In early 1987, as I sat beneath a cluster of giant oak trees near an old Indian crossing on the banks of the Colorado River, near La Grange, TX, I pondered a name for my nearby flourishing garden. After years of back-breaking work, I was soon to become one of the first state- certified organic growers in Texas… now I needed a fitting name for my new business. Remembering tales my mother and grandm
other told me about the Indian blood that coursed my veins, this could have been the same crossing that a wounded Comanche warrior named Hoonktaka, which translates to 'Two Rivers', crossed as he tried to escape the wrath of General Matthew Caldwell’s mounted troops after the battle of Plum Creek near Lockhart, about 4o miles to the west. Hoonktaka had made his way some 30 miles downstream from where I sat, and fate decreed that he and my newly- widowed great- great grandmother would meet; She in a lonely one-room log cabin on the banks of the Colorado, and he shot through the shoulder clinging to life by the slimmest margins. The story was that she had a 12 gauge shotgun aimed at his chest as he crossed the threshold, but didn't shoot. They wound up saving each other. Life went on. And on. All the way to this point of revelation. Comanche Oaks would be my name.
