My grandfather Rev. Link Hugh Billings (1872-1969) used to talk
about
the quietness that enveloped the darkness of his
father's home in Gonzales County when John Wesley Hardin, the infamous
Texas desperado, stopped to spend the night. It
is unlikely that my grandfather was old enough to recall these visits
himself, since Hardin was in jail in Austin by late summer
1877 and soon would be sent to prison. But during that short period,
the infamous Taylor-Sutton Feud erupted in the
Gonzales County area and Wes Hardin and his gang would touch many
citizens
of the area through participation in the Feud
and through their own misdeeds. And the William Carroll Billings
family,
living in the Sandies Creek area of Gonzales
County, near W.C.'s father Gipson Billings-who had brought his family
from Tennessee in 1854-were just as likely to have
have served as overnight hideouts for the fugitive Hardin as would
have others during the early 1870s.
By January 1871, when he was 18 and the killer of several dozen men,
Hardin had moved his base of operations from the
Waco area where his family lived to Gonzales County, home of several
cousins, including Jim Clements who would marry
14-year old Ann Caroline Tennille on January 11, 1872-just a week
before
my grandfather Link was born. Ann was the
daughter of George Culver Tennille and Amanda Jane Billings
(1840-1916),
the daughter of John Billings (1803-1872),
brother of Gibson (1817-1882). Hardin and the Clements family were
so closely identified that Wes for a time was
mistakenly named a Clements by the authorities and press.
In turn, Hardin would marry the 14-year old Jane Bowen on February
29,
1872. Jane's father Neill Bowen owned a
mercantile store in Nopal, Gonzales County, and Wes and Jane lived
for a brief time on the second floor of the Bowen home
on Coon Hollow, a short distance north of the store. By this time,
Wes Hardin's companions included George Tennille,
Jane's brother Joshua Robert "Brown" Bowen, Wes's two cousins Jim and
Gip Clements, Rockwood Birtsell and Thomas J.
Haldeman. One of the most frequently told Hardin stories, and one of
the best documented, occurred shortly before
Christmas, 1872. An extensive account of this drunken and murderous
episode is included in the extremely readable "John
Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas," by Leon Metz (El Paso, TX: Mangan
Books, 1996).
Like Jane Hardin's father Neill Bowen, William MacDonald Billings
also
operated a store in Nopal. (Although Metz calls
William Billings a father-in-law to George Tennille, William
(1834-1903)
was actually the brother of Amanda Billings
Tennille. W.M. Billings' son, John MacDonald "Mac" Billings was 14
and liked to hang around the store. He would later
describe how he he observed Brown Bowen come around a corner of the
store, lift a blanket from the sleeping, drunk Tom
Haldeman and shoot him in the head. Tom had apparently been suspected
by Hardin of being a spy for the State Police.
Mac Billings' testimony helped convict Bowen of the murder.
According to court testimony, Mac said he saw "Haldeman's head
rather
sink at the fire of the piston." Inside the store,
Hardin asked Mac who had fired the shot, and Mac informed him that
Mr. Bowen had shot Haldeman. When William
Billings asked Bowen why he had shot Haldeman, Bowen told him he had
a right to kill him. When Billings asked Bowen
why he had shot Haldeman in front of his son Mac, Bowen replied "I
did not see Mac until my finger was was on the trigger,
and it was too late to stop then."
Bowen and all the others in jail with him were soon "delivered the
county
jail" by Wes Hardin and a dozen other men,
according to a San Antonio news story. Brown Bowen and his
brother-in-law
Hardin would both shortly flee to Florida, and
each would be recaptured and returned to Texas. Bowen was hanged in
front of four thousand spectators in Gonzales in
May of 1878, and Hardin was sent to prison in September, to stay until
he was pardoned and released in February, 1894.
Jane and Wes Hardin's daughter, Mary Elizabeth "Mollie," would marry
Charles R. Billings, another son of William
MacDonald Billings, in 1894. Strangely enough, in the mid-1990's
grandchildren
and great-grandchildren of Charles and
Mollie, and other family members, would become involved in a court
case involving the possible removal of Wes from his
grave in the Concordia Cemetery, El Paso, to join Jane in the Asher
Cemetery in Karnes County, just across the line from
Gonzales County. No one's body was moved.
Many relatively innocent persons had been dragged into the events of
John Wesley Hardin's life, and especially his eventual
participation in the Sutton-Taylor Feud in those years between 1873
and 1877. Ten years after George Tennille's death in
1874, Amanda Billings Tennille married James Monroe "Doc" Bockius,
another individual close to the Hardin escapades and
Sutton-Taylor Feud. Bockius, like others, would eventually shed the
feud's legacy and complete their lives as upright citizens.
That the Billings family was not completely removed from the more
violent
activities of these times is proven in news stories
from the Bonzales Inquirer. Frederick K. Gibson recounted these events
in his Master's Thesis for The University of Texas in
1964, "A History of Gonzales County in the Nineteenth Century." Among
the violent episodes described is the murder in
June, 1894, near Ottine, of William Twellsing by Joseph Billings, who
slit Twellsing's throat the day after he was "offended"
by a remark made by the other man. A month later, he was acquitted
by the jury for "avenging the 'grossest of insults.'"
It is likely that the violence of the Taylor-Sutton and Wes Hardin
day
helped convince many of these families to depart
Gonzales County and move to the Texas Hill Country, many settling in
the Harper, Texas area of Gillespie County. These
groups included families like those of William Carroll Billings (who
had married Mary Jane Hesskew, dauther of another
Gonzales pioneer family) , and members of the John Duderstadt family,
whose son Fred (Friederick), had married Henrietta
Tennille (daughter of Amanda Billings and George Tennille) and son
George Washington Duderstadt ,who married Maggie
Caroline Billings (apparently a daughter of William MacDonald Billings
and sister of Mac Billings, whose testimony had
helped hang Brown Bowen). George and Maggie were married in 1900 and
moved from Gonzales County to the Klein
Branch, near Harper in Gillespie County, where they would develop
connections
with the Bode family, the Callahan, Billings,
and other Hill Country families.
It is apparent that the complex family relationships between the
Billings
Family and members of the Hardin Gang could be
elaborated far beyond this summary. In addition, the intermarriages
among the Billings Family, the Kent Family, the Zumwalt
Family, in addition to the other families mentioned above, are also
complex, but there is a great deal of information about
these relationships growing on the World Wide Web, and more information
will be added in future years.
--Harold