Price Gouging in the Republic of Texas

How much was too much for a new life?

"A New Thing Under The Sun": front bottle label for Price's Patent Texas Tonic, ca.1845. (Courtesy of PeachridgeGlass.com)

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one bottle from the era of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845) that actually has the name of that short-lived country embossed on it. PeachridgeGlass.com states that only three examples still exist, and I have recently had the privilege of holding one of those three treasures in my hands. I thought I could make a worthwhile contribution to history and the bottle-collecting hobby by researching and writing about Price’s Patent Texas Tonic. The results? A web of patent medicine connections between a war hero, governors and ministers, slaves and  plantations, Mormons at Nauvoo, Transylvania University, and the infertility of a U.S. president. I came to realize that probably only three examples of this old glass bottle still exist because the others burst at the seams with the explosive story they tried to hold inside.

Opportunity Knocks

The year 1840 was a hopeful, fearful, profitable, risky time to be in the Republic of Texas. The continent’s newest country had come into existence just four years earlier when the far superior, better equipped, professional army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna had been soundly defeated by a ragtag assemblage of untrained volunteers under Sam Houston. Suddenly, the northeast borderlands of Mexico had become the Republic of Texas, where land was cheap and plentiful, and opportunity was as big as the Texas sky.

Map of the Republic of Texas, ca.1837. The area under control is in pink; the area disputed by Mexico and Texas is outlined in a solid red line; the disputed area included what today comprise sections of Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. McConnell's historical maps of the United states (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division).

Even with the challenges of continued Mexican raids, Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache attacks,  a lack of roads and mail service, and a seasonal rotation of epidemics, the opportunities proved irresistible to the many arriving from the U.S. and Europe. The defiant taunt that had been stitched into the Texian flag at the start of the revolution could have been willfully misread by the new wave of opportunistic invaders as a friendly invitation: "Come and Take It".

The Merchant Prince

No one heard the siren call of opportunity in Texas more than a certain middle-aged merchant of Nashville, Tennessee. His name was John Price and he was all about the money. It was how he measured his house, his business, and even his family. Born in 1790, some of his values were formed in his childhood: his mother was a devout Methodist and his father was a slaveowner. He was remembered as an eccentric man but shrewd, fond of Methodist camp meetings and a zealous participant in revivals. Deeply involved in Nashville’s Methodist church, he was a manager of its missionary society and bible society, as well as the county temperance society.

In 1814 at age 24, he married the daughter of a Methodist preacher whose family were said to also be quite wealthy. From the time of his first marriage and into the 1820s, John Price was already one of Nashville’s elite, a slave-owning merchant, selling virtually anything for a profit and renting out houses and warehouses for still more gain. His advertisements listed for sale or barter everything from 19,000 pounds of pig lead, 400 pounds of cotton, 40 hogsheads of tobacco, 100 barrels of pecans, and 500 bags of salt to Kentucky Whiskey, Virginia tobacco, Jamaican rum, and peach brandy. His ads were also found selling sugar, coffee, and bacon, a large work horse, anvils and vises, and cooking and parlor stoves. His strong support of Methodism was clearly a strong motivation behind him also selling a popular Methodist book, Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible, and he got his first taste of promoting and selling medicines with Lorenzo Dow’s Family Medicine, the product offered by the eccentric, unorthodox, and zealous traveling Methodist preacher who was widely known as “Crazy Dow.” His first ad for Dow’s medicine in 1828 listed the he had an inventory of 3 dozen bottles along with the hogsheads of tobacco and the barrels of pecans; a year later he still had a few bottles of the stuff left and tried to get rid of them by bluntly pushing,

“LO OK– DOW! –Save yourselves from sickness and death.”

Not only had John Price made the effort to help out the Methodist preacher, but his wealth and reputation seemed to have helped him establish connections with some of Nashville’s favorite sons, like Sam Houston, who became governor of Tennessee and later the Republic of Texas, and James K. Polk, who became President of the United States. There’s no evidence that John Price sought elective office, but he may have risen from a merchant to a merchant prince had he stayed in Nashville long enough.

Five-Dollar Bill, Republic of Texas Currency, ca.1840. Five dollars was all the money John Solomon Fullmer had when he arrived in Nashville, not nearly enough to get permission to marry the daughter of John Price; it was, however, enough to buy a bottle of his Texas Tonic. (Courtesy of CABANISS CURRENCY).

