Going Back for Him

A retrospective on the 2026 Texas Jack Association Roundup — and the road to Leadville 2030.

I set out from Chattanooga just after five in the morning last Wednesday, driving north toward Richmond, hoping to beat the rush hour through Knoxville and Bristol. It's a long haul to make alone, but I wanted the time. This was my last Roundup as the Association's Vice-President. In October I take over as President, and somewhere, passing from my home state of Tennessee into the Old Dominion state of Virginia, it occurred to me that a person ought to spend some time considering the role he's stepping into before he steps into it. So I drove, thinking about the man we'd all be gathering for.

Palmyra

I made a short detour, turning south at Zion Crossroads headed for Palmyra, Texas Jack's hometown, to see the historic marker the Association lobbied to have placed back in 1988.

It turns out Wednesday is a fine day to visit. The Old Stone Jail was open for tours, and next door at Maggie's House the Fluvanna Historical Society was welcoming and genuinely knowledgeable — the kind of local stewardship that keeps a place's memory alive long after the last person who remembers it firsthand is gone.

Jack turned up on a quilt hanging in the jail, stitched to commemorate the town's history, which delighted me more than I expected it to. I signed a copy of my book for the society and got back on the road toward Richmond.

Richmond

The Roundup proper opened with a docented tour of the Tredegar Iron Works. Among the personal effects on display were some belonging to Jack's commanding officer during the war, J.E.B. Stuart — including the ostrich-plumed hat Stuart wore in the field. It's a small, strange thread of history: that hat, that plume, is a look Jack would borrow when he first walked onto a stage. The costume of the cavalier became the costume of the cowboy. You could stand there and see the seam.

We went to Hollywood Cemetery, where two of Jack's commanding officers, J.E.B. Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee, are buried. We talked about how Jack carried the final battlefield dispatch from Lunsford Lomax to Lee at Yellow Tavern, shortly before Stuart was mortally wounded there. We noted the graves of two Presidents of the United States, Monroe and Tyler, and that of Jefferson Davis, President of the would-be Confederacy.

And we visited the Omohundro plot. Texas Jack's youngest half-brother, Malvern Hill Omohundro, is buried there, alongside his wife Daisy Van Lew Omohundro and his mother — Jack's stepmother — Margaret Shores Omohundro. Standing at that plot with Malvern Hill's grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who are the grand and great-grand nephews and nieces of Texas Jack, along with cousins of various numbers and degrees, I found myself thinking of Faulkner's line from Requiem for a Nun: The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Across the cemetery, we came to the grave of Silas Omohundro, Texas Jack's uncle, the brother of his father, John Burwell Omohundro. Silas was one of the most successful slave traders of the years just before and during the Civil War, and his grave — set apart from the rest of the family — went unmarked for more than a century and a half. He kept families with three enslaved women, Louisa Tandy, Martha Tandy, and Corinna Hinton, who were forced to labor alongside him in that trade. As war approached, he sent his children out of the South, where they could presumably pass as white.

We talked about how a single family could hold a man like Silas and also claim Richmond's famous Elizabeth Van Lew, who spent the war spying for the North. She had eyes and ears inside Libby Prison, where Union prisoners were held, inside the Confederate War and Navy Departments, and inside Jefferson Davis's own home. When the Union Army finally retook Richmond on April 3, 1865, she raised the first United States flag to fly over the city since Virginia's secession four years before. Her intelligence kept Lincoln and Grant supplied with Confederate positions, and after the war Grant appointed her postmaster of Richmond — a post in which she modernized the city's mail while employing Black men at equal pay and benefits to their white colleagues. Her grave marker was donated by relatives of Union Colonel Paul J. Revere, grandson of the patriot Revolutionary rider, whom she had aided during his wartime captivity. When she died, she was buried standing up. And facing North.

