WISE ABOUT TEXAS

In December 1907, San Antonio marksman Adolph “Ad” Topperwein spent ten days shooting at small pine blocks tossed into the air. He fired at 72,500 and missed nine. In Episode 157 of Wise About Texas, Ken Wise tells the story of Ad and his wife, Elizabeth “Plinky” Topperwein (Toepperwein), the husband-and-wife exhibition shooters from Leon Springs in the Texas Hill Country. Plinky was loading .22 cartridges at the Winchester plant in New Haven, Connecticut, and had never fired a gun when she married Ad in 1903. She became a champion trapshooter whom Annie Oakley called the greatest shot she had ever seen. Hear how Ad drew pictures with bullets and used up every .22 cartridge for sale in San Antonio, and why Plinky may be the reason we call it “plinking.” Listen now on Wise About Texas, the Texas history podcast.

Why would an Army fort on the Texas frontier be built without a wall? In episode 156 of Wise About Texas, recorded live at the Young County Museum of History and Culture in Graham, Texas, host Ken Wise talks with Jim Hammond, director of Fort Belknap near Newcastle, about the 1851 post that became a crossroads of North Texas on the Butterfield trail and the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Hammond describes a soldier’s life that was far more monotonous than the movies suggest—until it wasn’t. He then takes listeners through the Elm Creek Raid of October 1864, when Comanche and Kiowa warriors crossed the Red River into a Young County emptied of most of its men by the Civil War, and the story of Britt Johnson, the man he calls his “hero of the frontier.” Listen to the full episode to hear how one small fort shaped the Texas frontier.

In episode 155 of Wise About Texas, Ken Wise sits down with curator and board president Tony Widner and founder Shannon Potts at the Young County Museum of History and Culture’s first-anniversary celebration. Neither had run a museum before, yet they turned a 1937 Piggly Wiggly into a home for Young County history, a history that ran longer than most because the Civil War emptied Fort Belknap and slowed settlement for decades. Highlights include a pistol recovered from the site of the Marlow brothers gunfight, an 1817 James Monroe peace medal reportedly worn by the Kiowa leader Little Buffalo in the 1864 Elm Creek Raid, pieces of the oak tree where ranchers organized in 1877 what became the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, and a chuck wagon display tied to Charles Goodnight. Listen to the full episode to hear the stories behind them.

Polo is called the sport of kings — but in America, it ran on Texas cow ponies.

In this episode of Wise About Texas, host Ken Wise traces the interesting but often ignored history of Texas polo, beginning with cavalry drills in sixth-century B.C. Persia and ending on a ranch in Kendall County. The game reached the United States in the 1870s when New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett brought mallets home from England — but the horses he needed were not in New York or London. They were in Texas.

By 1885 San Antonio was the headquarters of polo pony development in the United States, with Vanderbilts and Belmonts buying Hill Country mustangs bred in Llano, Kendall, Gillespie, McCulloch and San Saba counties. In July 1883, a group of retired British officers played the first public polo game in Texas at San Pedro Springs Park in San Antonio; three days later, a group of unimpressed local cowboys formed the Cowboys Polo Club and challenged them to a match.

And in 1904, on the Moss Ranch near Llano, a foreman’s son named Cecil Smith was born who would grow up to be called by the New York Times the best polo player who ever lived — a working cowboy who held polo’s highest rating of ten goals for twenty-five consecutive years, who beat the East Coast establishment at the 1933 World Series of Polo in Chicago after being knocked unconscious and waving off the ambulance, and who led an all-Texas team that swept every major tournament in England in 1938, including the King’s Coronation Cup.

Saddle up, grab your polo mallet, and get Wise About Texas.

In the early 1840s, a broke Republic of Texas could barely afford an army, so President Sam Houston tried something else: he deputized private citizens to raid Mexican trade on the Santa Fe Trail and split the spoils with the government. What followed was one of the strangest near-wars in Texas history, one that pulled in a Mexican governor’s militia, a buffalo herd used for artillery practice, a battalion calling itself the “Home Boys,” and finally the United States Army, whose commander disarmed the Texans but refused to accept one of their leader’s surrender because he was carrying a commission signed by the president of a foreign republic. Ken Wise unpacks the Warfield and Snively expeditions of 1843 in Episode 153 — and how a fight over a trade route very nearly became a three-nation conflict.

I have started a second podcast. It is called Wise About Golf, it is a Texas golf history podcast, and the first episodes are up now.

Here is why. Golf is not a break from Texas history. It is a way into it.

The game reached Texas in the 1880s — before Spindletop, before automobiles — and it did not arrive on its own. It came attached to the army posts, the ports, the railroads and the British land companies that were building this state. Pull almost any thread and it leads somewhere else. I would set out to trace a golf course and end up in a railroad story, or a port story, or the 1900 Storm. Wise About Texas is not going anywhere. This is the main show and always will be. Wise About Golf is separate, with its own feed and its own website. If the game interests you, go find it. If it does not, you will notice little difference here. Now and then an episode will belong on both — not a golf episode with some Texas in it, but a Texas history episode that involves golf. When that happens I will run it on both feeds. This is the first: attached in full is episode two of Wise About Golf, on how and when golf came to Texas. You need not have heard episode one, and you need not play golf.

Search for Wise About Golf wherever you listen and follow it. Send ideas to [email protected] — episodes, interviews, a club whose history nobody wrote down. Any connection to Texas is enough.

Eleven years, and this podcast has never been built on advertising. It was built by you listening, and by you telling somebody else. Thank you for that.

We think and talk a lot about the Republic of Texas (I hope). But what are we talking about? Most of the early settlement in Mexican Texas was east of the Colorado River and extended up the river as far as La Grange. The battles of the Texas Revolution took place in San Antonio and ended at San Jacinto. So we have a Republic, but how big is it? What are its borders? Well, it depended on who you asked. Here’s a fun fact: If you go to Colorado this summer, as so many Texans do, you’re probably never leaving the old Republic of Texas. But a claim isn’t enough–you better control it. Find out if your summer vacation ever really involves leaving Texas in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.

250 years ago, the “American Experiment” began, with the result being the freest and most successful nation in the history of the world. The American Revolution, like the Texas Revolution, was the unlikeliest of victories. But a victory it was, and Texas played a significant role. This episode celebrates America’s birthday by looking at the role Texas played in one of the most transformative events in world history.

There is nothing prettier than a river flowing gently through the canyons of the Texas hill country. But traveling along the river can be treacherous. The canyon walls are steep and rocky. The path is narrow and the drop steep. Is the beauty worth the pain? The German settlers sure thought so. In this episode, we discuss just one of many “river roads” in Texas and the rich history that unfolds along the trail. Load up for a Texas road trip in this episode of Wise About Texas.

The podcast has a good problem. There are so many listeners and downloads I had to move the podcast to a new RSS feed. There should not be any interruption, but if you notice that you may not be getting all the new episodes, please go re-subscribe through your desired podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Wise About Texas!