EDITOR’S NOTE: We thought this feature newspaper article on the Kuykendalls - four years before their deaths in 1920 - provided anecdotes about their personal lives.
PEOPLE WE KNOW
Mr. Wiley M. Kuykendall is a native of Fort Bend county, born on the Brazos river 77 years ago.
His parents, the Kuykendalls who were among Austin’s first colonists in 1822, died soon after getting the farm home improved, leaving one of Texas’ first natives to hustle for himself at the tender age of 6 years.
At about the age of seven years the lad drifted into Matagorda county and worked his way among the hardships of western life, until fortune threw him in with that veteran ranchman, A.H. Pierce, better known all over South Texas as Shanghai Pierce, from which time on Fortune dealt kindly with the young Texan - very kindly when in 1869 he woed and won Miss Pierce, the only sister of A.H. and J. E. Pierce.
Miss Pierce was something of cow-rancher herself. Educated at her home town in Rhode Island, she came to Texas in 1867, following her brother A.H. who came in 1853 and J.E. in 1860.
Her friends tell us her first years in Texas was the life of a genuine cow-girl as picturesque as any of the heroines of the magazines or movies.
She could ride and shoot equal to the cow-boy, invested her first earnings in land on which Buckeye now stands, paying 10 cts an acre for it, and then she bought calves to grow and multiply on the fine grass, and she looked after her own branding and roundups.
But it is presumed stopped those activities when in ’69 she took from her brother the best ranch boss in all this country.
Mrs. Kuykendall certainly doesn’t appear to have passed through as many winters on the range as she admits (75), and then they must have been very mild ones or mostly summers.
She is full of life, vivacious and a charming conversationalist, always entertaining.
Mr. Kuykendall, not only has served a full half century of activities on the range, but seasoned his young manhood with four years of service for the Confederacy in the civil war, most of the time in Yeager’s North Texas regiment and Gen. Buchell’s brigade in the Louisiana campaign.
Mr. Kuykendall relates an interesting incident of his first drive of cattle to northern markets, along in the early seventies.
It was the custom of the Indian tribes to exact toll of the herds crossing their reservations, and where their demands were refused, they would stampede the herd during the night.
Mr. Kuykendall says that as they were crossing the Comanche lands and just about time they were stopping for the night he saw standing on their horses 20 figures silhouetted against the sky, and these figures cautiously advancing proved to be a score of Comanche braves, with a demand for ten beeves.
Mr. Kuykendall played “no understand,” and remembering that “the surest way to a man’s heart (or head) is through his stomach,” he called his camp cook and took him to cook plenty of supper; and he saw to it that the braves were well filled, refusing all the time to understand the chief’s desires.
After the feast, however, Mr. Kuykendall told the chief he could not talk Comanche and asked if one of them could talk Spanish, and finding among them one who could he opened negotiations through the interpreter.
Having been well fed and feeling lazily comfortable the chief soon fell from ten to eight, and then reduced his toll exaction to six, and still the cow-man argued it was too much.
Then to four, three and two the chief fell, and finally a worthless jack traveling with the herd caught the eye of the chief and he proposed to compromise on the jack and a heifer.
“All right,” promptly responded Kuykendall, “the jack and the heifer are yours,” and the braves went away perfectly satisfied.
The Matagorda County News and Midcoast Farmer, Tuesday, September 12, 1916
