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The Cattle Tyrant of Nueces County
I have heard the cattle tyrant of Nueces County has once again come to Corpus Christi. Each morning, at 8, the people gather to watch him walk down Chaparral Street alone, vagrant and exile, contemplating the change of the world around him. Cars. Parking meters. Cement. Automobilists let him pass; parents whisper to their children as he takes up his usual posts. At the cigar lounge, he reminisces on the gardens and courtyards of houses, the pastures near woods and thickets; at the oyster bar he remembers his quarrelsome bands of six or eight, little afraid, until whatever ship it was brought him here. “Makhētēs”—fighter, Gray called him. Now there is no fight to be had. He is a spectacle, eating bugs on the lip of the blue dumpster behind El Camino. The photographers gather and point him out: “there he is,” they say, “The North American Cattle Tyrant.”
River Story
Hardly a dozen women’s names appear across three and a half million miles of American river. These names were given by men.
On May 20, 1805, Captains Lewis and Clark named the “Sâh-câ-gar me-âh or bird woman’s River.” The following week, Clark gave to Judith River the name of his sweetheart; Lewis, the week after, Marias, for his cousin and the object of his affection, Maria Wood. There is a Marys River in Illinois, a Marys River in Nevada, and a Marys River in Oregon, which Adam E. Wimple named for his sister, Mary, before hanging, in 1852, for the murder of his wife, Mary.There is Hutchinson River in the Bronx, remembering the antinomian Anne Hutchinson, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 and killed, in 1643, on the muddy east bank by the Siwanoy; and the Elizabeth River, in Virginia, named by the colonists of Jamestown for Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, daughter of James VI and I, Queen of Bohemia for a single winter, in 1619.
In east Texas, Spanish missionaries named Angelina River for the “little angel” Hasinai girl who extended her hand in friendship. In northern Minnesota, settlers named Ann River for the Ojibwe woman they called “Old Ann,” “Old Moose,” and “The Monument.”
For the millions of miles of American creek, run, and stream that remain have been left only genera: Woman Creek, White Woman Creek, Old Woman Creek, Crazy Woman Creek, Woman Hollering Creek, Dirty Womans Creek, and Strangle Woman Creek.