"She rode a white horse..."

Ima Hogg loved horses all her life. She was an accomplished horsewoman. Sometimes she rode a white horse named “Joe,” a gift to J.  S. Hogg from the governor of Tennessee. Joe was “a gaited horse, a plantation horse, always beautifully groomed so he was a picture under a saddle.” Ima’s brothers were not allowed to ride this horse. Sometimes Ima would ride horseback from the 19^th-Street house all the way out to Mount Bonnell, on the outskirts of Austin. That was a ride of about eight miles, there and back.

A University of Texas classmate remembered Ima riding her horse across the campus in  “a black close fitting riding-habit that only a woman of superb physique could carry off to perfection, the shining beaver [hat] with its fluttering veil, the gauntlets, the riding-crop, the long sweep of the robe over the feet, the erect and of necessity a bit unnatural carriage in the side saddle. Ima Hogg, unapproachable as she appeared seen atop the gallant steed, was in reality a charming freshman ”                                    

Vacationing in Colorado in 1900, Ima found a pair of horses she wanted to buy, and she wrote to ask her father. He wrote back immediately:

Find out what is the least price that will purchase them delivered at Austin. Are they stylish and good matches? About what will they weigh each? How do they hold their heads? What are their gaits? Do they work single or double? How many times have they run away? What are their ages? How many and what kinds of brands are on them? Have they been scarred, crippled, wind-galled, spavined or stove-up? Have they had the “swiny,” fistula or big-shoulder? Are they poor or fat? Have they long or short tails and manes? Have they a pedigree and if so what is it? From your intimation I infer that you would like to have them, and doubtless you will take an interest in them sufficient to find out the answers to these questions and let me know them. I rather inclined to tell you to buy the horses if you want them on your own judgment and that I will pay for them but upon reconsideration I concluded that it would be best for you to first furnish me with the desired information about them, so that I can pass upon the question of purchase myself.

J. S. Hogg loved his daughter, but he was a shrewd horse-trader.

        

"When a lady goes with a gentleman...."

When Ima began to go out with young men, her father was ready with advice. He wrote to her from New York in February 1900:

                                            

         When a lady goes with a gentleman she is safe in fact and also against suspicion and criticism. A gentleman is known by his general reputation in the community where he lives or by his acts or language when he is a girl’s escort. If his reputation is bad the lady who permits him to accompany her must share it with him. If his reputation is good, yet his language or conduct is bad while an escort or at other times, the woman who finds this out must take notice and avoid his attentions in the future. While alone a couple must act and talk with more circumspection than while in the presence of others. – I do not feel that it is at all necessary to say this much to you, for I have all along known you to be sensible, prudent, and well-poised. It cannot be amiss however to present these general suggestions for your own reflection in the light of the well known axiom that a woman’s character is her capital. When it is bad she is poor indeed. Yours is a fine one. I know you will always prudently guard it and from that source draw many of the genuine pleasures of life.

        

         A few years later, one of Ima’s suitors wrote her a letter, remminiscing the good times they had in Austin in their university days--especially sitting on the high stone steps of St. Mary’s Seminary in the “richest, mellowest moonlight,” when he and Ima “talked and talked of things and things. . . .”

        

         Ima may not have told her father everything.

"Two joyous years"

When 17-year-old Ima vacationed in Colorado her father had cautioned her to “let buggy rides alone” except with her cousin Pearl. But the next year she was a freshman at the University of Texas, and young men began to call at the 19^th-Street house in the evenings. Ima’s father established a routine:

Promptly at ten o’clock he went up to his bedroom when I was old enough to have young men callers. At ten o’clock a heavy dropping of shoes would be a signal for the caller’s departure.        

         Some of those suitors took Ima to dances:

         Every Saturday night we went to a German [a cotillion with elaborate dance steps] or hop, held usually over one of the fire-stations. The Driskill was reserved for the commencement balls. Sometimes there were hops on weeknights. –-Nobody drank alcoholic beverages at a dance—nor did a boy smoke without asking the girl’s permission.

         The dance halls were crowded and there was competition for a boy to get his name on the dance card, consequently there were more extras signed up for each dance sometimes, breaking in as much as three times.

         It was an unwritten law that no one drank at a dance. My escort one night didn’t appear at once for his second dance so my extra on the card was entitled to break in. But I preferred to wait a little. When my date did appear I smelled liquor on his breath and I was not allowed to dance with him. I went home with another of his fraternity brothers. The following Sunday afternoon his whole fraternity called with him to apologize.

         The second year ended with some five or six balls—fraternity balls—and then the big final ball at the Driskill. There had to be a different dress for each ball. Dancing didn’t begin until around ten o’clock p.m. and it lasted until the wee hours. Some dancers even went to a restaurant for breakfast. I usually arrived home near daylight ready for a nap. . . .