Elizabeth Van Lew was the aunt of Daisy Van Lew, Malvern Hill's wife. So for some of the people standing in Hollywood Cemetery that day, the family tree holds the slaver Silas Omohundro, the world's first famous cowboy Texas Jack Omohundro, and the Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew — all aunts and uncles and cousins of one degree or another. In that way the family is a micro version of so many families and their ties to this history. There are people we agree with and people we don't, people we are proud of and people we are ashamed of, people we identify with and people we can't understand. All of them are markers along the ebbs and flows and curves of the river of history that carries us to where we now stand.

We visited the Chimborazo Civil War hospital museum and saw the devastating human cost of the war. The next day, we loaded up on the bus and went to Colonial Williamsburg and saw the world the Omohundros who came before Jack would have known — a line stretching back to Richard Omohundro and Ann Moxley, who lived in the Westmoreland settlement on the Potomac in the mid-1600s.

When we gathered for dinner that evening at the Tobacco Company Restaurant, we were led to the third floor. As we took our seats, a giant mirror on the wall beside our table showed scenes from the life of Buffalo Bill Cody. The restaurant didn't know — couldn't have known — that the people dining there that night were there to honor the life of Cody's best friend, his first stage partner, the man who had saved his life in a skirmish with Miniconjou Lakota warriors in April of 1872. It was easy to look around and remember that we wouldn't have been here were it not for Texas Jack. More humbling to know that without Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill wouldn't have been here either.

The Business of the Association

On Saturday the Association held its business luncheon. I spoke about a project the board has already approved: marking the grave of Texas Jack Junior's infant son — also named Texas Jack — which lies unmarked today in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. Treasurer Rick Omohundro walked us through the Association's finances, which I'm glad to report are on a firm footing as we look towards the future. President Robert Omohundro explained how the board arrived at its decision to rework the dues structure for the first time in over twenty years. We welcomed an incoming Vice-President, Amanda Omohundro Adams, and thanked Robert for his exemplary service — both in leading the organization and in planning and running this year's Roundup. And we settled on our next two gathering places: Deadwood, South Dakota, in 2028, and, in 2030, the Denver area, with a day trip to Leadville, Colorado, where we will mark the 150th anniversary of Jack's 1880 death, at the memorial stone his friend Buffalo Bill paid for and placed in 1908.

Dr. Megan Shockley of the Shockoe Institute gave us a detailed history of Richmond's slave trade and of the part Silas Omohundro played in the trafficking of enslaved people. She then led us on a walking tour of the city alongside the Institute's Senior Historian in Residence, Dr. Gregg Kimball, whose reading of the city and its history was illuminating throughout.

The Banquet

That evening we held our banquet. Secretary Linda Omohundro read a moving poem on the nation's 250th anniversary, written by Association member Driftin' Aaron Poff. Former President and current Director Larry Tyree showed us a pair of videos his son had made, using modern tools to give us a glimpse of the past — Texas Jack reading works he wrote or spoke more than 150 years ago.

Then I was asked to say a few words about what I see as the future of the Association as it heads down the road toward the 150th anniversary of Jack's death. What I said, roughly, was this.

The future of the Texas Jack Association is the same as the past. It's the man at the foundation of the myth, kept at the forefront — wherever and whenever we can.

Forty years ago, this Association held its first Roundup. Eight years after that, the people who started it put Jack where he belonged — the Hall of Great Western Performers, the earliest-born man and the first stage actor in that company. That was the work of a generation. It's done, and it stands.

I want to talk about where we stand in time, because this year the calendar has something to say to us.

The country marks its two hundred and fiftieth. A hundred and fifty years ago — on the third of June, 1876, the year of the first centennial — Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill stood on a stage together for the last time. And this July, Jack turns a hundred and eighty.

Think about what 1876 was. The nation was a hundred years old and telling itself a story about what it had been. Custer fell that summer. The West was turning, in real time, into myth. And right at that hinge, two scouts who had played themselves on a stage for four years went their separate ways. Cody walked off and into the myth — he had forty more years to become the most famous man on earth. Jack walked off and, four years later, into a grave in Leadville at thirty-three. The myth kept one of them and very nearly lost the other.

