Hello and welcome to the Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Gary Pinkerton, author of "Trammel's Trace: The First Road to Texas From The North" and "Bridles and Biscuits: Contraband Culture in Spanish East Texas".

Gary, thank you for being here.

I'm happy to be here.

Christine, good to see you.

I'm excited to discuss these books because this is one of those kind of forgotten histories, or maybe not as fully examined pieces of history.

And I like when we can shine a light on some on some things that weren't getting them.

Maybe they're due.

So I want to start with Trammel's Trace because it's the first book he wrote.

How did how did you come to this project?

Accidentally.

My father, one day mentioned Trammel's Trace, and when I asked him what that was, he said, oh, is that right across the pasture in front of the farmhouse?

I'm like, how did I not know this?

I look at my mom and she's like, there's a lot of things you miss hearing.

But I just started pulling that thread, trying to learn more about it.

And, you know, the more you pull, the more you learn.

And it just, it took on a life of its own, kind of on the back burner for a long time.

And then my wife and my mother ganged up on me, and we have a book.

So for those of us who are like you, when you when you ask that question, what is Trammell's trace?

It is, an Anglo name for an early cattle trail, and it came to be named after Nicholas Trammel because he was a notorious, gambler and horse smuggler.

It's not really clear when his name got attached to the trace, but it was before Astor's, colony formed in 1821.

And, it's a road that connects the trail that was a crossed, Arkansas into, Texas at the great bend of the Red River near Fulton and connected with the El Camino Real in Nacogdoches.

I think that maybe El Camino Real, maybe the one that people know of.

You see those signs if you're driving along the highway.

But this is one that people didn't really know the name of, as you say.

It's really interesting.

I found a lot of people who knew a little bit about it.

It wasn't always true, but they knew the name.

Travel Strikes was mentioned in a historical marker in the cemetery where my grandparents were buried.

That also went over my head.

So pulling together pieces was, was tricky.

A lot of myth and legend around Nicholas Trammel.

But, you go to the right archives and you dig in the right places.

You find good stuff.

Yeah.

Tell us about the research for this, because I imagine it was both.

Maybe.

I think he did some mapping to try to figure out where it actually went.

But also, like you say, going into archives, trying to find physical records that are buried somewhere.

Yeah.

People always talk about I remember when I something happened, I was, in the seat of a truck delivering furniture when I got a call from an archive in southwest Arkansas that had, some research done back in the 40s by a man who was a civil engineer mapping.

And his wife, and I just felt like I had had a miraculous event at that point.

Visiting, the, you know, the basement of small county courthouses, looking at deed records, scanning through all those documents and in the script and handwriting of the time.

That was the most fun going to those little out of the way places.

I imagine you got to see a good, a good bit of East Texas by driving up and down.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

It's I can't even begin to describe it.

I'm glad I didn't keep track of domino reading of any kind or, you know, gas receipts.

Driven a lot of back roads.

Because this is not that really coincide with any main highway corridor.

Because it was laid out by the Caddo.

It appears to go around Marshall, but there was no Marshall when the trail formed.

But there were Caddo villages in the area where the trail crossed.

So, you know, you can think of the roads as in corridors.

Peat roads go places for the same reasons that they went back then.

He's your place just across a river or the soil make up and, it's back roads.

I think one of my favorite parts of that book is that maybe it's chapter 2 or 3.

I don't remember exactly, but you kind of go through what it would have been like, what somebody's traveling this, this, this trace back then, you know, kind of from point to point, the kind of landscape they would encounter, the kind of interesting flora and fauna they might see.

I mean, that that Kane picture that you have there, you have to talk about that because it's a, it's a it's it's a great way of putting you in the shoes of maybe the travelers.

Yeah.

I wanted to do that earlier because for me, you know, I'm not an academic historian.

I'm intrigued by the story, and I think history is best communicated when you connect with people's personal histories and their emotions.

So I wanted to let people know what it was like to travel down that trail.

And there were, you know, dozens of snippets of accounts of, you know, rattlesnakes up on an island in the middle of a swamp.

The woodcut in the book shows river cane that was 30ft high on this side of the Red River, and it stretched for seven miles.

And that's where, you know, cotton was later planted.

It's very fertile, but the bamboo arched over the trail.

During the, in that section.

So, I think that was important to sort of set the stage.

I yeah, I think it's it's good to put yourself in the mind of because I can't imagine what would drive a person to come to a wild and unexplored to, to Anglos wild, an unexplored place that's very foreign from, you know, maybe where you were from.

It takes a real kind of special kind of person to do something like that.

I found a quote from Moses Austin, Stephen Austin's father, that basically said that, you know, people go to places they don't know anything about it.

They think they can get land, but they don't know what it's like, and they go anyway.