As she wrote of her university days,“Those were two joyous years.”

Ima Hogg was no wallflower.

The New House: "There was nothing elegant about it."

After the term at the Coronal Institute ended in the spring of 1896, Ima, Mike, and Tom were once again back in Austin in the clutches of the redoubtable Aunt Fannie. But they were in a new house: Jim Hogg had bought a two-and-a-half story house on a large lot on the northeast corner of Rio Grande and West 19^th Street (now Rio Grande and Martin Luther King Boulevard). As Ima remembered this house, "There was nothing elegant about it, but [it was] in an excellent neighborhood and plenty of ground for a small orchard, a barn for horses and cows and chickens and ducks and a flower garden." Across the street the Hoggs could watch the construction of an impressive Classic Revival mansion, completed in 1899, by Dr. Goodall Wooten, the brother of their family physician Dr. Thomas Wooten. (The Hoggs’ house site is now an apartment complex, but the Wooten house is now The Mansion at Judges Hill, an Austin boutique hotel.)

Streets around the house were still unpaved, but a trolley car ran past it on Rio Grande Street. Just up the hill from the University of Texas campus, the house was a prime Austin location. As Ima wrote years later: “Father was so busy at his office downtown on Congress Avenue [that] he knew little of what was going on in the house.” To get to his office from his new house on 19^th and Rio Grande, the ex-Governor took Joe, the Tennessee walking horse, and the buggy, or he used the streetcar which ran on Rio Grande Street and made a circuit South and North going over to Lavaca. The younger Hogg children did not often ride the streetcar, as Ima recalled, because it was “a tedious trip” and they “had rather use the car fare for chili or tamales after school.”

Now that they had a home in Austin again, Ima, Mike, and Tom began attending school there in the fall of 1896. Will was a student at the University of Texas, just down the hill.

As for Aunt Fannie, as Ima recalled, she “did her best to keep house—but that was not her forte." She moved in with "a number of canary birds to sing for her" and she "looked after them religiously."

She also taught Ima to sew, and to make her own clothes.  As Ima remembered: The only compensation for that was, I was free to select my own materials. Mother’s example had given me a taste for pretty fabrics. I can’t speak for my creations, but I studied the pictures on the old “Bon Ton” fashion magazines and did the best I could until I was ready to graduate from Miss Carrington’s school. Then I protested . . . . I went to Father and asked him if I could have my simple white dress made by a good dressmaker for my graduation. Of course I could, so that ended my own dressmaking.

Jim Hogg could not deny his only daughter anything. 

"We children stood completely in awe of her."

In September 1895 Martha Francis Davis accompanied her brother, his children, and Sallie’s body back to Austin. It is not clear if Jim Hogg had asked her, or if she had volunteered to help care for his motherless brood. But she took over, and what had been a merry and rambunctious household soon changed. Ima wrote that her aunt “was evidently not prepared by experience or nature to have charge of such undisciplined children as she found us to be. While Father was away from home during the day, she was using all her strength of will and ingenuity to train the two younger boys and myself. She believed in giving us chores and filing every idle moment when out of school, with some duties. She was a woman of great intellectual attainments, high ideals and determination. She had been a beauty in her day, a belle and a leader. Her efforts served mainly to make the children unhappy.”

For example, when a little boy said to 13-year-old Ima, “That’s a pretty dress you have on, and you look pretty in it.” Aunt Fannie said: “Ima, you are not pretty. You will never be pretty, and you must never let anyone tell you so.”

It was Aunt Fannie who told Ima that she must never marry. In her eighties, when someone asked “Miss Ima” why she had never married, she said, “When I was a girl, tuberculosis was thought to be hereditary. My mother died of tuberculosis, and I thought I should never have children.”

Then, with wry humor, she made light of it:  “But, you know, it’s just as well. I always liked a handsome man, and none of my beaux was any good! But I do regret the children.”

        

In her memoir, Ima wrote more about her formidable aunt: Aunt Fannie “was a constant reader and flattered herself that she could entertain the boys successfully with Plutarch’s Lives and juvenile versions of the lives of heroes. So she read aloud whenever she was able to seize any opportunity. She had been brought up with brothers, I am sure, as lively as these little boys, but evidently did not understand their nature. . . . Father must have sensed the depressing effect she had on the children.”

         The Hogg children never breathed a word of complaint to their father. But Jim Hogg made a decision: he would put the younger children in boarding school. Six weeks after Sallie’s death, Ima, Mike, and Tom, escorted by Aunt Fannie, left Austin on the train for San Marcos and the Coronal Institute. A private Hill Country school founded in 1868, the Coronal had about 300 students in grades 1-12. But for children who had so recently lost their mother, it must have been a traumatic experience to be suddenly uprooted from home and placed in the unfamiliar surroundings of a boarding school.

