The Roberts and McCormick children were next-door neighbors all their lives until they got to Texas, and Ike Roberts and Portia McCormick were childhood sweethearts, with Ike being two and a half years older than Portia. When they got to Texas, Ike was eighteen and Portia fifteen. In 1860, Ike’s oldest brother James Henry Roberts (Uncle Jimmy), married Portia McCormick’s older sister Sarah McCormick (Aunt Sack). In 1864, Ike Roberts went to Denton County and married his childhood sweetheart, Portia McCormick. Their daughter, Mary Beatrice Roberts, married William Thomas Graves, and they became Gordon’s grandparents.
Gordon’s parents were schoolteachers. His father, Grady Graves, was a high school football and basketball coach and was always a player of competitive games. Grady taught his son the fun of competing and the pleasure of winning. Graves’s father was active until his death in 2005 at the age of 101. He died on a Wednesday and had a bridge game scheduled for the next Saturday. He loved to win, and if he couldn’t win, he derived pleasure from watching someone else do so…even if it was his opponent.
Of his lineage, Gordon said: “I am a fifth-generation Texan. Like most families that have been in Texas that long, my ancestors were mostly younger siblings, and being younger meant they did not inherit the farm and instead migrated west. My father’s people were of English, Irish and German descent.”
Gordon also spoke about his mother’s lineage. “My mother’s people were French Huguenots. My great-to-the-sixth-power Grandfather Pegus came to Charleston from London as a teenager in 1749 and later became an extremely successful merchant and community leader. Grandfather Pegus served in the Revolutionary Army, and his plantation house is still a preserved landmark outside Charleston. When I was young, a member of my family said I looked and acted like my great-grandfather Benjamin Franklin Pegus. Dannie Pegus’s maternal grandfather, Alfred, was a Dallas policeman.”
Both of Gordon’s maternal great-grandfathers died of a common Texas malady: lead poisoning.
While on duty in Dallas, Alfred was chasing a suspect who jumped on a streetcar. Alfred likewise leaped onto the same streetcar with a cocked gun in hand but dropped it during the jump. The weapon discharged when it hit the floor, and the errant bullet struck Alfred in the chest. He died from the wound within a couple of days.
Gordon’s mother’s paternal grandfather was Benjamin Franklin Pegus. He was a Mississippi River gambler, a U.S. marshal, a businessman and a railroad detective, among other things.
While serving as a marshal, three different railroad companies were laying track to the town of Mineola, Texas (about 200 miles east of Dallas), where Ben resided. He saw the opportunity to make more money there as a marshal, so he resigned from his position and negotiated contracts with all three railroad companies to provide them with crossties. The price Ben worked out included the cost of transporting the ties from Mineola to work sites. As the tracks drew closer to Mineola, Ben’s shipping costs decreased, and his profits soared, making him a small fortune.
When the project ended, Ben became a railroad detective. One day, Ben confronted a man in a bar who had painted a dirty word on a boxcar. Neither man carried a sidearm due to an ordinance prohibiting guns in bars that Ben had enacted while he was a marshal. Patrons had to check their weapons at the door, and a man posted at the door collected weapons. A confrontation over the matter ensued, and Ben knocked the man down. The man fell behind the edge of the bar, where he saw a shotgun the barkeeper kept there. The man grabbed the gun and killed Gordon’s great-grandfather.
About his father’s grandfathers, who were both Texas Rangers, Gordon had this to say: “My maternal grandfather, Isaac Newton Roberts (known in the family as Uncle Ike), came to Stephenville, Texas in 1850 when he was about eighteen. The Frontier Rangers formed in 1861. Ike was about thirty then and had a family. The Rangers did not expect Ike to be a fighting man, so his assignment was as quartermaster. My other great-grandfather, William Mitt Graves, was a Texas Ranger, and there was a good reason for the group to exist. Shortly before the Rangers formed, Mitt was away from the homestead, and my grandmother heard a ruckus outside and opened the door. A Comanche Indian then shot an arrow into the door’s jamb. My grandmother locked the door and got her rifle. The Indians took what they could and left.
