protection for further settlement. Unlike the feeble attempt of Jonathan Bird, Ripley Arnold's fort had the full backing of the U.S. government. That made all the difference in the world.

The men who guided Ripley Arnold to the bluff over the Trinity have been the frequent subject of some fanciful stories. The accepted version is that they were Texas Rangers, led by the redoubtable Middleton Tate Johnson, who met the dragoons at Johnson's Station (in present-day Arlington) and led them straight and true to the site of the fort. Another part of this lore says that Johnson even owned the land on which the fort was built, suggesting the possibility that but for fate and the traditional army practice of naming its posts for regular army heroes, Johnson's Station might have had its counterpart in "Johnson's Fort" on the Trinity! It never happened because M. T. Johnson never owned the land where Fort Worth was built.

The men who led Arnold and company were not Rangers. Rangers in Texas history come in two varieties: the peace officers of legend who wear six-guns and Stetson hats, and the mounted state militia who were called out to suppress Indian uprisings and Mexican raids. The distinction between these two entirely different forces is seldom explained in the historical literature.¹¹ One inference is that the party of "civilian" guides who linked up with the dragoons were state militia, not law enforcement officers. This explanation at least has some possibility of being correct, although it still misses the mark.

None of the five men who met Ripley Arnold at Johnson's Station at the end of May 1849—Charles Turner, Dr. William B. Echols, Simon B. Farrar, Joe Parker, and M. T. Johnson—were in the mounted rangers at the time. Only two of them, Farrar and Johnson, were even on record as ever having served in the state's volunteer companies known as Rangers. Johnson had been discharged from state service on February 3, 1849, and at the time of the Arnold expedition he was a civilian living in Shelby County in east Texas.¹² But the image of rawhide-tough Texas Rangers guiding the army through hostile Indian country to a new home has far more romantic appeal than explanations of eager land speculators and evolving patterns of settlement.

In later years, Johnson's name became intrinsically linked with early Fort Worth history, not just as the man who led the dragoons to the site but as (supposedly) the owner of the property where it was built. Simon Farrar, who watched it grow from a humble fort to a thriving city, stated that, "Fort Worth is indebted to him for existence probably more than to any other man.¹³ This is true as far as it goes. As the claimant of more than a thousand acres on the upper Trinity plus the legal owner of additional acreage in east Texas, Tate Johnson was something of a land baron albeit not in the same exalted class as Samuel Burke Burnett, Charles Goodnight, or Richard King. His hopes of securing patents to some of the rich land on the Trinity had a lot to do with why he helped the U.S. Army establish Fort Worth in 1849. Obviously, the comforting presence of the soldiers would boost the value of everybody's land holdings as increasing numbers of immigrants poured into the area.

But it is the nature of those land holdings that separates the myth from the reality. According to local lore, Johnson and another man, Archibald Robinson, granted the site to the government "during the time of [its] occupancy as a military post." Supposedly, they owned the original surveys and donated the property to the army, then "retook possession of the premises" after the soldiers moved out in 1853. This so-called Donation of Johnson is one of the oldest and most stubborn of Fort Worth legends. (Robinson is usually left out in the telling.) It was solemnly recorded in the City Directory of 1877, which contains the first official history of the city, then repeated in the even more officious City Charter of 1889. Although both sources are considered authoritative, neither is any more accurate on this particular point than the ninth-cen-tury Donation of Constantine was with regard to the Catholic Church.¹⁴

In the purported arrangements between Johnson and Robinson on the one hand and the army on the other, no contracts or formal agreements were ever drawn up; the historic land transfer, if there was such a thing, was simply by gentleman's agreement. There is no record that the U.S. government ever paid a cent to Tate Johnson or anybody else, and Ripley Arnold, while he was commander at Fort Worth, believed the surrounding country was public land where his men could cut timber and gather food without so much as a "by your leave." This assumption caused him to be hauled into court in 1852, and the case was still pending when he died a year later. In the meantime, he doggedly refused all payment demands for timber and other materials presented by local citizens "until the title to [this] land should be satisfactorily proven." An army inspector who came through in 1853 apparently agreed with the major because in his report to Washington Lieut. Col. William G. Freeman stated that the fort was "on a disputed tract of land" for which no rent had been paid since its founding.¹⁵