Father Knows Best

The wealth and luxury he was busy accumulating provided more than just a birthright for his children to enjoy; it was a social status they were expected to maintain. They grew up with servants and houseslaves, a handsome home and fine clothes, and received the best education money could buy, but they were forbidden to marry beneath their station. John’s oldest daughter, Mary Ann Price, was a perfect example of her father’s formula for success. She was his oldest child and never had to experience need or hardship. She had her own maid and a private tutor and she graduated from the Female Academy of Nashville. But then she went and fell in love with the wrong guy.

Mary Ann had turned 21 in September 1836; in the eyes of the law that made her an adult who could choose the man she wanted to marry – but not in her father’s eyes. The man she loved was John Solomon Fullmer; he had some education, worked hard at a newspaper, and showed entrepreneurial promise but he had arrived in Nashville a few years earlier with “a five-dollar bill in his pocket … without friends … and no training in a trade” – not at all good enough to marry a daughter of John Price. His marriage proposal having been rejected by the obedient daughter, the embittered beau put all the blame on the “wicked and avaricious heart … of Old John Price”:

… Mary’s reject[ed] me, solely for her father's sake … I have abundant evidence that she loves me still, and that she would still marry me if she were not prevented by her father; but without his consent she would not marry any man living.

The young lovers went off and eloped in May 1837 and her father never forgave her. About two decades later, another daughter of John Price married the man who had been the fourth governor of Texas; it was exactly the kind of union John wanted for his children while the unprosperous newspaperman certainly was not – and Price’s relationship with his daughter and her unacceptable husband only went from bad to worse.

In February 1841, the son-in-law non grata wrote to John Price about how he had taken Mary Ann far away, “It was no doubt with great surprise that you first heard of our removing to Illinois." In 1839, Fullmer had gone to the Mormon colony at Nauvoo, Illinois, where he was baptized by their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith. He then returned to Nashville to gather Mary Ann, their child, and possessions to move and join the Nauvoo colony. John Price was incensed at the planned move and offered Mary Ann a restoration of her wealth and social position if she would desert her husband and stay behind with their family in Nashville. Mary Ann refused and was consequently shunned by her father – she never saw her parents, siblings, or Nashville again.

John Price just moved on; while his forsaken daughter and her family moved over 400 miles northwest to Nauvoo, John took the rest of his family twice as far to Galveston, Texas. To him, his daughter’s departure was based on delusions while his was based on opportunity: he was certain she would pay for her choices, while he would earn for his.

Port of Galveston, ca.1845. Public domain book illustration, Library of Congress.

Making Money in Galveston

In March 1837, even before Mary Ann eloped, John Price was already preparing to move his family to the new Republic of Texas. He had entered into a business arrangement that apparently necessitated a substantial investment on his part.

In consequence of a recent compact entered into with a company of respectable gentlemen as their agent in the Republic of Texas … it is probable that myself and family will or may be required to move to the Republic. (emphasis added)

His preparation involved mortgaging his properties in Nashville and Columbia, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama, to fund the relocation and business investment. It was a big move, a big investment, and a big opportunity. Three years later, early in 1840, the Price family, with the palpable absence of daughter Mary Ann, relocated to Galveston Island in the Republic of Texas. With a population of about 3,000 in 1840, the city of Galveston wasn’t even half the size of Nashville and it was dwarfed by New Orleans, which exceeded 100,000 but the tin island city was the front door of Texas; everything the new republic needed would have to pass through it. It was a merchant’s paradise.

The signature of John Price on a Galveston property document dated 6 November 1840. The letter "i" in the surname appears to be creatively dotted three times in sequence but it also could have been the result of a dripping pen trip.

John invested heavily in his new country; he purchased properties in Galveston, Jefferson, Crockett, Fort Bend, Sabine, and Bastrop counties, and city lots in Houston, Galveston, and Fort Houston – 11,262 acres in all by 1844. The Price family lived in a mansion on the north end of Galveston Island on Twelfth Street, between Church and Winnie Street. It fronted to the east towards the gulf; it was “one of the largest and most conspicuous residences in Galveston.” The family and mansion continued to be served by domestic slaves, starting with three under 15 and four adults upon their arrival in 1840, but settling for the next several years on one adult male, one adult female, and two children under 10. Some other items on which John Price was taxed included a gold watch, a silver watch, a saddle horse, and a “pleasure carriage.” He also became one of the founding members of the Methodist Church formed in Galveston and he purchased $100 in stock certificates ($3,600 in 2024 USD) that were designed to help reduce the Republic’s massive post-war debt. Just like in Nashville, John Price firmly entrenched himself in Galveston’s community, the church, his business enterprises, and his social station.

