Matagorda County TXGenWeb
William Prissick.
Passages in the Life of an Eccentric Texas Legislator.
The Family Pedigree of Hon. William Prissick-Oddities of Odd Englishman
Scraps of Early History
in the Settlement of Texas.
(Written for The Galveston Weekly News
Jan. 12, 1882
by D.E.E. Braman, of Matagorda.)
EDITOR’S NOTE: D.E.E. Braman came to Texas in 1836 to fight in the Texas Revolution and became one of the state’s early great writers and chronicler of the Times - William Prissick was an important topic to him.
We’ll be running Braman’s biography of Prissick over the next three or four editions.
On the unpicturesque eastern shore of Tres Palacios bay, where the wire grass flats and the gradually ascending land toward the bay each commingle, and where mosquitoes and other insect and animal pests of low degree abound in summer and winter alike, stands a small, windowless ranch-house, that was once used by Allen and Poole for their herders, when they shipped cattle from Palacios.
These premises afforded a home for the Hon. William Prissisk for several years previous to his death. The innermost recesses of this house were accessible to all of nature’s elements—save sunshine; rain, wind and hail penetrated with little hindrance, and bleak northers howled and scurried through its rents and openings with undiminished force.
The only room was fourteen by sixteen feet, with bare rafters and studding; here and there daylight peered through the roof; several of the decaying weatherboards had dropped from their nailing at one end, and were convenient openings for slinging out any household refuse.
A box of earth in the middle of the floor was the fireplace, from which the smoke escaped through the roof in calm weather, and wherever the wind drove it at other times.
From a nail in one of the studdings hung a strip of rusty bacon rind; from another the vertebrae of a dried fish; in one corner was a used-up cast-net; at another place a two-gallon stone jug, with which the late tenant had brought his water about two miles from a cattle tank, and alongside the jug was a blue paper, fourth-gross match box, which, from its inside appearance, had contained very brown sugar.
This about concludes the inventory of the humble dwelling, as near as I can now reproduce the scene. The odor from the inside and the outdoor filth, even in the cold weather of winter, was sickening.
The bad smells, however, could by retreating from this “dread abode,” be left behind; but the moral sensibilities were affected by a more serious subject beyond a temporary shock, for there, within a few feet of the water jug, lay the lifeless corpse of William Prissisk on his couch, which consisted of prairie hay spread on the bare floor; over that was an old sail for a sheet; a piece of drift-wood served for a pillow; his lifeless body was clad in filthy summer wear, and was partly covered with an old brown blanket. Age, exposure and starvation combined had, after many years, extinguished his restive, restless life, and, according to his belief, his every attribute.
After this fashion lived William Prissick, and there he miserably died during the very inclement weather in the early part of the year 1881, destitute, uncared for and unattended.
But during his life he asked no favors from anyone, and died as he had lived, in the bay, lay his water-logged skiff-boat, tied to a stake on the shore; the stump of a mast was still standing, but there was no rigging or other appliances on board. She was named the Never Sweat, and was now, like her master, at the end of her last voyage.
A few feet from the door was a large heap of oyster shells and the remains of crabs and fish, which were the refuse portions of Mr. Prissick’s edibles, and had accumulated in the same way that the prehistoric man left his sign in the kitchen middins.
Mr. Prissick was born in County Shropshire, England at his father’s farm, called Polmer, seven miles from Shrewsburg, towards Wales, in 1805.
His mother’s maiden name was Weaver, and she was Welsch. Young Prissick received a good common and scientific education, and at the age of twenty-one he was apprenticed to a large mercantile establishment in Liverpool.
The third year of his apprenticeship he was sent as supercargo in the ship Chelydrea, D. Smale, master, to the African gold coast, where he remained six months. In his absence his father moved to Seacomb.
During his apprenticeship he married and had one son; and in 1831, on account of incompatibility between himself and his wife, he abandoned her and his child, came to America and purchased real estate in that portion of Ohio then called the Western Reserve, where he lived until 1834; and in the early part of the year he went back to England for the purpose of settling up his family affairs, in which settlement he conveyed to his son and only heir a large tract of land in Australia.