Whereas it is true Johnson ultimately acquired a fistful of certificates in Tarrant County in later years, the place where the army decided to set up housekeeping on the Trinity had not even been surveyed in 1849, much less parceled out to settlers. Tate Johnson did not patent (that is, file legal claim to) his first piece of property in Tarrant County until 1854. The original survey maps of the area atop the Trinity bluffs show two surveys on the site where the military post was built, those of Archibald Robinson and Mitchell Baugh. Robinson patented his 160-acre survey in 1856, while Baugh let his own certificate for 320 acres slip through his hands, leaving it to Tate Johnson to file the necessary patent papers on August 15, 1854.¹⁶ Up to that date, no one possessed clear title to the site atop the bluff. Any claims by Johnson prior to 1854 were purely of the squatter variety, which was a normal method of operation for early-comers on the frontier throughout American history. Squatters asserted their right to own the land they occupied because they got there first, not because of any piece of paper filed in the land office in Austin. What can be said about Middleton Tate Johnson is that he was a shrewd businessman who cashed in on the settlement of the Twin Forks region by bilking, bluffing, or buying out other legitimate landowners during a time when property titles were ambiguous. He created his own legend in later years, and his admirers elaborated on it after his death, claiming that he had graciously donated the land to build Fort Worth.

The archival case against such a claim is buttressed by the normal practice of Uncle Sam to establish posts on the unsettled frontier without regard to land ownership. At best the army leased the land for a nominal sum if an owner could prove clear title, but usually they simply moved in and took possession of a site based on some vague principle of eminent domain, staying until civilization arrived, then abandoning the site to follow the frontier farther west. The locals received the benefit of army protection plus whatever improvements the army made while they were neighbors. The record suggests this is what happened at Fort Worth. A Quartermaster Department report in 1860 requesting Congressional appropriations to pay for "rent and the privilege of cutting wood and timber" at Forts Belknap, Merrill, and Graham, does not mention Fort Worth, although, like Fort Worth, all of these posts were on the frontier line and had been shut down by this date.¹⁷ The U.S. Army apparently felt no financial obligation to Tate Johnson or to any other local citizen for its four-year stay on the Trinity.

If anybody ever had a legitimate claim to the site where Fort Worth was built, it was the Peters Colony and its various successors. The original colonizing venture was the creation of a group of Kentucky empresarios led by W. S. Peters. They secured a contract with the Republic of Texas in 1841 to bring immigrants into a large area of north Texas that eventually included present-day Tarrant County. During the next several years, certificates issued by the state of Texas were bought, sold, and traded freely until the courts ultimately had to step in and judge the validity of the claims. The company's contract expired on July 1, 1848, but legal wrangling over titles dragged on until 1871. More than 150 Tarrant County residents eventually proved their claim to be bona fide Peters Colony colonists, meaning, by the terms of the original contract, that they had arrived before July 1, 1848, built a cabin on their site, and kept at least fifteen acres under continuous cultivation.¹⁸ There were no homesteads that met that definition on the bluffs above the Trinity in 1849.

In May of 1849 when Ripley Arnold came to locate the site for his new post, he found neither settlers' cabins nor cultivated land on the bluffs. The only man-made structure in the vicinity was an abandoned trader's cabin nearly a mile from the site.¹⁹ He was quite confident the State of Texas was the primary landowner on the bluff where he proposed to build his fort, and if he thought about the issue of sovereignty at all, he probably thought the right of eminent domain gave the U.S. government whatever authority it needed anyway.

