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.
This is the second installment of the William Prissick chronicles that tell a good bit about Matagorda County life in early and mid 1800s.
From William Prissick from last week
he was not only indebted to the county $1,600, but had used up all of his own private funds in paying the expenses and carrying on the business of the estate, without having made a single charge against the trust in his own favor.
He had by his folly enriched the estate confided to his care, jeopardized the surities on his tax bond and bankrupted himself.
In order to pay up his official deficit to the county, he sold his headright league of land in Houston county for $1,600.
One of his idiosyncracies was, when entrusted with the business of two or more persons, he selected one as a favorite and made all others subservient and contributory to that one, and even sacrificed his own time and money to promote the object of his choice as freely as he did that tax fund.
He was subsequently intrusted with other public and private business but he invariably managed the affairs of others to his loss and their gain.
Estranged From His
Early Connections
He never communicated with his relatives in England, and always endeavored to keep his place of abode secret from them; but they through the British Consul, discovered his hiding-place, and in 1842 sent out in care of one Dr. Duck, on a British vessel, to Matagorda Bay, several trunks and boxes with valuable clothing, books and family relicks.
As soon as the vessel arrived at Matagorda anchorage, Dr. Duck dispatched a note to Mr. Prissick, informing him of his charge, and requesting him to come on board and receive the goods.
Some of the young men about town hearing about the circumstances, started the report which came to Mr. Prissick’s ears, that his English wife was on board the vessel; this agitated him so much that he fled to the woods and remained there two weeks.
During his absence the vessel sailed away to Port Lavaca, and Prissick’s freight was stored in the custom house, where moisture and rust do corrupt and thieves do occasionally break in and steal; at any rate Mr. Prissick never received any of the contents of said trunk and boxes.
Cistern Marshall the Discoverer
of Gold in California
In 1842 Annah Marshall, the original discoverer of gold at Sutter’s flume, came to Matagorda county and lived on the west side of the Colorado river, with Mr. Vandeveer.
He was a suspicious, jealous sort of human formation, with much Yankee ingenuity.
Having heard in his New England home that Texas was a very dry country, he conceived the idea of storing the water from the clouds for domestic purposes, by digging holes in the ground and plastering them over with mortar.
This kind of cistern may answer in some countries, but from the nature of the soil they soon cracked and let the water out.
From the circumstances, he gained the sobriquet of “Cistern Marshall,” and was very little known by his sobriquet or prefix.
One day he rowed over the river from Vandeveer’s to Matagorda, and purchased twelve hams, which he sent down to his skiff at the river landing by Bill Hailey, the drayman, who instead of carrying the freight on board like a prudent carrier, tossed the pieces one by one from his dray into the boat, and in doing so missed his mark once by a little too much momentum, and the ham fell into the river where the water was ten feet or more.
Hailey then with a long pole groped around in the water for the magnificent freight, but meeting no encouragement gave up the search and drove back to town, where he reported correct delivery and collected his drayage from Marshall.
Mr. Prissick was during the whole of this time lying in the bottom of his leaky hulk, which was tied to the bank a few feet above Marshall’s and he say how Hailey had managed the loading.
When Marshall arrived at Vandeveer’s and unloaded his hams, he found only eleven, being one short of his invoice.
On thinking over the subject, he recollected that there was no other boat at the Matagorda landing save Prissick’s, and he came to the reasonable conclusion that the outward appearance and apparent circumstances of the strange man, ran conclusive evidence of his bad character, and that the theft of a single ham by such a looking outcast would be one of his least crimes.
Marshall had frequently seen Prissick about the landing at Matagorda, and had formed his estimate according to New England notions.
When he next came to Matagorda, he accused Mr. Prissick of stealing his ham, and demanded restitution of him, but Mr. Prissick, without denying the insulting charge, or making any other answer, merely laughed in his face.
Marshall was terribly angered and aimed a heavy righthander at Prissick’s head, which the latter fenced off with his left hand, and as quick as thought gave him a blow with each fist, which instantly grounded the cistern man, and wonderfully humbled his pride; while prostrate he even agreed that he had not lost a ham, or even a piece of meat of any kind, and never expected to.
But after he had got well through with his first painful experience, and brushed and washed himself off, he found that, added to his sense of loss, he had acquired other new and disagreeable sensations, as shame and humiliation at being whipped and browbeaten by a rag-muffin, and pain from the blows.
He quickly made up his mind that it was waste of time and breath to any longer discuss the disagreeable subject with Mr. Prissick, and he also thought that he could more satisfactorily vindicate his cause with Bill; so he goes, sore and bruised as he was, straight to the drayman, and accuses him of stealing his ham with malice aforethought.
This was rather brash talk for a vanquished man, and so thought Bill Hailey, and so he expressed himself in language not appropriate for tea-table or church.
