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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
Trails, Treasures, and Texas Tales
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Join us in this episode of Talking Texas History as we sit down with Gary Pinkerton. Discover the historical importance of Trammell's Trace, and get a sneak peek into Gary's upcoming projects. He also talks about the Alliance for Texas History, a new organization focused on preserving and promoting Texas history. Stay tuned for updates on Gary's latest book ventures!
Learn more about Gary and his publications at his website: https://garylpinkerton.com/
Exploring Texas History Beyond the Alamo
Speaker 1This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. This is Talking Texas History. Well, welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Preuss, I'm Scott Sosby. Scott, today we are in Huntsville, texas, and we are at the East Texas Historical Association-sponsored New Deal Symposium. How long has this been going on?
Speaker 1Well, as we talked about, we started this. Our very first one was in 2013, and we held in greenville at the cotton museum, and we've held one every year, except for in 2018. Uh, some things came up, we didn't have one and then covid caused us to lose two, so this is our ninth one that we've held, so it's become an institution now. We hold every year, every every june. We hold this. Next year we'll hold it. We don't have a location yet. We're negotiating between a couple of places, but it will be in June next year for our 10th anniversary of the Texas New Deal Symposium.
Speaker 2Well, this week we have actually my ex-neighbor or you know, lived in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1He moved out to get away from you, right I?
Speaker 2don't doubt that. That's what I'm thinking. It's Gary Pinkerton. Gary, welcome to Talking Texas History.
Speaker 3Thanks, glad to be here.
Speaker 1Gary, you had a lot of things going on in your life here recently, we're glad to find. In fact, it took us a while to get you on because you were so damn busy. We had so many things going on. We're going to get into a lot of those things, but start off like we almost always do.
Speaker 3Tell us about yourself and particularly, I think our listeners will be very interested in, let's say, the path you took to studying and writing about Texas history. Well, it is. You know, history discovered me, I have to say, back in around 2004,. My father made an offhand comment about Trammell's Trace, and so when I asked him what that was, he said oh, that's that rut over there across the pasture that you used to play in when you were a kid and it is a rut.
Speaker 1I'm like what.
Speaker 3I looked at my mom and she gave me that look like you should have been paying attention, and I knew nothing about it but started to pull that thread and discovered a lot of information, not a lot of facts about it. There had been some research done in the 1940s by James and Mary Dawson. That was helpful to get started, but I quickly discovered that that was a major route for immigration, particularly the formation of Austin's Colony right there across the pasture of our family farm, and so it was very personal and I'm terminally curious.
Speaker 1That's a good quality to have.
Speaker 3It is. It'll be on my headstone. So, you know, researched a lot of years of back and forth and my wife and my mother finally ganged up on me and got me past the footnotes and the indexing and turned that into a book in 2016. But you know, any researcher has hopefully a limited number of rabbit trails that come up when you're doing that core research that you're trying to pay attention to. There are all kinds of distractions and I've picked up a few of those that have turned into another book about a treasure legend in east texas, some spanish expedition or spanish trails prior to the, the austin colony, and an autobiography of the guy who pretended to be a world's greatest underwater treasure hunter but who actually never got wet. That's one of my favorites. Two of those the Paper Diver is the title of the book that's coming out later this year from McFarlane, and Bridles and Biscuits is the book about Spanish colonial trails during that late 17th century.
Speaker 2There may be some people on here who don't know anything about Trammell's Trace, and the book won an award. Right, it's won an award. So great book, great topic. But let's tell people what Trammell's Trace is about and where. Your book, if you don't mind, follows that trail Sure.