That gap — between the man the myth kept and the man it nearly erased — is why this Association exists. We are the ones who go back for him. Not the legend. The man, with the records to prove him.

Every fifty years, this country stops and retells the story of itself. It did it in 1876. It's doing it now. It will do it again in 2076. The only question that matters for us is whether, when they tell it next time, the man at the foundation of America's ideation of the cowboy is still there to be found.

That isn't finally a question of more research, or a better archive — though we need, and I think will achieve, both. It's a question of who carries it. And when I look at the future, I see the people in this room. Some of you were at that first Roundup. You built something that has lasted forty years. Whether it lasts another forty doesn't have a documentary answer. It has a human one.

We'll take this Association to Deadwood. We'll take it to Leadville — to the place where Jack's life ended, which is the right place for us to stand. But the road that matters most doesn't run between towns. It runs from this generation to the next one. The people in this room are going to have to bring their children and their grandchildren, not just to the Roundup, but into the Association, and into the mission.

And we have to teach them the hardest thing, and the most important. This isn't only Texas Jack's history. It isn't only ours. It's theirs. The day they understand that is the day the man at the foundation of the myth stays at the forefront long after every one of us is gone.

In 1876 the country was a hundred years old and Jack was celebrating it at the Centennial in Philadelphia. One hundred years later, as the nation celebrated its bicentennial, he was all but forgotten. Between then and now, this organization was formed. It placed markers at the spot where Jack was born and the spot he died. It ensured he was properly memorialized in the Cowboy Hall of Fame as the earliest cowboy to have an impact as a performer. Today, on the doorstep of celebrating two hundred and fifty years as a nation, we're still here, still saying his name. In 2076 someone will stand where I'm standing. The whole of our work is to make sure that when they do, they know exactly who he was, and why his legacy is worth preserving.

That's the future I see. The same man we started with — carried by people who've come to understand that he was always theirs.

Left to right: Matthew Kerns (Vice-President), Linda Rhodes Omohundro (secretary), Robert Omohundro (President), Amanda Omohundro Adams (incoming Vice-President), and Rick Omohundro (treasurer).

The Road Ahead

So the work begins again, this month.

The Association will mark the 180th anniversary of Texas Jack's birth on July 26th. We'll open the fundraising effort to mark the grave of the child who, through a daring rescue on the plains, came to bear the famous man's name. We'll begin preparing for our 2028 Roundup — a return to Deadwood, South Dakota, and, I'll admit, a small measure of revenge on the place: our 2002 Roundup there was cut short when a raging wildfire evacuated the town and robbed us of our banquet. And we look ahead to the day we can stand together at the stone in Leadville that Buffalo Bill, Jack's best friend and his partner on the stage and the trail, provided in 1908 — marking the 150th anniversary of the death of Texas Jack, America's first famous cowboy, the man at the heart of the legend.

That's a lot of road. We don't intend to walk it alone.

If any part of this stirred something in you — if you carry the Omohundro or Mohundro name, or a thread of this family through a marriage or a maternal line, or simply a love of the frontier, the American West, the heroic cowboy, and the people who turned it into a story America still tells itself, there's a place for you in the Texas Jack Association. Membership isn't a transaction. It's a way of standing in the line of people who go back for him: who mark the graves, keep the records, hold the gatherings, and carry the man at the foundation of the myth forward to the generation that comes next. Come to Deadwood. Come to Leadville. Better yet, bring your children and grandchildren, and let them find out what those of us at Hollywood Cemetery were reminded of that day — that this history was always, in the end, theirs. Ours.

You can join us at texasjack.org. I hope you will. There's a good deal of road between here and 2030, and it's a far better walk in company.

— Matthew Kerns, incoming President, Texas Jack Association