Ep. 52: Basil Muse Hatfield, The First Admiral of the Trinity
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Trinity River flows from roughly Fort Worth to Trinity Bay in Chambers County. For several years boats navigated the river but never all the way. Several attempts were made to promote the Trinity River as a commercial asset but none were more enthusiastic than the 2-year, 9000 mile, yes 9000 mile, journey of Basil Muse Hatfield. The grandson of a San Jacinto veteran and steamboat man, Hatfield boasted a family that not only had many “Basil Muse’s” but also one of the most famous “Devil’s” in American history. He fought wars in South Africa, South America and China, hunted ivory and mined diamonds in Africa, mined silver in Mexico and even studied with Tibetan Lamas. Or so he claimed. He did find oil in Texas. One of the great characters of Texas, meet Basil Muse Hatfield, the First Admiral of the Trinity, in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast. I'm your host Ken Wise and I want to thank you |
| 0:14.7 | very much for tuning in to learn a little something about Texas. We just got through |
| 0:19.6 | the 180 second anniversary of the Texas Revolution. I'm releasing this |
| 0:23.2 | podcast in 2018 shortly after San Jacino Day. I hope everyone listening had a |
| 0:29.1 | great San Jacino Day. I went of course to the San Jacinto Monument for the official state |
| 0:34.3 | celebration. Wouldn't miss it. It was a lovely day, a little bit of rain, but it did not |
| 0:38.4 | put any damper on the festivities. Be sure and put the San Jacinto Day celebration on your calendar for next year. |
| 0:45.3 | I had the opportunity to give the keynote address at the annual Gala benefiting the San Jacinto Museum. |
| 0:51.4 | That was a ton of fun great Texas history crowd |
| 0:54.4 | president of the Texas State Historical Association was there the |
| 0:58.4 | direct executive director was there was a wonderful time. San Jacino is something that we definitely should celebrate all through the year, |
| 1:06.0 | but especially around the April 21st anniversary, and I hope everyone did that. |
| 1:11.0 | I also want to mention a new podcast called Legends of the Old West started by a |
| 1:16.2 | friend of mine who lives in Brenham his name is Chris Wimmer Chris is a very |
| 1:20.0 | talented writer and producer and he's created a very unique Old West podcast. |
| 1:24.7 | He's telling stories from the great history of the Old West and it's very engaging and |
| 1:31.6 | sometimes dramatic and it's a ton of fun to listen to. |
| 1:34.9 | So if you're into Old West history, which of course will include some Texas, |
| 1:39.3 | then you need to check out the Legends of the Old West podcast. I actually had an opportunity to be |
| 1:44.3 | interviewed by Chris for his third episode which has been released and he did an |
| 1:50.0 | episode on some of the Texas Ranger, early Texas Ranger stories and then we had an |
| 1:56.7 | interview afterwards that was a lot of fun to do and matched up well with a couple |
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