Speaker 3Trammell's Trace was the first road into Texas used by Anglos to migrate into the area of Boston's colony. So it had been a cattle trading trail for centuries and Trammell essentially followed the same lines corridors to get from Fulton, arkansas, at the great bend of the Red River it takes a 90-degree turn there, just outside the Texarkana and wove down through seven counties into Nacogdoches where it joined up with El Comité Real, which ran east and west. And you know when I say joined up most of the roads, there were more roads around Nacogdoches than there were through Nacogdoches, so that's a good thing. They were avoiding various authorities there over the decades. But it really exploded for use by Anglos when news of Austin's colony came up. So if somebody's pre-Republic ancestors came from Tennessee, missouri, arkansas, kentucky in that direction, they likely came down Trammell's Trace into Texas.
Speaker 1Tell us something because you know and I think people you know. When people hear about a trail and a trace and all these very things, I think they have some sort of conception in their mind, like we've been living by popular culture in movies, like you know, this is this big wagon trail or something, but it wasn't. I mean in the origin, what it looked like.
Speaker 3Tell people what it really looked like, because I think they'll be surprised by that. Yeah, it was, you know. I've got a great photo that Rachel Gallant at Kettle Mounds State Historic Site took of a tortoise making its way through some tall grass and behind it the grass is pressed down, so even a turtle can make a trail and with more use they become wider and and, uh, you know, better defined. But multiple, multiple accounts of the route from uh Fulton down to Nacogdoches were that the trail was, you know, was flooded or lost, or, uh, you know, same thing happens on back roads now, if it's muddy you do a turnout, or somebody found a better way, or there were signs saying that the trail goes here. But it only went to their house because they wanted to see some eggs, had lived in Arkansas and was enlisted by the military in 1846, I believe to lead them into Texas.
Speaker 1But that's how it got the name.
Speaker 3The name came earlier. He was credited with making some of the trail from the Red River connection and one branch of Trammell's Trace went up near Jonesboro, pecan Point, clarksville area and he was credited with widening that trail to get some of those people down into Austin's colony. But it was very ill-defined and you know, at that time 21, trammell was credited with using chopping axes to widen the trail to get wagons and livestock down. Until that time it was just wide enough for a horse and a little-used trail is going to grow over just like your backyard would if you don't tend to it.
Speaker 3Especially in East Texas. Yeah, no kidding. So yeah, it was a very not a clearly defined route. There were no signs, there were no hotels, there were no hotels, there were no stopovers. There were river crossings where, you know, depending on the level of the water, people would pile up behind that.
Speaker 1But a trace is a good name for it. You know, I always say I was born in the right centuries because I wouldn't want to live in any of that thing. My idea of roughing it is they don't put a mint on your pillow at the end of the night.
Speaker 3I know right. So I don't want to stay in any place like that, With no power. Here in Huntsville it would have melted, that was.
Speaker 1This brings up something else I want you to put, because this is really great. You know there's this whole I don't know what you call it a strata in our profession and discipline, that some people like to create division between this idea of academic historians, lay historians and this type of thing, and you obviously were not academically trained as a historian, social worker.
Speaker 1But you turned yourself into a researcher because, it's obvious, anybody who completes a number of books you are. Tell our audience a little bit about how you came to that and how you found it, because I really want them to know. Look, you don't have to be this professionally trained historian to find these types of research principles, so just kind of talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3Well, one of the things I found that served me in my career that's just kind of the way I look at things is that if I can understand something, I can explain it to people. I can explain it to people. So I worked in HR and training for most of my career and being able to interpret sometimes wordy or obscure or scholarly efforts to explain history don't meet everyone's ears the same way, Exactly right, and so if I pull on it hard enough and I'm able to explain it to myself, I feel like I can be a good interpreter of that information to others. And because I want to explain it to myself, that's really where it starts. So you know, you know, I got a master's degree in social work and had to do a thesis years ago, so I understood how, the rigor of documentation and what footnotes are. I call footnotes the root canal of writing.
Speaker 1Man, I'm going to remember that, because that's what it is, yeah.
Speaker 3So a lot of people stop right there at that ledge before they jump off.
Speaker 2Right, that's a great description.
