Need to burnish the image of a town? Beautification, public amenities, reasonable cost of living etc. go a long way in keeping residents happy and outsiders impressed. So do law and order. Being tough on criminals is a selling point for mayors, district attorneys and the local chambers of commerce. In 1838, Houston, the rag tag "capital" of the newly formed Republic of Texas was struggling to establish a respectable identity. To prove to its many shady and lawless denizens that he meant business, the then Houston Mayor Francis Moore Jr. ordered a pair of public hangings – the first judicially sanctioned executions in the city. The macabre and melancholy tale involves two young criminals (one a war hero), a pompous mayor, a horse theft, bowie knives and phrenology as a prosecution tool.
The history of the young city on its path to mainstream civilization and its first executions are chronicled by Texas historian Stephen L. Hardin in his new book Texian Macabre.
Houston? An image problem? Nothing new there. Back in 1838, when the city amounted to little more than a dozen offal-strewn streets, it had an image problem. Swarms of unemployed young men — "rowdy loafers" in the parlance of the day — made life miserable for respectable folk. They drank, they whored, they fought, they punctuated the night with their raucous clamors. Houston was the capital of the new Republic of Texas, for chrissakes, yet people across the Sabine in the United States might be forgiven for thinking it a den of yahoos.
The city fathers decided to act. What Houston needed to burnish its reputation as a law-abiding burg was a good hanging. So it happened that on March 28, 1838, in the first judicially sanctioned execution in the city’s history, a Texas Revolutionary War hero named David James Jones and fellow miscreant John Christopher Columbus Quick — convicted murderers both — met their maker in a small grove of trees somewhere in what is now Midtown.
And thereby hangs the tale Stephen L. Hardin, a history professor at Victoria College, tells in Texian Macabre, an eye-opening and entertaining study of what happens when frontier mores collide with the forces of so-called civilization.
Texas history buffs will know Hardin as author of Texian Iliad (1994), a well-received account of the military side of the Texas Revolution. An avid re-enactor as well as a scholar, the 55-year-old author is passionate about the period, and for an interview about this new book he brings props. These include a plastic human skull, the relevance of which will emerge shortly. Also a replica of a Bowie knife, "the Saturday-night special of the time."
Those fearsome blades had only one purpose, to eviscerate another human being, and nearly every man in Houston carried one. It was a Bowie knife that David James Jones plunged into the belly of a New York-born toff named Mandred Wood, earning himself a date with the hangman.
Hardin builds his book around Jones and the young man’s nemesis, Houston Mayor Francis Moore Jr., a one-armed physician turned newspaper editor turned politician. Moore hailed originally from Salem, Mass., and trailed some of that stiff-necked sanctimony we associate with New England witch hunters. …
See the review of Hardin’s book in the Houston Chronicle.
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