Logan Vandeveer: Fact vs. fiction in dime-store Western about Burnet’s first businessman

He is described as a “noble figure” of “splendid physique” dressed in a deerskin suit riding a black war horse through Burnet County to rescue a fair maiden from violent kidnappers. Logan Vandeveer was a true Texican hero, but the story you are about to read is more dime-store Western than carefully researched biography. The following is a mixture of fact and fiction, so read with discernment.

FACT 

Vandeveer (1815-1855) was a Texas revolutionary soldier, Texas Ranger, and founding father of Burnet County, where he served as the first postmaster, built its first school and first stone building (still in use as the Masonic Lodge in Burnet), and became its first merchant. 

He was granted two partial leagues of land in Central Texas to reward his participation in the Battle of San Jacinto. The Congress of the Republic of Texas reclaimed one parcel of that land for a capitol building. The eminent domain seizure included much of what is now downtown Austin. 

The second grant was in Burnet County, where Vandeveer raised cattle to provide meat to the soldiers at Fort Croghan, which was built to protect white settlers. When the fort closed in 1853, he and brother Zachary had to find customers elsewhere. In 1855, they herded their stock to sell at auction in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where they both died of yellow fever—Vandeveer at the age of 40.

He had only lived six years in Burnet County, where his was one of 80 signatures officially establishing the county and he became one of its first commissioners. He left a lasting legacy in his new home and the state of Texas as well as in the works of Wild West melodrama.

MOSTLY FICTION 

A Burnet County “news feature writer” named Mary Johnson Posey wrote three versions of the following tall tale, which was originally printed in an Austin newspaper. It can still be heard to this day on a guided tour of Longhorn Cavern. 

Posey* wrote the story, which was first published in the Feb. 24, 1918, edition of the Austin Statesman (not yet the Austin American-Statesman). She cast Vandeveer and two companions, W.H. Magill and Noah Smithwick, also of Burnet County, as frontier heroes who saved a fragile damsel in distress from a band of Native Americans she labeled as “savages.” 

“This is the vivid story of Logan Van Deveer* (sic), at one time owner of the townsite of the city of Austin, and who rescued from the Indians the fairest belle of San Antonio, whom he afterward married,” reads the first sentence in Posey’s missive. “Van Deveer was a hero of San Jacinto’s bloody battlefield. The story also tells of a terrific fight with Indians in Burnet County. It is a story for all Texans to know, a story historically authentic and taken from historical records.”

The fight and rescue of “fairest belle of San Antonio” Mariel King is said to have begun at the historic Council House Fight in San Antonio. Before getting to that, however, it is important to point out that Mariel King did not marry Vandeveer, who was already married to Lucinda Mayes at the time. 

Logan and Lucinda had seven children together in Bastrop before moving with their four daughters to Burnet County. Lucinda died shortly after the 1850 census, though no official record or burial site has ever been found. That was 10 years after the Council House Fight, so the couple was still building a family when King was rescued. 

The claim of “historically authentic facts” taken from “historical records” did not make it into the two versions printed years later in The Frontier Times, first in April 1926 and again in June 1938. 

In the earlier version in the Times, the story had a new focus: Sherrard’s Cave, now known as Longhorn Cavern. Posey wrote that she had no documented proof of the account’s authenticity but heard it from an original Burnet County settler of the “highest honor and integrity.” 

“And while it is not recorded in history, I am sure that it is true, as these men were his (Vandeveer’s) personal friends in the early days,” she wrote. 

She does not reveal her own connection to the early settlers, which might have lent more credibility to her story as it is a close one. Posey was the daughter of the founder of Marble Falls, Confederate Gen. Adam R. Johnson, who was integral in trading the stone from Granite Mountain used to build the capitol in Austin in exchange for a railroad line. 

The Council House Fight occurred in 1840 in San Antonio between Texas troops and Penateka Comanche leaders. According to Posey, Vandeveer was there as part of the military.

In an account from the Texas Historical Association, peaceful negotiations over the return of settlers held hostage by the Comanches turned into a bloody battle, resulting in the deaths of 30 Native American leaders and warriors and five women and children. 

