by Heber Taylor
King Fisher: The Deadliest Man in Texas
King Fisher is a novel about the deadliest gunslinger in Texas. The story is set in South Texas in the 1800s. He began to carve out an empire based on cattle as a teenager. When other men tried to interfere, he settled the arguments with gunfire. He was so successful at defending his stake against lawless men that his neighbors made him a lawman. Somehow his spectacular rise and his spectacular fall is the stuff of Texas legend.
A discussion of King Fisher by Heber Taylor
King Fisher: The Deadliest Man in Texas (Amazon Print)
An Excerpt from King Fisher: The Deadliest Man in Texas (Chapter 1)
Prologue: Progression
Dec. 1, 1870, Huntsville, Texas
Two men, a minister and a botanist, were on a train from Huntsville to Houston. The shy man was the minister. Because T.B. Larimore was introverted and because he felt a duty, hard as a bayonet to the back, to preach, he constantly had to force himself to overcome his shyness. As a matter of practice, he forced himself to speak to strangers. He quietly and deferentially introduced himself to his fellow traveler, Joachim Seinsheimer, a boisterous lecturer in botany who spoke with a thick German accent. Seinsheimer was from Hamburg. He’d studied in Europe and won an academic post. But he wanted to see the plants of the New World and, inspired by the writings of Ferdinand Lindheimer, a German who had settled in Texas, he especially wanted to see the flora of the Edwards Plateau.
Larimore instinctively sought common ground in conversation. He said he taught at a small school for boys in Mars Hill, Alabama. It was an academic environment, though far from the kind available to a scholar such as Seinsheimer. Larimore had an unusual trait in a minister of the gospel: he was far better at listening than at speaking. He hoped his remark would prompt the scientist to talk about his own studies.
“Texas is infested with botanists,” Seinsheimer said. “Like fleas on a dog, as the Texans say. Half of them, like me, are German.” Seinsheimer had realized his ambition of visiting Lindheimer in New Braunfels, a community of Germans who’d come after the upheavals in Europe in 1848. Seinsheimer planned to take another look at the plants of the Edwards Plateau. He was interested in the new ideas about how plants tended to grow in communities or associations. But first he had wanted to see the place called The Big Thicket, a vast region of river bottoms in East Texas. He had just come from the thicket — three weeks in the deep woods, he said.
“There are insectivorous plants in The Big Thicket, Reverend,” Seinsheimer said. “Three species I found, and there are perhaps more. Who knows?”
Larimore held up his hand, trying to interrupt politely. “I’m interested, professor, but please, don’t call me ‘reverend.’ I’m like any other man. I hold no title, no credentials, from any denomination. I’m opposed to denominations.”
Seinsheimer smiled a great smile, as if he had recognized another characteristic species of an exotic region. “The Great Awakening! Of course, you are a product of that movement. I should have guessed. And they call you Cambellites, unless I am badly mistaken, although you perhaps consider that demeaning. That was the case when some Christians first began calling others ‘Lutherans.’”
Seinsheimer was interested in what he had heard: that the Campbellites believed that Christians would be cast into the fires of hell if they were not baptized as adults and that they sang their hymns unaccompanied by musical instruments because they thought that’s the way the original Christians had done it. Remarkable, these Americans! Such a pioneering spirit — but each new trail seemed to lead to a conservative ideal, to the political freedoms of ancient Greece, to the spiritual purity of the ancient Christians. Innovations to dead ends, rather than evolution, the professor thought.
But Seinsheimer noticed that the minister was curiously slow to tell his own story. He asked the minister if he had heard of Darwin. Larimore had and found the great scientist’s theory interesting.
Seinsheimer was surprised. “But surely, you see that this is the end of religion?” he suggested.
“Not at all, professor. Might this idea of evolution be an evolution of our understanding of God’s creation? Might this not be a better understanding of how God created, and is still creating, the world?”
“You surprise me, Mr. Larimore.”
“Surprised but not convinced?”
“Not convinced, no. I see no reason for a god, yours or anyone else’s, to be involved in this process.”
“Well, tell me about the process.”
Seinsheimer gave an elementary lecture on the idea of plant progressions. He started with a beach — sand, rock, ocean and wind — and told how the simplest plants took hold in sheltered areas where they would not be washed away, fertilized by chance by the arrival of dead fish or a rotting log upon the shore. These plants died and decayed, and in dying released nutrients for more complicated plants, whose roots held the soil in blowing dunes. As generations of plants died and decayed, building up the soil, more complicated plants took over. And so, as a scientist moved inland from the coast, he could see a progression of plants, from the primitive to complex, from salt-tolerant grasses to trees, and the delicate, highly specialized plants that ate insects in The Big Thicket.
The botanist paused. He wondered whether the scientific idea had made any impression on this curious preacher.
The minister said, “And what happens to that specialized plant if the environment changes?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens to your insect-eating plant if the woods of The Big Thicket are cut for the timber?”
“That plant will die,” the botanist said, studying the face of his fellow passenger. Seinsheimer had seen the sawmills on the edge of the thicket. He had seen the cities of the East Coast and wondered how much timber would be cut and shipped to build them. “The species itself will perhaps become extinct. The organism goes when it loses its environment.”
Larimore thought for a moment and said: “I think, professor, that you will see the same thing among people as you travel the frontier. You will find, at the very edge of civilization, hard men, simple men. And, as the environment becomes tamer, more developed, richer in nutrients, you will see men more refined, men such as yourself.”
The botanist was surprised at the idea and more surprised that it had come from a simple clergyman. He did not interrupt the preacher, who seemed lost in his thoughts.
“I have just been behind the walls of the state penitentiary back there in Huntsville,” Larimore said. “I met many hard men, shaped by a hard country. I’m afraid they are beyond hope, at least to my way of thinking, of any kind of good life. But while I was there, I met a 16-year-old boy. He is to be released soon, and I wonder what kind of life he will lead in this country, what kind of forces will shape him.”
The conversation stayed in Seinsheimer’s mind for days. When he dined with Lindheimer and other men of science in New Braunfels later that week, he told about this traveling preacher. At the university in Frankfurt he’d talked with theologians and doctors of theology who still believed that the essence of man was in some kind of immaterial soul. Here, on the frontier, was a simple man who seemed to think that man was just part of the natural world.
—All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Heber Taylor or Narrativemagic LLC.
Copyright 2018.
Narrativemagic, LLC
Stone Mountain, Ga
ISBN: 978-0-9986416-7-6
King Fisher: The Deadliest Man in Texas and other books by Heber Taylor are published by Narrativemagic Press, Narrativemagic, LLC (narrativemagic.com)
