I found this story while I was researching a different topic, and it struck me on several levels. First how dangerous it is to walk around in the dark in rattlesnake country, second how incredibly strong the woman was who took the bite, and third how lucky we are to have a good treatment for something that was often fatal. The story is from a book that is hard to find, Leona Banister Bruce’s Trickham, Texas, a Neighborly Chronicle. It is out of print, so I thought I’d condense it and share it with you.
Young Jack Lawrence came West from Alabama in 1866, at the age of 20, searching for work in order to help his mother and siblings survive at the end of the Civil War. Jack eventually returned to Alabama to marry his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Beasley. The family arrived in Brown County in 1876 and lived on the ranch of Brooks Lee, along Clear Creek, while they bought cattle and turned them loose to graze on what was then open rangeland. Jack had gone into town, leaving Nancy and 3 children at home. The summer was extremely dry and very hot, and water supplies were critically low. Nancy awoke at night to hear the sound of rain on the roof. Thinking to catch some of the precious water before it was gone, Nancy got up to place pots and pans under the eaves of the house. While performing this task, she was bitten on the ankle by a rattlesnake. The situation quickly became desperate.
Mrs. Lawrence woke her son John, a boy of around 9, and sent him to the Lee’s house to call for a doctor and ask Mrs. Lee to come and help. Little John set off along the mile-long path, in the dark and rain, while Nancy’s leg began to swell to an impossible size. The pain must have been indescribable.
Nancy was now, however, a Texan. As the leg worsened, she began to think she would probably die from the bite, and her two youngest children, George and Emma, could be left to fend for themselves, possibly for days. Instead of falling on the floor and crying, like I probably would have done, Nancy dragged herself out to the woodpile and back. She gathered her pots and pans, lit a fire and started cooking! She prepared everything they had in the house to eat, so that the little ones would have food if she passed away. I honestly cannot imagine what she must have gone through, standing over a fire to cook in her condition. .
Meanwhile, John reached the Lee homestead. Mr. Lee rode for a doctor and Mrs. Lee hitched up her buggy and headed for the Lawrence home, along with John. Back at the Lawrence place, Nancy continued to show the kind of heroic spirit that makes Texans boast about the state. According to a passage, found in Bruce’s book, Nancy prepared her very young children for the ordeal by telling them she was very tired. “I may go in that room and shut the door,” she reportedly said. “And if I do, don’t you come in there and wake me. Mrs. Lee will be here pretty soon, and you can tell her to come in. But you children must not come in there.”
When Mrs. Lee arrived, she used all the home remedies she had. “The West could never have been won without kerosene and baking soda, biscuit poultices and turpentine,” Bruce wrote. A doctor came in the morning. He believed Nancy might survive. The leg swelled and burst, but Mrs. Lawrence did survive the bite, although her ankle was permanently damaged where the fangs went in, and she walked with a limp for the rest of her life.
The sheer grit of some of these early settlers leaves me feeling pretty lame myself. I get upset if the air conditioner goes out for half a day, so I wonder how I would have done in Nancy’s position. Some older people say there is probably more in each one of us when events turn extreme than we realize. While maybe there is some kind of inner steel core in me that is untapped, something that might be able to handle a bad situation like Nancy Lawrence did, I am sure I don’t want to be forced to discover it.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com