Speaker 1So I just take it as part of my mission is to explain these things in a way that other people who might generate interest Well I think that's great, because we talk about this and I say this all the time is that many, many academic, professional, historians, if you want to call it that one of their biggest failings is we don't write for everybody and we just write for each other, and we have to stop doing that. And I think, taking your concepts is, you're exactly right. If we learn to actually disseminate the information we take in a way that everybody can understand, we've accomplished our job. That's something we need to work for, and we need people like you to actually do those types of things.
Speaker 2I mean, I think that you know to follow up kind of on what Scott's saying is I think that you know, as a social worker it's not a bad background to have, because you're used to explaining things to people.
Speaker 2Well, in HR you know you're professionally assigned to give bad news to people, so you have to learn how to be diplomatic at least, and that's part of the thing, right, and that's what makes a good teacher or a good writer, and not just writing to your internal constituents, but to be able to write so that anybody can understand what you're talking about.
Speaker 3Yeah, and I'll give credit to my mother here she's visiting with my wife came up this weekend to visit us in Kingwood, and I have to give her credit because she, since I was four years old, was reading books, and so I'm an incurable reader. The bookshelves in our house that we moved had to be in the right place, the right order and the right sequence.
Speaker 3And so being a reader makes a lot of difference as well. But you know, like Scott said, I don't think we have to get away from that academic pool because I'm amazed by highways and construction and big projects like that, and thank goodness there are a lot of engineers who do the research about the span of that bridge, but there's also a group of people who make it look pleasant and blend into the scenery and have a nice fit with the landscape. Everywhere except Huntsville, apparently, which is like the biggest span of unconstructed I-45?
Speaker 2there is, but they're working on it.
Speaker 3But there's both sides of that coin that need to take place, and that's a good analogy too. I like that the deep dive has to take place, but then you have to say, okay.
Speaker 1what that really means is this and that's what so many are about and make it important to that person. You know, what this means is we think we are, but sometimes we don't get there and we need people to call us on it.
Speaker 3I'm learning my way into it, so I'll let you know how it goes.
Speaker 2Gary, you've got another book called True Believers Treasure Hunters on Hendricks Lake. Tell us a little bit about that story.
Speaker 3That was one of those rabbit trails. Trammell's Trace crossed near Hendricks Lake, which is just at the point where Panola, harrison and Rusk County joined, just south of the Sabine River. The county line between Rusk and Panola. When Rusk was formed the boundary of two-thirds of Rusk County was defined as Trammell's Trace. So it was as significant, even that late, as a river or a stream that are commonly used as boundaries like that. But Hendricks Lake was there.
Speaker 3It's a little oxbow lake and you know I bumped into this treasure legend that John Lafitte had stolen some bars of silver at the Gulf Coast from a Spanish ship, santa Rosa, and they were traveling apparently north to St Louis to have it turned into coins when they were attacked by Spanish soldiers and they decided to cut loose six wagon loads of silver into this three-quarter mile long Oxbow Lake in East Texas. And this treasure legend had persisted, no-transcript. In the 1880s, in the 1890s, one adventure newspaper writer had said that there were holes dug on either side of Trammell's Trace between the Sabine River and the lake, people looking for stuff. But this treasure legend has just popped up about every 30 to 40 years. Newspaper articles bloom, paper articles bloom.
Speaker 3And what interested me, in the late 1950s there was some significant efforts by a local TV repairman and some Houston oil men who had some money to locate this silver again. There were underwater metal detectors, there were dynamiting dredging all kinds of stuff going on in the late 50s. So what was interesting to me about this folklore were the people who actually believed it enough to put into that amount of effort and money. Right after I did the book, you know, got a call from the History Channel. Really yeah, the very first episode of Beyond Oak Island was about this Hendrix Lake treasure legend. I got a kind of behind-the-scenes view of how that gets hyped up. You'll see me in the canoe or my kayak. I was riding shotgun and they say my job was to look for snakes.