Aunt Fanny was still “a welcome visitor” in the Hogg household as well as the households of her other relatives. But “She always commanded the situation, however, in whatever home she was, but the families seemed to understand. . . . We children . . . stood completely in awe of her.”

"My mind was filled with horror."

         

In the summer of 1895 Sallie Hogg’s bronchitis would not go away, and she finally consulted Dr. Adolph Herff, a specialist in San Antonio. There the unwelcome diagnosis came: Sallie had something far worse than bronchitis: she had tuberculosis. In those days, the disease was often a death sentence. Years later, Ima Hogg recalled that difficult time:  “It was a great blow to Father,” she said. “I was with Mother all the time when she was ill, and my mind was filled with horror.”

Ima and Sallie set out immediately for Pueblo, Colorado to visit Dr. William Davis and his family, accepting the invitation his mother, “Aunt Fannie” had issued earlier. There, everyone hoped, Dr. Davis and the dry Colorado air would surely cure what ailed Sallie.

         Soon after she reached Pueblo, Sallie wrote to her eldest son, trying to assuage his worries about her: “William has started me on a tonic that he says will soon bring me out of the woods. . . . I believe I am going to get fat and well up here.”

         But the weeks passed, and she did not get well. Tuberculosis was a mysterious, serious illness little understood until well into the 20^th century. Sallie's long history of ailments, with a dramatic weight loss in the last year of her life, was probably tuberculosis, though oddly enough, no one in her family contracted the disease. There were no X-rays in Sallie's day to help with diagnosis.  A German physicist discovered electromagnetic radiation in 1895, and X-rays were in use by World War I. Effective treatment of tuberculosis with antibiotics did not occur until the 1940s.

         Ima celebrated her 13^th birthday on July 10, but at her mother’s bedside it was not a happy one.  In late August a telegram brought Jim Hogg and Will, Mike, and Tom to Pueblo. Sarah Ann Stinson Hogg died on September 20, 1895. She was 41 years old.

         There must have been farewells, last words, between Sallie and her husband and children, but they were not recorded.  Perhaps because her last days were such a sad time to recall, no one wrote much about them, then or afterward.        

A telegram carried the news of Sallie’s death to Austin, and a train took her body, accompanied by her husband, children, and “Aunt Fannie” back to that city for burial. Early Tuesday morning, September 24, the train was met by a “committee of citizens.” The funeral service for Sallie Stinson Hogg was held at the Governor’s Mansion at 10 a.m., and the state offices remained closed until two o’clock that afternoon. Sallie was buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery

         Sallie’s death left Jim Hogg a widower at 44, with 4 children: Will was 20, Ima, 13, Mike, 10, and Tom, 8.

"Her mother was reading a book...."

After the 1894 tour of U.S. cities, Texas’s Governor James Stephen Hogg and his daughter Ima were nationally known, and so was Ima’s name. Throughout the 1890s newspapers around the nation printed stories printed stories about Governor Hogg of Texas, who had daughters named Ima, Ura, and Shesa, and sons variously named Hesa, Harry, or Moore. The Galveston Daily News quoted New York papers about “Eura” and “Moore” Hogg. The New Oxford Item in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and the Richwood Gazette in Richwood, Ohio, remarked on Ima and her oddly-named siblings.

When the editor of a Chicago paper wrote to Hogg asking about his children’s names, Ima’s father replied:

         “I beg to advise you that the names of my children are William, Ima, Mike and Tom—three boys and one girl—whose ages are, respectively, 21, 14, 11, and 9 years. . . . The names of Ura, Hesa, Shesa, Harry, and Moore Hogg are the mythical creatures of campaigners who failed to beat me for office.”

That was not the last word: As an item in the Fayetteville [North Carolina] Observer noted a few days later:

“Ex-Governor Hogg of Texas takes the trouble to write to a Chicago paper that he has no children named Ura, Hesa, and Sheesa, but admits that he has a daughter named Ima. This seems to give his whole case away. . . .”

But the name stories would not go away. A few years later, ex-Governor Hogg told a journalist who asked about his daughter’s name:  “The truth of the matter is, that she was named by her mother. Her mother was reading a book somewhere in which one of the characters which interested her exceptionally was named Ima. About that time the little girl came along, and she was named Ima. We never noticed the play of her name until it was called to our attention.”

          

         But Ima had another version of her naming: she said that her father named her to honor the memory of his late brother, Thomas Elisha Hogg. author of  “The Fate of Marvin,” a poem about the Civil War. In it there was a heroine named Ima.

         Hmmmm.