Hathcock History

Calvin Tilley of Chippewa Falls Wisconsin emailed me recently asking for a copy of a story I wrote about an Island resident of many years ago that could possibly be a distant relative of his. I sent him what information I have and the following which is an excerpt from my new book, “Old Indio, Last of the Karankawa Indians and other short stories.”

Several years after Texas won its independence Henry Kinney left Pennsylvania along with his partner William Aubry, established the first trading post near Padre Island on what is now Corpus Christi Bay. Aubrey was only on the scene for a few years and little is known about him but Kinney became a successful rancher and made significant contributions to the development of the Corpus Christi area.
In the early 1840s, Phillip Dimmitt, James Gourlay, and John Southerland built their own trading post in what is now Flour Bluff on Oso Creek. Both establishments prospered, most probably as outposts for smugglers avoiding the revenuers stationed at the mouth of the Rio Grande about 100 miles to the south.  
These trading posts gained much attention when General Zachary Taylor and more than 2,000 American dragoons camped near Corpus Christi after Texans voted to be annexed to the United States in a special election held July of 1845. In February 1846, Taylor sent a reconnaissance party to determine a route to Brazos Santiago Pass and Point Isabel which lies along the eastern shore of the Laguna Madre.
Captain Ben McCulloch led a company of Texas Rangers down the Padre’s Island (as it was now called) from Corpus Christi at the onset of the Mexican War.
 “The island is uninhabited save by one old man,” McCulloch reported, “who follows the business of a wrecker, and lives not far from Point Isabel, in a wild-looking place, which he calls, after himself,  Tilley's Camp. Uncle Tilley lives there, and employs himself in gathering the wrecks of cargoes with which the beach is strewn, seeming perfectly happy in his loneliness, the undisputed lord of this desert isle.”
Tilley became famous throughout the nation as, the “Hermit of Padre Island.” Shortly after his death, the following obituary was published in dozens of eastern newspapers.
“For years past, Padre’s Island, extending from the Brazos to Corpus Christi, upwards of a hundred miles in extent, has been uninhabited, saved by a single individual, familiarly known as, Uncle Tilley. Here in a little hut, in sight and hearing of the surf, dwelt this old man upwards of twenty years, as undisputed a monarch as Alexander Selkirk on the Island of Juan Fernandez.” (Editor’s note: See: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe).
“For twenty years Tilley fished and hunted the beach, where the cargoes of wrecked vessels formed his only occupation. His wants being but few and simple, he seldom disposed of what he accumulated in this way, but after rescuing it from the mercy of the waves, left it to perish by the noiseless tooth of time. He seldom sought the society of men to destroy the monotony of his existence, and excepting when a solitary traveler, journeying across the Island, claimed the hospitality of his hut his solitude was never broken by human sounds. He was kind and humane to all who approached him, and, if he cast himself beyond the pale of society and circumscribed his powers of being useful to his fellow men, he certainly did them no harm. Here in his harmless and solitary mode, free from the tumult of a jarring world, lived and died this singular old man.
“He breathed his last on Friday, the November 29th, 1846 and was buried on the (“my own,” he called it) island. From a bleak sand hill, the old man’s grave overlooks the ocean, the ceaseless roar of which, occasionally intermingled with the howl of the wolf and the scream of the eagle, haunts the requiem of his departed spirit and proclaims the eternal truth that the grave is a great republic, which drags the proudest of the earth to a level of the most lowly.
In the hands of a De Foe, the life of a subject of this notice might be made the groundwork of a beautiful romance. The fact that Padre’s Island was once the abiding place of the Cronkaways, a tribe of cannibal Indians, and its jungles and vastnesses roamed over by almost every description of wild animals would seem to favor an undertaking of this kind, and furnish the wool to weave together a story.”
And so it was that the man known as “Uncle Tilley,” one of the Island’s most prolific beachcombers, shuffled off this mortal coil.