Stapleton: From Gum Swamp to Texas Wilderness
A family that couldn't read a page of law outfought the most powerful attorneys in territorial Florida. Then they loaded a wagon and headed for Texas.
Stapleton: From Gum Swamp to Texas Wilderness is the true story of one American family's thirty-year journey across the nineteenth-century frontier - from the swamp country of South Carolina through the raw wilderness of Alabama and Florida to the shores of Matagorda Bay, Republic of Texas.
At the center of it stands William Stapleton, an illiterate patriarch who built a mill on a Florida creek, raised thirteen children, was appointed a Justice of the Peace despite never reading a word in his life, and died in 1832 still fighting a fraudulent land scheme orchestrated by his own son. After his death, his children - led by William Jr. and including teenage twins Zeno and Zenothan - carried that fight into the courts of territorial Florida, faced down the personal attorney of Andrew Jackson, and won. Then they were named in a newspaper want notice for harboring an escaped person. Then they boarded a schooner in New Orleans and sailed for Texas.
This is narrative genealogy at its most propulsive - every name, date, court record, land patent, and sworn testimony verified against primary sources, brought to life with the full weight of the country these people actually crossed. It is a story about what land meant to people who had nothing else. About what an X pressed into a courthouse document could cost a man, and what it was worth. About the children who watched their father fight and understood, before they were old enough to name it, that this was what was required of them.
Book Two of the Stapleton Trilogy. The line does not stop.
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