Old Cowboy Recalls Alamo Stories

The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the Dallas/Fort Worth Star Telegram:

"But whether fact or fiction -- or both -- Hickman's stories were convincing enough to win him a spotlight role at the 1930 State Fair as a guest in The Dallas Morning News' "Little Alamo" exhibit.

I found the 1930 News features on Hickman when I tried to look up early stories about White Settlement. If the Star-Telegram ever interviewed him, I haven't found the story.

In fanciful language, The News described Hickman, then 110, as a local man who could relate "tales of early Texas" and said that he was "identified with all the stirring events of Texas history."

"From the tumbledown shack that has been his home for more than 30 years on the White Settlement road 10 miles from Fort Worth, his undimmed eyes watch the heavens fill with argosies of the air, and not 10 miles from there he witnessed the effects of his last brush with Indians," The News reported.

"More than 90 years ago, he blazed a trail from Alabama to San Augustine [Texas]. ... The Alamo, Goliad and the conventions in which Texas planned for its freedom are all fresh in his memory. He boasts that he brought from Alabama the first bushel of corn brought to Texas and the first demijohn of real whiskey."

In an interview, Hickman claimed to have met Alamo survivor Susanna Dickinson when he was sent from Gonzales to recover Bowie's body in San Antonio.

"I found him and I would have brung him out," The News quoted Hickman as saying, but the body had been burned. He said he took a gold star, a half-moon pin and a scarf back to Bowie family members.

In a 1911 interview in the Fort Worth Record, Hickman called it "an awful sight in there."

Hickman also told the State Fair crowd that he shined Sam Houston's boots before the general led the Texas Revolution. He said Houston gave him a 10-cent piece for his 15th birthday.

He said he thought he would lose it after the Civil War when a Union officer searched him on his way back to Texas from the Confederate surrender at Appomattox."

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