DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just here to make sure you hear it right. Now, most men, by the time they've stacked up enough years to call themselves seventy-three, are content to sit in the shade and let the world carry on without them. Richard S.
Stokes was not most men. It starts, as a lot of Texas stories do, somewhere else entirely. August 7, 1861 — Stokes joins the Confederate Army as a private.
That's the bottom rung, and he knows it. But the man climbs. By August 29, 1864, he's been promoted to First Lieutenant, Company I, 8th Infantry, Mississippi Regiment.
Three years of war will do something to a person, one way or another. Then comes 1868, and Stokes comes to Texas. He settles in Lampasas County — takes up ranching, takes up farming, takes up the kind of life that's measured in seasons and hard work.
He marries Elizabeth Rawson. They have seven children between them. By any accounting, that's a full life.
A complete one. The kind you look back on with satisfaction. And yet.
July 19, 1911. Chadwick's Mill, on the Colorado River. The man is seventy-three years old.
And somehow — somehow — on that particular day, three people end up in the water and in desperate trouble. Lillie B. Evetts.
Eva Foster. R. Ashley Greaves.
All three of them drowning. Richard S. Stokes goes in after them.
All three. He pulls out all three. The Carnegie Hero Medal isn't handed out for effort or good intentions.
You earn that medal by doing something most people simply would not do. Stokes earned it at seventy-three, at a mill on the Colorado River, on a July day that could have ended three lives and didn't — because of him. Some men's stories are done before they're finished.
Richard Stokes finished strong.
What the marker says
Joined Confederate Army, as a private, Aug. 7, 1861; was promoted to 1st Lt., Co. I, 8th Infantry, Miss. Regiment, on Aug. 29, 1864. Came to Texas in 1868, settled in Lampasas County as a rancher and farmer; married Elizabeth Rawson, and had seven children. On July 19, 1911, at Chadwick's Mill, on the Colorado River, at age 73, Stokes rescued Lillie B. Evetts, Eva Foster, and R. Ashley Greaves from drowning. For the feat, he received a Carnegie Hero Medal. Recorded - 1973