Benjamin McCulloch (1811-1862)

    Ben McCulloch, Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, United States marshal, and brigadier general in the Army of the Confederate States of America, was born in Rutherford County, Tennessee, on November 11, 1811, the fourth son of Alexander and Frances F. (LeNoir) McCulloch. His mother was the daughter of a prominent Virginia planter, and his father, a graduate of Yale College, was a major on Brig. Gen. John Coffee's staff during Andrew Jackson's campaign against the Creeks in Alabama. Ben was also the elder brother of Henry Eustace McCulloch. The McCullochs had been a prosperous and influential colonial North Carolina family but had lost much of their wealth as a result of the Revolutionary War and the improvidence of Alexander McCulloch, who so wasted his inheritance that he was unable to educate his younger sons. Two of Ben's older brothers briefly attended school taught by a close neighbor and family friend in Tennessee, Sam Houston. Like many families on the western frontier, the McCullochs moved often-from North Carolina to eastern Tennessee to Alabama and back to western Tennessee between 1812 and 1830. They settled at last near Dyersburg, Tennessee, where David Crockett was among their closest neighbors and most influential friends. After five years of farming, hunting, and rafting, but virtually no formal schooling, Ben agreed to follow Crockett to Texas, planning to meet him in Nacogdoches on Christmas Day, 1835. Ben and Henry arrived too late, however, and Ben followed Crockett alone toward San Antonio. When sickness from measles prevented him from reaching the Alamo before its fall, McCulloch joined Houston's army on its retreat into East Texas. At the battle of San Jacinto he commanded one of the famed Twin Sisters and won from Houston a battlefield commission as first lieutenant.

    He soon left the army, however, to earn his living as a surveyor in the Texas frontier communities of Gonzales and Seguin. He then joined the Texas Rangers and, as first lieutenant under John Coffee Hays, won a considerable reputation as an Indian fighter. In 1839 McCulloch was elected to the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas in a campaign marred by a rifle duel with Reuben Ross. In the affray McCulloch received a wound that partially crippled his right arm for the rest of his life. On Christmas Day of that year Henry McCulloch killed Ross in a pistol duel in Gonzales. Ben chose not to stand for reelection in 1842 but returned to surveying and the pursuit of a quasi-military career. At the battle of Plum Creek on August 12, 1840, he distinguished himself as a scout and as commander of the right wing of the Texas army. In February 1842, when the Mexican government launched a raid against Texas that seized the strategic town of San Antonio, McCulloch rendered invaluable service by scouting enemy positions and taking a prominent role in the fighting that harried Rafael Vásquez's raiders back below the Rio Grande. On September 11, 1842, a second Mexican expedition captured San Antonio. McCulloch again did valuable scouting service and joined in the pursuit of Adrián Woll's invading troops to the Hondo River, where Hays's rangers engaged them on September 21. After the repulse of the second Mexican invasion, McCulloch remained with the ranger company that formed the nucleus of an army with which the Texans planned to invade Mexico. The so-called Somervell expedition was poorly managed, however, and Ben and Henry left it on the Rio Grande only hours before the remainder of the Texans were captured at Mier, Tamaulipas, on December 25, 1842.

    McCulloch was elected to the First Legislature after the annexation of Texas. At the outbreak of the Mexican War he raised a command of Texas Rangers that became Company A of Col. Jack Hays's First Regiment, Texas Mounted Volunteers. He was ordered to report to the United States Army on the Rio Grande and was soon named Zachary Taylor's chief of scouts. As such he won his commander's praise and the admiration of the nation with his exciting reconnaissance expeditions into northern Mexico. The presence in his company of George Wilkins Kendall, editor of the New Orleans Picayune, and Samuel Reid, who later wrote a popular history of the campaign, The Scouting Expeditions of McCulloch's Texas Rangers, propelled McCulloch's name into national prominence. Leading his company as mounted infantry at the battle of Monterrey, McCulloch further distinguished himself, and before the battle of Buena Vista his astute and daring reconnaissance work saved Taylor's army from disaster and won him a promotion to the rank of major of United States volunteers. McCulloch returned to Texas at the end of the war, served for a time as a scout under Bvt. Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs, and traveled to Tennessee on family business before setting out from Austin on September 9, 1849, for the gold fields of California. Although he failed to strike it rich, he was elected sheriff of Sacramento. His friends in the Senate, Sam Houston and Thomas Jefferson Rusk, mounted a campaign to put him in command of a regiment of United States cavalry for duty on the Texas frontier, but largely due to McCulloch's lack of formal education the attempt was frustrated. In 1852 President Franklin Pierce promised him the command of the elite Second United States Cavalry, but Secretary of War Jefferson Davis bestowed the command instead on his personal favorite, Albert Sidney Johnston. McCulloch was, however, appointed United States marshal for the Eastern District of Texas and served under Judge John Charles Watrous during the administrations of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

