Okay, show of hands. How many of you knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (better known as the Mormons) played a prominent role in the settlement of the Texas Hill Country?

Don’t feel bad; I had no idea, either, until I was assigned to write the entries on Gillespie County for the New Handbook of Texas almost thirty years ago. In fact, for more than a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, a breakaway group of Mormons founded and then abandoned an astonishing number of settlements in Central Texas.

The Mormons are now well established in Utah, but that wasn’t always the case; their early history was, to put it mildly, peripatetic. Joseph Smith founded the movement in New York State in the 1820s, but he and his followers attracted violent opposition almost immediately. They moved to Ohio in 1831, intending eventually to settle in Independence, Missouri, but after bloody clashes with locals in both states, they moved again, to Illinois, where they founded the town of Nauvoo in 1840. A year later, Smith and the Nauvoo city council angered non-Mormons by destroying a printing press that had been used to print an exposé critical of Smith and the practice of polygamy; Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois, and died in a riot when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

Before his death, having concluded that Illinois was no more hospitable to the embryonic faith than New York, Ohio, or Missouri, Smith sent an envoy to negotiate with Sam Houston for the establishment of a Mormon settlement in the Republic of Texas. Lyman Wight, one of Smith’s favorites—he was ordained the first high priest of the church in 1831—had received Smith’s permission to lead a group to Texas, but Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided that Utah would be a more propitious site. While most of the Mormons followed Young to the Great Salt Lake Valley, about 150 to 200 dissenters (accounts vary) followed the renegade Wight, who felt compelled to honor Smith’s wishes, to Texas.

Wight seems to have had an incorrigible case of happy feet, even by Mormon standards, and a profound stubborn streak—hence the colorful nickname, “the Wild Ram of the Mountains,” bestowed on him by the New York Sun. (That’s John James Audubon’s ca. 1845 lithograph of Rocky Mountain sheep at the top of the page, by the way.) Wight was born in upstate New York in 1796 and subsequently lived in Canada, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin; he also refused to acknowledge Young as Smith’s legitimate successor.

Wight and his followers spent the winter of 1845–46 at an abandoned fort near Preston, in Grayson County, and arrived in Austin in June 1846. They settled in what is now Webberville, where they met the pioneer blacksmith and memoirist Noah Smithwick, in September 1846, and built a gristmill on the Colorado River which was destroyed by a flood.

By this time the Mormons must have been wondering if they would ever find a place to call home. In 1847, Wight asked John O. Meusebach for permission to found a colony on the Pedernales River; no doubt he hoped that the Germans, with their tradition of religious tolerance, would look more kindly on Mormon polygamy than had their Anglo neighbors. (Apparently the Germans considered the Mormons “lawless of religious practices,” but pragmatically figured the newcomers could teach them American agricultural and milling techniques.)

Wight and his followers founded the settlement of Zodiac, four miles southeast of Fredericksburg, in 1847. There they built a sawmill (the first in Gillespie County), a gristmill, a store, a school, and the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi River; they became the principal suppliers of seed, flour, and lumber to their German fellow settlers, and also helped build Fort Martin Scott, established in 1848 on what was then the western frontier of settlement in Texas.

Wight himself refused several invitations from Young to come to Utah and was excommunicated by the Mormon church in 1849. In 1850 he lost the election for chief justice of Gillespie County to the German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer, but was awarded the office after pointing out that Klingelhoefer was not an American citizen. By the following summer, however, Wight could apparently no longer be bothered to show up for court, so the county commissioners declared the office vacant and awarded it to Klingelhoefer, who had since become a citizen. (One historian has suggested that Wight was addicted to alcohol and opium, which may have contributed to his erratic behavior.)

Perhaps Wight had already sensed another move in the offing. In September 1851, after more devastating floods, he and his followers left Zodiac and moved to Burnet County, where they established a colony called Mormon Mill on Hamilton Creek—those Mormons were serious millers, weren’t they?—but in December 1853 Wight and his followers sold the property to their old friend Smithwick and moved on to Bandera, where they built a furniture factory. In the fall of 1856, however, they moved again, this time to a site on the Medina River below Bandera which came to be known as Mountain Valley or Mormon Camp. (The site is now covered by Medina Lake.)

If folks thought that Wight would settle down at last, they were sadly mistaken. In 1858, he had a premonition of the Civil War and decided to lead his followers—one can only imagine what they thought when he told them to pack up yet again—back to Missouri.

Apparently this was one move too many even for the indefatigable Wild Ram of the Mountains; he died on the second day of the journey, when the group was about eight miles from San Antonio, and was buried in his ceremonial temple robes in the Mormon cemetery at Zodiac, which no longer exists.

