Ain’t That America? – Page 33

Thinking of Television

13. October 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, World

I have now come to that stage of life where I have seen every standard TV plot so many times that I am now able to predict the denouement almost as soon as I see the setup and have declared a personal embargo on watching any more shows about doctors, lawyers or cops. While some of the current offerings (House, Scrubs, etc) are quite passable ï¿½ there are other occupations, and other situations which in the hands of the creative, will offer sufficient interest to keep viewers returning on a regular basis. Shows like ï¿½Lostï¿½ and ï¿½Ugly Bettyï¿½ are splendid examples of what can be done by stepping outside of the cop-lawyer-doc box, and ï¿½Jericho ï¿½ Season Oneï¿½ is another. Take an intriguing and (for television) a semi-original situation, involve a large cast of interesting people reacting to it and voila ï¿½ something that will bring back the audience, over and over. Especially when it is a situation that we might imagine happening to ourselves. After 9/11, and Katrina (which provided the genesis of ï¿½Jerichoï¿½ to its creators) it is all to easy to imagine what happens when the world we know suddenly ends, right in the middle of all our mundane plans for a perfectly ordinary day.

Which is exactly what happens to the citizens of the small town of Jericho, Kansas, to the family of Johnston Green (Gerald McRaney) and their neighbors and friends. Jericho is a small, pleasant place, full of people going about their own business ï¿½ farming, stocking the grocery store shelves, going through a mayoral election, planning a wedding and enduring an audit by a visiting IRS agent. The school children are off on a field trip and the Greenï¿½s black-sheep son Jake suddenly appears needing a great deal of money ï¿½ the only ripple in the pleasant still pool of a modern American life. In one of the most quietly effective sequences, the camera follows two children, playing hide and seek in a back yard, while one climbs on the roof of a shed, and then onto the house roof. The boy suddenly freezes there, silhouetted against the clouds and the sky ï¿½ and then we see what he has seen; a mushroom cloud, coming up from a line of mountains on the distant horizon.

And that is the exact point where the people of Jericho, and a handful of visitors who just happen to be there begin a long slow devolution from the twenty-first century into something that more resembles the frontier Westï¿½ and then to a condition that looks more like the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy, or classical Greece. First they struggle to figure out just has happened to the rest of the country ï¿½ and then begins the fight to survive, ending in a cliff-hanger which promises a large audience for the second-season premiere. It makes for a more interesting television show than I had thought, when I first heard about it. The first season set of 22 episodes is neatly packaged on 6 discs. Commentary and deleted scenes are included for selected episodes on the same disc. I would have much rather that deleted scenes be edited into the episode where they belonged, to make a sort of ï¿½directorï¿½s cutï¿½, rather than having them tacked on as an appendage. The omitted scenes would have done a lot for the overall story; itï¿½s clear that they were omitted to shorten each episode for broadcast.

It’s an interesting show, on the whole – well worth watching, although I hope that it won’t disintegrate like “Lost”. I think of Jericho as a remorseless study of what people will do under prolonged stress in a particular situation. There are some who adjust to the situation without losing their own core values, some who can see into the situation and confront the unthinkeable without flinching. And then there are those who can’t and won’t… and you can never really tell in advance who will be one or the other. But as I wrote earlier this week, just having to think about this sort of thing is the first step in beginning to cope – should such a situation ever arise.

Cross-posted at Blogger News Network.

Happening Here

09. October 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Home Front, Veteran's Affairs, World

Tuesdays and Thursdays are mornings when Blondie and I can take our time, letting the dogs drag us briskly through the neighborhood, especially those days when I am not needed at the ranch realty office. We talk about things we notice in the neighborhood, like who’s house is for sale, how the renovation work on the “burned” house three streets over is going, say hi to some of the neighbors and/or their dogs, note any interesting garage sales shaping up on the weekend, encourage Weevil and Spike to piss on the lawn of the neighbor who yelled after us last year because someone else had let their dog poop on her lawn… and us with our pockets bulging with plastic bags, I ask you! She has moved away, but we like to see our dogs carrying on with the tradition. It does get pretty dry around here: moisture is moisture, y’know.

This morning we were carrying out a practical exercise, brought about because last night we had been watching the DVD of Jericho- Season One. I’m doing a review, and had to catch the ones that I missed, early on. Chilling stuff, actually; how the world ends, in the middle of the morning with hardly anyone noticing, until static fills the broadcast channels. One thing and another reminded me of a story about a poor neighborhood in New Orleans, whose residents rode out Katrina and the aftermath comfortably tucked up in a local school. It was one of those small stories which didn’t get much play, probably because most of the reporters were drooling over what was supposed to have been happening at the Superdome and the Convention center. I did hear of it on NPR, and read a brief feature on-line, and of course recall nothing but the general outline of events. Basically some of the neighbors got together, led by a couple of local military veterans, and set up their own shelter on the upper floors of the school, which they assumed would be safe enough, as some of the older neighbors remembered taking refuge there during the last ginormous hurricane. They laid in plenty of supplies, bedding, cots, lamps, batteries, cooking equipment – everything they would need. And there they remained, setting up a soup kitchen for themselves, looking after elderly neighbors who refused to leave their flooded houses; tidy, efficient and comfortable. They had even thrown out a couple of thugs, who came looking for trouble… and when anyone came around asking if they wished to be evacuated, no one really wanted to, as they were doing quite well through their own efforts.

So Blondie and I were thinking out loud of how our neighborhood could be organized; we’re on high ground, so flooding wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but no electrical power and a breakdown of local law enforcement would present a bit of a sticky wicket. The neighborhood is thick with military retirees, and active duty; we agreed that the problem at first would be everyone trying to be in charge, before sorting out how everyone’s experience and training would best be applied.

In the interests of security, we’d have to cut off access into the neighborhood, first. There are four main entrances, and privacy fences along all four sides. So, block three of them with parked vehicles, and keep the gate nearest Stahl Road and Judson open, set up roving armed patrols of two or three each, along the outside fences, and guards at the entrances. Mark them with some kind of armband, nothing fancy, just a strip of cloth. This is Texas, god knows if you canvassed the neighborhood, there’s probably enough weapons to supply the army of a small European state, and their police force, too. Secure the perimeter, and begin canvassing every house. Who is home, who is in need of medical attention, who is gone, but has left pets or children alone? We’d have to assume that the active-duty military would be gone, and so would the reservists, leaving us with a lot of retirees in varying degrees of fitness, and a lot of family members of all ages. Who has a portable generator, a charcoal or bottled gas grill? A freezer full of food which will thaw, when the power has been off for a week? Who has large cooking pots, has managed a restaurant or a dining hall kitchen? Who is a doctor, a nurse, an electrician? Can we set up dining facility at the elementary school, and is there a generator there? What about the assisted living facility and the day-care just outside the entrance at the other end of the neighborhood? If we could secure them, we’d have a facility to care for the frail and elderly… even better, if they have generators. Canvas the neighborhood; collect batteries and over-the-counter drugs, medical supplies, bleach, pet food, lanterns and candles, blankets and bedding. Trees, Blondie pointed out. After a bit, we can start cutting down trees, and taking out wooden fences within the neighborhood. Most houses have functioning fireplaces – not terribly efficient when it comes to keeping a room warm, or to cook over, but better than nothing. Blondie also favored dividing the neighborhood into quadrants as far as security patrols went, and stockpiling food at one house within each quadrant.