Speaker 1That was pretty much it not much history in the history channel well the lost, you know, lost treasure, mines and stuff are such their trope.
Speaker 3Well, you know, lost the lost dutch mine in arizona, and well, at least you were looking for aliens yeah, no, we didn't have those yet, but jim bowie's there were a lot of silver mine there were a lot of metal sawmill parts in the bottom that kept metal detectors lit up.
Speaker 2Has anybody found any treasure?
Speaker 3No, no, there's no treasure there, you don't think it's fresh.
Speaker 2No.
Speaker 3I don't think there's anything ever. The exact same treasure legend, the same story, the same scenario is played out from Little Rockper on the on that side of the Sabine. But yeah, there's, there's nothing there but the. The power of that legend is pretty persistent.
Speaker 1And well, that's great that you can. You know when you find these things that you go into. I mean, you talk about the rabbit holes. Every time I start doing anything, these rabbit holes get to me like well, I need to go back and do that and I need to remember to go back and do that, and I need to just learn to be focused.
Speaker 3Some of them are good. The blinders have to go up.
Speaker 2But that's interesting, the fact that these myths persist and the people like this poor TV repairman guy. Maybe he was a local crank, I don't know, but he was very determined apparently to go out there and see if this treasure really was out there.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2And you know, invested time and money, and people do that all the time. And you know, the question is what do these stories really tell us about ourselves? Because that's not the only treasure story here in Texas, right?
Speaker 3No, they're everywhere. Yeah, yeah, you know this guy had hung in there. He was one of those TV repairmen that answered one of those ads in the back of a comic book kind of thing. Learn to be a TV repairman. But he was the TV repairman for Carthage. One of the photos of him in the local newspaper showed this underwater metal detector he built. That was about the size of a washing machine tub. Every good treasure hunter, though, if you want to attract investors, you've got to have something to show, and on one of his dives he pulled up a metal wagon wheel rim, and there's pictures of him in the newspaper.
Speaker 3His son gave me that wagon wheel rim, so I now have the Hendricks Lake wagon wheel rim in my backyard it's the size of a fire hose wagon that they would have used on the sawmill and when they destroyed the sawmills on the bank of Hendricks Lake. They just threw tons of metal into the lake and this is one of the things they found. But it's the wagon wheel from Lafitte's six wagon loads of silver. Of course it is, and I'm proud to have it.
Speaker 1Let's shift gears just a little bit, gary, as you've come into this and you talked about becoming a part of the discipline coming in, you've been a very integral part of a new organization, the state of new organization that is working to preserve and chronicle and promote Texas history, called the Alliance for Texas History. You're now recently named the managing director of that new organization. Tell us, tell our listeners, what's the organization's mission, what's its purpose, what's its future, what's it all about?
Speaker 3Well, the mission of the Alliance is to make sure that the focus on capital H history about Texas continues to focus on all people, all cultures, all backgrounds. There's a lot of history you know a lot about. History has become politicized. We want to get beyond that and determine the facts and make you know sound scholarly decisions about what that data means, what the events mean and actually what happened. There's a lot of misinformation that gets shared about historical events and we're just trying to make sure that our focus for the 21st century is to get a sound basis for continuing our study.
Speaker 1History. As you know, all history has been rife full of mythology. I mean, some of it is part of the discipline. I suppose dealing with that Texas history may be the most rife with some of this is part of the discipline. I suppose dealing with that Texas history may be the most ripe with some of those things, a whole lot of it has come through. In fact, what we come to believe as facts is folklore. So that's what I think is great about a new organization that's looking at that and trying to keep the focus on this. But this is not just an academically driven organization organization, is it?
Speaker 3Yeah, no, it's not. I mean the makeup that we've got almost 500 members now and when you look across the board at the makeup, there's a lot of people who are not in academic teaching positions or research positions that are focused on and supporting the effort to get Texas history on a sound basis and make sure we continue that way. So you know, I think a lot of it is what we just talked about. My interest in history is to try to interpret it to others. Soundbite history is so simple and easy to take into account, but there's just always more layers to what really happened.
