Newspaper article, Paul Denton - A Methodist preacher
Paul Denton - A Methodist Preacher
Paul Denton, A Methodist preacher in Texas, once advertised a barbecue, with better liquor than usually furnished. When the people were assembled, a fellow in the crowd cried out, “Mr Paul Denton, your reverence has lied. You promised us not only good barbecue, but better liquor. Where is the liquor?” “There!” answered the missionary, in the tones of thunder, and pointed his finger at the matchless double spring, gushing upon two strong columns, with a sound like a shout of joy from the bosom of the earth. “There!” he repeated, “there is the liquor which God, the Eternal, brews for all His children! Not in the simpering still, over smoky fires, choked with poisonous gases and surrounded with the stench of sickening odours and man’s corruptions, doth your Father in heaven prepare the precise essence of life, the pure cold water; but in the green glade and grassy dell, where the red deer wanders, and the child loved to play – there God brews it; and down, low down in the deepest valley, where the fountain murmurs and the rills sing; and high upon the tall mountain-tops, where the naked granite glitters of gold in the sun, where the storm-cloud broods and the thunder storms crash; and away for out on the wide, wild sea, where the hurricane howls music, and the big waves roar the chorus, swinging the march of God – there He brews it, that beverage of the health-giving water. And everywhere it is a thing of beauty gleaming in the dewdrop; singing in the summer rain; shining in the ice-gem, till the trees all seem turned to living jewels spreading a golden veil over the setting sun, or a white graze around the midnight moon; sporting in the cataract; sleeping in the glacier; dancing in the hail showers; folding its bright snow curtains softly about the wintry world; weaving the many coloured iris, that seraph’s zone of the sky whose warp is the rain-drop of earth, whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered over with celestial flowers by the mystic hand of refraction. Still always it is beautiful, that life-giving water; no poison bubbles on its brink; its foam brings not madness and murder; no blood stains its liquid glass; pale widows and starving orphans weep no burning tears in its depths; no drunken, shrieking ghost from the grave curses it in the words of eternal despair. Speak on, my friends: would you exchange it for the demon's drink, alcohol?
Missing text from the above newspaper article has been pieced together from another version of the text written by A. W. Arrington (kindly contributed by Mike Cochran of Denton, Texas.)
Background Information on Paul Denton
Paul Denton was a fictionalized account based on the life of John B Denton, a pioneer preacher who went to Texas in 1837 and became a lawyer. In 1841 went on to engage in Indian fighting; but unsuccessful in this endeavour as he was the only Texas killed in the battle with the Indians.
To read the accounts his actions seem brash and either foolish or brave depending on how you look at it. The Paul Denton aspect of the story is interesting because it demonstrates how the real Denton story was turned into myth after his death e.g. some accounts literally compare him to a Christ crucified by Indians on the prairie.
"Paul" Denton and the Famous Barbeque
It turns out that the barbeque story was passed around all over the world and used as filler in newspapers from the 1850s to the 1880s and from as far away as Brisbane, Australia. A. W. Arrington, the creator of the tale, was an interesting man and worthy of his own biography. He was a preacher and lawyer in early Arkansas and Texas as was John B. Denton. They surely crossed paths because Arrington also wrote a story about Bob Potter, who had defeated John B. Denton in a senatorial race in the old Republic of Texas. Several biographical pieces describe Arrington as being of low character and unsound mind... but he was certainly prolific.
In a 1910 article in the Texas Methodist Historical Association, Quarterly he is described as follows: "The author was an apostate preacher who had lost all regard for the Christian religion - especially the ninth commandment, 'thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor'- and with an unbridled imagination, and a pen dipped in gall he gave full vent to a heart of hate and prejudice:"... and it goes on but you get the idea.
Later Arrington went to Chicago where as a lawyer he achieved a degree of respectability becoming a judge. One reference to him being some correspondence of the US State Department concerning a company chartered by Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (in the last days before the Mexican people rose up and murdered this Hapsburgian swine), which was really a plot to relocate disaffected Southerners to Mexico after the Civil War. This decree authorized these Southerners to create their own towns in Mexico and control the natural resources in the areas of their settlements. Arrington was listed as a Director of this company.
Source and Further Reading
The Origins of Denton, Texas - The Denton County History Page
Background information on Paul Denton (John B Denton) supplied with thanks by:-
Mike Cochran
Denton, Texas
Mike also wrote "The plot thickens in my look into the Arrington/Paul Denton connection. It seems that many things Arrington wrote as fiction about Paul Denton infiltrated back onto the story of the real life John B. Denton and have been taken as fact. Arrington also wrote under the non de plume of Summerfield.
An even stranger twist is that another writer William Rhodes wrote a story after Arrington died in which he fictionalized the life of Arrington. The story, 'The Case of Summerfield' was written in 1871 and traces Arrington's life for a while before turning very strange to the point of a plot to blow up the world with a chemical he had discovered. Summerfield demanded $1 million from the world to refrain from dropping his concoction into the Pacific Ocean."