Twenty-seven Comanches were captured but escaped as soldiers attempted to exchange them for the still-missing white captives. 

In Posey’s first version in the Austin Statesman, which was reprinted almost word for word in The Frontier Times in 1938, the escaping Comanches grabbed King and headed north into Burnet County. 

In the second telling of the story, printed in 1926, she introduces a specific villain, Chief Yellow Wolf, who, she writes, had seen Mariel King “and then and there marked her for his own.” 

Yellow Wolf began repeated attacks on San Antonio, eventually capturing 13 settlers. When he realized King was not among them, “He swore a terrible oath that he would get her in spite of everything,” the story reads. According to Posey, this led to the ill-fated negotiations and the Council House Fight.  

Posey follows this with a a brutal, although somewhat comic, scene of hand-to-hand combat by two men on horseback—on the same horse. As Vandeveer sat atop his black charger watching the negotiations, a Comanche named Red Fox jumped up behind him and “pinioned his (Vandeveer’s) arms to his sides while he (Red Fox) kicked the black horse’s sides viciously, sending him into a wild run.” 

Vandeveer managed to maintain control of the horse, steering it in circles. The scene drew a crowd, and eventually, someone shot and killed Red Fox. 

On his way home after the battle, Vandeveer found a looted wagon train and evidence that a woman had been kidnapped. He followed a trail marked by a dropped lace handkerchief, and later a bit of ribbon, into Marble Falls, where he enlisted his friends Smithwick and Magill to help rescue the woman.  

The three found Mariel King tied and leaning against a cave wall in Sherrard’s Cave (Longhorn Cavern). 

“Even in the dishevelment of her capture and subsequent journey with her captors, the girl was beautiful, and though her dark wavy hair hung in a tangled mass, her lustrous brown eyes held weariness with despair, she was still lovely enough to be the belle of the Alamo City,” Posey wrote. 

Vandeveer and company fired on the unsuspecting kidnappers, who fled, thinking they were outnumbered. One stayed behind and was about to kill King when Vandeveer stopped him in what was described as a bloody, hand-to-hand battle. 

The kidnappers soon realized only three men had attacked them, and they returned to the scene, where they attempted to scalp the young woman as they battled the pioneers. Vandeveer and his companions prevailed and saved King, a scene described at some length in terms both bloody and bigoted. The end is a Wild West version of meet-cute.

“Van Deveer now caught up the fainting girl in his powerful arms, and with Magill and Smithwick protecting his retreat, he climbed up the rocky passageway leading out of the cave and soon reached their horses safely,” the story continues. “Of course, the natural sequel to this rescue was marriage,” Posey writes.

In the original 1918 version, Posey ends the story with a final paragraph of purple prose. 

“Though Texas’ heraldic roll glows with the names of Houston, McCulloch, Hays, Lamar, and Chevalier, which illumines the pages of her history with an effulgence of glory, she never nurtured on her bosom a son of more filial devotion or indomitable will to do and dare, or of more loyal patriotism than Logan Van Deveer, original owner of Austin, who now rests ‘on Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground,’” she concludes. 

The tale is still told today during tours of the underground at Longhorn Cavern State Park in Burnet County, although it is a much shorter version. 

“We don’t mention anyone by name,” said Longhorn Cavern General Manager Jimmy Cruz. “We just talk about the incident itself. We say that some Texas Rangers rescued a girl being held captive by some Native Americans inhabiting the cave.” 

Fact or fiction? 

suzanne@thepicayune.com

* Vandeveer’s name is spelled various ways in stories and even on street signs, but the commonly accepted version is Vandeveer, which shows up on most historical documents. That’s Vandeveer NOT VandERveer, which is how it is spelled on a prominent street in Burnet, a seemingly accepted misspelling that no one seems eager to change.  

**The author, Mary Johnson Posey (1884-1960), is buried in the Old Burnet Cemetery (former Old Fellows Cemetery). She was known as a newspaper feature writer.