Price also continued his work as a commission merchant, regularly receiving cargo from the sidewheel steam packets that came across the gulf to Galveston from New Orleans, like shipments of ice for which he advertised he would “keep a constant supply on hand for the accommodation and comfort of the citizens of Houston.” Supplying ice to Houston was as sure-fire as peddling ice cream in Hell – it was a guaranteed money-maker for the shrewd merchant.

He further invested his time and energies in inventing and patenting; John Price was one of the earliest residents of the new republic to get his ideas patented. In 1839, while still of Nashville, he had been granted U.S. patents on a cotton press (for compacting cotton into bales) and eleven days later for a burner of pine knots, providing a source of illumination long before the time of electricity. Over the following two years, as a resident of the Republic of Texas, he was granted some of the first patents the new republic issued. Two were for the inventions that he had been previously given U.S. patents; the other three were for a chimney, a mill-dam, and something he called a “Texas Tonic” – indisputably the first medicine patented in Texas. A cotton bailer, a chimney, a torch, a dam, and a medicine – his five inventions couldn’t have been more different from each other if he tried. He was remembered by one of his contemporaries for having original ideas – the variety of his inventions seems to have amply proved the point.

“A New Thing Under the Sun”

Of his five inventions, Price’s Patent Texas Tonic was the only one that would require retail consumer interest to succeed; the other four were mainly of consequence for business and industrial applications, so his most visible investment of time and money was in the Texas Tonic.

The first advertisement found thus far, in the Civilian and Galveston Gazette of December 1846, featured the sunburst shown here and the slogan, “A New Thing Under the Sun.” He sold it at his business on the Strand in Galveston, the major commercial thoroughfare of the city and the entire region. Price told his newspaper audience to look for “the agency flag” there; that instruction, along with the street address and the sunburst image over the same ad, strongly suggests that the flag marking his business on the Strand was the sun graphic appearing in the ad. The bold image on a flag would indeed make his place easy to locate.

According to his advertising, the tonic bitters, as the back label called them, was first and foremost a cathartic – a powerful laxative that would clear out all the evil, disease-ridden gunk that clogs up a sick person’s internal plumbing, causing maladies from indigestion, constipation, and migraines to hemorrhoids, dizziness, and rheumatism. It also helped prevent the onset of the chills and fever, an enormous seasonal problem in the South. Testimonials appearing in his ads spoke most often of the tonic’s remedial effect on indigestion, chronic headache, constipation, and ague and fever. His ads also stated it was safe for children and “Peerless for females, in a delicate state,” meaning pregnant. Another important medicinal promise, presented in rhyming verse, was that it would cure infertility,

Barrenness.

Oh cheer up your spirits! don’t look so shy,

If husband’s ashamed, a servant can buy;

In three weeks or so! perhaps not so soon,

Gaze with delight on the beautiful moon;

Your eyes become bright – a heart filled with joy,

Good prospects in view – a Girl or Boy.

Aqua medicine bottle with beveled corners; open pontil and short-style double-tapered lip, ca.1840-1845. [LEFT:] Embossing in the front sunken panel: Price's / Patent / Texas / Tonic; [RIGHT:] Embossing in the back sunken panel: Republic / OF / Texas. (Courtesy of PeachridgeGlass.com)

As boldly impressive as were the curative promises and the flag on the Strand, the caliber of the product’s endorsers was top-shelf, the elite of the social register with whom John Price liked to hobnob: an army major and a mayor, medical doctors and Methodist ministers, an ex-governor of Mississippi, the president of Kentucky’s Transylvania University, and even fellow Tennessean and hero of the Texas Revolution, President Sam Houston himself, who wrote with gratitude:

By occasional use of your Bitters within the last year (in all not amounting to one bottle) I am satisfied that my general health [within the last seven years] has not been as good as it is at present. … My opinion is so favorable of the medicine, that I will keep a supply on hand for family use. … [The testimonial is dated 1814, but that is likely a transposition of 1841, a common mistake during the era when newspaper type was set backwards and upside-down by hand.]

John Price was apparently of the opinion that the price of the medicine was proportionate to its importance – the more it cost, the more distinctively important it was. In a time when a bottle of medicine was usually priced at 25 cents ($9 in 2024 USD), John Price charged a whopping $5.00 ($180.18 in 2024 USD) per bottle, which he said held 100 doses.

