[AGL] Jackson's last book review

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Poisonal thanks Harry for forwarding this as i otherwise would
not have seen it.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harry Edwards" <laughingwolf at ev1.net>
To: "ghetto 2" <ghetto2 at lists.whathelps.com>
Cc: "ghetto survivors" <austin-ghetto-list at pairlist.net>
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 7:05 AM
Subject: [AGL] Jackson's last book review


Jack Jackson and the art of telling a good story

As his Texas histories prove, the late Austinite was more than a
renowned cartoonist.

By Mike Cox
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, July 23, 2006

Peter Ellis Bean, young, resourceful and handsome, had a tough choice
to make: marriage or prison.

The 17-year-old Tennessean's troubles traced back to his having joined
Phillip Nolan on a horse-hunting foray into Spanish-controlled Texas in
1801. Nolan allowed anyone who rode with him to keep half of the wild
horses they captured. Since a good horse could fetch $50 and an
excellent horse $150, Bean could have made some very good money.

Instead, as Jack Jackson related in his excellent 2005 biography,
"Indian Agent: Peter Ellis Bean in Mexican Texas" (Texas A&M University
Press, $35), Nolan ended up dead at the hands of Spanish troops and
Bean wound up a prisoner. Which is where the marriage proposition comes
up.

In Mexico, an attractive young woman named Maria Baldonada set her cap
for Bean and made him an offer most young men in his situation would
have found hard to refuse: She would help him escape custody if he
would marry her. The only hitch was that she was already married, to a
much older man. Bean, who since his captivity had already had a fling
with the daughter of a Spanish officer, didn't mind taking a chance in
the name of romance. But thinking he would soon be freed, he declined
the offer.

Pointing out that Maria was married, Bean said that if "I should get
free, I could then come and spend my days in this town, where I should
have the happiness of seeing you."

"Maria would not be put off by Bean's if-and-when proposition of being
her part-time love," Jackson wrote, clearly having fun with the story.
"Her marriage to (a) rich old coot (he was fifty-five) had been
arranged by her parents, and she had had to go through with it not to
displease them. But she did not love her husband and refused to be
bound by her marriage vows." She later smuggled Bean a letter
professing her love, but to no avail; Bean spent another three years in
custody, which gave him plenty of time to rethink his decision.

Though hardly one of Texas' better-known historical figures, Bean ranks
right up there on the colorful scale. Though he refused to marry Maria,
he was not always so choosy. He was, in fact, a bigamist. In Mexico in
1815, he married Magdalena Falfan de los Gordos, "a young lady of fine
family." Three years later, in Tennessee, he married Candace Midkiff.
Both women apparently thought he was their one and only.

But Bean did not spend all his time courting.

As Jackson wrote in his introduction, "Rarely can we follow all the
major events of Texas history in the first half of the nineteenth
century through the life of one man. . . . His life stretches like a
fuse between 1800 and 1847 all the way from Nacogdoches to Mexico
City."

Bean participated in Mexico's revolution against Spain, knew the pirate
Jean Lafitte, took part in the Battle of New Orleans, helped put down a
short-lived revolution in Mexican-controlled Texas in 1826-1827 and
served as an Indian agent in Texas with a colonel's commission in the
Mexican army. After Texas became an independent republic, he continued
to live in East Texas until 1843, when he returned to Mexico and his
first wife. He died there in 1847 at age 64.

Using Mexican military records previously unavailable to scholars as
well as numerous other primary sources, Jackson focused on Bean's work
as a Cherokee Indian agent in Texas and his dealings with Sam Houston
and other Texas officials. The result is a book that provides much new
detail on Bean and the earliest days of Texas.

"Indian Agent" will likely stand as the definitive study of Bean, but
Jackson added a thoughtful caveat: "Just because things are not in
archives or museums does not mean that they do not exist. If and when
(any new material on Bean turns up), we might have to take another look
at Bean and discover that we did not know him at all. This is why
history is such an interesting topic; it is not dead and gone but in a
slow process of birth."

Since writing those words, Jackson's artistic and literary career ended
last spring.

Jackson, a longtime Austinite who is credited with writing the first
underground comic book in 1964, eventually gained renown among Texas
history buffs for a series of illustrated histories on topics ranging
from Comanches to the outlaw John Wesley Hardin.

Though he never outgrew his love for the serious comic book, in 1986 he
expanded into more traditional prose nonfiction. His first such work,
"Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721-1821," published by
Texas A&M University Press, broke new ground as the first comprehensive
study of Spanish ranching in Texas. (It is being reissued next month by
A&M.)

The last chapter of Jackson's life ended in Pleasant Valley Cemetery,
not far from Pandora, where his story had begun in 1941. Troubled by
poor health, Jackson went to the cemetery on June 8 and shot himself.

Jackson ended "Indian Agent" with an assessment of Bean by one of
Texas' most quotable Texans, J. Frank Dobie: "No matter how many wives
he had — and he certainly never had a tenth as many as had the wise
King Solomon or the psalmist David — he told a bully story."

So did Jack Jackson.