Showing results by author "Dan R. Manning" in All Categories

Dan Manning has put together a compilation of stories about his ancestors and himself as each of them have interacted with anything equine. He is nearly as hybridized as the mules he writes about from his great, great grandfathers...one was a Belgian anarchist, one was a Kentucky abolitionist, and one was a missionary in the Indian Nation, to his great grandfathers...one was a teamster who became a hardware-man, and one was a circuit-riding preacher in Missouri.

Not many have experienced as much of Texas history firsthand as John James Dix. At the age of seven, he came to Texas with his family, arriving in Stephen F. Austin's colony, and listened to the stories of his father, who fought in the early battles of the Texas Revolution under heroes of the Republic -,Austin and Travis. He drove steers, worked under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, and, after he married, was a neighbor to Richard King on the Santa Gertrudis Ranch.

John Dix was born with an adventure-seeking spirit. Within a year after of his father's death, he shipped out at the age of 16 on a privateer during the War of 1812. That led to him joining the South Pacific merchant trade, and becoming captain of his own ship. When it was accidentally wrecked in New Zealand, he returned to America, married a girl from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Dixboro in Michigan Territory, and never went to sea again. Ten years later, Dix once more got the urge to move. He ended up in Stephen Austin's Texas Colony, where he fought in the initial battles of the Texas War for Independence at San Antonio de Bexar. During the Civil War, as loyal Unionists in secessionist Texas, Dix and his wife suffered until war's end. That was when he was sworn in as the County Judge and became the Nueces County Assistant Agent for the Freedmen's Bureau, a position held until his death in 1870, where he helped former slaves make the transition to becoming American citizens.