The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 60, July 1956 - April, 1957 Page: 233
616 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Early Texas Inns: A Study in Social Relationships
have expected a serenity and graciousness of living quite in con-
trast to the habits of ruder dwellings. The opposite, however,
seems to have been true. Mrs. Mann, herself, according to the
early court records of Harris County, was prosecuted for counter-
feiting, forgery, fornication, larceny, and assault with intent to
kill. It should be pointed out that the fornication charge, how-
ever, has been in part refuted by evidence that after Marshall
Mann's death, his widow was only following the custom of in-
formal marriage in her relations with her fourth husband, a Mr.
Brown-a holdover from the days of Mexican rule when marriages
could be entered into but not sanctified until blessed by the
itinerant priest. Later Mrs. Mann and Brown were legally united.
Perhaps, besides, it was not so much Mrs. Mann's example, as the
atmosphere of Houston itself, which accounted for such incidents
as the duel between two of her guests who shared a room, an
affray which resulted from the accusation by one that the other
had stolen a thousand dollar note from his wallet. This affray
became particularly notorious because it was discovered, later,
that the accused man was innocent.4
Yet duels and knifings were anything but rare in Houston.
One reason was the fact that in 1838 Houston was considered the
"El Dorado" of the West, because, as Mrs. Harris points out in
her "Reminiscences," the rumor had spread abroad that much
gold had been taken from the Mexicans at San Jacinto and that
all this treasure was located in Houston. For this reason many of
the gamblers forced to leave Mississippi had come there. Still not
everything in the two-year-old city of 1838 was violence. The city
was characterized by extremes of gracious refinement on the one
hand and rowdyism on the other. The Mansion House was the
scene, not only for challenges to duels, but, at least, on one
occasion, on June 15, 1838, of a distinguished wedding between
one of Mrs. Mann's sons, Flournoy Hunt, and Miss Mary Henry,
at which no less a personage than the President of the Republic,
General Sam Houston, was a guest. After the wedding there was
a supper and a ball.55
n'William Ransom Hogan, "Pamelia Mann, Texas Frontierswoman," Southwest
Review, XX, 364.
55Harris, "Reminiscences," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association,
VII, 217.233
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 60, July 1956 - April, 1957, periodical, 1957; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101163/m1/258/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.