Often called the “father” of Texas geology, Robert T. Hill lived a life as adventuresome as any dime-store western novel. From his near abandonment as a child to a place as one of America’s preeminent geologists, Hill was a larger-than-life figure, forever traipsing across the Lone Star State in hopes of better understanding the land that made Texas … well … Texas.
Along the way, Hill also once drew national attention for an uncommonly audacious claim — that Waco was the oldest city in the Americas. Hundreds of newspapers repeated Hill’s assertion, which was made as much through a curious twist of linguistics as any hard, verifiable archaeological proof.
But then, who was going to argue — at least back then — with the famed “discoverer” of the Comanche Series (Lower Cretaceous) and acknowledged expert on the structure and stratigraphy of the Texas Cretaceous strata, much less his hundreds of scholarly articles in the most prestigious journals in his field?
And not surprisingly, in his early life, the wild and wooly village of Waco made a vivid impression on the intrepid young Robert Thomas Hill. Thanks to the painstaking research of Nancy S. Alexander, the story of Hill’s tumultuous life has been preserved.
Born on August 11, 1858, and orphaned at the age of 5, Hill dropped out of school after the sixth grade. According to Alexander, he managed to find employment as a newsboy. Each morning from 2:30 to 7 a.m., Hill folded newspapers and carried them throughout Nashville’s sprawling red light district.
On his 16th birthday, Robert unexpectedly received a letter from his brother Josiah (known as Joe), an editor in faraway Comanche, Texas. Joe invited Robert to join him as a “printer’s devil” for The Comanche Chief, then the westernmost newspaper in the state.
Hill had painstakingly saved his pennies and had just enough money for the train fare from Nashville to Waco. In 1874, the terminal in East Waco was the station nearest Comanche — still more than a hundred miles away.
Alexander’s painstaking research provides a unique glimpse not only into Hill’s life but the Waco of 1874. After the relatively sedate and civilized Nashville, Six-Shooter Junction (as the city was already being called) came as a shock to Hill:
I certainly rubbed my dazed eyes as I stood there, a fresh young kid from good Sunday school land back in middle Tennessee, and I looked at the big-hatted and moustached men, most of them with a six-shooter on and wearing jingling belled cart-wheel spurs.
All around me were sights and sounds new and uncouth to me. I stood amazed at this gateway into the old-time Indian fighting, desperado, swash-buckling, buffalo-killing, cowboy-yelping, Ranger-ruling Texas frontier of 1873-74, as wild frontier days as this country has ever known.
Hill’s next problem was how to reach Comanche with only a single dollar in his pocket. Alexander notes that there were not yet regular stage lines traveling west, only the occasional wagon. Fortunately, brother Joe had provided Thomas with letters of introduction written to two Waco citizens whom Joe was confident would provide transportation for his younger brother. The first letter was to an unnamed “pioneer preacher.” But after meeting the man, Robert was so appalled by the preacher’s lack of “true moralities” that he tore up the letter and left.
The second letter was addressed to a well-known (also unnamed) merchant, who “cheerfully” agreed to arrange passage for Hill: “Alas … my next view of him was that evening, after a dipsomaniac spree had overtaken him, and when he was riding up and down Austin [Avenue] yelping like a coyote and sniping the lights and signs with his six-shooter.”
Lost and alone, that night Hill wandered the streets of Waco until he found a group of men in a wagon yard huddled around a small fire. Alexander writes that when Hill told the men of his plight, they kindly offered him not only passage to Comanche, but a place by the fire:
Never before had I spent a more miserable night. And then when the ants crept over me, I had unjust suspicions about that blanket. But worst of all, in the wee hours, my new-made companions and all other men in the yard suddenly jumped up and began firing their six-shooters in a bombardment.
What Hill had feared was an attack by Apaches turned out to be a small kerosene-fueled fire — and the cowboys were merely notifying the town’s volunteer fire department of the incident.
The next morning, Hill was allowed to hitch a ride on an ox-drawn wagon, heavily loaded with timber — for a miserable, rain-soaked slog to Comanche that took two weeks, interrupted by flooding in the Bosque River. But at least he was out of Waco!
Alexander details Hill’s equally unsettling adventures in Comanche, including a brutal stint on a cattle drive, in her book, “Father of Texas Geology: Robert T. Hill.”
An entirely self-taught geologist, Hill eventually was accepted to Cornell University and returned to Texas as the founding chair of the Department of Geology (now the Jackson School of Geosciences) at the University of Texas. He also served as principal geologist of the United States Geological Survey from 1886 to 1930.
Hill’s accomplishments alone fill several pages — including naming and defining the “physiographic provinces” of Texas (such as the Balcones Fault Zone and Texas Lineament), the founding of the state geological survey, serving as the deciding witness in a boundary dispute between Texas and Oklahoma (which won Texas half a million acres of farm and grazing land and billions in oil revenue), and success as a popular, prolific author.
Hill’s lively columns in The Dallas Morning News were widely consumed and shared. But his most famous column came near the end of his life. In 1941, at the age of 83, Hill boldly asserted that Waco was America’s oldest city — not St. Augustine, Florida, which proudly claimed continuous European inhabitation since 1565.
Hill based his claim on the narratives of the notorious fortune-seeker Don Luis de Moscoso Alvarado (commonly known as Moscoso), one of Hernando De Soto’s captains. In 1542, Moscoso reported to have visited a substantial Native American settlement on the Brazos River near the mouth of the Bosque River and identified it on his map as “Guasco.” According to Hill, the Spanish alphabet did not include the letter “W” at the time — and Moscoso was forced to invent a phonetic spelling to replicate what the local indigenous people referred to as “Waco” (or even “Huaco”).
Naturally, Hill’s “discovery” spread like a shockwave. Hundreds of newspapers reported on the claim in July 1941. Hill never presented his conclusion to the appropriate academic journals and eventually Waco’s lofty status as America’s oldest city was returned to St. Augustine, where it remains.
Through his long life, Robert T. Hill received honorary doctorates at both Baylor University and SMU, among many other honors.
His passing on July 20, 1941, was front page news throughout the country, including the Waco Tribune-Herald, where the headline read, “Robert T. Hill Dies in Dallas: Cow-Puncher, World-Famed Geologist, and Former Newspaper Worker, Kin of Wacoan, Passes Away.” A Dallas middle school was even named in Hill’s honor.
And in 1977, the Baylor Department of Geology (now the Department of Geosciences) created the “Robert T. Hill Outstanding Senior Award,” which is still awarded to excellent students and honors the memory of the man with a sixth-grade education who became known as the “Dean of Texas Geology.”