On account of troubles with his Ohio neighbors, he immediately, on his return, sold out his estate and came to Eastern Texas the same year and joined Captain Cheshire’s company of soldiers.
He received a headright to one league of land in Vehlin’s Colony, and was for several years engaged in surveying for Gen. T. J. Chambers, by whom he was much commended for his skill and scientific knowledge as a surveyorIn the summer of 1841 he suddenly and unheralded appeared in Matagorda.
“His figure,
Both of visage and of stature,
Is lothly and maigracious.”
He was about six feet one inch in height, long, lank-bodied, small limbed, dark skinned, with little flesh and much muscle, and in looks and habits more of an Arab than a European.
His face as rigid and sharp cut as though it had been whittled out of an old live oak and his small piercing dark-gray eyes indicated Moorish blood, which he claimed to possess.
During the summer weather he invariably slept out of doors, with his head and upper part wrapped in an old blanket, and in winter he sought shelter in some deserted building. Mr. Prissick was an excellent mathematician, knew something of every science and theory, and talked intelligently, but dogmatically, on all subjects, and expressed his ideas fluently and lucidly.
When interested, he was a great talker, and it mattered not to him whether the subjects were grave or gay, moral or immoral., he talked with the same earnestness; and not withstanding the filth of his person and his presumptuous egotism, he was always listened to with attention, even by strangers.
This man was an enigma, a self-contradiction, a man beside himself; not by any means crazy, as we generally understand that term, but
“Full of quips and cranks and wanton wiles,” and had a bee in his bonnet, as the Scotchman would say.
The most dire accidents and misfortunes that human beings are liable to, when they happened in his presence, were the sources to him of unseemly puns and ribald jokes, while his own ill luck was treated in the same way.
On the other hand, his sympathy was frequently excited towards the afflicted, in which case he freely contributed his money and time for the relief of human distress without any regard for his own necessities.
With educational acquirements and natural mental capacities fitting him for employments above manual labor, he was generally engaged in callings which required very little save physical strength and endurance, such as chopping wood and fishing; he was always clothed in the most flimsy, cheap and ill-fitting garments for summer and winter, and withstood the changes and inclemency of the seasons with the stolid indifference of a Digger Indian.
He was no respector of persons, times or places; his intercourse with the high and with the lowly was on the same independent plane.
He frequently annoyed and angered sober people by his rude remarks; but he had no enemies, neither had he any particular friends. The indifference did not arise from his worthlessness, because in many ways he was a very useful member of society, but from his utter disregard of the feelings of others and his contempt for the conventionalities of civilized beings.
His Religious Belief.
He had doubts about a future state of rewards and punishments, but there were no doubts in his mind about the falsity of the Christian religion. Voltaire and Rousseau were shining lights, and Tom Paine was his apostle par excellence.
One day Mr. Prissick got into a warm religious discussion with an old-fashioned Baptist preacher, and had riled him considerably by some sacrilegious remarks, when the good brother said:
“Once on a time the god Jupiter gave notice that on a certain day he would distribute to mortals souls and gizzards; that when Mr. Prissick arrived the souls had all been taken and he was obliged to accept a gizzard,” which was the cause of his waywardness.
His Advent to Matagorda
On the first appearance of this strange man in Matagorda he was quite a mystery and from his apparently destitute condition, which contrasted with his independent manner and free, intelligent conversation, the citizens became curious about his private history, but his he carefully concealed from all inquirers.
The first seen of him at this place was on a warm summer’s day when he came into a store with a large catfish attached to a fishline in his hand; he threw the fish on the clean counter, and lay down on the floor, leaning his head against a partition wall; not apparently from fatigue; but his natural position of comfortable repose.
In this position he commenced an animated discussion with one of the store attendant on the geology of the Colorado Valley, its tertiary formations and cocene period, from which he branched off to Dr. Samuel Johnson and pleonasm, and ended the two hours’ discourse, with a dissertation on cat fish and the best bait to catch them with.
Never during the whole time did he ask one question, but he promptly made answers to the interrogatories of his nonplused listeners, and then dropped off to a comfortable sleep. It was quite apparent that he had diligently studied Nature’s laws and the effects thereof, and reasoned from no theories but his own.