“In August 1864, William Mitt Graves was probably one of the twelve Rangers that intercepted thirty Comanche Indians. Three Rangers died during the encounter, and the Indians got away with fifty horses. Uncle Ike and the rest of the men got reinforcements and pursued the Indians to the San Saba Mountains, eventually recovering eighteen of the horses.”
Gordon recounted, “I believe my ancestors went home then, but a few days later, remaining men near Coleman, Texas were able to confront the Indians and recover all the horses.”
The Comanches were probably the best-mounted cavalry, ever. They fought with bow and arrow while many of the Rangers carried the Walker Colt revolver. It was a .44 caliber, black-powder, six-shooter, and at the time was the most powerful handgun in the world. Some Rangers carried two Walkers. The powerful weapon came to be in 1846 as a collaborative effort between Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker, a Texas Ranger, and American firearms inventor Samuel Colt. While the gun was powerful, it had a nasty reputation of sometimes blowing up in the hand of the shooter, and production soon ceased.
It was likely Quanah Parker (a renowned Comanche leader in later years) was with the Indians the Rangers encountered. He was about nineteen then, and a member of the Nocona (which means wanderers) tribe. His mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, became a captive of the Comanches when she was taken from Parker County near Fort Worth in May of 1826 when she was nine years old. The Comanche assimilated her into the tribe, and she married the chief, Peta Nacona, when she came of age.
About his Grandfather Graves, Gordon said: “Grandfather Graves had four brothers. He was the youngest. He had no relationship with his siblings that I know of. They were dirt farmers at a time when plows were mule-driven, and farmers suffered the sentence of hard labor for life. Grandfather did not work in the field. When he was a teenager, his mother was an invalid. Others in the family designated Grandfather to care for her rather than work in the field. This was fortuitous as his mother taught him to read and motivated him to become a teacher. His brothers were likely frustrated that they were destined to live out their lives in near poverty as dirt farmers.”
Gordon commented, “Grandfather was a schoolteacher and a Baptist preacher. Following his teaching career, he became a county judge and later a Texas state legislator. I never met a man who didn’t like hearing the title of judge, especially if he had been one. My grandfather, William Thomas Graves (known to many as W.T.), preferred the handle of Uncle Billy by his relatives but preferred the children to call him Pappy. Even then, I knew and could tell that W.T. enjoyed hearing the Judge Graves moniker; it gave him special pride. The title has a particular gravitas because the people have chosen this person to make decisions that will immediately change people’s lives for better or worse.”
May Beatrice Roberts, Gordon’s grandmother, was born and lived practically her entire life in Valley Grove just south of Stephenville, Texas. She and W.T. lived in Pony Creek when he taught school in that community around 1942, but it wasn’t long before they were back in Valley Grove. They bought a piece of property just west of Uncle John Roberts’s farm and east of the Valley Grove Baptist Church. That’s where they lived when Gordon was growing up. Gordon recalled, “My brother Robert and I stayed with them during the summer of 1946. Granddad was in his mid-seventies then, and they knew how to tend to the kids. We had a great time feeding chickens, gathering eggs, picking corn and digging up potatoes. We visited with relatives, who were mostly grandmother’s nieces and nephews. We called them Uncle Billy and Aunt May. We went to church a lot.”
Gordon continued, “I got to know William Thomas Graves very well. After he had a stroke in 1956, it became my responsibility to take care of him. I took him out of bed, carried him to the toilet, and cleaned him up. Our relationship changed, and he talked to me about many things. He said to me one day, ‘You hate doing this, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do hate it. You have always been my hero.’ He recovered from that stroke and lived to the age of ninety-one.”
I spoke with Bill Graves, Gordon’s younger brother, five