We’d be good for at least a week, we agreed, but after that, we’d have to send out foraging parties for food supplies, gasoline and medicine. A slightly off-kilter way to spend a morning, but sometimes just having thought about things like this is a good way to begin coping with the situation, should it ever arise.

Sucker for Our Dumb Chums

05. October 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Domestic, General, Rant

There may be a chance – albeit hopefully a distant one – that at some point in the future either Blondie or myself will be taken away by kindly attendants in white coats while horrified animal control authorities remove a zoo of cats and dogs from an unspeakable house as neighbors gape in horrified disbelief and the news cameras roll. Unless there has been a mega-spectacular crackup in rush-hour traffic or Teddy Kennedy has been found in bed with a live boy or a dead woman, the resulting story will be about third or fourth down in the evening newscast.

Sigh.

Which is by way of saying that my daughter has brought home another animal! To add to the menagerie! In a very small house! And like a sucker, I said yes! Like a sucker I tried to insist that this one MUST go to the no-kill shelter eventually! Like a sucker, I know that it probably won’t! As soon as it has finished a period of quarantine in the garage, it will join the rest of the happy clan, shredding the furniture, shedding drifts of hair all over the house, fast asleep on anything soft, and it will remain until it pops off of old age!

Or Blondie takes it with her, when she finishes veterinary school and has a place of her own. Jay-sus, she had better qualify as a vet, it’s the only way we’ll ever afford to keep all the furry freeloaders in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed.

This one is named “Meek”. He is a cat, a neutered male, white with a brindle saddle and ears, about three years old. He’s been hanging out at the place in Selma where Blondie works part-time, one of the herd of tame and semi-ferals which she has fed off and on for the last year or so. He’s one of the tamest and the most slavishly devoted to her; she has always thought he was dumped by his previous owner. One of the other tame ones was run over and killed by a car a couple of months ago, and this morning when she left the office to run an errand, Meek ran after her and followed her car almost to the highway. Evidently, he has decided that if he can’t live with Blondie, he doesn’t want to live at all.

Not good survival instincts for an outdoor cat, living adjacent to a highway. The veterinarian pegs him to be about three years old, a real sweetie… and it appears that he has already survived a traumatic event that broke one of his legs and ribs. Hard to say if he was dumped first and then injured… or more horrible to imagine, injured and then dumped.

Sigh. There is a kind of symmetry to it, though. Two dogs, two gimp cats, two grey and two black. I swear on a stack of bibles, though; Weevil, Sam and Meek are Blondie’s critters. And there won’t be any more. Really….

Just for Fun

04. October 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, The Funny, Working In A Salt Mine...

Another writer sent me this musical parody, to be sung to the tune of “Back in the Saddle, Again”. It was composed especially for me, as he was inspired upon actually recieving a copy of “To Truckee’s Trail”.

“BACK IN THE BOOKWORKS A’GIN”

Well, she’s back in the bookworks a’gin.
Writin’ away when she kin’.
‘magination’s never dry,
When there’s his’try there to ply,
‘Cause she’s back in the bookworks a’gin.

Writin’ ’bout his’try once more,
Poundin’ her ol’ com-pu-tor
She’s describin” Truckee’s Trail,
Starvin’ and tra-vail
Back in the bookworks a’gin

Chorus:
Whoopi-ty-aye-Oh
Writin’ to and fro
Back in the bookworks again
Whoopi-ty-aye-Yay
She goes her own durn way
‘N’ she’s back in the bookworks agin.

Now, the first book’s the worst
You think the whole durn thing’s cursed
But you stick right to the trail
And you know, you’ll never fail!
You’ll be back in the bookworks a’gin.

I’ll send her a cowboy’s farewell
Pop off a round, bang the bell
She’ll be back someday, I know
An’ a-writin’ she will go
Back to the bookworks a’gin.

Chorus:
Whoopi-ty-aye-Oh
Writin’ to and fro
Back in the bookworks again
Whoopi-ty-aye-Yay
She goes her own durn way
‘N’ she’s back in the bookworks agin!

(I’m also working in one office or other, every day this week – even parttime, it does cut down on the blogging time – sorry!)

From Ancient Grudge

26. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, War, World

(Part One of several to come)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

I have been thinking about the Civil War, lately; most particularly because I am plowing through a great tall pile of books about all aspects of that most bitter national division. I have just finished the first draft of the second book about the experiences of the German settlements in Texas, and am now sketching out the initial chapter of the third. On one hand I am hard at work filling in blanks and fact-checking, adding incidents, experiences and observations to fill out the general story. On the other, I am trying to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick – to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began. Interesting work, this; putting myself into the minds of people who were seeing things as they developed, day by day and close up; without the comforting overview of hindsight

This, BTW is my way of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced – the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. And at first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes.

There was the War that split border states like Kentucky and Virginia – which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

How that must have broken the hearts of men like Sam Houston, who refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy, and Winfield Scott, the old soldier who commanded the Federal Army at the start of the war. His officers’ commission had been signed by Thomas Jefferson: he and Houston had both fought bravely for a fledgling United States. Indeed, at the time of the Civil war, there were those living still who could remember the Revolution, even a bare handful of centenarians who had supposedly fought in it. For every Southern fireater like Edmund Ruffin and Preston Brooks (famous for beating a anti-slave politician to unconsciousness in the US Senate) and every Northern critic of so-called ‘Slave power” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown… and every young spark on either side who could hardly wait to put on a uniform of whatever color, there were sober citizens who looked on the prospect of it all with dread and foreboding.

(next ; How they got to that point – some thoughts)

Also, the sample first chapter of Adelsverein, Vol. 3 is here

Pet Detective, Inc.

23. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, General, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

There must be something in the water, or a phase of the moon. One of my neighbors blames it all on the comparatively wet summer – another sign of global warming or cooling or whatever. A co-worker from the radio station blames it all on that old devil, the sex drive. Whatever the rationale, it seems to Blondie and I that a very high number of our neighborhood dogs have suddenly developed a serious wanderlust and Houdiniesque escape skills.

Since we have two dogs, whose high point of the day involves towing me at a brisk pace around a long circuit through the neighborhood, we’ve encountered most of the other resident dogs. Mostly they are towing their owners around a similar course, or leaping up and down behind a window or a fence in a frenzy of barking. Most of them we know well enough to know their real names, others only have a nick: Einstein, the not-very-bright young boxer who always goes nuts when we walk by, Goliath the enormous Papillion, Daisy-May the golden lab who likes jumping up on people, Fluffy the little white something or other who looks like an animated fuzzy bedroom slipper bouncing around on four little legs… you get the idea. Weevil and Spike usually have a lovely time barking back at them. It all reminds Blondie of the ‘midnight barking’ in 101 Dalmatians; for all we know, the dogs may be passing on messages.

It’s the other dogs that make our hearts sink right down to our running shoes – the ones who are out and about, unconstrained by a leash, an owner or a fence. Last week it was an elderly German shepherd whom Blondie named “O’Malley”. He lives two streets up and has perfected the technique of slipping between the fence bars. He’s been getting out all summer. By now, everyone recognizes O’Malley and knows where he belongs, but I don’t think his owners have a clue. I’ve walked him back to his house a couple of times, and he hops back through the fence obediently and trots around to the back with the air of a hard-working dog having done his duty for the day. The week before that, it was a fluffy little Shi-Tzu who followed me all the way along Creekway, barking like mad, and dashing out into the street. I thought sure the little wretch would be run over about four times. I tried to catch him; not with any success, being encumbered by my own two, who were going nuts. And I am still pretty damned annoyed at one of the neighbors, who primly refused to let the little dog stay in her yard, tied to a tree for safety and visibility. She had called the pound, though, since the dog had been hanging around for a day or so. I finally turned around and dragged Weevil and Spike towards home, with the stray following after, figuring that I could at least catch it, once I had put the two of them inside. Luckily, a pair of kids walking to school overtook us before I got very far: the stray Shi-Tzu was theirs.

