Trail
Drivers, Cowboys, Merchants, and Ranchers Descendants of Thomas Bailey Saunders (1816-1902) of Texas
The Sanders
of Randolph and Montgomery have many branches of the family tree
around the country, including several in Texas, but
the descendants of Thomas Bailey Saunders have an especially
storied place
in the annals of cowboy traditions, stock raising and ranching in
Texas. This history began in 1850 when Thomas Bailey Saunders and his
wife Emily Harper Saunders moved their family in an ox driven wagon
from Yalobusha County,
Misssissippi, to Gonzales County, Texas, taking
a small herd of cattle with them. The family settled at Rancho in
Gonzales County until 1859 when they moved to a ranch on Lost Creek in
Goliad County, remaining there until 1880, and then moved to eastern
Bexar County about four miles from the town of Sayers and
seventeen miles from downtown San Antonio to a place that
eventually became known as Saunders Station because it was on the Gulf
Shore Railroad. The couple had eleven children in all, most of
whom were active in ranching, farming, cattle driving, and related
business activities. Thomas B. Saunders remained a cattleman all
his life and his family became increasingly properous as he
took advantage of the growth of the industry when the big
cattle drives expanded after the Civil War.
Thomas Bailey Saunders was born October 9, 1816, the son of Nimrod
Saunders and Mary Elizabeth Ricketts. Although some accounts state that
he was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, it appears more likely he
was born in Montgomery County, North Carolina, where his parents were
living at the time. Four Sanders brothers, including Thomas Bailey's
grandfather William Aaron Saunders, had moved to the
Randolph/Montgomery area of North Carolina from Virginia just before
the Revolutionary War. Thomas Bailey's father Nimrod Saunders
owned a grist mill and
was
known as "Honest Rod." Nimrod and Mary Elizabeth had fifteen
children, born between 1803 and 1829. In the 1830s many of the
Sanders (or Saunders as the name was alternatively spelled) living in
Randolph and Montgomery counties in North Carolina
moved to Alabama to take advantage of the opening of Cherokee Indian
lands for white settlement. Many moved to Jackson County in the
northeastern part of the state but Nimrod and his family settled first
in Cherokee County, Georgia, and then moved to Cherokee County,
Alabama, where he and his wife died at some point between 1860 and
1870. Their son Thomas Bailey Saunders married Emily Harper on August
25, 1841 in Jefferson County, Alabama, and then moved to Yalobusha
County, Mississippi, and remained there until the relocation to Texas.
Thomas Bailey Saunders' middle name of Bailey was taken from the maiden
name of his grandmother, Joan Bailey. Thomas Bailey stated in a letter
written in the late 1890s that his grandmother was from the "famous old
Bailey family of Virginia." Evidently, he was quite proud of his Bailey
family heritage, though no one today seems to know what the Baileys
were supposed to be famous for or even which of the many Bailey
families in Virginia was associated with the Saunders family. As they
spread out from their ancestral home in North Carolina to Alabama other
states, many of the Saunders cousins of Thomas Bailey Saunders switched
to the more simplified spelling of "Sanders" rather than "Saunders,"
but TBS and his children and descendants almost invariably retained the
"u" in the surname. Thomas Bailey Saunders was not the
first of his line to come to Texas. His second cousin, William
Hamilton Sanders, had arrived in East Texas in 1835, and several
other cousins were in the state before the Civil War. Thomas Bailey
Saunders, however, was the family member who moved the farthest west,
to "cattle
country."
One of his sons, George
Washington Saunders (1854-1933), expanded his interests far
beyond those of a
cowboy, rancher, or stockman. On his tenth birthday his father
gave him ten catttle of his own and by 1871, he was driving
cattle to Kansas as part of a thriving business. He later served
as a deputy sheriff and organized a livestock commission business which
grossed over five million dollars a year and which continued to operate
until 1958, enabling him to acquire considerable land holdings and
several ranches. He was a civic leader in San Antonio who served
on the city council and other public boards and committees and promoted
many public improvements. He corresponded with many notable people of
the day, such as the humorist Will Rogers, Queen Marie of Romania, and
the sculptor of Mount Rushmore Gutzon Borglum. He was instrumental in
organizing the Trail
Drivers Association of Texas and in publishing a book of memoirs
by elderly trail drivers which remains a classic to this
day.