And even Moses Austin couldn't understand that urge.

But he capitalized on it, and it was his son in the colonies.

They formed, with Spain and Mexico.

So let's talk about the namesake of the trail.

What was this man like?

How did his name get attached to this, very mysterious, his story was kind of confused by myth and legend that he was a highway robber and, murderous.

You know, there was blood on his cabin wall, but all that got played up years later.

What he was was a man who did not like to be crossed.

He had one lawsuit over a few hundred dollars that went through five levels of court.

It went on so long that his attorneys at previous stages had become judges at his later stages.

But he would not let go with that.

And signs of that personality trait showed up even when he was younger and still in Kentucky.

He was jailed over some stolen, livestock.

And he.

When he was released, he sued the jailer for charging him $0.25 for his meal instead of 12.5 cents.

So he was very tenacious.

He was also, a big gambler.

He was a published, classified ad, in the 1830s where he wanted to race a man for $2,000 in 1836.

So a lot going on there with him.

But he was, you know, very quiet, stayed in the background, but that just led to his mystery.

And we did.

Why did you come to Texas.

How did he end up in our neck of the woods.

Yeah.

He had come to Texas to try to get into Austin's colony.

He was living along with a lot of other Tennesseans and Pecan Point, which was a river crossing up north of where Clarksville is now.

And, that trail connecting from Crown Point down to that Could Travel was given direct credit for opening up himself to get people down when he got there.

He and another man named William English were called out by name by Stephen of Austin as people who were known to all the world as criminals and would not be allowed into, the colony.

So he backed out of the colony a bit up to the Trinity River crossing, which is Robin's Ferry now.

And somewhat, mysteriously took over that crossing from the man who owned it, a, man who had a Spanish land grant.

And he remained there for two years until he got caught up into the Fredonia Rebellion and was actually he and his family chased back to Arkansas.

They stayed there until the 1850s, and then, for unknown reasons, came to Gonzales and Lagrange, where they opened up a tavern and opened up racehorses.

The family business there.

We're not gonna have time to cover it, but you do cover a lot of his life.

And what?

We know what you could find about him.

And he's a fascinating, just a fascinating guy.

So I would hope people would want to read more because, yeah, he's a very interesting character.

It's been fun to talk to descendants.

Oh, yeah.

How's the family about there?

They must.

I would bet they have a lot of myths and legends that they got passed down to listen to what you were trying to.

The facial characteristics were what was interesting.

There was a description of Trammell that fit a lot of people's family members.

So that's fascinating.

I would love to find that DNA is a powerful thing.

Yes, it is, yes it is.

I do want to mention, too, that this, this this, as you say in the title, it was the first road kind of into from north into Texas, and it was traveled by a lot of names that maybe people would recognize from their grade school, Texas history classes.

Yeah.

From all accounts, it appears that, Bowie and Crockett and Sam Houston used that trail to move down from their location, particularly Crockett, who had visited Pecan Point and had a big party in Nacogdoches.

And, that was the way to get there from those parts.

So, they got across the pasture where our farm is now.

It's kind of.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, that that's actually I was thinking about it.

So what does the trail look like, trace?

Look like today?

What?

You you have a rut in your backyard or your family's backyard.

But is it like that throughout?

No.

There.

I mean, it's bits and pieces.

This is all private land.

It's all been farmed and logged and, you know, everything you can think of done to it.

One place we visited geographically on a map was grown up with pine saplings.

So close you couldn't walk between them without sharing your clothing.

But there are still remaining ruts.

You know, there's one, photo.

I have that, Rush County, line that was defined by the trail, mowed pasture on both sides and like a mohawk haircut of trees and growth down the middle of that road that couldn't be mowed.

So a bright green line marked it out.

The big thing is that the original Texas land grants a lot of those in these counties called trammell's traced by name and said specifically measured terms where it was from a particular corner.

So we can look at, satellite images and lidar and use a lot of tools to try to find that track the landowners down and, and get out there with them.

And you have a map that you've worked on that, that people can go to your website to look at, to see where, right where it is.

Yeah.

Gary, l pinkerton.com.

It's free downloads of these maps and for trails trace there's a county by county map because I really do want to connect with landowners who may own some of this history.

Sure.

That's that's good to connect.

Is any of it public or is it all on private land?

It's all on private land.

Yeah.

They're maybe a little bit.

You're right, Patman Reservoir.

But, and the Corps of Engineers, is where Epperson Ferry was located.

Yeah, it's a little bit there.

And I do want make sure we mentioned that out of this project, out of your your work to recognize this.

There's now a marker, placed by the daughters of the Texas Revolution.

Yeah.

And, in Nacogdoches, the dad called me up and said, hey, we'd like to do a medallion.

And I'm thinking, oh, that'd be nice.