A couple of Saturdays ago, we retrieved another German shepherd – this one a well-mannered female whom Blondie called ‘Lady’ for the lack of a better name. We found her at the bottom of the neighborhood, and Blondie put her on a leash and walked her around the neighborhood all that afternoon, until she found where Lady belonged. And it turned out her name really was ‘Lady’ but her owner was so unenthused about getting her back, it was really no wonder she went wandering in the first place.

We had an easier time yesterday, but still – two loose and lost dogs in a single day. The Chihuahua who lives in the house with all the sculptures got out and went skittering across the road, chasing after us. In all the excitement, Weevil slipped her leash and the Chihuahua, aka Mr. Teeth bit Blondie’s hand… didn’t break the skin, fortunately, and we managed to return Mr. Teeth to his owner. Didn’t latch the gate after himself, and didn’t notice when Mr. Teeth headed straight across the road to pick a fight with two larger dogs and a Marine. Forty minutes later, when we came back down the road what do we find at practically the same corner? A sad little min-pin, a miniature Doberman slightly larger than Spike, with no collar… and as it turned out, no chip, either. But he let me pick him up, and we went through the whole routine, walking down the street asking people if they recognized him. No one did, although he was very obviously a pet and well-cared for. We took him home, where he got on amazingly well with Spike and Weevil. We planned to do the whole sweep of the neighborhood this weekend, but fortunately Blondie spotted the posters that his frantic owners were plastering on the neighborhood mailboxes. They were very glad to get him back, since he had been missing for two days.

And I thought yesterday was the far frozen limit, but I just now came back from being towed around the block and it happened again! There was another Chihuahua-type doggie, innocent of collar running along the creek-bed that I couldn’t catch, and which snapped and snarled at me anyway… and a pretty and affectionate Weimaraner female who came running after us. At least the Weimaraner had a collar with her name on it, a telephone number, a rabies tag and one of those electric-fence restraint thingies. Which is no advertising for that system and the telephone number turned out to be disconnected! But at least today, one of the neighbors helped me catch her and has promised they will keep her safe tonight and call the veterinary clinic tomorrow… if no one comes around looking for her before then (as I am sure they will.)

Really, this is getting past a joke; being a magnet for every sort of lost and loose dog in the ‘hood. I’m really almost afraid to go out tomorrow; at this rate there will be a lineup of the lost and pathetic, waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway. Perhaps we should begin asking for a reward; through repetition, we’re getting pretty good at it..

Dan, Dan, Dan

20. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Stupidity, World

What is it they say; the first time tragedy, second time farce? What do they call it when it was a farce the first time around – only dressed up in the high seriousness of a Searing Sixty Minutes (dum-de-dum-dum!) Expose? Here it comes around again, with Mr. Rather’s suit against CBS News for making him the scapegoat in the whole “not only does the Emperor not have any new clothes he is as nekkid as a jaybird” imbroglio that was the 6o Minutes “scoop”, concerning the so-called finding of some 1973 Texas Air National Guard.

For those of you who spent 2004 in a coma, the memos appeared to give backing to the contention that President Bush spent part of his Air National Guard service AWOL, and that his then-commander (now deceased) was exceeding wroth about this. Unfortunately for CBS News, for 60 Minutes and all of Mr. Rathers’ minions, those documents appear to have been inexpertly forged; a fact that became fairly obvious early on. One can only assume that Mr. Rather and his team desperately wanted them to be authentic, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary. And that they desperately wanted to drop a just-before-Election-Day bomb on the Bush campaign, and didn’t care how thin the evidence was.

Quelle tacky, Mr. Rather, quelle tacky. Kind of makes one wonder about all the other documents uncovered by Sixty Minutes over the years, which made one or two flash appearances on camera and then were gone before anyone could say, “Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute!” Ah well, just another reason that legacy media is melting faster than the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her.

Anyway, enough of a stink was raised about this at the time… and now it looks like we are in for another round of slapstick. Dan Rather is going to sue CBS for mishandling the resulting s**tstorm. Cooler and more legally-oriented minds than mine are betting A) that it is just a means of squeezing some more retirement monies out of CBS and B) that if it continues, the process of discovery is going to be embarrassingly revealing and C) Pass the popcorn, it’s a pity they both can’t loose.

Myself, I keep imaging the hostage-taking scene from “Blazing Saddles”… only instead of Cleavon Little holding a gun to his own head and begging for mercy, I’m seeing Ted Baxter (the hamster-brained newscaster from the Mary Tyler Moore Show) holding himself hostage and squeaking “Lemme out of here or the newscaster gets it!”

Oh, yeah… pass the popcorn. I’ll take mine with melted butter, but hold the salt.

(Later: More here from Captain’s Quarters)
Even later: still more giggling and requests for popcorn, here

Newsflash: The Truth about the Service Academies

18. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, Military, sarcasm, World

Apparently, it comes as an earth-shattering surprise to this student writer that the service academies… you know, West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy (and mustn’t forget the Coasties as well) are run by the various military services as a means of producing officers… and that the students of the various academies are, in fact, members of the military.

What a shocker. As Blondie remarked, in awed disbelief, “Wow… Did she go to college just for the drugs?”

In other late breaking developments, water is revealed to be wet, the Pope is Catholic and bears crap in the woods. And it is nice to know that just about anyone can get into college and write for the student publication, these days.

I can’t wait to see what other startling news is revealed in upcoming segments of this multi-part article.

Later: More acid remarks and comments from Andrea Harris, here

On With the Dance!

14. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

And someone throw another quart of liquid soap in the bubble machine, the madness of the writers’ life waltz has just been ratcheted up another couple of notches. No, wait… that’s the Tylenol cough syrup kicking in… that blue stuff does have a kick, doesn’t it? Yes, sports fans, I seem to have contracted the current misery of a very sore throat and hacking cough. Fortunately our vast collection of over-the-counter medications seem to be kicking in at long last. The cats didn’t mind… much. Not with something warm to curl up next to, 24-7 but the coughing rather disturbed them. Whenever I started hacking like Camille, I would get this dirty look from Sam and Percy – like “Do you mind keeping it down?! We’re trying to sleep, here!” “Well, don’t mind me, fellas, that’s just me and part of a lung.”

Finished the first draft of the Civil War volume this week; next stop, revisions, but only after reading… a lot. Went and ordered some books from Amazon, bought some more at Half-Price and picked up an armload at the library, including a local history of the town of Comfort, Texas, written (I kid you not) by a gentleman named Guido Ransleben. Is this a great country or not? I went to school with a kid named Sean Nardoni, though, so maybe I am used to ethnic collisions when it comes to names. My stack of required reading is as high as an elephants’ eye, metaphorically speaking. I did some work for Dave the Computer Genius early in the week, but was too damn sick to do anything else but read or sleep.

