Coyote Hunters of the Quesenberry

Bernard Pyron

The Quesenberry - which is just east of  Paso de las Garzas, at the Medina Crossing on the Old Somerset Road -  was a tract of land, a ranch, of South Bexar county, Texas from the Medina River Crossing east about three miles to the Poteet Road, now called Highway 16.

My sister Mary in Waxachachie, Texas was interested in the new Toyota plant south of San Antonio near where we grew up. I found it on the internet and its only 2 to 3 miles east of an area where my father and others ran hounds after coyotes. That got me interested in coyote hunting and also in the history of that general area, which includes the history rich Medina River crossing on the Somerset Road to San Antonio.
The area I am talking about is five miles north of where I was born and raised, south of Somerset. Earlier, when I was a child in the thirties I went on a  coyote hunt in what the "Wolf Hunters" called "The Quesenberry." I remember having to beg m y Father to take me along that night. At that time there was a narrow dirt road I think that ran due east from the Medina River Crossing on the Somerset Road to the Poteet Road. The hound dog men parked their Model A cars right in the road and made a campfire a few yards from the road. They did not usually leave the campfire unless the coyote the dog pack was running ran out of hearing. Then they might break camp and try to get back in hearing range of the dogs barking on the chase.

I usually got sleepy sitting around the campfire and would go to our Model A car  and go to sleep in the back seat. One time I was awakened by the scream of a panther out in the brush of the Quesenberry and ran to the campfire.

The last time I was on The Quesenberry to listen to hounds bark on the trail of a coyote was in the late forties. At that time the Quesenberry was still thick brushland from Somerset Road over to the Poteet Road. But what is that stretch of brushland like now? How much of that land was owned by the Quesenberrys - and were there more than one Quesenberry family living in that area? Do the Quesenberry descendants still own some of their land in that area? Is the new Toyota plant 2 or 3 miles to the east already bringing in more houses and perhaps even subdivisions to The Quesenberry? I can see by a 1986 USGS topographical map and a 1995 USGS aerial photo that there are scattered houses built there since the late forties, and I saw a mobile home park on Watson Road.

The thick brush of the Quesenberry is mostly gone now and coyotes would have to use the few small areas of trees and brush left for cover. Panthers are probably not usually found there now. Back in the thirties my father Blake Pyron, my brother George Pyron, John McCain, my Uncle Casey Pyron, Brother Balcalm, the South San Antonio Baptist preacher, and some other men such as Otto Koehler who had packs of coyote hounds hunted on the Quesenberry. George said in 1978 that a man named Elgin Kilborn also hunted with them. Luther James was also a Somerset "Wolf Hunter," though I don't know if he ever hunted in the Quesenberry. There was a Somerset man named Woods who sometimes went along on hunts.

The Quesenberrys may have owned most of that brushland from the Medina crossing on Somerset Road to the Poteet Road. The coyote hunters also hunted in an area they called the "Old Box School House, and usually off a small dirt road running from the old School House down to Atascosa Creek," which was about as close to Lytle as Somerset. And they hunted on a ranch called "The Turpey." Turpey had a large ranch south of Somerset and used to fly over us in his early thirties airplane to his landing strip in what is called the Blackjacks, sandy land and hickory, oaks and far less thick brush than the usual brush country surrounding it.. My father had built a kind of dog cage to fit into a small trailer that he pulled behind our four door Model A.
See:
http://www.time.com/…/magazine/article/0,9171,757026,00.html

"A wet, grey dawn was breaking over Texas last week when a strapping, six-foot figure in cowhand clothes strode out on the 80,000-acre Storey Ranch near Cotulla. The hard-preaching, hard-riding pastor of South San Antonio's First Baptist Church, Reverend Robert Gaddy Baucom, faced an impressive, tensely quiet assemblage. Lined up in front, 257 eager hounds strained at their leashes. At one side a Master of Hounds and twelve field judges sat their horses. Behind the dogs ranged 150 other mounted Texans, more than 1,000 in automobiles and trucks of every size and shape.

Hats went off, heads were bowed as Brother Baucom boomed a prayer. Master of Hounds John Aiken Rowan raised a Texas steer horn to his lips, blew long & loud. At this signal the hounds were loosed and, amid a great uproar of babbling dogs, roaring engines and shouting men, women & children, the whole assembly moved off into the brush. Thus began the 1936 field trials of the South Texas Wolf Hunters Association, biggest "wolf hunt" in U. S. history."

