The intimate papers of Colonel House arranged as a narrative by Charles Seymour.

CHAPTER II
BACKGROUNDS
Your success has been without a parallel in Texas politics.
Governor-elect Sayers to House, May 17, 1898
I
'WE originally came from Holland and the name was Huis,
which finally fell into House. Father ran away from home
and went to sea when a child, and did not return to his home
until he had become a man of property and distinction. He
came to Texas when it belonged to Mexico. He joined the
revolution, fought under General Burleson, and helped make
Texas a republic. For his services in this war he received a
grant of land in Coryell County. He lived to see Texas come
into the Union, secede, and return to the Union. He lived in
Texas under four flags.'
Thus wrote Colonel House in the summer of 1916, when a
brief lull in his political activities gave opportunity for him
to reconstruct on paper something of the background that
lay behind his rapid rise to national and international eminence. Although the family was in its origin Dutch, his forbears were for some three hundred years English, and it was
from England that his father ran away. House himself, a
seventh son, was born in 1858, at Houston, Texas, and this
State he has always regarded as his home. Even more than
those of Wilson or Walter Page, with whom he later was so
closely associated, his first years were touched by the excitement and turmoil of the events of the time.
'Some of my earliest recollections are of the Civil War. I
began to remember, I think, in '62 and '63, when our soldiers
were coming and going to and from the front. I remember