One of the library books turned out to be damned fascinating: “The Civil War in the American West”. Sort of an overview and very well written, I thought… of everything that happened west of the Mississippi River during those years; in Arkansas and Missouri and Minnesota, in New Mexico and Colorado and Texas; all those efforts to secure the overland trails to Santa Fe Trail and Sacramento. How the regular Army troops were withdrawn, and so many of their officers resigned their commissions and declared for the South, while local companies of volunteers assembled; not to go off and fight in Virginia or Tennessee, but to take the place of the regular Army, in securing the frontier forts. And the frontier went up in flames during those years for two reasons… the Regular Army stepping back and the Indians seeing an advantage, while the local volunteers were much more accustomed to conditions and much more eager to settle the Indians’ hash for them. Which is how we wound up with the Sand Creek massacre…

Fascinating stuff… also found a compilation of short biographies of women in the Texas cattle business, who trailed herds of cattle to the northern railheads, or to California. Some went along with their husbands; some did it as a business after being widowed. Most of them seemed to have enjoyed the experience terrifically; and I am taking serious notes on this. Volume 3 of Adelsverein, or Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a lot of Sidearms will get into this territory. I am still pretty amused at the difference between how the cattle bidness appears in Western movies, and how it really looked in people’s memoirs.

Nine, Eleven

11. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, GWOT, History, World

A Tuesday morning in September, one of those autumnal days when it has begun to cool down and the skies in Texas are a deep, clear blue. There is rain predicted for today, so at best the sky will be spotted with tufts of cloud, perhaps overcast all together. I am going to work today, after the dogs drag me around the block a couple of times – normal day, except for the persistence of memory.

It all seemed like a perfectly normal work day, six years ago. A normal, routine day at the office and then that perfectly prosaic day shattered into a million pieces and we could perceive the horrors that seethed and boiled underneath – which was very strange because it went on seeming perfectly normal.. The mail was delivered, and I picked up a gallon of milk at the grocery store. Drivers obeyed the stop lights at the corner, and the birds came around to the feeder as they did every afternoon. Everything superficially normal; which was kind of a comfort, especially as we have been poised ever since, expecting a repeat of that shattering Tuesday morning. And for most of us over the six years ever since, things have continued to seem absolutely normal. The only difference is that now we know how suddenly and absolutely the world can change.

One of the factoids noted in the aftermath was that on 9-11-01 more Americans died in war in a single day on our own soil since the Civil War. Those of us who think about such things have spent the last six years knowing in the back of our minds that there may be another day like that, at any time. Without warning, without notice: watch ye therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour.

Along the Emigrant Trail – Forting Up

03. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, World

Considering all those cinematic or literary occasions in which an emigrant wagon train on the California/Oregon trail was pictured being attacked by a war-party of Indians, it actually happened as represented on very few occasions. That is, a defensive circle of wagons, with the pioneers being well-dug in while the Indians ride around on horseback, whooping and shouting to beat the band, and firing volleys of arrows at them. Very likely, more emigrants died in accidents with firearms than were ever actually killed by Indian attack. A little disconcerting for the fan of westerns to find this out; kind of like discovering that most cowboys didn’t have much use for a six-shooter, and that most western towns were really rather refreshingly law-abiding places. It ruins a whole lot of plots, knowing of these inconvenient verities. But those historians who become passionately interested in the stories of the trail, the frontier, the cattle baronies; they are not terribly surprised. As with everything, the more one looks… the more nuance appears. But of such dramatic incidents are books made, non and fiction alike.

Why does this image reoccur, in the face of considerable scholarship to the contrary? Besides the inherent drama in the stories of the westering pioneers and gold-rushers and the desire of those later telling the stories to heighten the drama, the biggest reason may be that those who took part in the great transcontinental migrations fully anticipated encounters of that sort. They had two centuries of bitter history to draw upon, of grudges and warfare and atrocities on both sides. Of two cultures colliding, of ancient grudges breaking into fresh enmity; why would it be any different west of the Mississippi than it had been east of it?

Amazingly enough, for at least two decades, until well after the Civil War, the wagon-train pioneers encountered little open hostility from those various tribes whose territories they passed through. Not of the open sort described above, anyway. There was a degree of petty thievery and low-level harrassment, of oxen, horses and mules stolen or strayed at night, sniping from the badlands along the Humboldt River, and sometimes single wagons and small parties of travelers beset, robbed or murdered at any point along the way. There are any number of reasons for this relative tranquility, some of them overlapping. In the early years, there were relatively few wagon parties venturing over the trail during the course of the trail season. They were transitory, well-armed and usually well led, and had absolutely no desire to pick a fight with warrior-tribes like the Sioux, the horse-lords of the upper plains. Other tribes along the route took the opportunity to do business with the wagon-train parties, either trading commodities or labor in helping them to cross rivers, and as historian George Steward pointed out, it must have gotten pretty boring in the winter camps in the Rockies and the upper plains. A new set of travelers passing through their lands offered at least some interest to the same old routine.

Up until the Civil War there were only a handful of incidents where Indians made a concerted, sustained and ultimately effective attack on a wagon train party – twenty members of the Ward party (including women and children) were overrun and gruesomely massacred near Ft. Hall in 1854, and 44 emigrants of Elijah Utters’ company met a similar fate after being besieged near Castle Butte, Idaho in 1860. Considering the enormous numbers of emigrants and Indians wandering around, fully armed and not particularly inclined to trust each other very much, the length of the trail and the wide-open nature of the country, this is a very fortunate record indeed.

But there was one single incident which puts the deaths of the Ward and Utter parties into the shade, and besides which all the other incidents pale. There was indeed one particularly brutal and horrendous massacre of wagon-train emigrants which started almost exactly as outlined in all those melodramatic books and movies: the pioneers forted up in a circle of the wagons, and besieged for days while awaiting rescue by the cavalry.

It happened just before the Civil War…

(to be continued)

Memo: Another Bottle of That Whine?

02. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Iraq, Politics, War, World

To: Representatives Moran, Tauscher and Porter
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Slimed in the Green Zone

1. Well, my heart pumps pure piss for your pathetic predicament and your wounded sensibilities. Traveling all the way to Iraq, to demonstrate your tender consideration for the troops serving there at the whim of the Bushchimphitler and his eeeeevil war, only to find out that they had your number, short bios and an assortment of your previously reported remarks on the war. What a shocker, eh?

2. Yep, it sure was just another example of the deep-laid plots of the eeeeevil Bushchimphitler and his crafty minions… that troops assembled to meet ‘n greet should actually have read news reports. Really… how damn stupid do you really think the average military member is? Wasn’t it enough of a warning, when John Kerry’s adlibbed comment about dropping out of college and being stuck in Iraq rebounded within twenty-four hours with this priceless repost from troops in-theater?

3. Allow me to break it to you gently, lady and gentlemen; the military mind-set, like that of the Boy Scouts worships at the high altar of preparedness. It is an essential part of the culture to swiftly acquisition and disseminate necessary intelligence about whatever task they are ordered to accomplish. Doesn’t matter if its’ taking Omaha beach, Baghdad or providing the suitable background for a collection of globe-trotting pols burnishing their credentials; be assured that they will do their homework, and come to the party with all the angles covered.

4. Trust me on this also; while there a great many in the military today are apolitical, indifferent, or otherwise un-interested in the current political landscape, many more are intensely interested. They are betting their lives, in a manner of speaking, on their ability to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into something with a closer resemblance to a functioning and fairly democratic nation. Which may yet be possible: South Korea didn’t look like much of a good bet fifty years ago and look at the place now.