Most likely. the Texas steer horn that was blown was from a longhorn like the ones that my father,uncle and older bother used in the thirties to call in their hounds.

This interesting Southern Baptist preacher who was a "Wolf Hunter" brought his hounds out to the Somerset area from South San Antonio - Robert Gaddy Baucom, in the thirties preacher of the South San Antonio Baptist Church, who had coyote hounds and sometimes ran them with those of my older brother and father. Baucom, or, as the coyote hunters called him "The Preacher," had a Model A truck which was equipped to hold several of his hounds - and he had built along the sides of the back shelves and cupbords like in the old chuck wagons the cowboys of the open range used. Baucom would arrive in the Somerset area on a Saturday night before dark with his rig and park it at our house near town. When my Father Blake Pyron and my older brother George got off from work after dark on a winter night, they would head out to the Quesenberry, the Ballard, or wherever the group was going that night.......

Baucom dressed in cowboy outfits and wore cowboy boots when he preached. He was one of the older Southern Baptist Preachers, who was more like George W. Truett than W.A. Crisswell, the dispensationalist.
Unlike W.A. Crisswell of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, George Washington Truett - the preacher there earlier - was not a dispensationalist and each year Trudett went out to West Texas to be with cowboys on the range and preach to them.

Truett Edwards, of the Somerset--Lytle area of South Texas, who may still be alive, son of Bodie Edwards, is very likely named after George W. Truett.

​George Pyron, As An 18 Year Old, At the 1936
South Texas Wolf Hunter's Association Field Trials
Near Cotulla

I wonder if at night in the winter out in the Quesenberry there is ever the sound of packs of hounds barking like crazy on a hot coyote or fox trail? Back in the late thirties when four or five "Wolf Hunters" all gathered in the Quesenberry, and the trail dogs jumped a coyote on a hot trail, they sometimes would turn all their dogs loose. They might even turn mostly untrained pups loose to give them some experience. There could be forty or fifty hounds in a pack, most of them barking. I doubt that sound is heard, nor is the sound of a horn being blown to call in the dogs after a chase likely to be heard in the Quesenberry in 2006. Its more likely, though, that there still some coyotes in that general area though perhaps they no longer make the Quesenberry their main territory as they did in the thirties, forties and fifties..

​Some Pyron Coyote Hounds - Late Thirties
There is a book I read put out by the Texas Folklore Society on various activities people used to engage in many decades ago and most think have long passed into history. The book was called "Some Still Do." Coyote hunting with hounds was one of the topics. Maybe some still do run coyotes south of San Antonio with packs of hounds. Maybe way out on a dirt road a few still build up a campfire, sit around telling stories of great hunts of the past, with the smell of coffee and bacon frying drifting over the moist night air.

​Horseman Pass By - Father, Blake Pyron, In About 1915
When my wife and I were home from Wisconsin at Christmas in 1961-62 I went coyote hunting with Uncle Casey Pyron, my brother George, and Warren Healer who had the dog pack. We camped on a little dirt road about two miles southwest of Somerset and built up a campfire. George went to sleep on the ground by the fire. It was that warm in South Texas. Healer's hounds were out in the brush barking only once in a while, indicating they had not picked up a hot trail. A coyote yelped up the road and George jumped up and started running that way, apparently to locate him for the dogs. Like my father, his brother, Casey Pyron, had been a hound dog man and "Wolf Hunter" when younger, who would tell many stories of coyote hunts of the twenties and thirties, of common dogs hunting with hounds on the trail, and of getting dogs out of holes or basements of old houses where they had fallen. I still have a horn made from that of a Texas long horn cow that my father, Uncle Casey and brotherGeorgeusedin the thirties to blow their hounds back into camp after the end of a coyote chase. The men who ran hounds after coyotes in South Texas then did not hunt to kill the coyotes. which they called "wolves." They always referred to themselves as Wolf Hunters. Contrary to the sport of the brush country hound dog men, some men in Vermont and other states shoot coyotes with rifles. That was not allowed among the hunters of the Quesenberry. I don't see how at night in that thick brush you mostly cannot even walk through, they could shoot coyotes with rifles. In addition, if the coyote hunters of the Quesenberry were brought out of 1938 through a time machine to the year 2006, I do not think they would approve of using calls to lure coyotes out of the brush to shoot them. Some hunters with rifles now use coyote calls imitating the sound, for example, of a rabbit in distress. No,the object of the Quesenberry hound dog men was to hear their dogs barking and to determine from thei r barking what was happening out in the brush, a quarter mile to two or three miles away, though once in a while the coyote they were running would come near the camp fire of the men.

