Under even the best of circumstances, life would not have been easy for the daughter of a former slave in post-Civil War Texas. But for a young Coryell County girl named Betsy, it became a living hell.
Betsy’s mother worked for a family that had come to Central Texas not long after the Civil War. They’d settled on 250 acres near the small community of Pidcoke, founded in 1857 about 15 miles west of the county seat of Gatesville.
One day, with her mother laboring over a wash tub while Betsy played along Cow House Creek, the child suddenly screamed in terror. Running toward the sound, the woman saw a sizable black bear mauling her child. The mother began yelling at the bear and it disappeared into the cover along the creek. But it was too late for Betsy.
The bruin had struck the girl with its clawed paw, ripping her scalp from her forehead to the back of her head. She was still alive, but just barely. Carrying her bleeding child back to the family’s homestead, the woman nursed Betsy back to health.
“Betsy’s physical health recovered,” former Coryell County Judge Robert W. Brown later recalled, “but her mind didn’t.” Whether the bear by blow or bite had damaged the child’s brain or whether simply due to psychological trauma, after the attack Betsy was never the same.
She could make sounds but not speak. In addition to the unseen damage from the bear attack, a large white scar stood out on her forehead and could be seen under her hair. As Brown put it, “She was a ghostly sight.”
In time, probably after her mother’s incapacitation or death, Betsy became an inmate of the county’s poor farm. In 1869, likely around the time of the bear attack, the newly drafted state constitution mandated the establishment of what the amendment called “Manual Labor County Farms.” a pioneer social services system. An 1887 state survey shows nine people at the Coryell County farm at that time, one listed as “colored.” That person must have been Betsy. The one-page document showed the county spent an average of $7 per person each month.
Inmates able to do so were required to work on the farm to lessen the county’s costs in maintaining the facility. But the farm was more a dumping ground for the indigent, mentally ill, or disabled than care center. No matter its important role in their community, most county residents pretended the poor farm didn’t exist. The farm wasn’t discussed much or covered extensively by the newspapers and generally operated in as low-key a way as possible. “Ending up on the poor farm” was more than a flip expression back then. For many in Texas and elsewhere in the nation, a county-operated farm constituted the end of the road.
By the turn of the 20th century no one had seen a bear in Coryell County for a quarter century or more, but Betsy remained a ward of the county. She had her own room near that of the poor farm’s superintendent, J.M. Hair, an older man who was a friend of Judge Brown.
Hair told Brown that for all practical purposes, Betsy merely existed. Clad only in a piece of cloth that had been cut and sewn so as to loosely hang from her neck around her body, she spent much of her time aimlessly wandering the grounds. She never tried to leave the farm, never bothered anyone and never caused any other problems.
One day after a rare heavy snowfall, Hair called Brown to report that Betsy had been walking barefoot in the cold. He asked the judge if the county would agree to buy the woman a pair of shoes and stockings. Brown readily assented, but Betsy wouldn’t keep them on. She ended up contracting pneumonia, and while she managed to recover, she later died at the farm of another illness.
Despite the racism that still permeated Texas in the 1920s, Brown and Hair were clearly moved by Betsy’s sad plight. Only those two were present as Betsy’s body was lowered into a grave near a grove of elms on the south side of the farm.
Brown wrote in his 1980 privately published recollections, “Stories By Robert W. Brown A Country Lawyer,” that her funeral consisted only of a prayer on his part. He remembered it like this:
“Oh Lord, Betsy has passed to her long sleep. May the sun shine softly on her grave. May the rain fall gently. May the grass grow green. May the spring flowers bloom with beauty and fragrance. May the winter snow silently spread its white blanket over the fallen leaves. May the breeze whisper its sweet murmur songs of peace during the long night to come. May Betsy’s endless sleep be free from the nightmare of the mauling bear that tore away her mind and maimed her body. Good night, Betsy, good night.”
When the county later relocated the farm to a new 80-acre site, county commissioners authorized payment of $10 per grave for the removal of remains buried at the original location—including Betsy’s—for reburial at the new location. In 1956, years after the farm had been closed, the county sold the property. None of the graves left behind had been marked.