5. Finally, this is a wired and interconnected world these days; military bases overseas are not nearly as isolated as they were fifteen, or thirty years ago. That you could innocently assume that what you had said to your constituents or in the halls of power would not reach the ears of those serving in a garrison on the other side of the world indicates that you have not taken this to heart. You assumed that all the good little uniformed peasantry would trot obligingly up and tug their forelocks for their betters, and never mind in the least that your previous remarks could be construed as undermining their mission. I trust that you have been enlightened.

6. Military people do vote, you know. And sometimes their votes even get counted.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

Adventures in the Literary Life

30. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Finally got paid last week for the ever-loving magazine article, but alas, just as I feared, being implacable and insistent about being paid did rebound. My friend who referred me to them said “Ummm – you know you won’t be getting any more story assignments from them.” Which neatly coincides with what I had decided; if actually getting a check for work performed and published was going to be so prolonged an agony that I would pass on doing any more for that particular publication.

Getting the check at last means I could order another box of review copies of To Truckee’s Trail which will go out in the mail the instant I get them. Most of them will go to Mom, who is even more brash about promoting my work than I am. Always has been; she was the one who practically frog-marched me into the place where I got the job that carried me all the way through college.

I mailed out autographed copies this week to everyone who paid for one, one to be considered for review by ï¿½True Westï¿½, another to be reviewed at Blogger News Network, one to B. Durbin with extravagant thanks for the use of her photo for the cover, one for The Fat Guy, who loves Westerns and Westernish things. Does anyone else want an autographed copy? Dave the Computer Genius helped me install a donation/payments page at www.celiahayes.com where you can order one with a simple click of the button. Iï¿½ll be sending for another box of copies in a couple of weeks, if anyone does.

On the marketing front, I have sent out quantities of postcards to various museums, historical societies and independent bookstores across the western states, and followed up with emails. A google map-search only turns up one independent bookstore in San Francisco which isnï¿½t self-consciously leftist, new-age or oriented to alternate lifestyles and/or the LBGT community. I havenï¿½t tackled Los Angeles yet; San Diego Iï¿½ll leave to Mom and her friends.

So far, a bookstore in Truckee has e-mailed me back, saying they will order copies ï¿½ they carry about a dozen books about the Donner Party alone. I am picturing my book in the ï¿½local historyï¿½ shelf, waving its hands and calling ï¿½Hey ï¿½ read about the people who didnï¿½t screw up their journey big time!ï¿½ And the Truckee-Donner Historical Society is making noises about reviewing and stocking it as well. So my instincts for marketing the book are paying off in a small way; not bad, considering I have no reviews at all to publicize it with, so far!

I do believe I shall finish the first draft, volume two of ï¿½Barsetshire with Cypress Trees, etcï¿½ this week, at about a chapter and a half to go. This ends neatly with the conclusion of the Civil War, with all the men trickling home and facing up to the ruin that the war left of their farms and businesses. Iï¿½ll be taking a breather and doing a lot more reading before I do necessary revisions and additional research. Then comes the final volume, and finding a new way to write about trail drives and cattle baronies, something that hasnï¿½t been seen in about a couple of million books, movies and TV Westerns.

There is some promising stuff I have discovered so far. Did anyone know that there were trail drives out of Texas, to California, well before the Civil War? And that refrigerated beef began to be shipped out of Indianola almost as soon as the war was over? Or even that the long trail drives towards the railheads in the mid-west even began because Texas was glutted with cattle that had run wild during the war?

Stay tunedï¿½.

Deep In the Heart

26. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, The Funny, World

There are reasons for not particularly enjoying residency in Texas; beginning with the brutal summer heat, and working down through the serious lack of good mountains, distance from the seacoast, the brutal summer heat, highway interchanges that look like the planners just threw a plate of spaghetti at a wall-map, self-chuck-holing surface roads, the brutal summer heat, a distressing tendency for citizens to drown in urban low-water crossings, a high percentage of drivers of large vehicle who completely spaz out when it rains (as if they had never, ever seen such a thing before!), the brutal summer heat, urban downtown areas (I’m looking at you, Houston!) which look like Calcutta had thrown up on Los Angeles…. And the fact that everything is bigger applies to the insect life as well. You wanna see a garden spider large enough to snag small birds? Check out my back yard… but bring along a baseball bat. And did I mention the brutal summer heat?

Against those considerations, though, there is an even longer list of reasons to relish living in the Lone Star State… look, flyover country is not cultural Siberia. We’ve got the bookstores, the boutique cinemas, the museums and opera companies, and the whiney self-centered artistes to prove it. In no particular order of importance, we also have…

Wildflowers; square miles of wildflowers; For months in spring the highway verges and the empty lots, and the hillsides look like paintings by the better sort of early impressionalist painter.

And given enough rain, the countryside looks really, really quite pretty. Not spectacular, mostly of a gently-rolling variety, cut across with green rivers and creeks. The Hill Country is rather more enthusiastically rolling. West Texas is really, really rolling, but not very green most of the year. More medium crispy, and not to everyones’ taste… but this being Texas – where everything is bigger – there is more than enough of it all to go around.

Fields of grazing cows… very restful to look at, although in some places this program is startlingly varied with flocks of llamas and other exotica.

The HEB grocery chain. Statewide powerhouse, having sent several national chains running for the borders with a matchless combination of quality, excellent service and attention to detail. Quite simply, if it isn’t on the shelf at HEB’s Central Market, you probably don’t need it anyway. There are whole sections devoted to local salsa, hot sauce and BBQ sauce.

Austin local music scene; not that I know much about that first hand, other than seeing “Austin City Limits” on PBS but Cpl. Blondie does, and she made me put that in.

Local history: a rich mine containing many solid gold nuggets. Like Churchill once remarked about the Balkans, Texas produces almost more history than can be consumed locally.

Breakfast tacos; the food of the gods… oh, ye who only know of this marvel through the medium of Taco Bell should hide your faces in shame, and make a pilgrimage to San Antonio on your knees. I solemnly swear that every block on every main avenue has a breakfast-taco place on it somewhere. Many of them also offer drive-through service.

And Texas also has a most exuberant sense of being a distinctive place. Utah is the only other place that has anything like the same strength of identity, of pride in a shared and unique history. I suppose it comes from both states having been politically independent and separate entities during their respective founding decades. Sometimes this sense of identity strikes new visitors as rather overstated, but after a while it’s kind of endearing, and makes other places feel a little bland in comparison.

And finally, this is only a personal and purely anecdotal statement… but I do believe that out of all other bodies of human beings in the world, a substantially higher proportion of Texans will slide out of this existence and into the next, breathless, exhausted and whooping triumphantly, “Day-am! What an incredible ride!”

Occasional Nightmare

22. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Technology, World

Everyone has a reoccurring nightmare, so I have always been told. If you are very lucky they are fairly benign, sometimes to the point of making you wonder if they can really be classed as a nightmare, like dreaming that you are stark naked in your place of work. A good few years ago, there was an article published, the result of a survey that revealed that college-graduates of all majors and vintages still had finals nightmares. They dreamed they went in to take a Terribly Important Final Exam, and when they actually began taking the test, realized that they didn’t know any of the answers, or it was an essay question and their mind was a Complete Blank… or that, like my mother’s reoccurring Finals Nightmare, they skipped that class for the entire semester.