Ironically, the forgotten man in all this, Archibald Robinson, probably had the best claim to all or part of the post property after the army departed in 1853. Robinson was issued a certificate by the Texas Land Commissioner in 1850 for a section of land (160 acres) in Tarrant County, duly noted in the Abstracts of the Texas General Land Office. That site was atop the bluffs that followed the winding Clear Fork of the Trinity, although its exact location in reference to the fort is anybody's guess since no surveys were ever made of the fort. Middleton Tate Johnson's name, however, does not appear on the list of bona fide certificate holders in Tarrant County before 1855. Barring the discovery of additional land records, the vague claim that M. T. Johnson owned the property where Fort Worth was built simply does not stand up to scrutiny.²⁰ Not only is the historical record unclear on who owned the land but also there is still more confusion over just who issued the orders that sent Ripley Arnold to north Texas. Local lore says it was General Worth, but Worth was dead and buried some two weeks before the major set out from Fort Graham to the banks of the Trinity; his death on May 7 after a long bout with cholera makes him an unlikely candidate as the author of the orders, and, furthermore, no such orders over his name have been found. The lack of evidence has not hindered some local historians. Howard W. Peak, one of the first children born at Fort Worth (the settlement) and later a local celebrity, asserted that Fort Worth was established by Maj. Ripley A. Arnold, "who was commissioned to execute this order of the War Department by General William Jenkins Worth." According to Peak, Arnold also carried a personal letter from Worth to "Colonel Johnson" requesting assistance in locating the best site for the fort. Arnold and Johnson and their respective parties linked up at Johnson's Station and proceeded on to the bluffs over the Trinity. This version of the founding of Fort Worth, for which Peak is one of the principal sources, has come to be the accepted one. Yet his credibility as a source has been called into question ere now. He claimed to be the first male child born in the tiny community and later gained fame as a traveling salesman, raconteur, and prolific writer. When the WPA Writers' Project was preparing its history of Fort Worth in 1939 they accepted Peak's version of events while admitting privately that, "We have no data... either corroborating or conflicting with this version."²¹

Writing in 1972, Julia Kathryn Garrett, author of the oft-quoted and highly regarded Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph, accepted the conventional wisdom that Worth was behind the orders, describing the sequence of events this way: "In February, 1849, General Worth had commanded Major Ripley A. Arnold to use companies F and I of the Second U.S. Dragoons to found two forts [that is, Graham on the Brazos and Worth on the Trinity].²² But the orders she cites in her bibliography (General Orders No. 13) concern the organization of his department in the broadest terms and make no mention of Arnold either directly or indi-rectly. The relevant portion of those orders commanded "the Senior Officer on the North Western frontier," Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, to "make personal inspection of, and give the necessary orders for, the construction of such partial defensive arrangements as may be sufficient to guard against surprise, and for the security of public stores, animals, etc."²³ Garrett also accepts Peak as a reliable source, either unaware of or else ignoring the reservations of the WPA team.

With no evidence to either support or refute the conventional wis-dom, other writers have been free to make their own educated guesses about who issued Arnold's orders. Nevin Winter in Texas the Marvelous gives credit to Gen. Winfield Scott, which is preposterous since at the time Scott was on a ship at sea coming home from Mexico, having been relieved of his command by orders of the new U.S. president, Zachary Taylor.²⁴ He could not have been aware of local events in Texas.

The man who actually issued the orders has remained in the shadows for the past 150 years because he was neither the commander of the Eighth Military Department nor the (former) commanding general of American forces in Mexico. Rather, it was Colonel Harney, commander of the U.S. Second Dragoons and of the Frontier District in the Eighth Military Department. This information has always been in the records for researchers to find, but not in the obvious places. It comes from an obscure entry in the Fort Graham post returns for May 1849. The assistant adjutant at Fort Graham, where Ripley Arnold was commanding at the time, recorded that Orders No. 16, dated May 10 from "Headquarters, Austin," directed "Brevet Major Arnold with his Company to the West Fork of the Trinity."²⁵ The full orders no longer exist, apparently being either lost or discarded by Arnold soon thereafter, so that an assistant adjutant's annotation is all that we have today.

Austin was the headquarters for the Second Dragoons in Texas, where William Selby Harney exercised his considerable authority. Harney was known as something of a wild man in the antebellum army. A barrel-chested six-footer, he was a bearcat in a fight, but wont to take great liberties interpreting his orders as he saw fit, his superiors be damned. As senior officer in the state after General Worth died, Harney automatically took over the Eighth Military Department while at the same time retaining command of the Second Dragoons. Although his status was only interim, Harney was not one to let that get in his way, especially when the Indian threat to the state's western frontier was so pressing. As he wrote to his brother, Indians "are playing the devil all over the country."²⁶ Refusing to be a lame duck department commander, he issued Orders No. 16 to Ripley Arnold.

