Coyote Hunters of the Quesenberry - 1:09 PM, 1/25/2008

COYOTE HUNTERS OF THE QUESENBERRY
Bernard Pyron

My sister Mary in Waxahachie, 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 few coyote hunts in what the "Wolf Hunters"
called "The Quesenberry." 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
which had four doors 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. Balcomb, the South San
Baptist preacher, owned 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 cubbords like in the old chuck wagons the cowboys of the
open range used. Balcomb would arrive in Somerset on a Saturday night
before dark with his rig and park it at our house near town. When
Daddy got off from work after dark on a winter night, they would head
out to the Quesenberry, or wherever the group was going that night.

At the bottom of this page see photos of the Pyron coyote hounds, the
dog trailer, Melvin Schupp and Billie Kurz in the Medina River at the
time we played "hookey" from school, and the bluffs above the river
Ron Teel mentions in his newspaper column. A 1912 photo of Blake B.
Pyron, my father, is shown at left at the end of this article.


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 are
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.. 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. 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 brother George used in 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 their 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. 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.
Since the address of the farmer who killed Pep and another Pyron hound
that night was given as Von Ormy, its likely that the incident
occurred in the general area of the Quesenberry.

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 trailer 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.

BLAS HERRERA AND PASO DE LAS GARZAS

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 River Crossing on the Somerset Road.

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, wrote his son-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 Charles Quesenberry. 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 area 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 Joyce Quesenberry Herrera and 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 the Somerset 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.

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, I thought 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."

Below is the one photo that survived of those I took in May of 1948 of
our Somerset High School Junior class trip to the Medina River.
Melvin Schupp and Billie Eileen Kurz are shown wading in the muddy
waters of the Medina below the old bridge on the Somerset Road.




Melvin Schupp and Billie Kurz
Below Somerset Road Bridge 1948




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 names of some of the Pyron coyote hounds were Lemon, Jack, Pep,
Beulah, Red Wing, and Smut. Smut was an old hound as I remember him,
retired from running. He was around me a lot when I was about four to
six, and one time a car was coming to our house and Smut nudged me out
of the way of the car.

The preacher, Balcalm, had a dog named Igo Parish who Balcalm gave to
George when the dog was too old to run. Smut was out of Fritz, a hound
belonging to Otto Koehler. Fritz was half July and half Walker. I
think Red Wing was a pup of Beulah's.




Horseman_pass_by_174x240
Above: Blake B. Pyron, my father, in about 1912 on his
brush country pony




Pyron_four_door_model_A_used_for_coyote_hunts



The dog trailer pulled behind the Model A, without its top dog cage.