Always interested in volume sales, he also offered a bulk discount to plantation owners of 12 bottles at half price to cover the needs of their family and enslaved workforce. Consequently, plantation owners were quick to offer their enthusiastic endorsements of Price’s Texas Tonic, “Prepare me a demijohn for my plantation,” wrote a New Orleans planter; “A negro woman of mine took a violent chill,” wrote another, "I gave her one spoonful; she was well the next day, and so remains” [emphasis added]. Another Texas Tonic ad claimed Senator John C. Calhoun “intends to keep it on his plantation!” and the Mississippi congressman (William M. Gwinn, M.D.) who shared that insight ended with his own endorsement, “I think it will become a valuable plantation medicine and could be introduced into the army and navy of the United States with advantage!” Music to John Price’s ears.

Even with the choicest of southern aristocracy lifting Price’s Patent Texas Tonic on a pedestal, the entrepreneurial spirit deep inside John Price whispered that there was still one more plum to be pulled – the President of the United States – the recently elected James K. Polk of … Nashville, Tennessee.

What a Deal I've Got for You!

It’s not clear whether John Price and James Polk had a friendship or previous business dealings over the years; the two men shared Nashville as their home and John was comfortable to write to the president-elect in a respectful but casual manner, with some familiarity and humor. He wrote two letters to Polk on 31 January 1845 while he was back in Nashville, probably on business: one letter was about Texas debt and the second pitched the Texas Tonic without mentioning it by name (a note within the letter suggests that First Lady Polk was already familiar with the product).

President James K. Polk and First Lady Sarah Childress Polk were married for 21 years when he became the president in 1845. Image ca.1848. (Courtesy of the James K. Polk Presidential Museum. Wikimedia Commons.)

Price believed the President-Elect and his First Lady had a deep sadness in their lives that he could help correct. The Polks had been married for 21 years at the point that John Price was writing to them and they were childless; it was an emptiness that John Price, the father of nine children, couldn’t imagine. As a child, James Polk was operated on for the removal of urinary stones, but it may have left him sterile or impotent. John Price didn’t know about that, of course, and so told the president-elect,

…if everything in regard to your Phisical [sic] history is orthodox or to use an expression more Classical “everything in Denmark is right’ you need not die without children! [emphasis added]

He was proposing that President-Elect Polk use Price’s Patent Texas Tonic to cure the “Elect Excellency’s” barrenness – it was an offer uniquely designed for the President of the United States: Price would give Polk with the tonic bitters for two years, free of charge; if the medicine proved useful, “My prediction!” Price proposed,

… that is if you should have a living child by your best half within 2 years & 9 months from the first of January 1845 you pay me $1,600 … for perhaps a boy worth $16,000. I say again if “everything in Denmark” is right. I’ve known a case at Natchez of very late occurrence that succeeded in less than 12 months & a worse one or as bad as yours! 

The medicine he sold to the public for the 2024 equivalent of $206 per bottle he had just offered to the president-elect for the equivalent of $66,000 in 2024 USD! Early in my career with a trading card company, our CEO developed a line of embossed, 24-karat gold-coated football cards that were extremely expensive, exponentially more than the standard pack of cards. His justification was that it was far more efficient and economical to sell a single Whopper for a million dollars than it was to sell a million Whoppers for one dollar each. The gold football cards were nonetheless a tough sell and our company went out of business shortly thereafter. James K. Polk was 50 years old when he received Price’s sales pitch and the First Lady was 42 years old. Whether or not the President tried the Texas Tonic, they remained childless for the rest of their lives.

Advertisement, The State Guard (Wetumpka, AL), 22 AUG 1848, p.4.

John Price was quite aware that he was making a daring pitch and a hard sell and immediately followed it up with the justification that many innocent people had to pay even higher fees to lawyers to keep from being convicted. He was reaching and he knew it. He ended his letter trying to be sincere and trustworthy:

I assure you solemnly & personally that I am in earnest & also that this is entirely & (unless you make it yourself otherwise, which I think you’re too smart to do) eternally with me private! … even Mrs. Polk I hope won’t read on this delicate subject the whole or any part of this Epistle! … One request – Don’t let Mrs. Polk see this!

In the midst of pitching his medicine to the public for $5 per bottle and to the President for $1,600, daughter Mary Ann pleaded for him to provide “a few hundred dollars” so she and her husband and family could join the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo “to avoid unheard of persecution and mob violence.” His son-in-law suggested, “We intend to leave for the West if possible, before or by the 1st of June; a bottle or two of your tonic … might be of service to us in an uncultivated prairie region” [emphasis added]. Several months later J. S. Fullmer acknowledged receipt of two letters from his father-in-law, observing with concern, “you seem almost frantic with intense anxiety to rally us to a sense of our danger and Wonderful delusion.”

