THE WALSER LINE IN HOWARD'S
WRITINGS -
EXCERPTS FROM
LETTERS AND ESSAYS


 
 



Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, circa September 1929: I wear a Norman name myself and I am as proud of my close kinship with the Norman-Irish Martins of Galway as I am of my kinship with the Dano-Irish O'Walsers and the pure Gaelic Ervins, Colliers, and O'Terrals.

"A TOUCH OF TRIVIA", (circa 1930): Well, I am largely Gaelic; Irish, and Scotch-Irish, and Norman-Irish, and Anglo-Irish, and straight Norman, with a touch of the Dane - Dano-Irish, from a red-headed great-grandmother.

Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, circa April 1930:

One of my great-grandfathers was born somewhere on the Atlantic ocean between the coast of Kerry and New York - I mean, my great-great-grandfather - he was of the old Gaelic family of the MacEnry. He married Anna O'Tyrrell, who was born in Connaught. Another of my great-great-grandfathers was born in Georgia of Scotch-Irish parents. Another was born in Denmark and he married an Irish-American woman in Mississippi. But enough of that; I didnt start out to give my family tree - only to illustrate the unlikelihood of our ancestors to perform according to the mandates of pure racial lineage. Looking back over three hundred years I can find only one member of the family who did not trace his line back to Ireland, whether his name was English, Irish or Scotch - the red bearded Danish giant who was one of my great-great-grand-fathers.

Robert E. Howard to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, circa September 1930:

My branch of the Howards came to America in 1733 and the first of the American line married an Irish girl, an example from which no Howard has since deviated, to my knowledge. Behind my English name are lines of purely Gaelic Eiarbhins, O'Tyrrells, Colquhouns, MacEnrys, and Norman-Irish Martuins, De Colliers, FitzHenrys. Yet there is a Scandinavian strain at [sic] me, for one of the MacEnrys of my line married the daughter of an Irish woman and a red-bearded Dane who first opened his eyes on the cold shores of the Skaggerack.

Robert E. Howard to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, circa October 1930:

    My branch of the Howards came to America with Oglethorpe [in] 1733 and lived in various parts of Georgia for over a hundred years. In '49 three brothers started for California. On the Arkansaw River they split up, one went on to California where he lived the rest of his life, one went back to Georgia and one, William Benjamin Howard, went to Mississippi where he became an overseer on the plantations of Squire James Harrison Henry, whose daughter he married. In 1858, he moved, with the Henry's [sic], to southwestern Arkansaw, where he lived until 1885, when he moved to Texas. He was my grandfather.

 
Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, circa October 1930:
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Gaelic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore. I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Waltser, who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue eyed, red haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.

Robert E. Howard to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, circa August 1931:
Even now I prefer to think that my English strain is rather Danish than Sassanach, since as near as I can learn my distant English ancestors came from the old Dane-lagh. But its really not worth considering, since any Saxon strain in me must necessarily be very small, and the same goes for the Danish, though one of my great-great-grandfathers came directly from Denmark.

"THE WANDERING YEARS" (essay, circa 1933)
[William Benjamin Howard] turned southward, into Mississippi and obtained the position of overseer on the plantations of Squire James Henry, whose daughter, Louisa, he married in 18  . Of all the branches of  my line, the pioneer flame burned  in none so brightly as in the Henrys. Shamus McHenry was born in a ship on [the] Atlantic ocean. His family landed in New York, but without pause moved southward. The name was Americanized, and it was as plain Jim Henry that my great-great-grandfather grew to manhood on the western borders of South Carolina, and married Anna O'Tyrrell, fresh from the hills of Connaught. There his son, James Henry, was born.
    The echoes of the War of 1812 were scarcely done reverberating when Jim Henry was pushing westward. Before Alabama was a state, he came there. It was the southern frontier - sparsely settled, thickly timbered, swarming with game; Indians still dwelt there. In the Black Warrior River country, in what came to be Tuscaloosa County, my great-grandfather James Henry grew up, and married Martha Walzer, a daughter of the Walzers of Georgia, who came pioneering in Alabama in the days of early statehood. Tuscaloosa County is in the west central part of the state. The Walzers and Henrys were neighbors in the river country, and the green forest land.

Robert E. Howard to August William Derleth, September 4, 1933:
    Then I returned to Fort Worth, and wandered north west through Decatur, another old town (which I think of in connection with my great-grand uncle George Walser, who, hauling supplies from that town to the frontier settlements of Montague county back in the early days, lost an arm through a peculiar combination of red licker, a blue blizzard and a fall from his wagon;)...


Robert E. Howard to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, circa December 1934:
    The Henrys from South Carolina and the Walsers from Georgia came into the Black Warrior River country before Alabama was even a state, and fought Indians, British, Spaniards, and swamp panthers and helped build the commonwealth, until the early 1840’s when it began to get too densely settled for them, and they moved on into Mississippi, into the Big Black River country, immortalized by the legends of John Henry, the negro Hercules. The next move was in the early 1850’s and took them into Arkansas.

Robert E. Howard to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, circa January 1935:
    I don’t know just what year my people moved into the state of Alabama, but it was long ago. My great-grandfather, Squire James Henry, was born in South Carolina in 1811, and he was a small boy when they went into Alabama, so you see it was pretty far back, anyway. The Henrys and a family named Walser from Georgia settled in what is now the counties of Bibb and Tuscaloosa, near the Black Warrior river. James Henry married a Walser woman and most of their children were born in Alabama. In 1847 they moved to Choctaw County, Mississippi, and settled near the upper reaches of the Big Black River, immortalized in the legends of John Henry, the mythical black giant. Both the Henrys and the Walsers made the move. The Walsers remained in Mississippi until a year or so after the Civil War, and then moved to Texas and settled on what was then the western frontier. But the Henrys moved to southwestern Arkansas in 1856.


Robert E. Howard to Novalyne Price, 14 February 1936:
The tales of Sam Walser (a rugged, upright, forthright, typical American name, even if the original was a Dane from Skaggerack) appear — or will appear when they start publishing them — in a magazine called Spicy Adventure Stories.