In the green and leafy Texas State Cemetery in Austin, a few blocks east of the majestic pink-granite state Capitol, a modest headstone rests in the shadow of an impressive monument topped with a statue honoring Stephen F. Austin, the “Father of Texas.” The gray granite marker near the Austin monument, about four feet high, is crowned with what appears to be a carved oak leaf. It bears this epitaph: BIGFOOT WALLACE Here Lies He Who Spent His Manhood Defending the Homes of Texas Brave Honest and Faithful The old frontiersman, Texas Ranger, hunter, scout and Indian fighter doesn’t rank with the Texas icons who were his contemporaries – Sam Houston, William Barret Travis, Davy Crockett and Austin himself – but his name lives on, in part, I suspect, because of his memorable moniker but also because he somehow turned up throughout the 19th century as part of so many formative Texas moments. He’s one of those frontier characters whose long, colorful life bleeds into legend. A folk hero, a Texas Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan, he represents the quintessential early Texan.
The eventual Texas legend had his misgivings when he first arrived in Houston from Virginia in 1837. In a fine calligraphic hand he wrote to his father, “I have seen a great many families here that want to get back to the States but cannot get back. And well they might for the Indians scalp them from the mountains to the Gulf, and have beat the Rangers in every attempt. A worse society could not be found on the globe. People here kill each other every day. People in Texas die like rotten sheep. The City of Houston contains about three thousand inhabitants, which ten months ago there was not a house in the place. And I will venture to say there are three times the number of graves around Houston than there is in the graveyard at Lexington, Va.”
Whatever the cause of the 20-year-old newcomer’s distemper – maybe a young man’s homesickness? – Bigfoot stuck around for the next six decades. Texasstyle exaggeration and hyperbole settled in around him through the years. As folklorist J. Frank Dobie put it in his Handbook of Texas entry for the Texas folk hero, “Wallace was as honest as daylight but liked to stretch the blanket and embroider his stories.”
To me, this original and representative fellow, this Texas legend, still lives. In a way, I’ve known him since before I was born. My grandfather, Pete Moore ran a meat market and general store in the village named in Bigfoot’s honor. He died years before I was born, but my grandmother – Mammy, her grandchildren called her – would outlive three husbands, which explains why everybody except friends and family members called her Mrs. Stevens. She continued to run the store; her modest house was part of the same building.
My mother, Mildred Moore Holley, grew up in Bigfoot, then and now a blinkand- you’ll-miss-it village in the Texas brush country south of San Antonio. She got back to Bigfoot for occasional visits. Even with three boys in tow, she seemed once again to be young and carefree when she was back home in Bigfoot. To her family, to customers dropping by the store, she was Millie.
Across the road from Mammy’s store was the Bigfoot Post Office. Every morning about 10, postmistress Lizzie Thomas, Mammy’s lifelong friend, would have the mail up, thereby setting in motion downtown Bigfoot’s weekday rush hour. Since there was no rural mail delivery, folks would troop in to pick up their letters, bills and catalogs, now and then boxes of peeping baby chicks. They’d greet Lizzie and their neighbors and then amble across the road to the store for a loaf of bread or a carton of milk, maybe a soft drink. Usually the women would visit with Mammy for a while inside the store, while the men relaxed on the red wooden benches that lined the porch.
(Stay tuned next week for Part Two of the story – “How Bigfoot Landed at NBC”) (Joe Holley, author of six books - mostly about Texas, has been a speechwriter for Gov. Ann Richards, a staff writer for The Washington Post and a Houston Chronicle editorial writer and columnist from 2012 until the present. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 and 2023 and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2022. djholley10@ gmail.com)