John and Mary Ann Fullmer escaped Nauvoo with their lives, their small children, and a few possessions in their handcart and eventually arrived at the Great Salt Lake Valley, where they did their part to establish a network of communities for members of their faith. As they went through their travels in the Far West, John Price was traveling through the Deep South, establishing a network of agencies for his medicine and promoting it in the newspapers. He set up agencies in Nashville, Tennessee; Selma and Wetumpka, Alabama; Frankfort, Kentucky; and Vicksburg, Mississippi; and his main agency for U.S. trade was at the business of his brother, Thomas Keene Price, in New Orleans, Louisiana; it was the hub of Texas Tonic sales and all the other agencies were spokes on the wheel. John’s own son, John Price Jr., was living and working the business with his uncle Thomas in New Orleans.

Preparing for the End of Days

In the closing days of 1846, John Price was in Galveston, preparing yet again for another extended trip to the east to promote his medicine and establish more agencies. At 56 years old, it almost seemed like he sensed his end of days might be near at hand, so two days before Christmas, he created his last will and testament, which he began, “Being on the eve of leaving Home for New Orleans & perhaps various other places in the U.S. & taking into view the various casualties of life…” and he left very specific, sternly-worded instructions for the continuation of the medicine business after his demise.

Mrs. Price has my Medical Recipe for Price’s Patent Texas Tonic, which she will wisely conceal, during a period of 2 years, after that my son William W. in conjunction with her will jointly hold the secret …

Never, - Never alter the Price of the Medicine 5$ per Bottle by retail and to families or planters at half price [for 12 bottles] …

… [be cautious in] writing or talk or needless exposure of the articles or mode of manufacturing this medicine … [the] loss of the secret … will be a sad folly. [emphasis added]

The persons who manufacture it should do it very privately.

The man who had been a thriving landlord in Nashville and a merchant in two cities, and who owned thousands of acres of land across the Deep South, was very, very serious about parlaying his one patent medicine into big business – it was not a pet project in between bigger endeavors – he wanted it to work.

It should be noted that all of John Price’s known business travel and newspaper advertising focused on points between Galveston on the west, Alabama to the east, and Kentucky in the north. Although it was called the Texas Tonic, its success was only minimally calculated for a Texas audience. During the years of the Republic of Texas there wasn’t a population or transportation infrastructure sufficient to justify the hope of mass marketing and sales inland. The tonic’s product name was more of a promotional device to attract the attention of other more established and populated areas of the Deep South; Texas was a brand-new country filling news stories, sort of like the curiosity that would be generated by an erupting volcano a few hundred miles away. The day was soon coming when the state of Texas was thickly populated, modernized and civilized to an extent that encouraged many patent medicine companies and thousands of other entrepreneurs, but in the 1840s the success of Price’s Patent Texas Tonic was always understood to be to the east of Galveston. It's highly unlikely that the bottle was manufactured in Texas but it was the home and base of operations of its owner.

On one of his many business trips for the Texas Tonic, John Price fell a victim to cholera in Vicksburg, Mississippi, one of eleven listed as dying of cholera in that issue of the Vicksburg newspaper. It was noted that he “died among strangers” but was respected by business associates, admired by church brethren, and loved by his family. Even his daughter Mary Ann begged for a daguerreotype or a locket miniature of her father to remember him by. And for all of his rough and gruff treatment of her, her husband, and their life choices, he was adamant in his will that “… all my children … [are] to be equal in every respect and in all my Estate.” [emphasis added] Despite shunning his daughter, he loved her and you don’t need to take a tonic for that.

After his passing, the family focused on ending the medicine business moreso than developing it. In 1853 John’s widow and brother advertised that they wanted to settle the business's accounts and have all consigned product returned. In 1866 Thomas tried offering the tonic in new small-sized vials of 4 and 8 ounces and put government stamps on every bottle before they left his New Orleans office. In 1873 the recipe was being advertised for sale (most likely making John roll over in his grave), along with a “considerable” amount of remaining inventory. Finally, another 14 years later, in 1887, a fire in the building holding what was still being described as “quite a quantity of Price’s Texas Tonic, owned by the Price estate,” was totally destroyed in a fire of unknown origin. The inventory was insured, which makes one wonder if it was an arson to get the insurance compensation for a medicine that had no apparent value after almost 40 years of not getting sold.

