A small, but important, correction is in order. Earlier, I posted this letter that passed in 1890 from the Presidio County Surveyor to the Chief Clerk of the Texas General Land Office. I thought it was a remarkable letter, showing the writer to be both a diligent surveyor and a man with a strong sense of propriety and social justice.
Marfa, Texas June 26th 1890
R.C. Shelly, Esq.
[Chief Clerk of General Land Office]
Austin, Texas
Dear Sir:
Yours without date in reference to Filipe Brito's 160 [acre] Preemption Survey, rather astonishes me that you hold to a conflict with other surveys when I have shown you there is no such conflict. I send you a plat according to the field notes of these surveys, and another as they are on the ground, and as I have them on my new map of the Co[unty].
I stated to you how this vacancy occurred and afterward offered to furnish you the evidence of John G. Davis who carred the chain for Mr. Hubbell [in 1862], when Burgess told the Mexicans to go on he would run the compass and he continued to make them go on until they refused to go any further he then told Cleto Heredia to build his house where he has it. The line of his land was never run off.
There appears to me that there is something wrong in your office, to say the least of it, as there is no court question about this matter, and no means to get the matter into a court unless it would be a suit against the Land Commissioner to show cause why he does not issue a patent to the parties who have applied for it. I have the satisfaction of having done my duty on the premises.
In fact I begin to think that County Surveyors heretofore must have been with an odd exception a pack of land sharks and that the office is a farce. When a officer elected by the people to fill one of the most important offices in the county, and has been put under a ten thousand [dollar] bond, makes an oath, and the Land Commissioner implies he, this bonded officer, swore to a lie, for that is the way I have been treated, and I can see it in no other light, it is high time to change either one of the other.
I took a great deal of trouble to explain how the vacancy occurred and spent several days running lines from one point to another, after Mr. Heredia gave me the history of the manner in which Mr. Burgess drove him down the river with the chain and when he would go no further told him to build where he has lived ever since, and how when he found he was on public land had to bring suit to recover his own Survey No. 201, which he did in the Dist Court of San Elizario.
Now if you want the affidavit of the owners of the surveys 200 & 201 and G.C.& S.F. Ry. Co. No. 523 showing you there is no conflict as well as the assessor's certificate to the fact of the lands upon which he collects the taxes, I will send them to you, but this land was unsurveyed public domain & I will see that the poor who have lived on it for 54 years are the ones who get it.
Yours truly,
J.R. Marmion
When I posted the above letter, I believed, based upon information from the surviving members of the Marmion family, that the writer was the J.R. Marmion seen below (depicted in a later photo)
James RICHARD Marmion
b: 09 Apr 1861 in San Antonio, Texas d: 27 May 1935 in San Antonio, Texas.
After doing more research, however, I'm pleased to share the information with you (as I have the ill-informed members of the present day Marmion family) that the writer was actually not some 29-year-old, but was his 60-year-old father.
Capt. James ROGER Marmion
b: 15 Mar 1830, County Down, Northern Ireland d: San Antonio, 08 Jan 1895
For those connoisseurs of West Texas surveying, James Roger Marmion's brothers-in-law were the well-known Texas surveyors, E.A. Giraud and George Angle. For an Irishman, he married well. His wife was from a very old and prominent San Antonio family.
That, to my mind is a very satisfactory correction in that the mature voice of the writer of that letter didn't really match the 29-year-old who supposedly had written it. His 60-year-old father, James Roger Marmion, Captain in the Confederate Army, former postmaster of San Antonio, from a prosperous family of merchants fits the bill perfectly for tone.
Yes, it does make more sense that it would've been the senior Marmion.
> Yes, it does make more sense that it would've been the senior Marmion.
I'm going to try to get more of Mr. Marmion's story. With the family connections he had and what I know of his personal bio, it has to be an interesting one.