​Model A Car Used By Blake and George Pyron To Pull
the Dog Trailer To Camp Sites

A coyote is faster than a Walker, July or potlicker hound and rarely do the dogs catch a coyote.
There was an article on the killing of the Lead Dog, Pep in the Hunter's Horn, April 1936 page 16, about how in a Bexar county, Texas court trial in San Antonio my father, Blake Pyron, testified that he could tell what his hounds were running by the sound of their barking. He said the dogs "never changed their tune," when the lead Dog Pep was killed. The man who killed her said the hounds were running his hogs.
Cleve Or Cleveland Kight was the man who shot and killed Pep the lead dog and another Pyron dog that  night. The coyote Pep and the dogs behind her were running may have circled an d came through the Kight place a second time, and he may have gone out on his land with a gun so he was in position to shoot into the dog pack.  Otherwise, Kight would not have been in position top shoot Pep; and the other dog probably close behind her.

The Cleveland Kight land in 1935-36 was east of Somerset, in South Bexar county,but farther east than the Senior Road area, where the McDonald place was in the thirties.

​Pyron Dog Trailer Without Its Top

But the brushland of the Quesenberry just west of the Toyota plant may even now be filling up with sub-divisions that have all kind of restrictions like the one I happened to rent a half acre in during the summer of 1994 for my travel trailer up near Palestine in East Texas that had restrictions against living in a travel railer and on having more than a dog or two. The Rich Men of the Earth, including some 20th century northeastern carpetbaggers and some financial elite, have made Texas a different place than my father and grandfather and especially my great-grandfather Gideon Blake Blackburn knew in their time. Gideon Blackburn and wife were in Texas during the days of the Republic.

J. Frank Dobie wrote something about the wind drinking mustangs being gone for 50 years from the Brasada, the brush country. Maybe the coyotes will never be gone from the Brasada. Pyron Coyote Hounds About 1938 These hounds below are just some of the coyote hounds my older brother George Pyron and my father, Blake Pyron, had in the late thirties. Some of these dogs ran in The Quesenberry. The topographical map above shows the Paso de las Garzas and Quesenberry area, but its not too recent. Its from the eighties. On the left is Somerset Road heading northeast. And over to the right is the Poteet Road, also heading northeast. It is a heavier line on the map. About half way between Somerset Road and Poteet Road is Watson Road which is shown running north and south and turning to run east and west. Quesenberry road is the line running due north and south over to the west of Watson Road. .

Blas Herrera, who alerted the Alamo defenders to Santa Anna's approach, is buried in the Ruiz-Herrera Cemetary which is near the Medina River at about the end of Quesenberry Road. In 1828, Blas Herrera married María Antonio Ruiz (1809-87), daughter of Col. José Francisco Ruiz, with whom he had ten children. Blas, Maria and their children lived on family land along the Medina River at Paso de las Garzas, which are the Herrera lands closer to the Medina. José Francisco Ruiz was born in San Antonio on January 29,1783. He was one of the four representatives of Bexar County at the convention in 1836 at Washington on the Brazos. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he represented Bexar County in the Senate of the first Congress. Francisco Antonio Ruiz, his son, was the acting Mayor of San Antonio in 1836 during the Battle of the Alamo. He is buried in the Ruiz-Herrera cemetery at Paso de las Garzas, established in the 1840s. Antonio's father, Jose Francosco Ruiz,wrotehisson-in-law, Blas María Herrera, on December 27, 1836. He said "Under no circumstance, take sides against the Texans . . . for only God will return the territory of Texas to the Mexican government." Jose Ruiz represented the Bexar District as its senator in the First Congress of the Republic of Texas, from October 3, 1836, to September 25, 1837.