Harney was not acting entirely on his own hook, however, when he ordered the dragoons to the Trinity. He was operating under the broad directives of Worth's General Orders No. 13, which placed him in charge of the Frontier District stretching from San Juan Bautista in south Texas to the Washita River on the Texas-Oklahoma border. Worth's instructions to Harney were to "give the necessary orders for the construction of such practicaly [sic] defensive arrangements as may be sufficient to guard against hostilities, and for the security of the families, stores, animals, [and] farms" in his district. The establishment of Fort Worth was a natural consequence of those orders.

Harney's tenure at the head of the Eighth Military Department was short-lived indeed. On June 4 he was succeeded by Gen. George M. Brooke, who continued Worth's policy of establishing a chain of posts to guard the frontier. Poor Harney has become the forgotten man in local lore, overshadowed by Worth, Arnold, and even Edward Tarrant, the militia officer and state representative whose name was attached to the county. There are no landmarks bearing Harney's name, but he rightly deserves the credit for issuing the orders that founded Fort Worth.

The same lore that elevates Maj. Ripley Arnold to heroic status as the founder of Fort Worth also suggests that only dragoons ever garrisoned the place. While it is true that members of the U.S. Second Dragoons founded the post, they were joined in the fall of 1849 by members of the Eighth Infantry Regiment. It was normal practice in Texas to mix elements of infantry and dragoons at frontier posts. There were not enough dragoons in the Lone Star State to man every point on the defensive line guarding the frontier, and infantry were cheaper to equip and maintain than cavalry. Throughout the rest of its life as an active post, Fort Worth was home to both dragoons and infantry, usually at the same time.²⁷ Yet Fort Worth celebrates its founding dragoons while ignoring the foot soldiers who also helped hold down the fort.

One of the most cherished and popular legends associated with Fort Worth involves that favorite villain in the drama of western expansion, the Indian. In theory Fort Worth was originally established to protect against the Indians, who had controlled the area for several years. While most of the Indians who inhabited north Texas were of the relatively peaceful, agrarian variety—such as the Anadarko, Ionie, and Tonkawa—more warlike tribes like the Wichita and the dreaded Comanche also visited the area. Reminiscences of early Fort Worth pioneers like John Peter Smith and George Harris mention seeing encampments of Waco and Caddo across the Trinity, and of small wandering bands visiting the fort for purposes of trade.²⁸

Ripley Arnold's reports also mention occasional Indian visitors, but he clearly did not ever consider them a threat. Yet local lore contains a thrilling story of at least one Indian raid on the fort, and there is even a cast-concrete monument commemorating the event on Summit Avenue just west of downtown. The sole source of the story is Howard Peak, a man who was born at Fort Worth a year after the soldiers left, and who relied for his account on some old papers found in his father's files after the elder Peak died many years later. His story of the great Indian raid on Fort Worth is a prime example of how well-told stories from a self-assured, believable source, when not examined too closely, can become entrenched in local history. Once they get into print, they take on the status of divine scripture, that is, inerrant and infallible.

Howard Peak's story naturally involves the most feared of the several Indian tribes who called Texas home, the Comanches. The fact that the Comanche Trail swung far to the north and west of the Twin Forks was only a minor inconvenience because the story was so good. According to Peak, in 1850 a band of Comanches under Chiefs Jim Ned and Feathertail were living in the Palo Pinto area when they decided to "wipe the fort out of existence" because some of Major Arnold's scouts had killed one of Jim Ned's favorite warriors and also because of the usual hatred of Indians for all whites. Some two hundred savages in war paint headed for Fort Worth in two separate groups under the two chiefs but were discovered along the way by "an adventurous fur trapper named Cockerell." The alarmed trapper raced ahead to warn Major Arnold, who ordered the garrison out to intercept the onrushing war party. The soldiers got the drop on Jim Ned's bunch when they came upon the Indians fast asleep in their trail camp. They quietly surrounded the encampment and on the major's signal charged, killing thirty-seven Indians and wounding another fifteen. No soldiers were killed or wounded in the melee. Chief Jim Ned escaped and rode away to join Feathertail's band. The dragoons pushed on toward Palo Pinto intent on dealing out the same medicine to Feathertail. This time, however, the troopers were on the receiving end of an ambush. Only the soldiers' superior firepower saved the day, killing Feathertail and forty-four more warriors before the rest fled for the hills. This time the toll in Arnold's command numbered five killed and fifteen wounded. They returned to Fort Worth, bloodied but proud of the job they had done.²⁹

