Episode 49: Jane Wilson’s Incredible Journey
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2018
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In early 1853, Jane Wilson and her new husband James set out with 62 others to strike it rich in California. They never made it. After two months of traveling they reached El Paso where successful thieves ruined their dreams of fortune. They decided to return to East Texas but what seemed like the end of a dream was just the beginning of a new nightmare. Hear tales of murder, torture at the hands of Indian captors, rescues by comancheros and friendly Indian tribes, starvation, thirst, and ultimately survival. Join Jane Wilson on her incredible journey and learn what tough really means in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do you and welcome to Wise about Texas the Texas history podcast. I'm your host Ken Wise and I want to thank you very much |
| 0:15.1 | for tuning into this episode and for your interest in Texas history. I also want to thank all the |
| 0:20.5 | listeners who provided feedback about the Crazy Ben |
| 0:23.9 | Oliver episode that is a fun story everybody loves buried treasure and |
| 0:28.3 | pirates so if you haven't heard it go back to the last episode and learn about some potentially buried treasure around Galveston, Texas. |
| 0:36.2 | That treasure is out there somewhere and somebody needs to go find it. |
| 0:39.8 | One of the things that I like to do on this podcast is tell interesting stories that occur in the context of the bigger events in Texas history because it's impossible to do a 20 or 30 minute or even an hour episode really on so many of the big |
| 0:55.8 | events in Texas history and consider them covered fully and finally. |
| 0:59.9 | And I think attempting to do that probably does more of a disservice to the event and the people |
| 1:05.8 | involved. |
| 1:07.3 | So what I've decided to do, and I've mentioned this to you listeners before, is I've decided to tell stories that occur within the bigger |
| 1:16.8 | aspects of Texas history. I'm gonna I'm working on a couple of episodes about |
| 1:20.4 | Sam Houston we're not gonna cover Sam Houston in one, you know, two or three part |
| 1:25.2 | episode. We're going to just tell stories about Sam Houston and hopefully you put all those |
| 1:29.7 | together and you get a real good picture of the man. Well today we're going to do the same thing |
| 1:33.3 | with a little bit different event. We're going to head into the Texas frontier in the |
| 1:37.5 | middle 1800s and the Indian Wars that occurred in Texas from its founding till the late 1800s. And today I'm going to tell you |
| 1:45.8 | an incredible story of hope and survival about one of the toughest women you will ever hear |
| 1:51.0 | of. So let's go back to 1853 and get wise about Texas. |
| 1:57.6 | The heroin of our story is named Jane Adeline Wilson. She was born June 12th, 1837 in Alton, Illinois. |
| 2:06.5 | Alton is right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. She had nine siblings, three of whom did not live to adulthood, but her family |
| 2:17.6 | ended up moving to Missouri and then later to Paris, Texas, up in Lamar County, where her mother and father unfortunately |
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