Events sometimes required the Catholic priest to use his revolver.
In 1860s Texas, gunfighters, horse thieves, bandits, Rangers, sheriffs, marshals and posses made headlines with their frontier exploits. Working mostly out of the public eye were the farmers, ranchers, businessmen, bankers and others who sought new life and opportunity in the Lone Star State. Among the everyday pioneers were Polish farmers and artisans who in the mid-1850s left their homeland of Upper Silesia (the southeastern tip of the Kingdom of Prussia) due to extreme poverty, inflation, high taxes, government oppression, ethnic discrimination, epidemics and natural disasters. On December 3, 1854, tired and hungry after a nine-week sea voyage on the ship Weser, the first group of Silesian immigrants had a rude awakening on setting foot on the docks at Galveston: No one was there to greet them, no one on the docks spoke Polish, and through German-speaking residents they discovered they were 200 miles from their destination with no way to get there.
Accustomed to hardships, the Poles hired Mexican oxcarts to carry their belongings and made a three-week trek on foot to their chosen location, 55 miles southeast of San Antonio. By Christmas 100 families were ready to celebrate mass at Panna Maria (Polish for the Virgin Mary)—the first Polish settlement in North America. The next year another contingent of Silesian immigrants founded a settlement in Bandera, about 55 miles northwest of San Antonio. By the outbreak of the Civil War some 1,500 Poles lived in Texas. In 1866 Father Adolf Bakanowski arrived in Panna Maria to serve as a spiritual leader there and at other Polish settlements in the region.
Born in 1840 in Mohyliv (in Russian Poland), Bakanowski was ordained a priest in May 1863. Soon after he joined the failed January Uprising against Russia and fled to Italy, where he became a member of the Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In 1866 his superiors chose this political exile to head their Resurrectionist missions in Texas. Traveling with him were fellow political exile Father Vincent Barzynski and cleric Felix Zwiardowski. The parishioners of Panna Maria greeted Bakanowski warmly, for he was fluent in their language, and they had not had the services of a priest for three years.
Bakanowski was ready to serve as needed. His primary role was as a spiritual counselor and father figure to the Polish settlers, but at other times he was a doctor, an exorcist and even an armed defender against attacks. The former revolutionary was no stranger to firearms. Lawlessness reigned in post–Civil War Texas, and thieves bothered the Polish settlers along with other good citizens. “Nothing like this in the old country, Father,” one settler complained to Bakanowski. “There a man gets to a tavern where he can eat and sleep in comfort without having to worry about his horse. Here you have to sleep in the woods with the rattlesnakes, get up every little while to be sure the horses haven’t been stolen or that they haven’t tangled themselves all up.”
Bakanowski packed a revolver with his vestments, rosary and breviary when he traveled between settlements, sometimes as far as 50 or 60 miles, in a small covered carriage. While camped out in the Texas woods, he would cook his food and read his breviary at night, occasionally firing his revolver to dispatch rattlesnakes and scare away coyotes (which he called jackals) and other wildlife. He also found it necessary to brandish the gun to deter aggressive Americans, mostly former Confederates not too fond of the Poles. “On the road, at home and even in church we had no peace from the Americans,” he wrote in his memoirs. “One of them wanted to gallop into the sacristy on his horse and shoot the church up.” Bakanowski usually hung the holstered revolver in plain sight from his saddle, “so that everybody who did not believe in God, would respect my revolver—the American deity—from afar.”
Indians were also a threat. On the long trips to Bandera he traveled with two companions, also armed. If forced to camp overnight in the woods, they would refrain from building a fire for fear of giving away their location. At times the Indians did draw near, but the horses would start, awakening the trio, who then fired their weapons to scare off the intruders.
One day during an Indian raid on Bandera the local pastor, Father Adolf Snigurski, was at home when it came under attack. As arrows rained down on the house, he answered with carbine fire until parishioners, hearing the commotion, arrived and repelled the attackers. One seriously wounded Indian remained behind. Mortified that he may have killed another human being, Snigurski would not resume giving mass until he had received absolution from Bakanowski.
On another occasion a parishioner suffering from a painful rattlesnake bite to the leg begged Bakanowski for help. The father administered the sacraments and then rode home to fetch a flagon of oil, normally used in a small lamp to illuminate a painting of Mary. Back at the home of the snakebite victim, Bakanowski first washed the man’s wounds with warm water and then used a feather to coat the wound with oil. After reassuring his patient, the priest departed. Sure enough, the next day the patient saw the swelling go down and the pain diminish. Two days later the man was well enough to get up and attend church, where he thanked the father.
Bakanowski often rode to San Antonio to minister to Polish parishioners in that growing town. On one visit a distraught woman came to his door at midnight, begging him to hear her confession. Noting the late hour, he asked her to come back another time, but she was insistent, claiming the devil had perched on a neighbor’s fireplace. Bakanowski told her not to worry, as the devil was not in her house. When asked what the devil looked like, the woman replied, “All black with little horns, and he pierced me right through.” The father then gave his instructions: “Well, woman, what you must do is take holy water and go quietly home. Some prankster it must be and not any devil. By now he is probably laughing at you.”
But the woman was in no laughing mood. “I won’t go, Father, if I have to stand here the whole night outside your door,” she insisted. “I’d rather die on your doorstep than in my house or on the street.” The weary Bakanowski finally relented, heard her confession and sent her on her way.
During the four years he spent in Panna Maria, Bakanowski occasionally had to remind his people why they had left their homes in the Old World for the Texas frontier. “Thanks for your Prussian comfort, but you may have it,” he writes in Polish Circuit Rider: The Texas Memoirs of Adolf Bakanowski, 1866–70. “What about freedom there—did you have that? Didn’t you have to work most of the time just for the king? A boy was hardly full-grown when he was carried off to the army, to defend whom and what? Oh, a kingdom that wasn’t his but the Prussians’. To lose his health and even his life, for what? And taxes? Were they light? Do you forget what they taxed you? Sometimes I hear you talking among yourselves how they even took the very pictures from the walls of the poor and the pillows from their beds. Wherever you want to go, you have to get even an affidavit from the voyt [village head]. You can hardly go even to the next village before you’re already a foreigner among your own people, with everybody looking at you askance. I know all about that Prussian freedom of yours! Is there anything you left behind to regret? I prefer it here—uncomfortable but free.”
Father Adolf Bakanowski might have wished to remain on the frontier longer, but his services were needed elsewhere. In 1870 church authorities sent him to Chicago, where he cared for the members of the St. Stanislaus Kostka parish.
Bakanowski was recalled to Rome in May 1873. Meanwhile, a new wave of Polish immigrants came to Texas in the 1870s, and others would follow. The 2000 census noted more than 228,000 Texans of Polish ancestry, making them the seventh largest ethnic group in the state.
Originally published in the December 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.