Texas Reader: Biography of a State
Bill Harvey fell in love with history as a teenager tending Mount Olivet Cemetery in Fort Worth. As he watered and mowed the grounds, he lingered over the headstones, pondered the passage of time and discovered, in his words, “the richness of humanity.” Harvey went on to become an outdoorsman, a photographer and a fisheries biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
By Michael Berryhill
In his spare time he continued visiting some of the most interesting of the estimated 35,000 Texas cemeteries, photographing headstones and, more importantly, discovering stories about the people buried in them. Working intensely for six years, he has produced a book with the deceptively simple title, Texas Cemeteries (University of Texas Press, $22.95, paper). But Harvey reveals his real achievement in his subtitle: “The Resting Places of Famous, Infamous and Just Plain Interesting Texans.”
If history is essentially biography, as Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed, then Bill Harvey has addressed the central task. For while his advice on how to explore cemeteries and photograph headstones may well be used by those who want to follow in his footsteps, his sprightly, tight biographies of Texans carry the day.
The famous politicians are here: Sam Houston, Sam Rayburn, Barbara Jordan and LBJ, along with legendary athletes such as Rogers Hornsby, Tris Speaker and Mildred “Babe” Zaharias. Harvey has a knack for picking the perfect detail. Babe Zaharias was nicknamed by the neighborhood boys for hitting like Babe Ruth. When Barbara Jordan taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, her class in political ethics was so popular that for fairness, students had to be selected by lottery.
Most of us have heard of the endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken, but don’t know Henry Philemon Attwater (buried in Houston’s Hollywood Cemetery), a naturalist and a director of the National Audubon Society in the first decade of the 20th century who helped create the first game laws in Texas.
Harvey has made a point of singling out Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Three of them are buried in the Seminole-Negro Indian Scout Cemetery near Brackettville. These scouts were descendants of slaves who had escaped their owners and lived with the Seminole Indians in Florida. They were honored for rescuing their officer in a battle with Comanches in 1875.
As for the infamous, Harvey includes them too: Bonnie and Clyde are here, and so is Philip Coe, probably the last man to be killed by Wild Bill Hickok. Gunfighters, politicians, gangsters, athletes, cowboys, teachers, soldiers, philanthropists, lawmen: they’re all here, mingled together by the great leveler, death, and briefly brought to life by a conscientious and thoughtful writer.