So today there are only three bottles of Price’s Patent Texas Tonic known to exist, which makes them worth exponentially more than John Price was trying to sell them for to President Polk. Maybe he understood its real value after all.

Lynn Massachusetts History - History of Medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century Medicine

High Noon in Old Texas: Ambushed by the Quarter-Inch Killer

Not everything is bigger in Texas.

AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE: A single letter came to my attention a year ago while I was engaged in a project of digitizing the Gandy Collection of family and business records and correspondence for Montgomery County, Texas, from the mid- and late-19th century. It was a personal letter, written in October 1859 by Sarah Elizabeth Davis to her sister, Amelia Jane Davis. What struck me as so especially poignant was Betty’s discussion of the season’s dangerous yellow fever epidemic, followed a paragraph later by her personal experience of being repeatedly bitten by mosquitoes and seeing it only as a miserable inconvenience. There was no way for her to know that some of those mosquitoes could be the vectors of yellow fever. I have researched the impact of the 1859 yellow fever epidemic on Betty, Montgomery, Texas, and the region, and would like to share it now with you.

High Noon

A month of drought across Texas in August 1859 had baked the crops, greatly reducing their yields. People were anxious for better times. Houses, barns, and stores were little better than ovens on the landscape, made barely habitable by wide-open windows, handheld fans, and likely various forms of liquid refreshment.

Little changed as summer melted into fall. On September 15th, the hot, humid, sun-burned air continued to blanket the little town of Montgomery, 50 miles northwest of Houston; in other words, it was another typical Texas day. But it was also a day for celebration as the town welcomed it’s guest of honor, “the lion of the day, the hero of his country,” governor-elect Sam Houston.

Loud Cheering

A huge crowd, estimated at as many as 3,000 – more than the entire population of the town – thronged to the all-day festivities. It was the rare day like this that made all the heat, all the manual labor, and the many do-withouts of rural life bearable. It was likely a welcome diversion even for a woman like the pregnant Sarah Elizabeth Davis, who went by “Betty”; she busied herself daily with household chores in addition to her pregnancy and mothering her toddler. The celebration was a refreshing break indeed.

The air was full of sounds, sights, and smells to savor: cannons thundered tributes; the minister’s invocation lifted heavenward; the inevitably long-winded VIP speeches did their part to further warm the atmosphere; patriotic music of the brass band marched through the breeze; beckoning smells of the Texas-sized barbecue on a very long table set for 700 to be seated, and even a manned hot air balloon drifted up into the sky. Later, bright lamps were suspended over “the fair women and brave men” who danced into the night. In newspaper accounts of the celebration, no mention was made of a single mosquito; even an occasional minuscule blood-sucking puncture was a tolerable inconvenience in the mist of so much fun – it was just another fact of life in Texas and the least of their worries.

Low Moaning

Like many of the towns and villages in eastern and inland Texas, Montgomery was established close by water – several creeks along the west fork of the San Jacinto River. They were sources of water for drinking, cooking, farming, laundry, and sometimes waste disposal. Hot and humid Texas summers sometimes turned creeks into boggy swamps and the gasses emanating from them drifted under noses and into homes.

On October 10th, less than a month after the Sam Houston celebration, Betty wrote to her sister Jane in Mississippi, that with her husband away on business and her toddler sleeping, she was finally able to write the letter; she also gossiped about neighbors who were “splitting the blanket” (divorcing) and of another yellow fever epidemic breaking out nearby. In the hot season, outbreaks of yellow fever, nicknamed “Yellow Jack,” were always alarming news.

In that long season of hot, humid weather that dominates the Texas calendar, the bad-smelling air was the harbinger of sickness, the omen that people would soon die. The stink of rotting vegetation and other foulness often seemed to result in young and old getting suddenly, terribly sick. A healthy young man in one moment could become suddenly ill in the next with muscle aches, nausea, chills and a fever that could quickly push the mercury up the thermometer to dangerously high temperatures. The skin and eyes turned yellow, signifying liver failure which earned the disease its name, the yellow fever.  The body became death’s barometer: the deeper and more wide-spread the yellow, the sicker the person was becoming. Within as few as three days, they often began puking what was called “the black vomit” – dark blood hemorrhaging from the nose and stomach – a sure sign that the end was near. Before Sunday dinner, the person who had sat next to you at the dinner table during last week’s sabbath was suddenly gone and often – too often – someone else at this week’s dinner table was starting to turn yellow.

