Happy Birthday, Texas Jack

One hundred eighty years ago today — July 27, 1846 — a boy was born at Pleasure Hill, his father's farm on Cunningham Creek, a mile and a half west of the courthouse at Palmyra, in Fluvanna County, Virginia. He was the fourth of the twelve children John Burwell Omohundro and Catherine Salome Baker had together, and the first of them born in that house. They named him John Baker Omohundro.

Nobody remembers that name.

His own family mislaid it. Malvern Hill Omohundro, Jack's much younger half-brother by their father's second wife, and the man who spent a lifetime assembling the Omohundro Genealogical Record, set him down as John Burwell Omohundro Jr. It was a reasonable guess. The boy was John B., the father was John Burwell, and sons get named for fathers. Herschel Logan, who wrote the first book about Jack, followed Malvern's lead. The family Bible didn't. It says Baker, which was his mother's name before it was his.

The printed record sides with the Bible. Baker appears in the newspapers in the summer of 1880, when the obituaries ran. Burwell doesn't turn up until 1951, when Malvern's genealogy was published and the papers began quoting it back at themselves.

None of which the world noticed, because the world had settled on something else a long time before.

The boy at Pleasure Hill

The Omohundros were a prosperous family. There was an overseer on the place and twenty-five enslaved people working fields of wheat, tobacco, and corn. Jack's older brother Orville took to books and would eventually study law and medicine. Jack did not take to books.

Malvern, writing decades later, put it plainly: his brother "was not very fond of work or walking," but seemed from boyhood "a natural-born fisherman, huntsman, horseman, and 'crack' shot." He could catch fish when nobody else could. He came home after dark with a full line or a full sack and an empty schoolbag.

Fort Sumter surrendered when he was fourteen. Both Omohundro brothers volunteered immediately and both were turned away as too young. Orville left school and found officers in southwest Virginia who didn't know his family well enough to ask. Jack, rejected twice, got in the back way, as a headquarters courier for Major General John Buchanan Floyd. He carried messages for the rest of the war, some of it riding, scouting, and spying for J.E.B. Stuart, and picked up the first of his nicknames — the Boy Scout of the Confederacy.

He was eighteen when the war ended. He soon turned his horse toward Texas and was shipwrecked getting there, came ashore in Florida, taught school for a season on the panhandle, and eventually reached Sam Allen's ranch on Buffalo Bayou, where his career as a cowboy began at the cook fire, feeding other men's outfits.

How he got the name

Every account of the naming is a little different, which is how you know it was told often and by people who enjoyed telling it. Here is the version that ran in the papers the summer he died.

The southern states were short of beef. Jack put everything he had into cattle, hired a crew, and pushed the herd east out of Texas across Indian country toward Tennessee, six months on the road. When the herd finally came up on a hungry town, the place went to pieces with relief, and a crowd gathered in the square to find out who had brought it.

Where is the man, they wanted to know.

"Here," he said.

What's your name, pard?

"Jack."

Where from?

"Texas."

Somebody in the crowd shouted hurrah for Texas Jack, boys, and that was that. He had been Johnny to his family and Happy Jack to the outfits he rode with, but he was Texas Jack for the rest of his life and every year since.

The new name took him over fast and completely. In February of 1887, seven years after Jack's death and seven months after his wife's passing, a humorist writing in the Weekly Detroit Free Press was still getting mileage out of it. His name was John B. Omohundro, the column allows, and nobody can blame the man for shooting it and taking up something shorter.

The piece recalls hearing that a New York Herald reporter once sent his card up to the couple's hotel room, hoping for an interview. Jack is out, but Morlacchi has the man shown up anyway.

"Good morning, Mrs. Omohondru," he says, bowing nearly double in the doorway. "Welcome back to New York."

She takes the name for an insult in a language she doesn't speak. Do you think I'm Dutch! She tells him to get out and informs him she will teach him better than to come around her calling names, and she reaches for one of the Navy revolvers lying on Jack's table. The reporter withdraws, and is heard downstairs complaining that the elevator is slow.

Which of course never happened. The writer says as much himself. It is related that, he begins, which in a newspaper of that era means I heard this once. He is writing a comic piece about the epidemic of counterfeit Texas Jacks then working the saloons of America, he misspells the name twice in two different ways, and a few lines later he says things about Morlacchi that are both false and unkind.

But a joke is evidence of something even when it is evidence of nothing it claims. Fourteen years after a crowd in a Tennessee square shouted a name at a cattleman, you could still raise a laugh in Detroit by proposing that the man's own widow would draw on a stranger for using the name he was born with.

What he left

The rest of it went quickly, the way it does with people who die at thirty-three. North Platte, a bar shift at Lew Baker's saloon, a dime novelist named Ned Buntline who wandered in looking for material and found two men willing to supply it. A Chicago theater in December of 1872 and a script written in four hours. A romance and marriage with his famous costar. Eight years split between adventures out west and engagements on eastern stages starring in border melodramas, where a genuine cowboy stood in front of eastern audiences with a lariat spinning over his head and told them about stampedes and cattle thieves in a Virginia drawl.

That was the invention. Not the buckskin, which Cody had, and not the marksmanship, which everybody had. The cowboy as a figure worth watching, worth paying to see, worth being — that was Jack's, assembled on stage between 1872 and 1880 by a man who had actually done the work. Buffalo Bill's Wild West opened three years after Jack was in the ground and carried the thing throughout America, across the Atlantic, and to every capital in Europe. Cody broadcast it. Jack built it.

He died in Leadville on June 28, 1880. They buried him in Evergreen Cemetery after a funeral at the Tabor Opera House the next afternoon. The theatrical profession of Leadville attended in a mass, and the musicians of the different companies came together to furnish the music, which means that on a Tuesday in June businesses shut down and the orchestra pits of a silver camp two miles above sea level emptied out into the street for a Virginia farm boy.

Some of the obituaries said he was forty. He was thirty-three. Some said he was from West Virginia. Some said he'd earned the name before the war, when it had been after. Four days dead and the details were already going soft.

Not the name, though. Nobody ever needed to check that one.

He was Texas Jack.