Yeah.

And they built a five foot granite marker with a medallion with, the map on one side and more description on the back.

And it's impressive.

I have to say.

It's just really cool thing, but it just people connect with the story and the the history that's, you know, more localized than what people are used to hearing about.

Well, if I could pull one lesson out of this story, it would be ask your elders about your history, about your local history.

My mom's 93, and she still brings it up from time to time.

Well, let's switch gears a little bit.

Let's talk about the second book, which kind of grew out of that project.

How did how did this one it did.

The first one, a group of us, and doing this research identified ourselves as retinoids, and just became interested in tracking all these old roads.

And so, Tom cannon, my collaborator on Bronson Biscuits, and I had been talking about other roads out of Nacogdoches.

That, continued down toward lobby, and Senate and, and by, San Antonio.

And so the more we got interested in that, decided to put together a book.

And, although we started with a conversation about the roads, it's really the road is just more of a mechanism to talk about the history, of that period of, Spanish.

Right in East Texas.

Yeah.

This one certainly covers a little bit more broader.

The roads are certainly representative.

But yeah, it's a broader look at this area and the industry that you cover.

Yeah.

At this time.

And I really, I mean I write books for people like me.

I'm, you know, thank goodness.

I'm curious.

A lifelong trait.

I'll never outgrow.

And, so questions lead to other questions.

And when I try to write, I try to explain it in a way that people understand and and connect with.

That's a wonderful, wonderful trait to have because look what comes out of it.

Yeah.

I want to ask you about the title.

Where does that title bridles and biscuits come from?

That one?

A lot of the research that went into this book came directly from the bear archives.

And, Antonio Gilly Barba was appointed, to be in charge of contraband in, Nacogdoches and engaged in it as well after he was removed, and arrested, held in south.

Arrest from Nacogdoches.

A captain from lobby here from the Presidio there was sent to, stop contraband in East Texas.

And within a month, he and his soldiers were engaged in it.

So during the investigation, one of the privates was asked what he traded, for deer skins to get the contraband that he possessed.

And he shares that he traded the bridle off his horse and his breakfast.

So that's where that title comes from.

That's.

And it it really speaks to the nature of contraband.

People think of it as, you know, guns and horses and scary criminal smuggling.

But this kind of contraband was closer to going to the dollar store.

So, it was just about getting the necessities that you need.

Pots and pans and cooking gear.

Tobacco, was a big, smuggled item even by priests who took the way around Nacogdoches.

They didn't go through Nacogdoch so a lot of people were engaged in contraband, and it was just the nature of the trade.

At that point, the this book I what I liked about this book, too, is that, as we say, it's broader.

But you really start out the beginning of the book with kind of a little bit of a even pre-history lesson about what this region was like before the Spanish came, what the tribes were.

Why was that important for you to include?

The first chapter of the book is purposely aimed seeing what the land remembers.

And it's kind of my personal philosophy about how to view history and how to connect with it.

And that is literally, you know, going to a place like where these retro located and looking at the land through a historical lens, trying to remember that it wasn't always a tree farm, it wasn't always watermelons, that other things happened there and being able to do that.

So yeah, the first part is, is a bit of a primer and a set up to what was the state of the geography and the relationships and the people in that region that led to this culture of contraband.

That's there.

The back of the book.

I've also got, a number of appendices that lay out who the governor and the viceroy and the commandant were, and translations for names and, things that help people get more grounded about this, this period.

That was really at the end of the Spanish era in East Texas, and also the different names that maybe rivers would have had through the years.

That that was a very helpful one.

That's, that's one of those dopamine research busses is to read, some of these early, regional Texas land surveys and, and see a name of a river marked and being able to go find that name of the river and connect it to a new one.

And I could go down that rabbit trail for a long time.

I do want to talk about there was there was a moment you describe in the book where you personally really connected to the history, of seeing something in a museum.

Can you tell that story?

Yeah.

This was, one thing that people learn about in the book is the, is, settlement called Lucarelli.

Lucarelli was founded, four years before the permanent resettlement of Nacogdoches in 1779, at the crossing of the Trinity River.

And this lobby road, there was nothing there.

They started from scratch in the middle of the summer and ultimately ended up with about 300 people there.

They were not allowed to go back to their homes and lost ice, which is now in Louisiana.

So, Tom and I were, knew that there was a artifact called the Buckaroo rifle.

It was a metal gun.

Stock of a flintlock rifle that was in a library in Trinity, Texas.

So we went there and it was right around Christmas.

We walk in and the case that was the Trinity, the book Raleigh Rifle was in was covered by wrapping paper and a little tiny Frosty the Snowman, among other things.

So, we told the, the people working there we'd like to see the book Raleigh Rifle, and they didn't know what we're talking about.