The quote below is from: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/HH/fhe73.html During the siege of Bexar in late 1835, Herrera served under the command of Capt. Juan Nepomuceno Seguín... "Early in 1836 Seguín sent him to Laredo to keep surveillance on Mexican troop movements and to report any advance on San Antonio. About the middle of February, Herrera brought the information that Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna's troops were approaching the city. Herrera's next assignment was to escort and protect José Antonio Navarro and José Francisco Ruiz during their trip to Washington-on-the-Brazos, where they signed the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836." Many of the children, grandchildren and later descendants of Blas Herrea lived at Paso de las Garzas, the Herrera lands west of that of the Quesenberrys.

I am not sure yet how much of that land from the Herrea holdings east to the Poteet Road the Quesenberrys owned during the thirties and forties. The San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society told me that Jackson T. Quesenberry came to Bexar county in about 1864. Jackson T. is the father of Graham and CharlesQuesenberry. Charles J. Quesenberry lived on Somerset Road and died in 1922. I believe Charles J. is the father of Joseph C. Quesenberry. Bexar county online land transaction records show that in 1978 Joseph and his wife deeded 30 acres to their daughter (it says that on the deed) Sophie Ann Quesenberry Bucklew, on the east side of Quesenberry Road and south of Watson Road, which is in the aea the coyote hunters called The Quesenberry. The deed copy says the land is in Bexar county block number 4298. I knew Sophie Ann Quesenberry in Somerset High School in the late forties, and was at their home once in perhaps 1947. Land was also deeded to Esther JoyceQuesenberryHerreraand to Richard Quesenberry by Joseph Quesenberry and wife in 1978, and Sophie Ann, Esther Joyce and Richard were their children.
Ron Teel used to write a column in the Devine Newspaper, called View From the Eagle's Nest. I wrote him once in response to his comments on the history of the Medina River Crossing on theSomerset Road. At that time I had a subscription to the Devine paper. In the spring of 1948 five of the Junior Class Somerset High School played "hookey." The senior class got to go on some kind of a trip, and so we decided to go on our own trip. Five of us got into Daddy's old 1936 Ford car and went to the Medina River Crossing to go swimming. Actually, we were mostly too poor to have real swimming suits, so we waded in the river. I have one photo from that day that has survived, one of Melvin Schupp, who was to become the preacher of Old Rock Baptist Church, with Billie Kurz in the Medina below the old bridge. Dorothy McCullough and Lamar Miller were also along that time.

​Billie E.. Kurz and Melvin Schupp, In the Medina, May, 1948. Both
of them are still alive. Of the five members ofSomerset Junior class who went to the Medina that day, only Lamar Miller is dead, and he made it to 80.
Teel writes that "I suppose the river has changed little since Pyron and friends used to go swimming in the cool, green water that gurgles through the cypress roots. Looking up at the tall bluff above the river, I thought about old Indian Caves which are now collapsed. Walking along beneath the new bridge, Ithought about how Santa Anna camped here when the Medina marked the northern most boundary of Coahuila, Mexico. I thought about how his soldiers bathed themselves and watered their horses before they crossed over into Estado de Tejas, before the fateful event which we call the Battle of the Alamo. In later years people used the same campground, today known as Devil's Bend, as a resting place before they drove their wagons or late automobiles toward San Antonio. Occasionally you will find reminders of all this history as you walk along; like pieces of glass bottles, of old pottery and hand-blown glass bottles, old shell casings, and perhaps a rusty bolt from a wagon,or a horseshoe, or bit from a horse's mouth... Then he ends up saying that the waters of the Medina at Garza's Crossing "...provided for something far more important in people's lives...untold numbers of human beings have been immersed in these waters in Holy Baptism after accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior."Good for you Ron Teel!

My father, Blake Pyron, used to tell the story about how when he went to San Antonio and came home to what later was the town of Somerset late at night in his buggy pulled by one horse, that he would go to sleep and let the horse find his way home. I wonder though about the horse finding his way over the Medina River bridge, if in about 1910 it was anything like I remember it from the late forties, a turn from the road above, going down and across a fairly narrow bridge. What Teel said about using the Medina to baptize people brings back vague memories. My sister Louise says she and some others were baptized in the Medina, probably at Garza's Crossing. I did not know that the area south of the Medina before 1836 was part of the state of Coahuila, while that north of it was "Estada de Tejas."