But this is not the end of the story. Six months later, the resolute Jim Ned led another war party against Fort Worth, this time getting as close as the high ground to the west of present-day downtown. As they rallied for an attack, however, the fort's six-pound howitzer lobbed a shell into their midst, scattering them and bringing the only Indian raid on the fort to a happy conclusion.³⁰

The problems with this story as Peak tells it are numerous and significant, beginning with the fact that the two officers whom Peak says accompanied Arnold were not at Fort Worth at the same time as Major Arnold in 1850. And one of them, Capt. Robert Maclay, commanded the garrison's infantry troops who were conveniently left out of Peak's story. Peak also says the wounded from the second battle were treated by the post's "two surgeons" and loaded onto ambulances for transport back to Fort Worth. The fort never employed more than a single surgeon and never had any ambulances assigned to it, facts made very clear in the post returns. And the "repeating carbines" that Peak credits for the narrow victory in the second engagement did not even exist in 1850. At that time the dragoons were armed with musketoons, short-barreled, smooth-bore weapons that were accurate only up to about fifty yards. Repeating rifles in the form of Sharp's carbines were not issued to the U.S. Army until after the Civil War.³¹

Even granting Peak the benefit of the doubt on such details as weapons and officers' names, the strongest evidence against any such Indian engagement as he describes comes from the records of the U.S. Army, Adjutant General's Office, for the years when Fort Worth was an active post. Neither the regimental returns nor the post returns from the years 1849 to 1853 mention any Indian battles or any casualties from hostile action. The sparse entries cribbed into the narrow lines on official forms tell the true story, but they are not as colorful or as readily accessible as Howard Peak's recollections, so legend trumps fact again.

Peak's book is out of print today, but the story of the major versus the Comanche chief has been repeated in more recent references, including the respected Fort Worth & Tarrant County, A Historical Guide, published under the auspices of the Tarrant County Historical Society in 1984.³² As long as standard references and historical markers like the one at 1424 Summit Avenue endorse it, the great Comanche raid will remain a part of local lore.

Jim Ned was a real Comanche chief of some repute, but hardly the most famous non-visitor to make an appearance in Fort Worth history. There is a slightly less familiar local legend which says that Robert E. Lee came to Fort Worth, somewhat along the lines of the "George Washington Slept Here" mythology. Lee was still a relative unknown in the 1850s, but his subsequent Civil War fame made any encounter with him an event of transcending significance to later generations. The local legend that he came to Fort Worth owes its origins to Nevin Winter, that fount of so many other legends.

According to Winter in Texas the Marvelous, Lee was standing on the north Texas prairie in the early 1850s gazing pensively westward when the following conversation took place:

"What do you see?" asked a companion.
"I am listening to the footsteps of oncoming millions," answered Lee.³³

Winter does not specifically place this encounter at Fort Worth, but that is the way the story passed into local lore, with the dramatic moment occurring while Lee and his companion stood on the bluff overlooking the Trinity River. It is a nice story with an old-fashioned Turnerian (i.e., Frederick Jackson Turner) message. The immediate problem is that Lee never spent any time in north Texas that we know about, and in the early 1850s, when the incident is said to have occurred, he was either building fortifications on the East Coast or serving as superintendent of West Point. When he got to Texas in 1855 with the Second Cavalry he was posted to Fort Mason in west central Texas, between San Saba and the Llano River; by that time, Fort Worth, the military post, was history. He left Texas in 1857 and did not come back for nearly three years. Because the requisite chronology, window of opportunity, and other elements are missing from this story, it lacks all credibility. Besides, if Lee had been standing on the bluff over the Trinity, he would have been facing north, not west, which undercuts the whole point of the story.

Anybody might have made such a statement; it has also been attrib uted to Ripley Arnold. The words did not have to come from Robert E. Lee, but associating them with his famous name gives added historical weight. Anonymous or apocryphal statements tend to be credited to famous persons. Lee never made such a statement any more than Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake," or Gen. John J. "Blackjack" Pershing announced to the French in 1918, "Lafayette, we are here." His most relevant comment about Texas in this vein came after he was sent to San Antonio by Department commander Gen. David Twiggs in 1860, when he wrote his family, "I prefer the wildness of Texas to its cities."³⁴ These hardly sound like the words of a man eagerly anticipating the arrival of hordes of immigrants to the Texas prairie.

Julia Garrett endorsed the substance of the story in Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph, without including the dialogue, by also placing Lee at Fort Worth in the 1850s, and with no more documentation than Winter provided. She writes that Lieutenant Colonel Lee and other "military men of distinction" were "visitors" to the tiny army post.³⁵ Among those distinguished visitors, she includes a Who's Who of the senior officers of the famed U.S. Second Cavalry: William J. Hardee, George H. Thomas, Earl Van Dorn, John B. Hood, and Fitzhugh Lee. Apart from the obvious problem that the Second Cavalry did not even exist until 1855, two years after the army had shut down Fort Worth, there is absolutely no evidence in either the regimental returns or post returns to support such an assertion.

A number of lessons can be drawn from these examples of Fort Worth lore, all of which illustrate the inherent problems in writing local history. The immediate problem is that pioneer founders are particularly susceptible to legendary treatment. This is as true of Ripley Arnold and Middleton Tate Johnson as it is of more famous men like Capt. John Smith, Daniel Boone, or Sam Houston. The historian must be particularly careful in taking at face value the popular stories handed down about such men. In the case of Fort Worth, Johnson's land grant and Major Arnold's battle with the Comanches are simply not supported by the historical record. Still, the possibility that they may be some day must be kept open.

One of the principal reasons behind Fort Worth's non-historical lore is that the individuals who played the largest role in chronicling the city's history were not trained historians. B. B. Paddock and Oliver Knight were newspapermen first and foremost, as were their non-bookwriting contemporaries, Edith Deen (1906-1994) and Mary Daggett Lake (1880-1955), whose contributions we have not mentioned heretofore. Both women wrote regular columns in Fort Worth newspapers for many years about local history subjects. Edith Deen wrote for the Fort Worth Press from 1925 to 1954, and Mary Daggett Lake did the same for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from 1926 to 1955. Both were respected journalists with strong ties to the community, and they were the first to extensively interview old-timers who still remembered the early days. Lake never collected her stories and interviews in book form, and Deen confined her book writing to religious subjects. But like Paddock and Knight, they were journalists doing the work of historians albeit without the credentials.

Howard Peak was a traveling salesman and Nevin Winter was a writer of travel books. They repeated the stories they had heard and added a few of their own. In the case of Paddock and Peak, who recorded and published their own recollections, their personal standing in the community added weight to their words. For what they actually saw and experienced personally, they are excellent historical sources, but for the full history of the city they must be used very carefully because rigorous scholarship was not their forte.

Years ago, any doubts about their strict historical accuracy were glossed over, as when Bess Carroll Woolford, the state guidebook editor for the WPA Writers' Project in the 1930s, told the Project's local supervisor, "We agree... that Howard W. Peak is unreliable in some facts." Nonetheless, they chose to rely on him extensively in preparing their authoritative reference work because "his reminiscences more nearly fitted the pattern [of local lore]."³⁶ Judging the historical accuracy of any account by how well it fits local lore is getting the priorities reversed, but this has been the standard commonly applied to Fort Worth history in the past.

