Ben Hogan An American Life

Chapter One God's Country Dating from the late 1880s, a U.S. federal surveying map of west Texas lands summarizes the isolated village of Dublin rather simply and starkly as "a moderately prosperous railhead located on the edge of formerly occupied Indian territories." In fact, since its establishment by Irish immigrant farmers a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, eighty miles southwest of Fort Worth and nearly at the geographical center of the state of Texas, Dublin had been an oasis of protection and shade in an unforgiving sea of scrub oaks and native grasslands. It occupied a limestone rise of forested hills that were notable for their clear running creeks and abundance of wild turkey, prairie chicken, and free-ranging buffalo. The Comanche, Kiowa, Lipan, and Apache tribes who hunted these bleak surrounding lands, undisturbed for centuries before white settlers pushed into the region, were more than a little reluctant to give them up to the newcomers, and thus Dublin's early town records are filled with vivid accounts of deadly skirmishes between uninvited homesteaders and native inhabitants, family massacres, and revenge killings. As late as the start of the twentieth century, surviving elements of these "pacified" native peoples periodically committed violent raids on Dublin township for horses and cows, and a year seldom passed without the murder of a farmer or disappearance of a town resident caught unaware in some isolated outlying area. "My grandmother used to say this was God's country," remembers a modern resident of Dublin whose family roots burrow back to the town's formation. "He put this nice little Christian town smack in the middle of a country that was meaner than hell. Reckon only He could truly love it." One popular account of how Dublin got its name holds that it came from the shouted alert to "double in the wagons! Indians a'comin'!" though the abundance of Irish surnames in local graveyards suggests the founding fathers were probably more intent upon honoring their distant homeland when Dublin actually appeared on government land maps around 1860. A less likely if more colorful theory holds that the name derived from the raucous Double Inn Hotel that opened up about the time the railroad arrived to serve the needs of a more prosperous crossroads economy, a notorious roadhouse that specialized in strong drink and cheap beds. Five years after the Yuma Stagecoach Line made Dublin a regular stop in 1874, the Texas Central Railroad surveyed a line straight through the heart of town and opened a small depot there in 1881, prompting an influx of cattlemen and cotton farmers aiming to seek their fortunes on the edge of a wild new country. One of those who came to town was a young, rawboned Mississippian looking for a new start. William Alexander Hogan had spent a year serving as a blacksmith in a Confederate cavalry unit before taking a bride four years his senior and settling down to try to raise cotton on rented land back in Mississippi. After five years of hard tenant labor that left the Hogans with little or nothing to show for their efforts, William and Cinthia Hogan pulled up stakes and joined the migration to the promised land of west Texas, arriving in Dublin sometimes after 1870 with their four young children: William, Josephine, Martha, and Mary. According to Sunday school records, they joined the First Baptist Church almost immediately upon arriving in town, and William abandoned farming in favor of the trade he'd learned in the Confederate Army. Whether by chance or design, the opening of a new blacksmith shop on Elm Street, just a block or so from the center of town, was fortuitously timed because the same railroad that brought settlers into the formerly untamed region also brought cattle ranchers and cotton farmers in growing numbers, people who relied heavily on the horse foDodson, James is the author of 'Ben Hogan An American Life' with ISBN 9780385503129 and ISBN 0385503121.