Diamond Bessie & the Shepherds

In the 1860s and '70s, luxury river boats brought U.S. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes; financier Jay Gould; writers Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman; and actor Maurice Barrymore, the father of John, Ethel, and Lionel, to "Queen City of the Cypress" -- Jefferson, Texas. Among lesser known visitors was Abe Rothschild and his apparent bride, Bessie, dressed in fashionable clothes and wearing many diamonds. The couple went to an unusual midwinter picnic in the woods, and two weeks later the body of Bessie was found in the woods shot through the head. From the three trials that followed came a folk drama, "The Diamond Bessie Murder Trial" presented annually in Jefferson as part of a historical pilgrimage. Los Pastores, a shepherd's play having to do with the epiphany of the Christ child, arises from a tradition reaching back to the Middle Ages. The Pastores tradition is oral, either created or creatively adapted by the Franciscans in Mexico, and performed at Mission San Jose in San Antonio and elsewhere in the Southwest between Christmas and New Year's.