My first cousin called not long ago, after he'd done some genealogy checking about his namesake, Thomas Coates. He said, "I don't get it. He died at 23 on the last week of conflict in southern France for World War I, and he had been a college freshman at Rice that year. Why was he so late going to college? Was he a delayed learner, or a little bit slow?" This from a Caltech graduate.
My cousin, bless his heart, had never been to "the ranch" on the salty marshes of Carancahua Bay on the southern shores of Texas, 120 miles east of Galveston, and 100 miles north of Corpus Christi. Think Padre Island without the beach (which is 30 miles further south from Corpus).
I don't often think of myself as "Texan"--I never lived there, and my parents weren't born there either. But . . . I do have heritage there, actually. My great-great grandfather, Lafayette Ward, took his young Baltimore-bred bride there six weeks after the infamous Alamo massacre in 1836. Enlisting in the rebel army as a Texas Ranger with General Sam Houston, he was awarded two sections of land (1,280 acres), while his unmarried brother got 640 adjacent acres. After Texas independence, and when Texas later joined the United States (recall that 6 Flags got its name for how many flags have flown over Texas lands), they became 'gentlemen cattle ranchers'. Their holdings at one point were larger than the King Ranch today; they were responsible for helping create barbed wire, for example. They also introduced Hereford, Brahman, and Jersey cattle to Texas. His son, Lafayette Ward Jr. was prominent for years http://usgenwebsites.org/TXJackson/family_ward_lafayette.htm
My great-grandfather, Henry Clay Coates, born in 1853 in Indianola, Texas (then the capital of Calhoun county until a hurricane blew the town away in 1875) was old man Ward's chief 'cowboy.' He led Ward's cattle on the Chisholm trail to Kansas City some 850 miles away, eight different years. He also married the boss' daughter, Susie, which begat my grandfather Henry Mitchell Coates, and another son, Thomas, the WWI victim.
Lafayette Ward died young, 51, of Yellow Fever, but his son founded the town LaWard (one of three incorporated towns in Jackson County today--population 200), and eventually opened a school there in 1911, bringing in a new schoolteacher from a Nebraska 'normal school'. So Thomas, born in 1895, never went to school until she arrived. His brother married the school teacher--my grandmother Ethel.
So the riddle for my cousin, "Why didn't his namesake go to school earlier?" is that there was no school within 40 miles of their home until he was 16. And they didn't have cars before 1910 in 'those parts'. So he made up 16 years of 'schooling' in six years, to gain college admission at 22.
The point of this relatively long anecdote is that this part of Texas was, and remains, relatively remote. Taking three local counties--Jackson where Edna and LaWard are (population 14,874); Calhoun with Port Lavaca (pop. 21,504) and Matagorda (pop. 36,643, mostly in Bay City), their population is one-seventh of my current county, Tulare in California, in an area 75% as big. You can look a long ways down any road to see a home. So the density of population in that area is one-fifth of our rural county; and one-fiftieth that of rural Morris County in New Jersey.
And guess what?
These three VERY RURAL counties (out of 254 Texas counties) had practically NO COVID for the first five months of the pandemic--148 total cases, and 8 deaths. After the governor "re-opened" the state for Memorial Day, things got explosive. They now have 1,426 cases and 28 deaths--case load up in 45 days by 900%. What the 'ell happened?
Some graphs show this story. It is a tragic Texas story:
No comments:
Post a Comment