George Washington's brother, William David Harris Saunders, wrote an
article in that book The Trail
Drivers of Texas in which he gave a
brief biography of his own life: "I was born in Yalobusha County,
Mississippi, March 1, 1845, and came to Texas with my parents in 1850,
locating in Gonzales County. Although quite small at that time, I
remember when crossing the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, a fire
started on the boat and there was great excitement on board. The
passengers succeeded in extinguishing the fire before it gained
much headway. We moved to Goliad County in 1859. I was married June 27,
1866, to Miss Annie New in Bee County, Texas. To us were born twelve
children, eleven of whom are yet living. I was engaged in the
mercantile business in Bee County several years, later moving to
Sayers, Bexar County, in 1884, where I was postmaster and merchant for
twenty years."
Of the twelve children of William David Harris Saunders and Anne New,
one was born September 23, 1872, and named Thomas after his uncle,
Thomas Bailey Sanders. However, although the middle initial of the
younger Thomas was "B," it it not at all certain that his middle name
was "Bailey." He was generally regarded as "Tom B.
Saunders II by everyone in the family, but his World War I draft
registration card
has his middle name as "Boney" which was the middle name of his
maternal grandfather, James Boney New.
At any rate, Thomas B. Saunders II(1872-1929) carried forward the
family involvement in the cattle business. He moved from San Antonio to
Fort Worth and started a cattle dealing business at the Fort Worth
Stockyards, a business that continued for seventy-five years. At one
time he operated ranches in four different counties and by World
War I was reported to be the largest cattle dealer in the United
States. He and his wife Harriet Jane Straw had only two children, one
of whom is the third Thomas B. Saunders.
Tom B. Saunders III's birth record in 1906 in Tarrant County,
Texas, doesn't give his middle name, but he always maintained that his
middle name was Bailey. Like his namesakes, he carried on the family
business at the Fort Worth Stockyards and he was involved in ranching
operations in several counties near Fort Worth. He was one of the
founders of the National
Cutting Horse Association and served as its
president. He also developed an
interest in genealogy and conducted extensive correspondence by
typewriter in those pre-Internet days trying to find out more about his
Saunders ancestors. The letter written by his great grandfather Thomas
Bailey Sanders I in the 1890s was his starting point but he also worked
with some of the research material provided a generation earlier by
Silvie
Escat Saunders who was married to George Allen Saunders, a grandson
of the first Thomas Bailey Saunders. She had been interested in
preserving family genealogical records since she married into the
family in 1902. Oddly,
neither Tom B. Saunders III nor Syvie Saunders seems to have
delved very deeply into the genealogy of the
Reverend Moses Sanders who
was well known to Sanders genealogists and was the great-uncle of the
first Thomas Bailey Saunders.
Tom B Saunders III married Virginia Lines Poindexter in 1931 in Tarrant
County, Texas and they had two children: Anne, who married Jim Calhoun,
a
well-known rancher and cowboy; and Thomas Bailey Saunders IV. The
fourth Tom B. continued the family tradition of involvement in the
cattle business, beginning as a youngster driving cattle to the
scales in the Fort Worth Stockyards. After graduating from
Oklahoma State University, he went into business with his
brother-in-law, Jim Calhoun, and they later operated cattle leases
of over 30,000 acres in Parker, Tarrant, Johnson, and Mason counties.
He was a director of the Southwestern
Cattle Raisers for many years and
has served as a director of the Fort Worth Stockyards for nearly forty
years. With the photographer David Stocklein, he was the author ofThe Texas Cowboys: cowboys of the Lone
Star State which was named one of the best coffee table books of
1997. He and his wife, Ann Osborne Saunders, worked to
preserve the western and cowboy heritage of their family, the
community, and the state of Texas. Tom B. Saunders IV died on February
1, 2018.
The son of Tom B. IV and Ann Osborne is the fifth Thomas B.
Saunders. He has spent his entire adult life in ranching in Parker
County, Texas, specializing in training horses. His company provides
cast and stunt animals for TV and movies from his headquarters in the
Twin
V Ranch of Parker County, established by his grandfather in 1929. Tom
B. Saunders' wife Lynn Hay Saunders also comes from a family with a
ranching tradition, as she is the second great granddaughter of the
legendary rancher William
Thomas Waggoner.