My reoccurring nightmare is a peculiar variant of the Finals Nightmare; The Radio Station Where Nothing Works. Either I am walking into a sort-of-familiar radio station control room, where the control board has been subtly reconfigured, where all the board switches which activate and control the audio levels for the mikes, the CD players, the computer (which as replaced the cart decks where the spots, inserts and IDs used to play from) have been changed around… or they have been disconnected completely. Or it’s a completely new control board.

And in a bare three minutes or so before I have to go on the air, I have to figure it all out, or fix it so it does work.

Sometimes it’s the CD players which suddenly cannot be made to work properly. Adding piquancy to this particular nightmare variant is the fact that some of the early broadcast CD-player models used in AFRTS got terribly buggy when over-heated. No matter how carefully the DJ cued up a particular cut, they would reset themselves to another selection, usually the first cut on the CD. Nothing is guaranteed to make a DJ feel more like an idiot than to cheerfully announce the next song,… and have something else entirely go out on the air. I got to the point where I would not announce the next selection on the playlist, unless I recognized the up-ramp. But total nightmare material: not being able to make the darned thing work at all.

Playlist. That’s another nightmare. Not being able to find the next thing you’re supposed to be airing, because the CD/record library is a complete shambles. Or to cue it up in time; see above as regards non-functioning CD players. At least my nightmare has progressed technologically, to the point where I’m no longer afflicted by record-players with missing tone-arms or needles. There was a new element in my most recent radio-station nightmare, though. I can barely read the tiny print on CD cases now, without my reading glasses, and I dreamed the other night of having a playlist with print too small to read.

And I didn’t have my glasses. It sucks to be getting old… but it does beat the alternative, doesn’t it?

South Texas Monsoon Season

19. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, World

…Or in other words, for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. No matter where Hurricane Dean makes landfall, South Texas will most likely get more rain. And we need more rain, (on top of the forty days and forty nights quantities which we have already been blessed with this year), about as much as Custer needed another Indian.

The first two weeks in August were about the longest stretch we had gone without a gully-washer, all spring and fall. Quite honestly it’s not like we were really complaining about that; a couple of times a decade it is damned nice not to have a summer drought. The wildflower meadows were spectacular this year and they lasted until… well, the tougher wildflowers, like yellow daisies, Mexican Hat, and sunflowers are still gong strong even as I write. I saw fields of purple wild verbena that I had almost never observed before. And when Wil and Blondie and I went down to the coast in June, Wil kept remarking that everything appeared as lush and green as the English countryside. Usually by high summer, the wildflowers are gone and the hills and meadows are starting to look light brown and medium-crispy. By August, everything is the color of dust. If it weren’t for watering gardens and lawns, suburbia would look pretty much the same, but not this year. The kvetching about not being able to go out and mow the yard because the lawn squelches underfoot like a soggy sponge has risen to nearly unbearable levels.

The grass itself is nearly up to an elephant’s eye; mine would be, if I hadn’t pulled out the last of it and did xerioscaping and a lot of pavers set in gravel by way of dog-proofing the back yard last year. But the bay tree and the fig tree, and the crepe myrtles have practically exploded, having put on so much new growth. Aside from the lawn-care fanatics, who really don’t want their private patch of paradise to look like an 8th of an acre of tall-grass prairie, the gardeners and wild-flower enthusiasts have few complaints about the rain. The ground is now so saturated, and the aquifer topped up to the over-fill level, any more rain will just spill off.

Our main local headache after the next bad storm does a prolongued swirlie over south Texas is that suburban San Antonio is threaded by creeks, and fairly substantial ones at that. Leon, Salado, Cibolo Creeks, and a handful of smaller tributaries all feed eventually into the San Antonio River. Even when there isn’t an established stream-bed, usually a wide swath of mown grass with some interesting rocks and a trickle of water down the middle, there is a well-known tendency for water to collect in the roads at certain points after there has been any more rain than a gentle sprinkle.

Some of these places are marked as low-water crossings, with a kind of giant yellow yardstick set vertically into the ground. Others can be recognized as such by mud-stains and an assortment of ground-level debris trapped at a higher level in fences and shrubs. The police put up barriers at most of them, but others are just well known by regular commuters. After living in the city and experiencing the aftermath of a couple of rainstorms, you just know where water gathers and swamps the street and adjust accordingly. With an extended rainstorm, though, the deeper such pools will become. Water in the creek-beds will rise over the level of the bridges crossing them… and water will collect in new places and catch everyone by surprise. It’s kind of embarrassing, to know you can be swept away in your car, in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Yeah, it’s nice to stay in touch with nature, but when the rescue services have to bring a rope out to you, marooned on the roof of your car in the middle of a raging torrent at the Basse Road and Highway 281 off ramp; it’s all a bit too much of a good thing. So, we’re watching the weather services with a bit of nervousness, and wondering if we should just take a vacation day or two next week, rather than risk the commute.

On the bright side, at least someone hasn’t drowned in high water in a parking garage elevator, in the same manner as a luckless office worker did in Houston several years ago.

True to the Union Part 3

12. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

The flood of enthusiastic volunteers for service in the Army of the Confederacy had slowed to a trickle. Early in 1862 the Confederate Congress drafted and passed a general conscription law, essentially declaring that every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for military service. Within months the upper age limits was moved to forty-five. In the last desperate year of the war it was seventeen to fifty… and if a man fell into that rather broad category, he had better have a damn good reason for not being in uniform. Of course there were outs: for a while and on both sides, wealthy men could hire a substitute to serve. There were exemptions for elected officials, and for men who owned more than a certain number of slaves. This last exemption was particularly galling, especially in those portions of the Confederacy where the peculiar institution was not much practiced, either because of inclination or economics. Nothing was more calculated to prove the truth of the bitter observation that it was a rich mans’ war but a poor mans’ fight.

In the Texas Hill Country, feelings about the draft were especially bitter. Firstly, most of the Germans had been Unionists and abhorred slavery. Secondly, a prime motivation for emigrating from Germany in the first place had been the existence of conscription there. To be forced to fight in the defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body whose very existence they had opposed was an insult past bearing. And finally, Gillespie County was very much still a part of the frontier. Fighting off war-parties of Indians was much more of an immediate concern to settlers there, than whatever difficulties the Confederacy had managed to run themselves into. And there was also that ongoing concern about raising crops and protecting families and property, since the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from the frontier forts which had protected them. The Texas State troops which had replaced them after Texas secceeded had not proved any more effective. Dissatisfaction with the Confederacy rose, as the Union blockade began to bite deeply at economic interests and most especially in those parts of Texas which had not been enthralled by the whole concept to begin with.

Gillespie and neighboring Kerr County was put under martial law in the spring of 1862, and by summer the military officer in charge essentially declared war on the Hill Country Germans. It was ordered that all males over the age of 16 must register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Suspicion followed by repression only bred resentment and further defiance, which in turn bred violence… and resistance. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush whenever anyone in a uniform came around. Even companies of volunteers raised by Hill Country settlements to protect against Indian raids and freelance brigandage were looked upon by suspicion; for they had… it was whispered… only volunteered for frontier defense in order to keep out of the Confederate Army. It had already been noted by the commandant of the South Texas district that volunteers and conscripts for the Confederate Army were quite thin on the ground in Gillespie County. A company of so-called Partisan Rangers, under the command of Captain James Duff, who had been a freight-hauler and wagon-master before the war, were sent to keep order. Duf’s company set up camp near Fredericksburg, and set about establishing their commander as the most hated man in the county; amongst a long list of actions, they arrested a respected local merchant for supposedly refusing to accept Confederate currency in his establishment.