    In 1858 he was appointed one of two peace commissioners to treat with Brigham Young and the elders of the Mormon Church; he is credited with helping to prevent armed hostilities between the United States government and the Latter-Day Saints in Utah. When secession came to Texas, McCulloch was commissioned a colonel and authorized to demand the surrender of all federal posts in the Military District of Texas. After a bloodless confrontation at the Alamo on February 16, 1861, General Twiggs turned over to McCulloch the federal arsenal and all other United States property in San Antonio. On May 11, 1861, Jefferson Davis appointed McCulloch a brigadier general, the second-ranking brigadier general in the Confederate Army and the first general-grade officer to be commissioned from the civilian community. McCulloch was assigned to the command of Indian Territory and established his headquarters at Little Rock, Arkansas, where he began to build the Army of the West with regiments from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Although hampered by logistical nightmares and a total disagreement over strategic objectives with Missouri general Sterling Price, with whom he had been ordered to cooperate, McCulloch, with the assistance of Albert Pike, established vital alliances with the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and other inhabitants of what is now eastern Oklahoma. On August 10, 1861, he won an impressive victory over the army of Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon at Wilson's Creek, or Oak Hills, in southwest Missouri. McCulloch's continuing inability to come to personal or strategic accord with Price, however, caused President Davis, on January 10, 1862, to appoint Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn to the command of both McCulloch's and Price's armies. Van Dorn launched the Army of the West on an expedition to capture St. Louis, a plan that McCulloch bitterly resisted.

    The Confederates encountered the army of Union major general Samuel R. Curtis on the Little Sugar Creek in northwest Arkansas. Due largely to McCulloch's remarkable knowledge of the terrain, Van Dorn's army was able to flank the enemy out of a strong position and cut his line of communication to the north. McCulloch, commanding the Confederate right wing in the ensuing battle of Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern, on March 7, 1862, overran a battery of artillery and drove the enemy from his original position. As federal resistance stiffened around 10:30 A.M., however, McCulloch rode forward through the thick underbrush to determine the location of the enemy line, was shot from his horse, and died instantly. His command devolved upon Brig. Gen. James M. McIntosh, who was killed but a few minutes later while leading a charge to recover McCulloch's body. Col. Louis Hébert, the division's senior regimental commander, was captured in the same charge, and soon McCulloch's division, without leadership, began to fall apart and drift toward the rear. Most participants and later historians attribute to McCulloch's untimely death the disaster at Pea Ridge and the subsequent loss of Arkansas to the Union forces. McCulloch was first buried on the field, but his body was removed to the cemetery at Little Rock and thence to the State Cemetery in Austin. McCulloch never married. His papers are located in the Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Source

Monument Hill

Texas State Cemetery

Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.921, -097° 43.636

Chloe Jones (1975-2005)

    Melinda Dee Jones was born June 17, 1975, and grew up in Silsbee, Texas. After graduating from Silsbee High School in 1994, she turned to modeling and appeared in various mainstream periodicals like Vanity Fair before moving on to softcore adult magazines like Playboy, Hustler, and Swank. In April 1998, Penthouse named her their Pet of the Month and crossed over into adult movies in 2001, adopting the pseudonym Chloe Jones. After some plastic surgery to emphasize her figure, she was signed to an exclusive short-term contract with the adult film company New Sensations. Two years later, she signed another exclusive contract, this time with porn giant Vivid Entertainment. She was wildly popular with her audience, on par with Jenna Jameson and Janine Lindemulder, the two biggest female stars at the time. Despite her enormous fan base, she only performed in eighteen films in her three year career, retiring immediately after her final film wrapped production. She began working as an escort in Hollywood and claimed in a March 2005 National Enquirer interview that actor Charlie Sheen was among her clients and had paid her $15,000 for her services. Sheen, through his agent, disputed this, stating that he had not seen her since 1996; she responded by claiming he was trying to have her killed to keep his television contract intact. A month after the interview, two weeks before her 30th birthday, Jones died of liver failure from years of abusing Vicodin and other prescription drugs, leaving behind a husband and two children.

Block 10

Woodlawn Garden of Memories

Houston

COORDINATES

29° 47.447, -095° 28.591

Ben Thompson (1843-1884)

    Ben Thompson, gunfighter and lawman, was born in Knottingley, Yorkshire, England on November 2, 1843, the child of William and Mary Ann (Baker) Thompson. His family emigrated to Austin, Texas, in the spring of 1851. He initially worked as a printer for various Austin newspapers. At age fifteen he wounded another boy during an argument about his shooting abilities. In 1859 Thompson traveled to New Orleans to work for a bookbinder and intervened on behalf of a woman being abused by a Frenchman. He reputedly killed the offender in a subsequent knife fight. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted on June 16, 1861, in Col. John (Rip) Ford's Second Texas Cavalry regiment. He participated in two actions, the battle of Galveston Bay, where he was wounded, and the Confederate defeat at La Fourche Crossing, Louisiana. On November 26, 1863, he married Catherine L. Moore, the daughter of a prominent Austin merchant, Martin Moore. After his marriage he returned to the army and served till the end of the war. In May 1865 Thompson fatally shot a teamster in Austin after the man pulled out a shotgun during an argument over an army mule. Later arrested by federal soldiers, Thompson broke jail and left the state to join Emperor Maximilian's forces in Mexico. Fighting until the fall of the empire in June 1867, Thompson received several promotions for gallantry in action. He then returned to Texas and slightly wounded his brother-in-law, Jim Moore, who was abusing his pregnant sister, Thompson's wife. Thompson was sentenced on October 20, 1868, to four years' hard labor and sent to the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, where he was held for two years until his conviction by a military tribunal was deemed illegal and he was pardoned by President U. S. Grant. 

    After his release, he left Texas for Abilene, Kansas, undoubtedly hoping to change his fortunes. In 1871 he opened the Bull's Head Saloon with his Civil War friend, Philip H. Coe. The pair ran the drinking and gambling establishment while Abilene prospered as a railhead for the cattle drives originating in Texas. Thompson was involved in a buggy accident in Kansas City which also injured his son and his wife, who had her arm amputated. While Thompson was recovering, his partner Coe was killed in a shootout with Abilene marshal "Wild Bill" Hickok. In the summer of 1873 Thompson was working as a house gambler in an Ellsworth, Kansas, saloon with his younger brother Billy. On August 15, during a drunken altercation with other gamblers, Billy shot and killed Ellsworth sheriff Chauncey B. Whitney, a friend of the Thompson brothers. Billy Thompson fled Kansas and avoided authorities until 1876, when he was returned to Ellsworth, stood trial, and was acquitted. The jury ruled that the shooting was an accident. Aside from a visit to Kansas in the spring of 1874, Ben Thompson made his living as a gambler in various Texas cities between 1874 and 1879. On December 25, 1876, Thompson was at Austin's Capital Theatre with several friends when a fight erupted. When Thompson tried to intervene on behalf of one of the troublemakers, theater owner Mark Wilson emerged with a shotgun. In the ensuing fracas, Wilson fired at Thompson and was killed by three fast return shots. Thompson was found to have fired in self-defense. 

    The Leadville, Colorado, silver strike lured Thomson to visit Colorado several times during the spring and summer of 1879. There he joined a group of Kansas gunmen led by Bartholomew (Bat) Masterson who were hired by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in a right-of-way dispute with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Well paid by the Santa Fe for his services as a hired gun, Thompson returned to Austin and opened a gambling hall above the Iron Front Saloon on Congress Avenue. According to Lafayette Rogers, a local patron of the Iron Front, "Ben...never run a crooked game in his house." Thompson's acknowledged honesty, loyalty, generosity, and prowess with a revolver impressed the citizens of Austin enough that they twice elected him city marshal. First winning office in December 1880, he proved to be an excellent officer, some claiming that he was the finest marshal that Austin had known up to that time, and was re-elected in November of the following year. In July 1882, while still serving as marshal, Thompson quarreled over a card game in a saloon in San Antonio, where he killed the prominent sportsman and owner of the Vaudeville Theatre, Jack Harris. He was indicted for the murder and resigned as marshal. After a sensational trial and acquittal, he returned to Austin to a hero's welcome and resumed his life as a professional gambler. On the evening of March 11, 1884, Thompson brashly returned to the Vaudeville Theatre with his notorious friend John King Fisher, deputy sheriff of Uvalde County. Word of their arrival in San Antonio preceded them. Within minutes of stepping into the Vaudeville the two were shot and killed from behind. Many believed that Harris's friends and partners, Joe Foster and William Simms, arranged the assassination. Thompson was survived by his wife, Catherine, and two children, Ben and Katy. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Austin newspaper editors engaged those of San Antonio in a free-wheeling, nasty debate after a coroner's jury in San Antonio ruled the killing self-defense and no one was ever charged with the murders. Source

Section 1

Oakwood Cemetery

Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.552, -097° 43.631

Albert Sidney Johnston (1803-1862)

    Albert Sidney Johnston, Confederate general, son of John and Abigail (Harris) Johnston, was born at Washington, Kentucky, on February 2, 1803. He attended Transylvania University before he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in June 1826. He served at Sackett's Harbor, New York, in 1826, with the Sixth Infantry at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, in 1827, and as regimental adjutant in the Black Hawk War. On January 20, 1829, he married Henrietta Preston. Because of his wife's illness, he resigned his commission on April 22, 1834, and farmed near St. Louis in 1835. She died on August 12, 1835. In 1836 Johnston moved to Texas and enlisted as a private in the Texas Army. 

