Husband - John Calhoun Bagwell
Suggested edit: A Brief Life Sketch Of Dr. J. C. Bagwell And Family In Texas, And The Early Panhandle, As Told To His Children, And As Remembered By The Children

(Source: History of Armstrong County, Vol. 2 (1939) transcribed by Susan Geist)
In attempting to write any one's life history or even the history of any event one is at the very first confronted with the problem of assembling the necessary from the unnecessary, and then your trouble is afain increased by the fact that if the events are covered by a period of many yers, they are usually so clouded by a haze of obscurity that it is very difficult to get at the true status of your subject. And when you attempt to trace a brief history that dates back over a period of nearly seventy years, the writer is compelled to rely not upon facts that are well known to him, but to a great extent upon what someone else has handed down to him, and a story of this nature is no different from that of any other story, the more times that it is told and the more to whom it is told, the greater it becomes, and the more different versions of very fact one encounters as he tried to weed out the facts from the purely fiction.

So in attempting to sketch a brief history of our Father and Mother after they arrived in the State of Texas, and more particularly in the Panhandle, we are compelled to depend upon a some what clouded history, as the nearly fifty years in the Panhandle itself, is no little time when compared with the brief span of human life, but again, it may have not been so long, just seemed a long time to those who came here in an early day.

Mother was gorn on the -th day of October, 185-, not far distant from where Father was born, but the exact place, I do not know. So both of them lived at a time and in a place where the very vivid memories of the Civil War left its indelible impression on their early memoirier, and the extreme hardships that immediately followed the closing of the war which they both endured, in a way fitted them both to adjust themselves to the hardships that always accompany those who are pioneers in any new country.

Their early childhood was spent in a near the place of their births, and as that happened to be in the direct path of the famous General Sherman's march to the sea, they were therefore early accustomed to the hardships that spread generally over the entire Southland immediately following the close of the war and for some time afterwards and these conditions early caused them to desire to go to some new land where they would have better conditions in which to rear their family.
The trip to the Panhandle from Cooke County, Texas, where they first stayed, took about twenty days as they came over land, in a two-horse wagon, as this was before the horse and buggy days, They bought with all of their stock, which I am told consisted of about forty head of cattle, and a few horses, and if I remember correctly, one yellow family dog, otherwise known as Tige. Judging from the time that they were on the road and as they had to drive the stock slowly, they could only have made about fifteen miles a day, which I presume was pretty good time for their entire distance.
The writer only has a very vague recollection of the trip here, and most of what I think that I now know of the trip is mostly hear-say, and in all probabilities I do not actually remember, that somewhere, on the way, that Tom tried his hand at bronch riding, and as he was rather too young for such work, he tried his hand on two year cold, and somehow the cold did not like his manner of handling young colts, so the final result was that the colt threw Tom off, and Mother thought that he was surely killed, and from the face that he made, I thought that he was ruined for life. Another occurance that I think that I remember that happened on the way here, was about Elmer and his rheumatism. He had for time been bothered with rheumatism in his right shoulder and arm, on the way here, probably due to the sleeping out in the damp, it became worse and Mother resorted to an old fashioned remedy and made him wear a red-flannel undershirt, and of course this red-flannel would scratch and irritate the skin and worry him a great deal, especially when he got hot, and he told Mother that he could see that the rheumatism was bad enough and that he could see no sense in aggravating his troubles by wearing that darned old shirt, but Mother was not to be argued with regarding a remedy that had cured so many in the years past and gone, so consequently Elmer wore the red-flannel, and entertained us all by constant scratching, much complaining, although so far as I now know, the aches and pains of his rheumatism remained with him to keep his mind off that red-flannel under shirt. In later years I have heard it intimated that famous shirt disappeared somewhere in or near Pease River, but as to what actually happened to that shirt, Elmer's mind like mine is somehat hazy, and he says that he does not remember what became of it. Its disappearance was one of Mother's unsolved mysteries.
The cold hand of death has three times made its unwelcome visit to our home, and twice almost at the same time. Howard and Ola, were taken sick with diphtheria, both practically at the same time, and as that happened to be a disease for which these was no speedy cure at that time, as anti-diphtheria-serums, were just beginning to come onto the market, and none were kept in the towns at that time, they finally got some from Chicago, but it was too late to do either any good. Howard died one day, and Ola, the next, some time in the year 1900, and in March, I believe, I do not remember the exact date at this time. They were buried side by side, on our old home place on the Flats. And again on the early morning of August the 28th, 1935 Mother too, passed to her reward in the great beyond. She was buried in the cemetery at Claude. The graves of Howard and Ola, were many years ago moved to Claude and reburied in the same cemetery, which will in all probabilities become the final resting place of many more members of our family as the years slowly take their toll of the living. Besides our Father, there now seven of the children living, and most of whom now make their homes in and around Claude.
Contributor: Sherry (47010546)