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| Tracy Crawford presents award to my Dad (right) |
I appreciated all the kind words
readers had to say about my father, Tom
Henson, who was honored Friday in Tyler with the "Justinian Award" by the
Smith County Bar Foundation, so I thought I'd point those interested to a
blog post from my brother
- a minister in Shreveport - giving a brief account of the event. I
should add that, though I've always been proud of my father, the
hagiography offered up by his law partner and (for me) life-long family friend Tracy Crawford during the introduction left me
downright tearful and beaming with pride. (I said to my Dad afterward that normally people don't say things like that about you until they're throwing dirt on you!) Your correspondent was
blessed to be raised by good Christian parents of high character
and it was wonderful to see my Dad justly honored for his life's work.
BTW, a line from my father's acceptance speech recorded in John's
post will give you a flavor of both my Dad's humor and a taste of the
cultural background that led your correspondent to choose the perhaps
unlikely
nom de plume, "Grits for Breakfast." At one point my Dad
rattled off a series of quotes about the law from a variety of learned
figures from Einstein to Clarence Darrow to St. Thomas Aquinas, but he finished off the litany
with a line from Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind: "The
south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers
and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt
such low callings!"
Tracy Crawford mentioned, as my brother recorded, that my great
grandfather, Archibald "Arch" Sneed, my grandmother's father, was a huge formative
influence for my Dad, and he could have added for me as well. (My
brother was a little too young to remember him very much.) He died when I was
six and was the first person I loved to pass away, which itself was a
formative experience. But this family patriarch's life and legacy was as
emblematic of Texas for me as Longhorns or spring bluebonnets.
Sneed's family came to Texas after Sherman's soldiers destroyed their
family farm in eastern Mississippi near the end of the Civil War.
According to family lore, the women and children hid
in a root cellar, terrified, silent and cowering while union troops burned out their farm. They listened to
the soldiers pillaging their home while their animals screamed and died
in a burning barn just a few feet away from them. Afterward, they abandoned
the smoldering rubble to head westward to Texas, part of a mass
migration of ex-Confederates that rapidly populated much of the state.
Arch Sneed was born a Texan and grew up in
Lampassass. As Tracy mentioned, he was inspired to see the cattle drives
plowing northward toward the markets in Kansas and Chicago. As a young man he moved north hoping to work as a cowboy on the famed XIT Ranch,
which covered large chunks of ten Texas counties in the northwestern section
of the Panhandle. He was turned down when he first applied, though. They only wanted men age 21 and over who could vote in order to maximize their power in local elections. If you're unaware of the XIT it's an interesting
tidbit of Texas history that was incredibly important to that region of the state. A Chicago-based syndicate, if I recall, had traded the state
for the massive expanse of property along the New Mexico border - three million acres famously surrounded by six thousand
miles of fence - in exchange for construction of the Texas capitol. The
granite building - the one still in use today - had to be built to spec:
Slightly taller than the capitol in Washington D.C. and facing south, with its
back to the Yankee oppressors.
Anyway, before my great-grandfather was old enough to land his dream job at the XIT, Teddy Roosevelt came through town recruiting men to
join his Rough Riders, who would eventually join him in his famed ride
up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. He was traveling through
cowboy country recruiting men as he headed southward where they would
train in San Antonio before heading to Cuba. Young Arch met the future
president, was sorely impressed with him, and desperately wanted to join
the Rough Riders, he recounted to me more than once many decades later.
But because he was 17, the Army required his mother's permission and
she said "no." Her reason: He would be required to wear a blue (read:
Yankee) uniform. The wounds were still too fresh. So that was that. He would remain a cowboy instead of
becoming a soldier, signing on at the XIT the moment they would have him. If Arch Sneed could be said to have had any life regrets, the missed opportunity to ride with Teddy Roosevelt would certainly be it.
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| TR recruited Panhandle cowboys |
When
the XIT Ranch folded before WWI, my great-grandfather became a
railroad engineer and worked 30 years based out of Dalhart piloting
trains across America for the now-defunct Rock Island Line, retiring
with a traditional company watch when he was done that's one of my
father's prized possessions. Less discussed in family lore was his
participation in massive railworker strike in 1946
busted by Harry Truman.
He was a Freemason of some fairly high degree. On a darker note, he
very briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan, say my older relatives, leaving
once he "found out what they were about." I hope that's true. His
favorite book was
Ivanhoe, which he read more than a dozen times.
(When books were more scarce, you read the same ones over and over.) He
could recite poetry nearly endlessly on command, much of it memorized
from a set of small blue books anthologizing "classic" poetry he'd
purchased somewhere on his railroad travels. (My father later taught me
to recite verse as a child from those very same texts.) He raised two
daughters, including my grandmother, and sent both of them to college at
Texas Tech.
Through all of that, though, he continued to self-identify as a
cowboy. It was who Arch Sneed was at his core. Dalhart continues to hold
an annual XIT Rodeo along with the world's largest outdoor barbecue.
But the annual event in August used to be the XIT Rodeo and
Reunion, where,
before they all passed, former XIT cowboys would be feted and honored,
even driven down the street in a full-blown parade with floats and
marching bands. By the time I attended, as we did nearly annually as a
kid, the increasingly few elderly former XIT cowboys would ride along in
horse drawn carriages, followed by one horse with a poignantly empty
saddle to honor the cowboys no longer with them. The XIT Ranch was
celebrated in Dalhart when I was a kid more vigorously than the Fourth
of July!
Tracy Crawford couldn't be more right that to understand Tom Henson one
must understand Arch Sneed. It's probably true for me as well. The man's life helped define our
family's values and priorities long after he was dead and buried, and my own identity as a Texan is certainly rooted in his legacy. My father's parents lived just a few blocks away from his maternal grandparents during his childhood and he spent nearly as much time at their place as at his own home. His father was Dallam County Judge and a rather stern man,
while Arch Sneed, his grandfather, was a jovial, joking character with a wry sense
of humor who liberally handed out nicknames and was
full of stories from his cowboy and railroad days, always sprinkled with
healthy dose of almost classic Texan exaggeration and bombast, but also
the down-to-earth self-deprecation of a man who'd helped transform the
Old West into the modern era, along with many others like him, not
through oil money or hustling real estate but by the sweat of his brow working other men's cattle and land.
As my father likes to point out, Arch Sneed's life coincided with a wave of technological and social change that's nearly impossible to fathom. As a boy he
established his life's ambition watching Texas cattle drives marching
northward and before he died he watched on television as a man walked on
the moon. What a mind blowing transformation he witnessed! He would have been proud of last week's homage to my father, and I was pleased his memory was recognized on Friday along with my Dad.
