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Samuel A. Maverick and The Maverick Spirit
Bernard Pyron

​ Samuel A. Maverick, 1803 –1870 - was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a Texas Revolutionary. His name is the source of the term "Maverick.". Samuel Maverick did not brand his cattle and an unbranded Longhorn came to be known a s a "Maverick." "Maverick": is a name for the American spirit of independence, self-reliance and resourcefulness, which historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued was the result of the American frontier. And historian Walter Prescott Webb said that the cowboy and others who lived on the Great Planes were "outlaws," not that they were gangsters like Al Capone, but that they were nonconformists who were not easily  dominated and   controlled. They were Mavericks. The Bexar county, Texas Clerk's Office lists land transactions online going back to the time of the Republic, when Samuel A. Maverick was buying and selling land in Bexar county. There are about 150 land transactions involving Sam A. Maverick that are online at the Bexar County Clerk's Office. For example, on March 16, 1838, Beriana Sandoval for a thousand dollars deeded one league and one labor of land, Survey number 378, to Sam A. Maverick. Sam A.,Maverick was to take out a patent on this land.

The Texas General Land office - search page for land grants at - http://www.glo.texas.gov/.../archives/land-grants/index.cfm - seems to be shut down right now.. A Bexar county Landowners map shows Survey number 378 to be in the north central part of Bexar county, SE of Balcones Creek. Survey 378 is west of the slightly larger Survey 330 of Franscisco Morales.......So, Samuel A, Maverick, who gave his name - Maverick - to the Texas and soon to the American spirit of independence, is very real on the land records of Bexar county, Texas, where I was born and raised.

The photo above is of me when I was in the Third Grade. 
In  the third grade we had a teacher, Kathleen Durham, who had three of us, Joe McMonagle, Lamar Miller and myself in a play in the school auditorium - based on Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I don't remember who played which roles.  And I don't remember who was the third character other than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  I remember the whitewashing of a fence.  But for third graders to lean the lines of a play and appear in the auditorium was something a little unusual.   Four or five years ago I talked on the phone with Joe McMonagle, when he was about 80.  I asked him about a photo that the photographer who took the Third Grade Class photo that made of the three of us who had been in the school play in the Somerset School Auditorium.  He remembered the photo and said it was put away in his basement.

James Joseph McMonagle, with his home listed as San Antonio, Texas,  was commissioned in the Marine Corps upon graduation from the University of Notre Dame in the late spring of 1953. Joe was sent to Korea as a Marine Lieutenant but the war was over in the summer of 1953. When I talked to him in about 2012 he remembered that Suwon Air Base where I was stationed in the war was called K-13.  Joe got his own war later, the Viet-Nam war.   He retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a Two Star General in 1988. When I knew General Joe in the Third Grade he lived with his parents and grandfather on Kenney Road in South Bexar county, Texas, not far south of what was then called Highway 81, which became Interstate 35, about three  miles west of Von Ormy.