The storekeeper had been so absorbed by the strange visitor, not knowing whether he was from above or below, that he had allowed the writhing, gasping catfish to beslime his counter, until Mr. Prissick awoke from his soft repose and took it away.
Mr. Prissick, after a few days, procured an old sail-boat and followed fishing and oystering for several months, with rather a poor pecuniary success, however as he knew very little about the managing of a sailing craft, and as the prevailing winds in summer are southeast and ahead in coming from his fishing grounds, he usually poled into shoal water and waded his boat to tow.
He was known to start frequently on a week’s fishing expedition without provisions or fresh water and depended entirely on oysters and roasted fish for food, and chance pools of brackish water to quench his thirst.
For several of his first years in and about Matagorda he was miserly in his habits and saved every cent that came to his hands, excepting the merest trifles for food and raiment.
His clothes, which were always of the cheapest fabric and most uncouth styles were worn unchanged until time and rough usage wasted them to a scant covering of his form, and not till he became loathsomely filthy would he recloth himself.
His bedding was in unison with his wardrobe, and so scant that one small horse blanket, or a bit of old sail, and a little moss in a gunny bag sufficed for his repose.
Mr. Prissick may have though with Rousseau: “Man is never less miserable than when he appears to be deprived of everything.”
This dispensing with bodily comforts to a degree that would have been cruelty, if not disease and death, to any other human being was not from extreme carelessness and a natural indifference to the requirements of civilized life. With the palate and stomach of an ostrich, and bones and muscles to match, he ws insensible to all manner of discomfort.
But within this filthy uncouth form was a vivid, refined and cultivated intellect which belied its squalid tenement, and verified what Pythagoras taught about metempsychosis.
When talking or reading, his mind was absorbed in the subject to such a degree that, if he said or did anything outside of that subject, it was through mechanical volition.
One cold winter night when he was holding forth over a bar-room stove to a party of listeners, one of them voluntarily handed him a half-pint tumbler nearly full of French Brancy, and told him to drink. Mr. Prissick talked and drank until he had finished the whole, and left for his sleeping den; but before the got there the effects of the branded grounded him, and he lay in the prairie all night exposed to the norther, but with no injurious effect. The next morning he declared that he had been drugged, and never could be convinced that he had drunk more than an ordinary dram; but he was never at any time addicted to the intemperate use or even the common use of ardent spirits.
By fishing, wood-chopping and surveying and other odd jobs of muscle and brain, Mr. Prissick, in the course of about four years, had accumulated and saved over $200 in hard earned money, which he secured not by bond or mortgage, but in large mouthed glass cherry bottles, and buried them in the ground in a secluded place.
He said that if he did not increase his pelt in the most approved financial manner, he was never troubled about the insolvency of debtors.
In order that luxury should not be extravagantly used, he would one in several months buy 50 cents worth of cheap brown sugar, and with much time and trouble put it into a narrow mouthed tin can canister, such as are used by grocers to retail gunpowder from; and if it took a long time to get it into the tin vessel it was a far more tedious job to get it out.
Another of this strange man’s peculiarities was, when he went to the country on a surveying expedition, or other business, no matter how great the distance of how bad the woods, he generally made the trip on foot, and if he took a riding horse along he walked and led his horse the greater part of the way; on starting he struck a bee line for his destination, and no more deviated from a straight course than Norway rats when they seek a new home. When riding on horseback his motions appeared most grotesque, and were likened to an unfledged bird vainly trying to fly.
His Disinterested Follly
In about the year 1845 a widow, an old colonist, died in Matagorda, leaving a large stock of cattle and real estate and slaves; as heir, a daughter of tender years.
The disposition of this estate and the care of the orphan evolved on Mr. Prissick, who was employed in the business for several years.
During this time he had also been appointed tax collector of Matagorda county, to fill a vacancy in that office. The affairs of the dead widow’s estate prospered in his hands and waxed exceedingly, but the county finances waned in the same portion, and when he came to account and settle for the taxes collected,
More on William Prissick next week