By summer, Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not made the difficult journey into town to take the loyalty oath. In a sweep of a thinly-settled area north of Kerrville, half a dozen men who had failed to do so where arrested by Duff’s troopers, along with their families. The families were sent to Fredericksburg, to be held under appalling conditions in a cramped one-room hut, but the six men were sent under guard to Fort Mason, in northern Gillespie County, where a large body of others suspected of being Union sympathizers were being held. During an overnight camp, two of the younger men saw that their guards were sleeping, and took the opportunity to slip away. The next morning, the frustrated guards simply hanged the four others and dumped their bodies into a nearby creek. Upon returning to Fredericksburg, the guards taunted the families of the men they had murdered with accounts of what had been done. To judge by the names, only one of the six was actually a German.

Duff’s rangers waged a savage campaign against the local settlers: flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking hard-built settler’s homes, arresting whole families and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock wholesale. After burning her home to the ground, one woman is said to have told Duff that he must have little enough to do, since he had left her and her children without any shelter at all. Captain Duff answered that at least, he was leaving her a spring of water, to which she shouted fearlessly that if he had known how to destroy that, he surely would have done so.

Thinking that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and that they had an opportunity to depart Texas unmolested, rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of sixty men gathered south of Kerrville in August of that year, led by a German settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener. They intended to travel westward towards the Mexican border; some of them intended to (and later did) join the Union Army. But there was no such amnesty in effect, and they were pursued and ambushed by a contingent of Duff’s troopers along the Nueces River. About half of Tegener’s party were killed outright in the resulting fight, and another twenty wounded, were executed upon capture. One was taken to San Antonio and executed there. The survivors scattered; some over the border, and some to the Hill Country, where their families brought food to them as they hid in the fields outside Fredericksburg. Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. They lay unburied until the end of the war, until the remains were gathered up and placed under a monument in Comfort.

(Next: the ‘Hanging Band’… to follow. Sorry, this is complicated, and I want to put it in small, edible bites!)

A Jolly Good Time Was Had by All: Pvt. Beauchamp

08. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Home Front, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military, World

Well, that was fun; sort of what I imagine a fox-hunt to be, with a pack of hounds and a merry collection of red-coated hunters on swift steeds. The successful conclusion of the milblogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour, the beat-down of aspiring fabulist Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just like one of those exhilarating hunts beloved by viewers of the very high-quality BBC dramas that have been exported to the lonely outposts of Peoria, Tujunga and Boise for lo, these many years.

There was the wily fox; not as wily as he thought he was, obviously… spinning an oh-so-tempting yarn for the editor of TNR, who eagerly snapped it up. And over there is a hound, a hound with a very clever nose who thinks something stinks and begins to bay, and a huntsman with a horn blows “tally-ho”, as the hounds quarter the rough ground, yapping noisily as they discover more and more interesting little discrepancies. No wounded woman at FOB Falcon? A small graveyard and not a dumping ground for victims of an atrocity? And where are the officers and NCOs, and how the hell is it possible for a clumsy tracked vehicle to run over a nimble street-mutt anyway? And for someone to find himself jaded and degraded by war… before he even arrives in theater?

So the hunt went off, in full cry, hounds and horses pounding over the rolling field and between the trees, spilling through the gaps in the fences, in hot pursuit of the nimble fox… who runs and runs and runs, twisting and backtracking. But every time he looks over his shoulder, the pack and the hunters are closer behind. And when the fox looks ahead, suddenly there is another hunt… a hunt of grim-faced people in mottled green and brown cammies, with lots of stripes on their sleeves or dull-metal stuff on their collars.

And the fox runs to ground. But he is hauled out by the scruff of his neck by the grim-faced people, and held so that everyone in the milling crowd… the hounds, the hunters, a great crowd of spectators can take a good long look. The fox squeaks out a few words admitting that everything he wrote was not true, whereupon he is sentenced to clean latrines with his long bushy tail for the foreseeable future.

Oh, there was a hunt-saboteur who tried to run interference for the fox, insisting that everything the fox said was of a high degree of truthiness… most everything had been confirmed by other foxes and experts, but that he just couldn’t share their names just yet, and why was everyone being so mean?

Well, that’s what the hunt-saboteur was saying just as he got trampled by the hunt, so he went off on vacation, and is there still, nursing some bruises and wondering what he did to deserve this, no doubt.

I shouldn’t worry, though. There’ll be another fox and another hunt, any time now. Just listen for the hounds and the sound of a horn, ringing over the blogosphere. And it will be fun!

True to the Union: Part 2

06. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

More new settlers than just the Germans were making their way into Texas, in the fifteen years before the Civil War. Once that the coastal lowlands below the Balcones Escarpment could be fairly said to be settled, Texas attracted more than just the land-hungry and restless. It drew ambitious and more prosperous settlers from across the south, settlers and entrepreneurs who brought their slaves with them. These men farmed sugar and rice and built fine plantation houses, gracefully adorned with neoclassical columns and ironwork balconies; in jarring contrast to the plainer log blockhouses and cabins built by the settlers on the western and northern borders of what passed for civilization. A fissure formed among communities in Texas that mimicked the split between North and South, between free-soil men and slave-owners. This split was exacerbated by the fact that the Germans, recent arrivals all, heartily disapproved of slavery, and retained strong cultural connections to other German communities in the north. Within a few months after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw the question of permitting slavery in the Western territories on those who settled there, a fresh ruckus broke out in Texas. The Act kicked up considerable bad feeling on both sides, since it was seen as allowing the peculiar institution to spread into where it had theretofore been forbidden. Many were the barrels of ink consumed, and thousands of spleens quite thoroughly vented, as adherents of free-soil and abolition expressed their disgust and disapproval.

One of those expressions took the form of a rather mildly-worded resolution disapproving of slavery, which was put up at a state-wide meeting of the various German choral societies, or “sangerbund” late in 1854 in San Antonio. German-American political and social organizations in other states had approved similar resolutions, but the vote of the Texas Germans set off a firestorm, especially among nativists and “Know-Nothings”, who were suspicious of foreigners anyway. Questions were asked, in increasingly belligerent voices, about the loyalties of the German settlers to Texas; very soon the abolitionist editor of a popular German-language newspaper would have to depart San Antonio at speed, driven out by threats of violence. The question of slavery morphed into a states’ rights issue; exactly what could the states decide for themselves was a burning question amongst the philosophically inclined. How much authority did the federal government hold when it came to strictly local issues? These and related points were vociferously disputed, even as attitudes about abolitionists hardened into a blanket detestation of anyone whose enthusiasm for the “peculiar institution” was less then wholly enthusiastic, across the South and Texas.. By the time that Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency as a free-soil man, Texas was aflame, literally and figuratively; although one can wonder just how much of the eagerness for war can be chalked up to the natural temperament of the Scots-Irish borderers who had an affinity for any fight going and gravitated towards it like a salmon going upstream.

