Dr. Smythe's "Secret" Journal. (original) (raw)

A doctor cannot hope to be a very competent physician without a strong sense of curiosity coupled with a power of observation as keen as the blade of his scapel.

Dr. D.Port Smythe clearly had both abilities, as evidenced by an all-but-forgotten journal he kept on a horseback expedition from East Texas to the wild frontier of Palo Pinto County in May 1852. Later that summer, the Leon Pioneer published his account.

While that early-day newspaper�s subscribers doubtless enjoyed reading the doctor�s descriptions of the then-unsettled Western edge of Texas, the issues containing his journal were in time buried under the weight of subsequent issues and finally, by the passage of decade after decade.

The aptly named Leon County newspaper eventually ceased publication, but fortunately, back copies ended up in the Texas State Library in Austin. There, in the early 1940s, a writer from Dallasnamed Donald Day rediscovered Dr. Smythe�s travelogue. Day had been doing research for a novel, but when he started reading the doctor�s account, he realized it needed to be available to other researchers.

Day and Southern Methodist University professor Samuel Wood Geiser got the doctor�s journal published in a magazine called Texas Geographic, a Lone Star state effort to produce something equivalent to the National Geographic. The Texas publication did not make it past 1946, and once again, Smythe�s work sank into obscurity.

Born in Sumpter, Ala. in 1824, Smythe moved to Centervillein Leon County immediately after finishing his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania.

On May 3, 1852, Smythe joined a surveying party led by John Patrick, a member of the Texas House of Representatives. In preparation for the four-week adventure, the doctor bought �a Hickory Shirt, a Sombrero, a Stout pair of Shoes, and a pair of Cordury Unmentionables� and equipped himself with a blanket, a long rope, a tin cup and �a few medicines for accidents�.�

The riders covered 17 miles on their first day, making camp near a homestead the doctor identifed as Eades� �ranche.� What caught the doctor�s eye were the rancher�s children, who �were living in a state of squalid wretchedness that would disgrace a savage.�

Continuing, Smythe said, �The only sign of human habitation in the place was a cow-pen, with a Pig sty in the corner, and on top of this, with a tattered sheet for covering, these unfortunate children had to pass their hours of sleep��

Happily for that part of Texas, though likely not so much for the kids, the man soon moved elsewhere. Or, as Smythe put it, �This degraded wretch has since freed the country of his most abominable example, by leaving, to avoid the just punishment that the outraged laws demanded.�

Not much past the Leon County line, the landscape began to change from rolling postoak-covered hills to prairie. One plant that caught the doctor�s eye was mesquite, which he spelled �Musquite.�

The party spent their second night at the then-flourishing town of Springfield, at the time the seat of Limestone County. Spread out on the side of a hill serrated by numerous gullies, the town wasn�t much to look at, though most of its buildings and houses looked newly built or freshly painted and more were under construction. What most impressed the doctor was the spring that furnished the town its name.

From Springfield (today only a cemetery proves its existence), the men rode to Corsicana and then turned west toward Fort Graham in Coryell County. The doctor said the military garrison amounted to little more than a supply depot.

By this point, the landscape had flattened and seemed to go on forever, a geographic feature that clearly caught the doctor�s eye. What he beheld, a sight no longer common in Texas, was an �undulating Prairie clothed with a luxurant coat of the most beautiful verdure, and innumerable gaudy flowers sprinkling this grassy Sea as a painter would a fairy Picture.�

****** More about Dr. Smythe�s journal next week.

�

Mike Cox - October 9, 2013 column
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