Texans got sick from other lethal epidemics throughout the 19th century, like cholera, measles, smallpox, and dengue fever, but for frequency, yellow fever outpaced them all. Epidemics broke out in almost every hot season between 1839 to 1867. Doctors and patent medicine makers promised cures for the disease, but they were just guessing. The doctor’s mercury injections and mustard baths did no more good than St. Nicholas Stomach Bitters. It was advertised heavily throughout Texas during the hot weather epidemic of 1859 by incongruously using the symbol of winter, Santa Claus, sitting next to a chimney, holding a bottle of the bitters in his hands, promising that “As a Tonic in Cases of Yellow and other Fevers, incidental to Tropical Climates, it is unsurpassed.” Some may have taken false comfort in the graphic suggestion of a cold weather cure. A heavy frost (also called a “white frost”) stopped further cases and spread of the disease. Mother Nature could end an epidemic, but Saint Nicholas was a fraud.

Quiet Buzzing

In her October letter to her sister, Betty wrote that two local friends were away when yellow fever cases began showing up on the river (she didn’t specify which one), and they would therefore probably stay away until about Christmas. It was a common response to the earliest reports of confirmed cases of yellow fever – many would travel far away to protect themselves from the disease; residents of Galveston and Houston often ran away from the city to the interior when new cases were emerging in the coastal cities; Betty’s friends were doing the same thing, waiting until a heavy frost ensured the end of the epidemic.

The only effective defense to prevent the fever’s spread was quarantine, isolating the infected from the healthy. She explained further,

There is some excitement in town about yellow fever. Two persons have died with it[;] one a white man the other a negro belonging to Dr. Price[;] both had been exposed to it at Cypress City where it is now raging – The Town Authorities have been yesterday and today passing some [quarantine] regulations to keep any more cases from coming here -

Betty and her husband, Nathaniel Hart Davis, a lawyer and Montgomery’s first mayor (in 1848) would have been well aware of the yellow fever epidemic that had devastated the town of Cincinnati, Texas, in 1853. That small country town was only 44 miles to the northeast of Montgomery and it lost a quarter of its population, about 150 people, to the disease. Betty wrote to her sister that the 1859 epidemic was “now raging” in Cypress City, 33 miles to the south of her Montgomery home, and two men exposed to the yellow fever in Cypress City had come to Montgomery and died there. One report stated that 33 of the 54 residents of Cypress City were sick with Yellow Jack and there were three deaths within the last few days of the report: “The conditions of the place [are] truly deplorable.” Betty bravely told her sister that she didn’t “apprehend any danger unless some of the citizens here were to [catch] it that had not been exposed to it [elsewhere].” She was hoping that the new town quarantine regulations would prevent it from coming any closer to her house and family.

Then Betty’s letter shifted to more pleasant topics, like the new spotted flannel material she bought to make her toddler some winter clothes and the calico and gingham dress she had bought for herself. She tried to keep her focus, but she had become so tired, she couldn’t even finish her sentence: “You must tell me if you get any nice dresses – I am getting sleepy.” Then she told her sister that what was really messing up her focus as she wrote was not sleepiness but mosquitoes:

The musketoes are worse than I ever saw them. I can hardly stay in the house for they bite me so. I don’t know what I am writing scarcely. I wish we could have a white frost to kill them for we will be annoyed with them until we do have frost.

This woman, wife, and mother lived during an epidemic outbreak in a town with terminal cases, nearby another town where it was “raging” and strangers were stopping at and passing through her town that may themselves have the disease. The chances that an infected aedes aegypti mosquito would land on Betty or her babies were, in deed, elevated – she and her family were certainly at risk. Two weeks after Betty finished the letter to her sister, three more deaths occurred in Montgomery and two more men were expected to die. By November 30th yellow fever deaths had totaled 15 in the town, including one of its doctors; he was a 36-year-old husband and father of four small children, which included a newborn. The future of the Davis family of Montgomery, Texas, could have been far different if just one of those mosquitoes that were driving Betty to distraction as she tried to write her letter had been the lethal kind.

But don’t worry, happy ending lovers. Betty had not inadvertently written her own eulogy. She and Nat and their toddler all survived the yellow fever epidemic of 1859 and she successfully delivered a healthy baby girl on December 30th, whom they named after her sister Jane. A thick frost had settled in on November 12th, the temperature having dropped from 80° to 25° Fahrenheit in less than 24 hours and a newspaper reported.