Speaker 1Well, that's what I think. That I mean. We use the word and a lot of people think of this as a derogatory word. We talk about inclusive history and you know we have a whole lot of controversy because things get politicized by things. But inclusive, I think, is the right word for something like this, because it does include everybody and everybody's story is part of it.
Speaker 3Yeah, it is. It's just odd. I'd like some historian to tell me how inclusive became a bad word actually.
Speaker 1I would like someone to tell me.
Speaker 3It seemed like a good thing. But, yeah, the Texas Historical Commission has a part of their historical markers that focuses on undertold stories, and that's a good way to say it. Dionne Babineau, who spoke at our symposium, has an online museum of undertold stories, and there's just a lot that gets ignored. The session here at the New Deal Symposium that just preceded our getting together was talking about two attorneys that were kind of the underbelly of a campaign by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Not very much is known about these pivotal, key people that were kind of under the radar.
Speaker 2You know, some people might say look Texas history, do you need another organization? We've got the Texas State Historical Association, We've got the East Texas Historical Association, We've got the South Texas Historical Association, the West Texas Historical Association and we had for a while there the Central Texas Historical Association. Is there that much interest in Texas history? Do we need another organization? How would you answer somebody who asked you that?
Speaker 3Well, I think it does seem to get to the point where you wonder about all the divisions, and even beyond Texas history, western.
Speaker 2History.
Speaker 3Southern History Association. We have a lot of members in the alliance who aren't residents, you know, based in Texas, but still study Texas history or have an interest in the mission and I think that the direction that we're trying to take I mean the organization just fully formed in March we're looking to add to a journal. Next year We'll have our first annual, we have a one-day symposium at the end of April and we'll have our first annual conference next May in San Marcos, and what we're finding is that the people who are joining the alliance are celebrating our mission, which is to focus on all the history of Texas in a way that invites discussion and opens people up to a better understanding of those inclusive histories.
Speaker 1Well, I think that's right. You can't have. I mean, somebody could say there's all these different organizations. Do you work counter to each other? But they don't, because I think the advantageous thing is they all start working symbiotic yeah, symbiotically with each other. And I think they do, and even if they're not fully now, that there's in the future that could happen, and that's that can be nothing but a good thing.
Speaker 2Well, and you know you and I and you know we we go to many different historical associations. You know I didn't even include the 254 local county historical associations and all these museums, and the beauty is that it's an association of different people with maybe different focuses, foci, and that's my academic.
Speaker 1Thanks, he looked that up before he got here.
Speaker 2But you know, and sometimes we see the same people, sometimes we see somebody new, and there's as you say, they're not exclusive of one another.
Speaker 3No, and it really the focus. I've been part of these Texas Historical Sessions for years now and growing up in Texas and having that the focus of research, that's the center of the universe for me. But having these local groups focus on things in their particular region or their particular county is important. The difficult part is to find ways to draw those things together is to find ways to draw those things together. There's an unwoven tapestry of information out there and trying to connect people to others who are interested in similar topics is really the difficult part. We purposely chose Alliance as part of our name because we think that is a critical. Part of that is that coming together part not just the research, not just the academic background, but it's that coming together that will make a difference in what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1I'd love to see you know I guess we can use inclusive as another word I think it would be great if, sometime in the near future, all of these organizations to get together in one place, have a get together in one place. We all share things with each other. That can only be positive. I don't know if that could ever happen, but I think that would be positive.
Speaker 3How big is your backyard? I haven't seen it. Well, you know, it depends on where my dogs are running at that time and how much rain it's been and how much.
Speaker 1Gene's backyard might be bigger now, since he doesn't have a fence. Yeah, you can use the neighbors Tell us we have to have the obligatory where people can go to join the Alliance or read more about it.
