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Montague County

Here’s an interesting website to investigate: http://www.totty-families.org/diary/jun1876.html.

The great-great-great-granddaughter of Capt. F.M. (Frank) and Rhoda Totty has transcribed numerous years of the diaries that Rhoda kept from 1876-1881, and she has put them online. I am their great-great-granddaughter. John Harvill was their son-in-law, married to Anna, one of their several daughters. My Harvill heritage is long and rather colorful, and its roots are in Montague County, Texas. I return to this scenic county once or twice a year, and each time that I do, I feel it calling to me.

I spent much of my childhood on a big ranch that my father owned, most of it playing and riding horseback on over 900 acres. My dad, habitually a very cautious man where his family was concerned, just turned me loose on my horse, once he was convinced that I could start it, stop it, and turn it right or left.

I had great times on that ranch, usually by myself, riding on roads, across pastures, and even in the deep canyons that once marred the landscape. Now they are dammed up and provide bottomless pools of precious water. The canyons were magical worlds of their own, the banks towering above me, and the beds so wide, and often filled with dry sand that I could ride in them.

This past weekend I returned for our annual homecoming, and several of us made a pilgrimage to a nearby ranch property to see the old Bean Cemetery, where the Tottys are buried. (The Beans were their neighbors.) It’s overgrown with bull nettles and thorny briars and poison ivy, but I did see the two Totty graves, side by side. About a quarter mile from the cemetery, we found the Totty cabin site.

The rock chimney and fireplace are still standing, in near perfect condition, and by my estimation, it’s been standing there on that site for over 132 years. Someone has rudely desecrated the site by constructing a modern deer stand on it.

The cabin stood on a sloping rise of land above bottomland which must have contained the crops and fields that they farmed. Capt. Totty was an early-day Texas Ranger, so he was absent much of the time. Rhoda did not spend the night alone in the cabin, if she could help it, but she had family members and neighbors in close proximity and would sleep over at their cabins. Why did she fear being alone? Indian attacks, of course.

Standing on the cabin site gave me an eerie feeling. I can’t imagine what it was like to stand outside and wonder if I were being watched from the dense bushes and trees growing near the cabin. The pioneer cabin that is housed in our own historical museum in Paris, Texas, is very similar to the Totty cabin, with one difference: the Tottys only had one door, and the cabin in the museum has two. These cabins were virtual fortresses and could be closed up against the Indians, but they could also be set afire and turned into furnaces for the occupants inside.

I don’t think, in all these years, I’ve ever felt such a strong familial connection as I did last Saturday at the Totty cabin site. To think that a small group of their descendants was walking around the place where they once lived — 132 years later — it was a powerful feeling.

It’s also amazing to think that Rhoda wrote in her diaries, year after year, by fire and lamplight to record the daily happenings and the names of those with whom she visited back and forth. There were also small churches nearby. In May 1876 alone she speaks of attending services at two separate churches. Forestburg, several miles distant (its community center is the site of our annual homecoming), was probably their nearest market town and would have been an easy half day’s wagon ride, I estimate. Their wagon road, in 1876, would probably have gone cross country instead of around by the road we traveled to get to the ranch gate.

I can easily lose myself in wondering what it was like in the past, but I would not have wanted to live in that cabin. Rhoda writes of suffering “the blues” from time to time, and fearing an Indian attack would have been enough to give me the blues.

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