Marshall made an ineffective effort to spoil Bill Hailey’s frontis peace, but before the well-intended blow had quite reached its destination, or anywhere else in particular the unyielding ground had arrested his sudden descent, and Bill was working away on the prostrate cistern builder with his two ugly fists.
In due time Mr. Prissick who had been witness to the scene, came up and rescued Marshall, who didn’t save his bacon and had lost his prestige as a fighter. Marshall, soon after the foregoing Texas experience, left Matagorda for the Pacific coast, and our loss was his gain, for he has been rewarded for his discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, with a respectable annual pension by the State of California, and now enjoys prosperity at his home in the Sacramento Valley, and several half-filled circular holes in the earth with crumbling mortar attached to their sides are the only existing evidences that Annah Marshall, the gold-finder, ever developed anything in Matagorda.
From the time Mr. Prissick came to Matagorda until emancipation he was a bold and outspoken abolitionist, and was always opposed to public opinion on that subject, but somehow he passed along unmolested at times when any other man would have suffered for like temerity.
During the Civil War, as a natural sequence, he was a fearless advocate of the Union cause, and several times jeopardized his personal safety by his indiscretion.
After the fighting had commenced, he followed the movements of the commanding armies, from the published reports and other sources; and announced the results with the precision of a military commander.
He foretold in 1861 the result of the war, and he then said that it would not continue over four years.
A Time of Peril
In the year 1862, when the war excitement was intense, and even moderate Confederates were accused of disloyalty, Mr. Prissick made himself unusually obnoxious by denouncing and refusing to pay a Confederate war tax which he, as the agent of another person’s property, was called upon for.
It was intimated to him by a well-wisher that in immediate seclusion could he only expect personal safety, and he knew that by the popular sentiment he had been adjudged guilty of many other acts of disloyalty besides his refusal to pay the tax, and concluded that a timely retreat was the proper movement.
So one day, just before sundown, he mounted his horse, Old Ball, and took a circuitous route from Matagorda to Hill’s Ferry on Peyton’s Creek.
When he arrived there it was sufficiently dusk to make the outlines of all distant objects indistinct.
He hallooed lustily for the ferryman, and in a few moments he perceived a tall human form, who seemed to have a long rifle in its hand, and the figure leisurely approached the ferry.
It seemed to the excited fancy of Mr. Prissick to be aiming a charge into the man-killer.
Mr. Prissick was greatly excited by the hostile appearances in his front, and came to the conclusion that he had been outflanked by the enemy.
His knowledge of military science suggested a hasty retreat with the least possible portion of his force exposed to the enemy, and the exposed parts as well protected from attach as circumstances and materials would admit.
Mr. Prissick recognized that strategy was the art of war, and that only by strategy could he outmaneuver the advancing foe.
He stripped the Mexican saddle from Old Ball in a twinkling, and bending himself toward the ground, so that his body and legs formed a right angle, he held the old saddle against his supposed enemies in the way as a shield, and retreated in quick time to a near gulley, where he lay and listened for hostilities until near daylight, and from thence, in the haze of the early morning, he fled to the Colorado timber, and secreted himself for nearly a week; in the meantime his unencumbered horse had found his accustomed prairie range.
It turned out that Mr. Hall, the owner of the ferry, was absent; that his stalwart daughter had answered Mr. Prissick’s call to be ferried over, and that she at the moment held in one hand a knife, and in the other a lusty sugar-cane from which she was deftly stripping the sweet rind as she walked toward the ferry.
This young Texas girl and these harmless objects were magnified through the nervousness and fear of Mr. Prissick into a hostile foe, prepared for and intent on murder.
As a Legislator
Mr. Prissick, from having been an abolitionist before the war and a prominent and active Union man during the four years of internecine strife, naturally, after emancipation, became the freedman’s friend and counselor and was elected by their vote as one of the representatives to the Twelfth Legislature from the Twelfth District.
Of course after his election to this distinguished position, and before going to Austin, he realized the necessity of brushing up; he shed his much depreciated raiment and reclad his person in a suit of “Cheap John” store clothes of various stripes and hues; the imitation cottonade pantaloons were six inches too short at the lower end; his coat of linsy-woolsey was built for a different model, and the scant sleeves reached but a short way below the legislator’s elbows, and exposed much of his thin dingy arms, to which his dirty hands added no grace.
For under linen, a blue hicory shirt was his selection, and his shoes had been intended for plantation wear, and were therefore unsightly and too large; his hat was a coarse, lowly constructed, straw concern, also too capacious, and to diminish its capacity he wore a red cotton bandanna, thrust in a wad between his skull and the hat crown, which made his head appear to his constituents much like the mental dome of Daniel Webster.
A short time before the first session of the Twelfth Legislature he started from Matagorda for Austin on the outside of a sorry old horse and traveled by by-ways and cross-roads most of the distance on
More on William Prissick next week