It's sitting right there.

They moved it.

So we took the paper off, and we start to tell them a story about Lucarelli and Navarro and the Spanish.

And one lady said, oh, I just love Texas history.

And I smiled and we left shortly after.

When I got out, I told Tom, people love Texas history, but they have no idea what happened right under their feet.

And that's kind of true except for, yeah, I speak to a lot of groups that really do know their history and are engaged in it, but for the most part, we don't know what happened last week.

You know, much less 200 years ago.

Sure.

But it really I told Tom, that's the people that we need to write for who just like with Trammel trace identify with that East Texas story and connect it to it.

It could go to places.

I've got maps and driving directions and all kinds of things out there for people to go see ruts from a county road somewhere.

But communicating, connecting people with history in ways that means something to them is the key to all this working.

It's not an academic exercise I'm interested in.

It's really getting people to connect with that history.

Well, I think that's why these books are so great, because they're not written in a very dry, detached, you know, which some people think of history books as.

Yeah, they're boring.

But as you say, you're telling stories.

You're telling the stories of people of who've lived on the same land that we we do now.

And it's it it makes it easier to to understand when you're hearing a story, it's really important that we connect that way.

And, you know, I'm now the executive director of the Alliance for Texas History.

And that's one of the things that we work on is how do we communicate that story and in a public way, not just to a tiny audience?

Sure, sure.

What?

So will you test that a little bit about it was like the dollar store, but what can you talk a little bit about the contraband culture?

Well, it was, in Nacogdoches, Antonio Gilley Bravo, you know, ruled everything.

He controlled the movement of goods and trade taking place between New Orleans, Natchitoches, Nacogdoches and on to La Bahia, Goliad.

And, and there he was in the middle man.

He was connected to, all the tribes, in the surrounding areas.

And the Spanish value that because they knew they had to stay on the good side or they had no power really at all to control that.

And so the goods that changed hands were what people wanted and needed.

And, if you drive around East Texas much, there's not many towns that you don't have a dollar store.

And the business model is to bring goods closer to people where they can afford it and make it easier for them to make purchases.

They don't have to drive to town.

And it was it was the same business model, but you know, a lot of the contraband and the trade that took place was from the Spanish perspective, efforts to maintain their standing with the Indians because they knew that if if the tribes ever, went against the Spanish and and got together, the Spanish would be, have been overwhelmed and lost their, their standing there.

They didn't have much of a foothold to begin with, but, in East Texas and then it certainly didn't help when the settlers who'd been there decided, well, we don't, you know, the Mexican people decided we don't we don't want that either.

Yeah.

I want to make sure we cover because there was a towards the end of the book is when the Mexican Revolution begins.

And the quote from that fairy man who was arrested.

Oh, man.

Really, it really tells the whole story.

And there have been books written, still being written about, the reasons for the Texas Revolution and what it all meant.

Was it over land?

Was it over slavery?

Lots of books.

A ferryman in 1811, on the Sabine River, seeing a lot of the traffic between Natchitoches in Nacogdoches, Mingo Crow, was being questioned about traffic, and and people crossing back and forth.

This is right before the filibusters began.

And really the early versions of the Texas Revolution.

And, he was very evasive when talking about details, but he said he knew one thing for sure.

This revolution was for commercial purposes.

And that really nails it in so many ways.

It was about business.

It was about trade.

It was about money and land.

And that's, you know, was a huge part of that.

That's what he saw.

He heard about it from the people across the ferry.

And he knew what was, you know, what was at the root of that?

I just love that quote.

I was like, it's a great it almost gave me chills.

It was like, oh, he sees he saw everything.

He really kind of put a pin and put a pin in it.

Well, unfortunately we are running low on time.

So in our final two minutes, what would you hope people take away from both of these books?

You know, I really the books are focused on East Texas and I certainly want the people of East Texas to understand, you know, what was going on, where where they stand, where they sit, where buildings are built, what missions were there, what trails were there, and roads and who the landowners were.

I want people to understand.

What about, the resources, the General Land office, the original Texas land surveys, and other archival material.

They have their mentioned the names of a lot of people, and places and events, that are there.

So I just want people to envision what it's like to be part of that time and better understand how we got from there to here.

Well, I have to say, I think you've done a wonderful job.

These books are needed, I think, in in this piece of Texas history, but approachable, easy to read.

I would really hope that they would spark people's interest and curiosity, as you say, because they certainly did mine.

Thank you.

I appreciate that kind of praise.

Wonderful.

Well, that's all the time we have today.

Thank you for for coming and speaking.

And thank you for writing these books.

You're welcome.

Appreciate it.

The books again are trammell's trace and bridles and biscuits.

That's all the time we have for today.

I will see you again soon.