Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 3, 1993 TAG: 9303030041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: TIMBER RIDGE LENGTH: Medium
HOUSTON'S DAY MARKED, TEXAS-STYLE
Birthday parties start early in Texas, so even though the guest of honor couldn't attend Tuesday and the party wasn't in the Lone Star State, a gaggle of Texans fired the opening salvo of Sam Houston's 200th birthday at midnight Monday.They built a bonfire and they passed around a bottle of brandy and they told Sam Houston stories until an hour before sunrise.
It was here, just outside Lexington, that Sam Houston was born on March 2, 1793. On his 43rd birthday, he signed his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence. A Virginian by birth, he became a Texan by history.
It was Sam Houston who avenged the massacre at the Alamo by pursuing a Mexican battalion across Texas. It was Houston who served as president of the Texas republic, later as its U.S. senator and its governor.
"We're indebted to you [Virginians] for giving us not only Sam Houston but also Stephen F. Austin," said Don Kennard, a former state senator in Texas and the man who assembled the two-dozen-member Texas delegation. "Sam Houston is revered in Texas."
And Texans think about him a lot. They say that lightning struck the Houston home the night that Sam was born and his mother was moved to a nearby log cabin to polish off the delivery.
This is hard to believe - we don't get much lightning around these parts in March - but it's a clue to Houston's long-running popularity.
He is the centerpiece of countless Texas yarns swapped around midnight bonfires and beneath the shade of cottonwood trees. There are enough Sam Houston stories to last through a keg of brandy; and there are many Texans adept at the telling and retelling, the polishing and the embellishing of these tales. It's as impossible to tell fact from fiction as it is inconsequential.
The charm of the yarn keeps Sam Houston's memory alive. Virginians still speak in hushed terms about our heroes - Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Robert E. Lee and the rest. The most human is Stonewall Jackson, likely because his shortcomings are as widely known as his strengths. The rest we preserve high on pedestals, frozen in marble in gallant poses.
Unlike stoic Virginians, Texans wear their eccentricities on their sleeves and they talk loud and slow and claim expertise with little provocation.
At a Monday night get-together and at the midnight bonfire and at a Tuesday ceremony to commemorate his birthday that drew 150 people - including a battery of Texas congressmen and a Houston descendant - Sam Houston loomed very much alive.
Thrice married, he is listed in military records as 6 feet, 2 inches tall. Some observers swore he was 6-3. Texans always insert in their stories that Sam Houston was 6-6. By the turn of the century, they'll probably have him towering around the 6-10 mark.
He was known as "The Raven," a name given him by the Indians he lived with for long stretches of his life. He was also known as "The Big Drunk," another reason Texans may so revere him.
"His foibles," said Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "were as large as his virtues."
She called him "the most human of all the great men."
For emphasis, she tells the story of President Sam Houston at a state dinner, taking a sip of scalding soup and quickly spraying it all over the table. He turns to the woman seated next to him and says, "If I were a damned fool, I would have swallowed it."
She tells the story of the French ambassador to Texas, a powdered dandy festooned in lace, calling on Houston only to find the Raven inside his hut dressed only in Indian leggings. Rising to greet his visitor, his expansive, hairy chest scarred by the cross hatches of battle, Houston frightens off the caller.
Of course, there is the classic story of Houston's surprise attack at San Jacinto on Mexican Gen. Santa Anna, caught in the siesta tent with a concubine. She's cast, too, in Texas legend by a song: "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
And there's a biographer's account of Houston's life with the Cherokees in Tennessee, walking along streams with maidens, "making love and reading Homer's `Iliad.' "
It's the kind of tale that breathes life into Sam Houston's story and inspires midnight midwinter vigils around a fire.