Tennessee & Texas
ESPN’s College GameDay set up this morning in front of Ayres Hall, and at noon the top-ranked Texas Longhorns kick off against the Volunteers inside a sold-out Neyland Stadium. By the box-score measure, this is hardly a rivalry at all. The two programs have met exactly three times, the last of them on New Year’s Day 1969, and every one of those games was played in Dallas. Today is the first time Texas has ever walked onto the field in Knoxville.
But the football is only the newest part of this story. Tennessee and Texas have been playing each other for two hundred years, and for most of that time Tennessee was sending over its starters.
It starts way back in 1814, at a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River in what is now Alabama. Andrew Jackson’s army, heavy with Tennessee militia and volunteers, broke the Red Stick Creek breastworks at Horseshoe Bend in March of that year, and a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant of the 39th Infantry named Sam Houston went over the wall early, took an arrow in the thigh, had it yanked out, and went back in until musket balls finally put him out of the fight. By all accounts he should have died. He survived and he spent the rest of his life as a Jackson man.
The treaty Jackson dictated afterward forced the Creeks to surrender some twenty-three million acres, including land belonging to those who had fought on his side. Their dispossession opened an enormous southern country to settlement and speculation, and the men who came out of that campaign—soldiers, surveyors, land jobbers, politicians—formed a Nashville-centered network that would spend the next thirty years looking southwest. Jackson rarely had to appear on stage for his gravity to be felt. His people did the traveling for him.
Houston rose fast: congressman, then governor of Tennessee by 1827. Then, in 1829, his brand-new marriage collapsed under circumstances neither party ever fully explained, and he resigned the governorship and walked away from the state. He lived for a time among the Cherokee, drank hard enough to earn an unflattering Cherokee nickname, and eventually drifted into Mexican Texas. Within a few years he was commanding its army. He remains the only man to have served as governor of two different states, and both of them are playing today.
David Crockett, who hated being called Davy, took a route that was much shorter, but which ended much worse. Voted out of Congress in 1835, he is supposed to have told his constituents "Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas." That's the line as it has come down to us, polished by a century and a half of retelling, and like most Crockett quotes it is more likely to be a legend than a transcript. What’s documented is that go to Texas he did, and that in March 1836 he died at the Alamo alongside a heavy contingent of fellow Tennesseans, one of the largest groups of defenders born anywhere outside Texas.
Six weeks later, Houston’s army routed Santa Anna at San Jacinto.
Here’s the part that should interest anyone in orange today. Tennessee’s nickname, the Volunteer State, is usually traced to the War of 1812, when Jackson’s volunteers turned out for the Creek campaign and New Orleans. It got its second, louder confirmation in 1846. When the United States went to war with Mexico, following the annexation of Texas, Tennessee was asked for 2,800 volunteers and reportedly produced some thirty thousand. Texas entered the Union as the 28th state under James K. Polk, another Tennessean and another Jackson protege, who then led the country into war with Mexico.
So when you hear “Volunteers” at kickoff, you are hearing, in part, a word Tennessee earned by going to fight to make Texas a state.
The Tennessee-Texas pipeline didn’t stop with the politicians. Jack Hays and Ben McCulloch, both Tennessee-born, went west and became two of the defining Texas Rangers of their era. Hays in particular did as much as anyone to invent the Ranger as an archetype: the mounted, self-reliant frontier fighter who, a generation later, would slide almost seamlessly into the dime novel and the cowboy myth.
The first Longhorns to invade Tennessee didn’t arrive by team bus or charter flight.
In 1866, with the war barely a year over, Tennessee was a hungry place. Four years of armies from both sides had stripped the state of livestock, and beef was scarce. Texas had the opposite problem: vast herds of half-wild longhorn cattle had multiplied on the open range while the men were away fighting, worth next to nothing where they stood and a good deal anywhere people were short of meat.
Among the Texas hands who pushed a herd east across Arkansas that year was a young Virginian named John Baker Omohundro, barely twenty, a former Confederate cavalry scout who had first drifted to Texas as a teenager. When the cattle reached Tennessee, the grateful locals gave the cowboy who brought them a name. They called him Texas Jack.
That’s the story as it has come down to us, and like the Crockett line it has probably been sanded smooth in the retelling. I’ve spent enough years with Jack to be suspicious of any origin story this tidy. But the name was real, and it stuck. Buffalo Bill’s stage partner, the dime novel hero, the man I’d argue was America’s first cowboy star: that whole career traveled under a name a Virginian picked up from Tennesseans for delivering Texas beef.
Notice the direction of travel. For half a century Tennessee had been exporting men to Texas. Here Texas sent something back, and it was a Tennessee crowd that decided what to call it.
Sixty years after Jack’s herd came through, another Texan came east, and this time he stayed.
Robert Reese Neyland was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1892. He did a year at Burleson Junior College in his hometown, a year at Texas A&M studying engineering and playing ball, and then won an appointment to West Point in 1912. The Texas-born kid became the most important figure in Tennessee football history.
Neyland came to Knoxville in the mid-1920s as an Army officer assigned to ROTC, and for a stretch he was also doing Corps of Engineers work out of Chattanooga, including river dredging on the Tennessee and Cumberland and early survey work for what became Norris Dam. On the football field he built the most dominant defenses of his era, won national championships, and retired from the Army as a brigadier general. His 1939 team did not allow a point all regular season.
Now look at the bookends. The signature bowl win of Neyland’s final era came on January 1, 1951, in the Cotton Bowl, when Tennessee beat Texas 20–14 behind a fourth-quarter comeback. His last game as head coach came two years later, in the same stadium, against the same opponent. Neyland had been in Florida recovering his health and flew to Dallas to take the sideline one more time. Texas shut him out, 16–0.
The Texan who became Tennessee’s general went out in Texas, beaten by Texas. And today Texas plays, for the first time, in the stadium that bears his name.
The other concrete thread this afternoon is a family.
Peyton Manning played quarterback at Tennessee from 1994 to 1997 and wore number 16, a number the university later retired. His nephew Arch Manning is Texas’s quarterback, and he wears 16 too. Today, for the first time, Arch plays in the building where his uncle became a legend, wearing his uncle’s college number in burnt orange.
The Mannings aren’t a Tennessee family or a Texas family, exactly. Archie was Ole Miss, the clan is rooted in Mississippi and New Orleans, and the sons and grandsons have spread out across the SEC’s map. The loyalties travel with them. Tennessee fans who spent four years cheering for a Manning will spend this afternoon hoping to see one sacked.
None of this history will block a linebacker. Texas is favored, Neyland Stadium will be very loud, and the outcome will be decided on the field.
But it’s worth knowing, as the Longhorns come out of the tunnel, that they are walking into a building named for a Texan, playing a team whose name owes something to the men who went to fight over Texas, in a state that sent Texas its first great general, its most famous martyr, and the president who oversaw its admission to the Union. Tennessee helped make Texas. This afternoon, Texas gets to return the visit.
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