Welcome to the Engines of Texan.

Episode 5, Comanche Superfood.

I'm Brendan C.

Gail Borden moved through the streets of Galveston, quote,

in breathless haste, a man forever

ahead of himself, end quote, according to one biographer. On this evening in particular in 1847,

he was loudly and excitedly inviting Galvestonians to an impromptu midnight dinner at his house,

sweetening the invitation with the promise of some post-dinner entertainment.

Being a devout Baptist, however, no one mistook Borden's invitation for anything too risque,

but the 36-year-old Gail Borden was well-known enough, and eccentric enough, for people to be intrigued.

Borden was basically the town's founding father, if you set aside the pirate Jean Lafitte,

as the head of the land company that had surveyed and sold off most of the town's lots.

But even before that, ever since his arrival in Texas in 1829,

Gail Borden had always been one of the most widely known men in Anglo, Texas.

Born in western New York in 1801 and raised along the Ohio River, at the age of 19, he had hired on to one of the first steamboats to ply the Ohio Mississippi River, and he worked it all

the way down to New Orleans and back.

It was his first glimpse at the power of a literal engine of history, the steam engine, and the radical way in

which it was revolutionizing the economics of transportation. Earlier watercraft had managed

only maybe one round trip per year to New Orleans, but a steam-powered packet boat could make it

six or eight times. Not surprisingly, freight costs along the Mississippi soon fell from five cents a pound to two cents a pound.

It was as though this great innovation had condensed the world.

In this new world, distance was better measured in steamship days to New Orleans than in miles,

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