Travels and Adventures in Texas in the 1820's. Being the Reminiscences of Mary Crownover Rabb

Waco: W.M. Morrison, 1962. Very good.. [4],10pp. Publisher's full leather, boards ruled in gilt with gilt titles on front cover reading, "Texas in the 1820's." Front cover noticeably bowed, some light wear, minor dust-soiling. The rejected and almost wholly-destroyed first printing of a previously unpublished account of early Anglo Texas written by Mary Crownover Rabb. In 1823, along with her husband John Rabb, infant child, and eighteen head of cattle, Mary moved from Arkansas to Texas to join Austin's colony. The present memoir was written down by her in 1875; the original manuscript resides at the University of Texas's Briscoe Center for American History.

Besides being an important early account of Texas, the work is a bibliographical oddity. It was published by Waco bookseller W.M. Morrison and printed at the Texian Press, owned in part by Samuel Lanham. According to Morrison's limitation statement, 500 copies of the book were printed before, for unstated reasons, "this first printing had to be rejected." Morrison continues: "I steeled myself with some tranquilizers and performed the odious task of destroying 474 copies." He retained twenty-six copies, giving one to Lanham "for services rendered" and releasing the remainder as a limited edition of twenty-five copies bound in leather; this is number twenty. The introduction to the work was written by legendary Texas playwright Ramsey Yelvington.

"Mary and John settled first on the Colorado River a few miles upstream from the site of the future La Grange, where John's father, William Rabb, had claimed a headright in Austin's colony. Harassed by Indians, they moved eastward to the Brazos River, where John claimed a league of land below the site of present-day Richmond.... The Rabbs established several temporary homes along the Brazos and Colorado rivers. During warm weather they camped out, their shelter a tent made of quilts and a sheet. During winters they built a cabin or stayed with relatives who had one, though Mary recalled spending one winter in a shed that was open on three sides. One of their houses was washed away by a flood. Often Mary and her children were left alone. On such occasions she tended the stock, saw to child-rearing and household chores, and continued the never-ending task of spinning. Karankawa and Tonkawa Indians remained in the area. Mary kept her spinning wheel going to drown out their sounds, which frightened her. Another recurrent fear was that alligators from the Brazos would eat her children" - Handbook of Texas online.

Obviously rare from the beginning, OCLC records eight surviving copies, all in Texas institutions, at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, Denton Public Library, Howard County Library, Lee College, Texas A&M, Houston, UT Arlington, and UT Austin.