June 21, 2001
Dear Elreeta,
How nice that you have gotten such good feedback from
others. I appreciate your having shared it with me.
I don't know if you knew Hervey, but he had a
fascination with local and western history, and an uncanny ability to
remember names, dates, and to tie the names and families and events
together.
Sometime in the mid to late 30's a man from the
University of Texas, doing historical research, asked on the square who
in Hamilton had an interest and knowledge of local history and events.
Evetts Haley knocked on my uncle's door and began a life long
friendship. Hervey, as you know, was a local attorney, but spent
most of his time as a court reporter in Hamilton and elsewhere. He
took shorthand and must have easily typed at 120 words per minute on his
old Underwood. Shortly after they met, Hervey and Evetts began a series
of trips into west Texas, New Mexico and Arizona where they interviewed
aging sheriffs who had done their jobs in the last decades of the 19th
century. To get the old timers in the mood, they would go out into
the desert, build a camp fire, cook supper and then sit around the
campfire listening to tales of chasing bank robbers, rustlers and
killers. Hervey took down these stories in shorthand, verbatim,
and then transcribed them.&! nbsp; Evetts used them as source
material for the several dozen book he subsequently wrote about western
ranches, sheriffs and the cattle trade.
I remember hearing these stories in the 40s. When I
was in college in the early 50s and visiting in the summers, there was
an old trunk in the attic sleeping area in their home that was full of
these onion skin manuscripts. There must have been 25-30 of them,
many a couple of inches thick. They made fascinating reading, and
I remember reading them far into the night. The words were rich with
slang, colloquialism and the earthy language that made the stories seem
real, as if I was hearing the conversations, which, of course, I was.
Late in his life, Hervey wrote his own book about these desert trips,
called "Adventuring with the Old-Timers." It is still sold at
the Nita Stewart Halley Library in Midland.
Hervey carried on extensive correspondence with
historians and the subjects of their history. His letters would
frequently be five or six pages of single space typing from his
typewriter that usually needed the keys cleaned and which had been
written so fast that many letters were raised on the line because the
carriage had not fallen into place when the next key was struck. He also
corresponded at length with family and others in New Hampshire, where my
grandfather had left, as a teenager, around 1880, to come to Hamilton
County to raise cattle with his older brother on the Cowhouse.
Hervey's extensive collection of books on western history, many
inscribed by the authors, with whom he had exchanged information, was
given to the Haley Library on his death.
Around 1945, I got a feel for his
"adventures" when I traveled with Hervey and Lena to Carlsbad,
New Mexico. While there, we visited with Dee Harkey, one of the
old sheriffs that Hervey and Evetts had interviewed in earlier years.
I remember sitting on his front porch for several hours in the evening,
watching distant lightning silhouette the storm clouds, and listening to
incredible tales of daring and resourcefulness in the pursuit of
justice, or so it seemed to a youngster.
Several years later, Harkey published a book of his
own titled "Mean as Hell." I don't know how many letters they
had exchanged in the meantime, but Harkey sent Hervey a copy about the
time the paperback arrived in the drug stores in Hamilton. Harkey had
printed one of Hervey's letters which described someone from Hamilton,
possible an outlaw that Harkey was writing about. The letter to
Harkey had been personal reminiscence and Hervey was appalled. He went
around the town square, to all three drug stores, and bought all the
extant copies. As I have heard the story, the drug stores thought
they had a best seller on their hands and ordered twice as many copies
from their sources.
The memory of those manuscripts in the trunk has been
a lasting one. In 1989, ten years after Hervey's death, I stopped in
Midland and had lunch with Evetts Haley. I was under the impression that
he had a copy of those thousands and thousands of pages of raw, real
history. Evetts told me that he had only borrowed copies from Hervey.
Their whereabouts are a mystery.
I do have a file of letters that Hervey wrote to me,
as I was growing up, and to our children when they were young. I haven't
read them for a long time, but there is probably some Hamilton County
lore there. I also have negatives and slides that my father, Ted,
took in the 30s and 40s. He had a small darkroom in our house and
I would think that some might be of historic interest. I am
currently looking for a film and slide scanner and might be able to
provide you with some images if that would be of interest. With
the present layout of projects, it might be a while, however. By
the way, I remember the picture of Cad Williams pointing with his cane
that Hervey described, and may actually have it somewhere. I think
that Ted was the photographer.
If I interpret correctly, you must have been several
years behind me in the Hamilton Schools. I confess I don't
remember you, but such oversight is becoming easier to explain these
days. After my father died in 1946, my mother and I remained for a
couple of years before she left her eighth grade teaching job to return
to college for a degree in psychology. I was greatly influenced by
Virgil Santy, am still a ham radio operator, and went on to be a physics
teacher and later an official at the U.S. Department of Education in
Washington. The memory of Hamilton is strong and, more so, the
remarkable people who lived there. I was back briefly last year
for the 50th reunion of the class I would have graduated with, had I
stayed.
I have rambled. But I had so much pleasure reading
through your site and other Hamilton items on the web last weekend, that
I wanted to share something with you.