And what of his followers? Some remained in Texas, while others moved on to Iowa, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), or Utah. As of 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claimed 315,895 members in Texas, or about 5 percent of the national total of 6,321,416. Only four states—Utah (of course), California, Idaho, and Arizona—had more. I wonder how many of today’s Mormon Texans are descendants of Wight’s followers, followers who were secretly relieved not to have to uproot themselves yet again at the whim of the Wild Ram of the Mountains?

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

Happy Belated New Year, O Faithful Reader! And what better way to belly up to a brand-new year (and decade) than by contemplating the past? And what better place to contemplate the past, both personal and communal, than the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera, Texas?

A stuffed two-headed goat; a dentist’s chair and equipment from the 1880s; dead fleas wearing tiny human clothes (magnifying glass provided); a cluster of melted nails from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

If you’ve never been there, you’re missing something special. Bandera, which likes to bill itself as “the Cowboy Capital of the World,” boasts a number of attractions: Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar Saloon, where musical legends like Ernest Tubb, Hank Thompson, Willie Nelson, and Robert Earl Keen have been known to appear; the OST Restaurant (officially the Old Spanish Trail, but fondly known as the Old Sloppy Table), where you can dine in the John Wayne Room, a shrine to the Duke (who supposedly stopped in during the filming of The Alamo in 1960), or perch on a saddle at the bar; and numerous dude ranches, where you can try not to think about Jack Palance in City Slickers.

But for my money the Frontier Times Museum beats them all hollow. You can talk about your Louvre and your British Museum, your Prado and your Uffizi, your Met and your MOMA, but the Frontier Times is pretty much my favorite museum ever. Wandering through it is like exploring your grandparents’ attic, if your grandparents happened to be eccentric and obsessive collectors of (mostly) Western memorabilia, and perhaps addicted to psychotropic drugs.

A diorama of the 1843 battle of Bandera Pass, using plastic cowboys and Indians; a photograph of John Wesley Hardin’s bullet-riddled corpse; the shrunken head of a Jivaro Indian woman; a map of Texas made out of rattlesnake rattles.

The Frontier Times Museum was the brainchild of J. Marvin Hunter, a newspaperman and amateur historian who founded the Frontier Times, a magazine dedicated to “frontier history, border tragedy, and pioneer achievement,” in 1923. The Frontier Times, which ceased publication in 2004, was a successor of Hunter’s Frontier Magazine, founded by Hunter’s father and published from 1910 to 1917; of this earlier publication, Hunter once wrote that its articles “are true in detail, though in some instances names and dates may be incorrect.”

Mrs. Louisa Gordon’s collection of 400 bells from around the world, with a pen-and-ink sketch of Mrs. Gordon’s grandfather’s house in England; a stuffed armadillo displayed beneath a hanging clarinet and sousaphone; stereoscopic views of the Taj Mahal, Acropolis, and Matterhorn.

As might be expected from someone with such a, well, flexible attitude toward the writing of history, Hunter was also an indiscriminate collector of memorabilia and relics. In 1927 he decided to share the wealth, as it were, and bought a small stone house two blocks from the Bandera County courthouse to show off his stuff.

But the collection grew like Topsy, and an addition was built in 1933, and then another in 1972. The effect is as if anybody in Bandera who ever went anywhere and brought anything back and eventually got tired of tripping over it in the garage just figured, “What the hell, let’s give it to the Frontier Times.” As a result, and unlike many museums, the Frontier Times is still adding to its collection, which now includes more than 30,000 items, and storage is becoming an issue.

German army helmets from World War I and World War II; a combination knife and fork for a one-armed man; a diary kept by “someone” in Geneva NY from 1835 to 1837; a serpent made of several hundred old English postage stamps.

The museum itself is charmingly low-key, its treasures arranged in what seems like random order, and many of the exhibit labels are either hand-written or typed on index cards, with occasional misspellings. Blessedly, you can make it through all three rooms in less than an hour, if you hurry. But take your time; the place is a unique meditation on the nature of history, a look inside the mind of a man and his community and a record of what they found worthy of preservation and celebration. As such, it is eminently deserving of more leisurely appreciation. I wonder what future generations will make of what we leave behind?

Plastic bottles from Poland, vintage 2006; a photograph of Judge Paul Desmuke of Jourdanton TX, who had no arms, playing the violin with his feet; a pillow stuffed with hair from camels brought to Texas by the U.S. Army in the 1850s; a Japanese shoe.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, The Case for God
Martin: Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked