Rambling Boy – El Indio cemetery tombstone mystery solved

By LONN TAYLOR

The Karam Tombstone Mystery is solved. Faithful readers will recall that in my January 12 column I described a mysterious tombstone with an Arabic inscription in the El Indio cemetery between Presidio and Ruidosa. The tombstone commemorated two Lebanese peddlers, Ramon Karam and his fourteen-year old son, Salvador, who were murdered by bandits near El Indio in 1918. No one in Presidio or El Indio knew who placed the tombstone there, or when, and no one knew much about the Karams, either. The matter became a cause celebre in Marfa last December when Fieldwork Marfa artist- in-residence Emily Bovino produced a performance piece about Ramon Karam at Padre’s, and a giant poster depicting the tombstone was created to decorate one of the walls there.

The Karam family at their Shafter home, front row from left, Frances Karam and George Karam; back row from left, Luz Karam, Saab Karam, Vivian Karam, Ramon Karam, Elias Karam, and Salvador Karam. (photos courtesy of RAMOND KARAM)

On January 31 I received an e-mail messsage from Raymond Karam, a lawyer in San Antonio. Someone had shown my column on to him and he wrote, “Lonn, that was my grandfather and his oldest son, Salvador. I have a picture of the whole family taken on that fateful day when the father and the oldest son set out as peddlers.” Karam’s message went on to give more details about the family and ended by inviting me to call him, which I did the next day.

Raymond Karam is an ebullient-sounding man in his early 50s. He was born in McAllen, Texas, went to college at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, finished law  school there, and has practiced law in San Antonio ever since. “The story that you wrote about was central to our family history,” he told me. “I’ve known it all my life.”  He explained that his father was Elias Karam, Ramon Karam’s next-youngest son after the murdered Salvador. “Elias wanted to go with his father and brother that day. He was twelve, and he had his gun ready. His mother chased him around the wagon with a belt to make him stay home. After his father was killed, he had to be the man of the family. He looked after his mother and raised his siblings.”

Karam explained that his grandfather had emigrated from Barhalyoun, Lebanon, to Mexico about 1900, bringing his wife and children over from Lebanon a few years later. He set up as a peddler in Parral, Chihuahua, where his sons Salvador and Elias were born. Doroteo Arango, later known as Pancho Villa, was on his grandfather’s peddler’s route and in his credit books, Karam said. When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1911 the Karams moved to Shafter, Texas, and that is where the photograph was taken that morning in 1918. Ramon Karam is the tall man in the middle of the back row, with his wife, Maria, on his right. Salvador is the boy on the far right, wrapped in a bandolier of bullets and holding a rifle. Raymond Karam’s father, Elias, is between them, in short pants but also gripping a rifle.

Ramon and Salvador Karam's tombstone in El Indio cemetery in south Presidio County.

Karam told me that after the murder the family moved to McAllen, Texas, at the urging of a relative there who told them that the Lower Rio Grande Valley was “just like the old country, lots of breezes and palm trees.” But before they left Shafter Ramon’s brother, Daniel – the brother who gave the affidavit about the murder to Captain Matlack, as I described in my earlier column – hunted down three of Ramon’s murderers and killed all three of them, one of them in a pig sty, according to the family story. “Daniel was a giant of a man,” Karam told me. He did not know whether Daniel killed the men before or after he gave the affidavit describing them to Matlack. Daniel was evidently something of a wild man, famous in his later years in the Lower Valley for making fortunes and then losing them in all-night card games.

In the Lower Valley, the Karam family resumed peddling and eventually opened a clothing store in McAllen. “There were about thirty Lebanese families in the area, all peddlers,” Karam told me. “There was a Jewish wholesale merchant in Mission, Sam Greenfield, who supplied all of the peddlers, and he liked my grandmother. He said she had an honest face, so he helped her start the store, and my father ran it.” They had a rough time at first, and they spent the Depression “living on stacks of soda crackers and cans of sardines,” as Karam put it, but after World War Two they began to prosper. George Karam, the little boy with the lasso in the front row of the photograph, moved to Donna, Texas, and opened his own store, Karam’s Department Store, which became such a community fixture that when George retired and closed the store in 1979 the mayor of Donna declared June 23 “Karam Day” and George was honored with a parade. Elias continued to manage the McAllen store.

Prosperity enabled Grandmother Karam  to do two things that she had been putting off for years. In 1950 she sent Elias, now in his mid-forties, off to Lebanon to find a wife and continue the family, and she ordered a tombstone for her husband’s and Salvador’s grave. A cousin, Monseigneur  John Trad, long-time pastor of St. George Marionite Catholic Church in San Antonio, was involved in both enterprises. He went with Elias to the family’s home town of Barhalyoun in Lebanon to help him choose a wife, and he wrote out the Arabic inscription that is on the tombstone. Raymond Karam thinks that the tombstone was made in McAllen. When it was finished, Monseigneur Trad journeyed with the family from McAllen to set it in place at El Indio.

And that is how the Arabic tombstone got to El Indio, where it remains as a monument not only to two murdered peddlers but to the tenacity and endurance of an immigrant Lebanese family in Texas. I think the Presidio County Historical Commission should erect a marker there, telling passers-by the story of the Karams.

Lonn Taylor is a writer and historian who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.