Her name was Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long and she should have been an empress. Her filibustering husband, James Long, wove her vasty dreams of an empire in Texas and twice rode through blood to wrest it from the hands of Spain. In the end, as her husband dueled with the fates, she could count herself empress of only wild animals and cannibals with a ice shingled tent for a palace. Alone on Bolivar island, surrounded by a frozen bay, she gave birth to a daughter she later claimed to be the first white child in Texas. Turns out she was wrong but that fact soon lost to the legend just as James Long lost to Spain. Shot dead in prison. She never remarried. And though her husband failed to bow the first Republic of Texas low at her feet with fire and steel, she became the perpetual first lady of another Republic, her own beauty and charm conquering more than her husband every could with arms. She regaled the great men of the time with her tales and hospitality - Travis, Milam, Houston, and Lamar made up her stable of suitors at her boarding house. Lamar would scribble out her colorful tales and weave them into his own book on the history of their adopted country - a book she would later save from the Mexican army during that mad scramble towards Lousiana now known as the Runaway Scrape. The tales she told proved to be as grandiose as her husbands schemes. She held off the man-eating Karankawas with only a cannon and a slave girl, gave birth in a frozen tent during one of the coldest winters in Texas history, conducted a tête-à-tête with the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte to enlist his help with her husbands schemes, and even wove a lone star flag for her husbands men to wave above the flames of conquest that fizzled out - possibly the first lone star flag in Texas history, and she offered up her home as a meeting place for other revolutionaries and empire builders. Though her official title -Mother of Texas - stems from that mistaken claim that she was the first to bear a white child in this wilderness of dreams, the name is still more than fitting for THE archetype of a Texian mother: beautiful, charming, yarn-spinner, and tougher than a one eared alley cat.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 02:54:08 +0000