Texas Rangers, Ranchers, and Realtors

Book excerpt: A native Georgian, James Hughes Callahan (1812–1856) migrated to Texas to serve in the Texas Revolution in exchange for land. In Seguin, Texas, where he settled, he met and married a divorcée, Sarah Medissa Day (1822–1856). The lives of these two Texas pioneers and their extended family would become so entwined in the events and experiences of the nascent nation and state that their story represents a social history of nineteenth-century Texas. From his arrival as a sergeant with the Georgia Battalion, through the ill-fated 1855 expedition that bears his name, to his shooting death in a feud with a neighbor, Callahan was a soldier, a Texas Ranger, a rancher, and a land developer, at every turn making his mark on the evolving Guadalupe River Basin. Separately, Sarah’s family’s journey reflected the experience of many immigrants to Texas after its war of independence. Thomas O. McDonald traces the pair’s respective paths to their meeting, then follows as, together, they contend with conflict, troublesome social mores, the emergence of new industries, and the taming of the land, along the way helping to shape the Texas culture we know today. With a sharp eye for character and detail, and with a wealth of material at his command, author Thomas O. McDonald tells a story as crackling with life as it is steeped in scholarly research. In these pages the lives of the Callahan and Day families become a canvas on which the history of Texas—from revolution, frontier defense, and Indian wars to Anglo settlement and emerging legal and social systems—dramatically, inexorably unfolds.