The wind continued all Saturday night, and Sunday morning found ice everywhere, ice in the prairie, and ice in the town, ice in the gutters and ice in the houses, ice in the kitchens and ice in the bedrooms, And cold? – guess it was cold! Cold enough to keep lazy people and invalids in bed half the morning; … cold enough to freeze the horns off from a Billy goat! And of course, cold enough to freeze Yellow Jack’s ears off. Runaways can come back now. The frost we have had has killed the fever if frost will do it. Last night we had another heavy frost. And to-day is bright and beautiful, but not brighter or more cheerful than the faces of our citizens, who are all rejoicing that the dark days are over.

In the decades to come, Texas outlaws would become infamous for being the bad boys of the Wild West – mean, unpredictable, and dangerous. All combined, Texas-based outlaws like James “Killer Miller,” Sam Bass, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid were said to have killed about 63 people. Amateurs. There was another killer in Texas – Yellow Jack – a deadly terror that killed an estimated 4,000 in Texas alone during the 19th century, without a single bullet being fired from a six-shooter. It was the meanest, most unpredictable, and most dangerous killer of them all – and it was just a quarter-inch long.

Definitely NOT the official flag of Texas; just the author goofing around.

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT : By the way, if you’re enjoying my blog, the kindest favor you could do for me is to tell a friend about it. The blog has about 50 consistent readers at this point, which is wonderful, but now my goal is 100! Thanks very much for your continued support.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine

Huntsville24!

This past week my wife enjoyed a wonderful archaeological exhibition and excellent talk about the ongoing archaeological dig at Wasington-on-the-Brazos, one of the oldest and most historically significant towns in Texas. They were both held at the Walker Education Center, which is part of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, and the whole experience was well worth the trip.

It was like a miniature version of the great Houston24 National Bottle Exhibition held back in August - and we had a great time!

Before the seminar, we took in the museum exhibition; it's in just two rooms, but beautifully done and really fascinating. I'm not putting in a lot of text about the exhibit - I'm just going to let the pictures do most of the talking - but you will see how many of their finds were bottles and bottle fragments. Along with the other relics found, the archaeological display looked very much like what I've come across in my days digging dumps in New England. The bits and pieces of history were uncovered archaeological sites throughout Texas. So with that, I hope you enjoy experiencing some of the exhibition for yourself.

(All photographs by me, shared with the kind permission of Michael C. Sproat, Curator of Collections at the Sam Houston Memorial museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library.)

The large alkaline glaze jug, circa 1850s, was made at the Kirbee Kiln in Montgomery County, TX. It was not dug, but retrieved from the Fanthorp Inn in Anderson, Texas (which still stands, now a beautifully restored state historic building.)

The proverbial "fish out of water," but unquestionably the distinctive figural Fish Bitters.

I have only found one pipe bowl in my life (when I was about 6, and I still have it), but I would love to have some more in my collection; I think they're as evocative of lives past as bottles and antique advertising.

These images of an archaeological dig remind me of Brandon DeWolfe's great Houston24 presentation about digging in Galveston and all the amazing artifacts he and his three children have discovered over the years.

This great snuff bottle instantly brings back memories of the world-class snuff bottle collection displayed at Houston24 by my neighbor at that event and my new friend, Brian Commerton, the Snuff King!

In the wonderful seminar given by Alexandra Younger, MS, RPA, and Principal Investigator at the archaeological excavations at Wasington-on-the-Brazos, TX, I loved seeing the shout-out in the lower left corner of her slide that the "Success to the Railroad" flask illustrations came from the FOHBC Virtual Museum. She went on to compliment the FOHBC for that wonderful website and rightly so; it's one of the finest bottle sites on the internet. This slide represents to me the important cooperation between the FOHBC, museums, and other professional historical entities.

From another of Ms. Younger's great slides ... the Rucker Drug Store, ca. 1856 (original at the Star of the Republic Museum, Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site). These guys look pretty cold, waiting for the store to open.

I'm ending your tour with this poster in the exhibition because the graphic caught my attention. I believe there's plenty of room for archaeology and bottle-digging to coexist and even work together, but the 1% out there who just dig for dollars, plundering historical sites, the environment, and personal property, ruin things for everyone and tarnish the reputation of careful, respectful bottle diggers who ask permission, respect the dig site, and restore it to an even better condition than how they found it. The guys in this poster are clearly NOT bottle diggers from our hobby - they are history bandits (and packing heat no less - good grief).

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine