Three Brothers Well Suited for Early Texas.
Years later, long after wild and wooly Texas had been saddle-broke and gentled up, what Frank Jackson remembered most about his youth along the frontier was his first pair of pants. Well, the first pair of pants he got in Texas.
Jackson came with his family to Texas from Devonshire, England in 1848. They settled along the Trinity River in the Peters Colony. With only a few scattered log cabins along the river, that part of the only three-year-old Lone Star State lay about as far out in the wilderness as anyone dared go.
Despite the hardship born of their relative isolation, the family got by. But before long, a somewhat unexpected problem evidenced itself: The clothing the Jacksons carried to Texas from England soon began to wear thin. By the fall of their second year in North Texas, Jackson and his two brothers wanted little more out of life than new pants.
Accordingly, Jackson and his brothers set out on their first deer hunt. After walking for several miles, they spotted a large doe. John, the oldest of the boys and the best shot, took aim at the whitetail and knocked it down.
After skinning the deer and collecting as much fresh venison as they could tote, the boys headed home with food for their family and the raw material for some doeskin apparel.
Their neighbor followed through on his offer to instruct the boys in the art of deerskin tanning. Once the hide cured and had been softened, their mother made John a suit out of it. The only problem with deerskin clothing was the time it took to harvest the raw material and get it to the point being sewable.
Happily for the nearly threadbare Jackson boys, one day a traveling merchant showed up in their area with a variety of notions and fabrics for sale, including a large bolt of ducking. Paying $1.50 a yard for it �in good English sovereigns,� the boys� father bought enough for pants and jackets for all three sons.
However, one problem remained. The boys didn�t feel comfortable wearing all-white. In fact, from a young man�s standpoint, their new duds looked downright sissy-like. On top of that, boys being boys, the clothes showed dirt more readily.
So when they learned that their parents would be taking their three sisters to a stay-over camp meeting while leaving them behind to mind the stock, the brothers Jackson decided that would be a good time to do something about their all-white wardrobe. Dutiful parents, before leaving they sternly reminded the boys to keep a sharp lookout for Indians and to be sure and keep the cabin door barred at night.
When the boys judged that their britches had cooked long enough they washed them out and draped them across bushes to dry. Once the now-brown pants had dried, the brothers retrieved them, moistened them and used a fire-heated sad iron to press them.
Alas, the pants looked great but they had shrunk so much that the boys could hardly stuff themselves into them. Even so, they much preferred their new look.
But when one of the boys saw an Indian moving through a nearby draw toward their cabin, they forgot all about the tight pants.
Jackson grabbed a hatchet and his younger brother picked up a bar of iron while his older brother ran to fetch his rifle. Sure that more Indians would follow, the boys watched as the one Indian slowly walked toward their cabin.
Just as John was about to pull the trigger, the Indian said, �Good morning, boys� in English as good as theirs.
And he probably never noticed the well-pressed matching brown britches the three boys sported that day.