Journalists, in their efforts to make history more accessible, often gloss over the finer points of good scholarship. Since the average person gets most of his or her knowledge of local history from feature articles and the occasional special edition, the hometown newspaper becomes the preferred primary source. When Oliver Knight did his research for Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity, most of his information came from the October 30, 1949, Special Centennial Edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The WA writers in the 1930s relied heavily on both B. B. Paddock and Howard Peak. The fact that both men were well-known, long-time residents of Fort Worth enhanced their credibility, which illustrates another point: the credibility of the story is directly proportional to the standing of the source. The better known and more respected the source is, like a Paddock or a Peak, the more likely that account is to be taken as gospel. The number of misconceptions and outright errors of fact in Fort Worth history that can be traced back to those two men are too numerous to count.

Julia Kathryn Garrett, another standard reference in local history, is a different matter. A trained historian with a doctorate who studied under the inestimable Herbert Eugene Bolton, she spent most of her professional career as a high school teacher. Her purpose in writing A Frontier Triumph was to write "a popularized story of Fort Worth," not "a record of historical events." She therefore reported, as she herself explained, "both legend and historical fact" without drawing a clear line between the two. She also chose to put aside her scholarly training ("the inflexible limits of Bolton scholarship") by dispensing with "documented footnotes," leaving the reader to try to match up the information in her text with the various entries in her extensive bibliography.³⁷ The resulting work is more scholarly than what came before, but still not up to the rigorous standards of her University of California at Berkeley training.

Her most laudable accomplishment was utilizing the dozens of oral history interviews collected by newspaperwoman Mary Daggett Lake years before, and sending out squads of "Junior Historians" to interview elderly family members who were descendants of some of Fort Worth's pioneer families. Those sources made her work fresh and well grounded but did not guarantee good scholarship. Oral history traditions often do not bear close scrutiny because memories fade with advancing years and there is a tendency to exaggerate for the sake of the listener. Where the dim recollections and hearsay stories from which Garrett drew dealt with the military post, some careful double-checking in old army records would have helped.

She probably made her mistake in accepting the official explanation that such records simply did not exist. For many years the army answered all queries about Fort Worth's origins with a figurative shrug of the shoulders. In the military reservations file for Fort Worth that is part of the Adjutant General's Office records in the National Archives, there is a notation by the Acting Adjutant General of the War Department from 1890 that says, "Any correspondence that led to the selection of this point [that is, Fort Worth] as a post and the reasons therefore were doubtless the subject of local correspondence that has never reached this office."³⁸ This pronouncement may have scared away unknown numbers of local historians over the years, while convincing others of the need to fill in the blanks in the historical record with guesswork and fabrication.

Garrett, Knight, Paddock, Peak, Deen, Lake, and Winter are all gone, leaving behind a rich legacy of history mixed with apocrypha. Their writings virtually define Fort Worth history as we understand it today. The challenge is to correct their errors without tearing down the fine work they did preserving Fort Worth's past when the field was virtually wide open.

The errors cited in this work relate only to the received wisdom about Fort Worth the military post; Fort Worth the subsequent city deserves a whole different discussion of local lore and primary sources. For many reasons, Fort Worth the army post seems to be less understood and more misinterpreted than Fort Worth the city. Maybe this is because it was so long ago in the local memory, or because it requires a more specialized understanding of military history to understand, or simply because the primary sources are buried so deep in the files of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., that even the army could not find them when asked. Whatever the cause, local historians have had the hardest time explaining that period in the city's history. B. B. Paddock and Julia Garrett, who were hardly tyros when it came to writing history, do much better when they get to the story of the city's growth and development.

Local history is held to higher standards today than it was decades ago when people like Buckley Paddock and Howard Peak were writing. Nowadays, genealogists and local historians can take their place at the main table with the best the graduate schools turn out, but it is only because they have improved the quality of their product. Indeed, the graduate schools are producing scholars who choose to devote themselves to the study of local history rather than the more traditional rise and fall of empires, great political movements, and the like. In the past those same scholars might have overlooked or completely ignored the rich history to be found in their own hometowns. As the amateur historians of the historical societies and the Fourth Estate pass the torch on to the professional historians, Fort Worth history will be reexamined by going back wherever possible to archival sources. The city's history will only be the better for it.