    On August 5, 1836, he was appointed adjutant general by Thomas Jefferson Rusk and on January 31, 1837, he became senior brigadier general in command of the army to replace Felix Huston. A duel with Huston resulted; Johnston was wounded and could not immediately take the command. On December 22, 1838, he was appointed secretary of war for the Republic of Texas by President Mirabeau B. Lamar, and in December 1839 he led an expedition against the Cherokee Indians in East Texas. On March 1, 1840, Johnston returned to Kentucky, where, on October 3, 1843, he married Eliza Griffin, a cousin of his first wife. They returned to Texas to settle at China Grove Plantation in Brazoria County.

    During the Mexican War he was colonel of the First Texas Rifle Volunteers and served with W. O. Butler as inspector general at Monterrey, Mexico. On December 2, 1849, Johnston became paymaster in the United States Army and was assigned to the Texas frontier. He went with William S. Harney to the Great Plains in 1855, and on April 2, 1856, he was appointed colonel of the Second Cavalry. In 1858 Johnston received command of a Utah expedition to escort a new territorial governor and three judges to Salt Lake City and to establish a military presence, due to Mormon resistance of federal authority. He set up Camp Scott near the ruins of Fort Bridger in the fall of 1858, and later selected a site southwest of Salt Lake City for a permanent camp-Camp Floyd which was dedicated in November of 1859. Johnston remained in charge of Camp Floyd until 1860 when he was sent to the Pacific Department and stationed at San Francisco. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, he resigned his commission in the United States Army, refused the federal government's offer of a command, and returned overland to Texas.

    In Austin 1861 Jefferson Davis appointed Johnston a general in the Confederate Army and in September assigned him command of the Western Department. Johnston issued a call for men and formed and drilled an army, but it lacked men and organization, had a huge area to defend, and could not control the rivers that were vital to military success in the region. In February 1862, following Federal victories on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, he moved his line of defense to the vicinity of Nashville, Tennessee, and later to Corinth, Mississippi. On April 6, 1862, he was killed while leading his forces at the battle of Shiloh. He was temporarily buried at New Orleans. By special appropriation, the Texas Legislature, in January 1867, had his remains transferred to Austin for burial in the State Cemetery. In 1905 a stone monument executed by noted sculptor Elisabet Ney was erected at the site. Source

Confederate Field

Texas State Cemetery

Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.913, -097° 43.597

Charlotte Ganahl Walker (1878-1958)

    Charlotte Walker, actress, was born in Galveston to Edwin A. and Charlisa (De Ganahl) Walker and was the mother of character actress Sara Haden. Walker made her stage debut as a teen, when at nineteen she performed in London, England in a comedy called The Mummy. She performed with Richard Mansfield and later returned to her native Texas. She appeared as June in Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1911 and would later reprise the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film Trail of the Lonesome Pine. David Belasco noticed her in On Parole and signed her for starring roles in plays The Warrens of Virginia, Just a Wife, and Call The Doctor. In 1923 she played with Ethel Barrymore in The School For Scandal, produced by the Player's Club.

    Walker's motion picture career began in 1915 with Kindling and Out of the Darkness. Sloth (1917) is a five-reeler which features Walker. In the third reel of this film she plays a youthful Dutch maid who is about sixteen years old. The setting is an old Dutch settlement on Staten Island, New York. The theme stresses the perils of indolence to a nation of people and cautions against permitting luxury to replace the simplistic life led by America's forebears. In her later silent film work Walker can be seen in The Midnight Girl (1925) starring alongside a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. The Midnight Girl is one of Walker's few silents that survives. As a film actress she continued to perform in films into the early 1930s. Her later screen performances include roles in Lightnin' (1930), Millie (1931), Salvation Nell (1931), and Hotel Variety (1933) She married her first husband, Dr. John B. Haden, on November 16, 1896 in New York City. With him she had two daughters, Beatrice Shelton  and Katherine, who later changed her name to Sara Haden. After her divorce, she returned to the stage. Her second husband, Eugene Walter, was a playwright who adapted the novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine for Broadway; the second marriage also ended in divorce in 1930. Charlotte Walker died in 1958 at a hospital in Kerrville, Texas at age 81.

Note: Crypt is unmarked. There are several crypts inside the Haden family mausoleum, all marked with a small nameplate except for two - those of Charlotte and her daughter Sara.

Haden Mausoleum

Trinity Episcopal Cemetery

Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.621, -094° 48.682