Speaker 3Give the email address yeah, the Alliance website is atxhorg or alliancefortexashistoryorg. You can go to the website there. Dot org or alliance for texas history dot org. You can go to the website there. You know there's the the usual things about how to join, what our mission, our values are. The one thing I would urge people to take a look at is we have a, an option there called texas history news, and what we do is just curate links to outside news about news about history. So I call it what's what's new about.
Speaker 3visited it yet Gene what's new about what's old is the name of that page.
Speaker 2We haven't had electricity, Scott.
Speaker 3Okay, so you know. Then we get updates to that, you know, once a week or so, just pulling in items from outside the outside world and and doing that ATXHorg is the website.
Speaker 1It's a very good website. Gary designed the website. Did you really, I did.
Speaker 2This is a new thing and I don't know, maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember this, but when the fact that history we're having a podcast for heaven's sake, the new social media aspects of organizations and historical associations really talks about getting meeting people where they are and getting them interested in new ways. They're not just coming to a university to take a class or you know a continuing ed place to take a class on history. Now you can go on YouTube. You've got to have a good website and you've got to have this other information on there, and it takes people who know how to do that. It's quite an undertaking that the Alliance took in just a few months.
Speaker 3Yeah, you know I'm like the world of this webmaster, I think now, but I haven't done some of that with the East Texas Historical Association and kind of getting my skills weaned with Scott and Crystal allowing me to meddle in their membership and set up. It was a nice transition and you know I'll continue to do some of those type projects for other organizations as well.
Speaker 1Yeah, he's given a lot of his time, folks and things. Well, we wish that and we could talk about this forever. We wish that these things could last for a long time, but we are just 30 minutes is all we are and we're coming to the end of that. One thing is you know from listening to our podcast, we always give our guests the last chance to answer the last question, which is that person's chance to pontificate on anything they want. You notice, we don't let Gina or I pontificate on whatever we want. Oh, never.
Speaker 2That would never happen. We have to go for three or four hours on this podcast and we know the other people are better than us.
Speaker 1So we ask our last question, and it's for you to just give us something, a gem of wisdom, what you want to leave everybody with. So this is where we've come to Gary Pinkerton what?
Impact of Social Media on Communication
Speaker 3do you know, man? You know, I think there's a lot of social media PTSD among people.
Speaker 2That's a good term.
Speaker 3And it's fundamentally changed the way we communicate, how we get information, how we connect with others. I mean, you just ignore all the trolling and all the crazy things people say online. They would never say to somebody's face, but somehow we've got to get a grasp on it because it is, you know, it's like erosion in my mind. It's really chipping away at some fundamental, foundational things about the way we communicate, the way we research, the way we do business. Good and you know good and bad, but it boils down.
Speaker 3I'll come back to my 91-year-old mother again. Just be nice to other people, you know, just find ways to connect with them emotionally. Just like you know, it wasn't the facts of Trammell's Trace that got me hooked, it was that emotional connection I felt to that history. And so if we find ways to put history in a perspective that makes someone get chill bumps or wonder about their own family history, or you hand them a little thread and they start to pull it because of something you said, that's the most valuable thing that we can do for people and what we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1Well, I think that's great.
Speaker 3And I think you've done that.
Speaker 1You've done that. You know reading your books. I can't wait to the. When is the Spanish Trail book?
Speaker 3It'll probably be next year, next year sometime. Yeah, I've just got a copy editor assigned to that one. Okay, so you have a copy editor assigned, it's about a.
Speaker 2That's a minimum of a nine-month process.
Speaker 3That's a fall, yeah, and probably 12 months. However, the autobiography of the treasure hunter will be sooner than that. I've got the page proofs and doing a final, final, final markup on that with an index.
Speaker 2So closer. Well, Gary Pinkerton, thank you so much.
Speaker 3Appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 2Thank you.