Just because Abraham Lincoln was heinously unpopular across the South as president-elect did not mean that every Texan, slave-owner or not, made a mad dash for the exit and the passionate embrace of the Confederacy. There were men such as Sam Houston, a slave-owner, who were also Unionists. And there were also those who detested the “peculiar institution”… but who were strong for the abstract principle of states’ rights, even if they held no particular affection for the concrete policy of chattel slavery. And finally, there were those bedrock Texan settlers, like The Fat Guys’ ancestral kin who felt that:

a) “Texas never should have joined the union, as we were managing just fine on our own, no matter what the politicians said
b) since we did, though, we should stick to it and
c) how about a little help with these Comancheros?”

When the fighting began in the spring of 1861, the states-rights, and the pro-Confederacy factions carried the day had carried the day. Texas departed the Union and cast its lot with the Confederacy, over the objections and misgivings of a substantial minority, which included most of the German settlers.

By the second year of the war, barely a handful of men had volunteered out of Gillespie County for the Confederate Army. There were recruits a-plenty for the Home Guard, and for the Frontier Battalion, and for locally-recruited ranging companies to defend against Indian raiders sweeping in from the west and from the Plains… but a year and a half of full-out fighting in the east had already burned through those eager volunteers who had the inclination to leave their fields and families and go to fight. Halfway through 1862, New Orleans fell to the Union. Anyone could look at a map and see that the Union now commanded both ends of the Mississippi River. Perhaps many of those Texans who had doubts about the wisdom of departing the Union and joining the Confederacy now felt completely justified. And many of those who had been so eager for it now must have felt a cold little trickle run down their spines.

The Confederacy’s reaction to the Union threat would unleash riots and vigilante mayhem across the Hill Country, and in the Northern Texas settlements.

(To be continued)

True to the Union – Part 1

03. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Local, Old West, World

Last week one of my occasional employers and I were talking about my current writing project, “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. This employer knows the Hill Country and Fredericksburg quite well, and he remarked at once upon how clannish many of the old German families are, and how difficult it was for him, as an outsider selling farm supplies, to do much business with them. They were, he said, very loyal to each other and to those few outsiders who had established relationships with them. I didn’t find this hard to believe at all, since the part of the chronicle I am writing now covers the bitter days of the Civil War in Gillespie County.

There is actually not much available in print or on line about that specific period; just barely enough to give tantalizing hints at what happened during those years. It’s a skeleton upon which to drape a story of split loyalties, of bewildering events and sudden hatreds, seemingly sprung fully-armored out of the ground, like dragons-teeth, much to the astonishment of recently arrived but cultured and hard-working German settlers. In the space of a decade and a half, they had turned Gillespie County from an all-but empty wilderness into their new homes. They established singing-societies, and newspapers, celebrated the Forth of July with parades and festivals, and participated in the great American experiment of democracy with passionate enthusiasm. The finest doctor practicing in San Antonio was a recent émigré from Germany. The German settlers also built stone houses and planted orchards, established mills, hotels and workshops. Their communities, even on the edge of the frontier, were prosperous and several degrees more attractive than similarly-situated Anglo-American settlements, and connected by regular stage lines and the US mail to the larger communities of Austin, San Antonio, Indianola and Galveston. But something happened, something that put a roadblock in the blending that usually happened with even the largest immigrant communities.

Those Hill Country towns are still very distinct, even a hundred and fifty years later. The same family names crop up over and over; Herff, Arleheger, Ransleben, Marschall, Keidel, among others. Other 19th century immigrant-founded towns diluted over the decades following their establishment but the Hill Country Germans did not. Up until WWI, German was the predominant language, almost exclusively, and I had read an account of a traveler passing through Fredericksburg in the 1880s, who insisted that he had only found one person in the place who spoke English, and that was the sheriff and he spoke it very badly at that. At first, I wrote this tendency off to the sheer numbers of German immigrants who poured in to Gillespie County, and the homogeneity of the communities they formed. They came all at once, relatively speaking, first through the auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein in the mid 1840s, and then a second wave following upon the failure of the 1848 Revolution.

And then I read a little more, finding an interesting tid-bit in a translation/replica of a book put together for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Fredericksburg, which covered practically aspect of the founding of the town, in great detail, and with detailed first-hand reminiscences by many early settlers; how they forded the Pedernales River, and passed by an encampment of Delaware Indians, and one of the Verein troopers escorting them killed a bear at the river ford. They held a great celebratory feast that evening, in a grove of post-oak trees near where the Verein had begun building a blockhouse and a fenced compound, around which the town of Fredericksburg had been surveyed and marked out. (The blockhouse was about where the Subway sandwich shop on Main Street is now, catty-cornered from the Nimitz hotel.) Such accounts were so thorough I hardly needed anything else for a good few chapters… but contrasted oddly with comparatively terse accounts of what had happened among Fredericksburg’s citizens during the Civil War. Essentially, the person who wrote that particular segment in the mid 1880s admitted that feelings were still so raw about the Civil War, that it was best to just not go any farther with such details.

Interesting, but not entirely unexpected, that tempers would still be pretty hot, and wartime grudges would still be held. But still, I wondered about that. Texas had been a pretty far-distant corner of the Confederacy. And someone who had fought as a soldier in that war would be middle-aged when that book was written. A veteran or survivor would have spent twenty years building a post-war life, repairing a farm or business that would have been interrupted by the storm of war, or the Reconstruction that followed upon it. Texas had not been fought over, marched over, occupied and reoccupied to the same degree that some of the eastern states had been. The economy had been wrecked… but that was more due to the Union blockade, and the diversion of able-bodied men into military service. Emancipating the slaves caused barely a hiccup; there weren’t that many in Texas, comparatively speaking… and the German immigrants were famously opposed to chattel slavery anyway.

And that turned out to be exactly why feelings had run so hot and so hard, you see. (To be continued)

The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving

29. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, World

TNR’s “Shock Troops” diarist is just the gift that keeps on giving. After reading this, and shaking my head, I sent the following email to “editors@cjr.org” offering this feedback:

I read with interest and considerable amusement Mr. McLeary’s comment, as regards the wanna-be Hemmingway, Pvt. Beauchamp and the kurfuffle-du-jour over his “Shock Troops” article in TNR:

“How dare a college grad and engaged citizen volunteer to join the Army to fight for his country! (Which is something that most of the brave souls who inhabit the milblog community prefers to leave to others.) ”

I doubt that I am the first, and probably won’t be the last to write to inform Mr. LcLeary that the term “milblog” is a contraction of “military blogger” and in current usage means “members of the military, their families, or veterans who blog”.

Such veterans and currently serving military members took the lead in reviewing and debunking Pvt. Beauchamps’ extremely dubious stories, offering an expertise in military culture and current events in Iraq which seems to sadly lacking at TNR. And to judge by Mr. McLeary’s off-hand comment, it appears to be also lacking at the CJR.

BTW, all military officers are required to have a college degree, as a prerequisite for recieving a commission. These days, it is not uncommon for enlisted members to also have degrees, either before enlisting, or to work towards one while in service.

I myself came into the service with a college degree, but while I flatter myself that I am a much better writer than Pvt. Beauchamp,…so are most of the milbloggers out there. TNR would have been better-served with practically any of them.

Sgt. Mom, TSgt, USAF (Ret)
The Daily Brief

This tempest is far outgrowing it’s teapot; is anyone making more popcorn? If I get any reply, I’ll post it.

Note, as of 9:45 CST: recieved the following reply from Paul McLeary, at CJR:

“I’m getting slammed with emails about this, but I want to answer
every one, because I think that it’s important. Here’s the email
that I sent to the Mudville Gazette milblog, who posted part of it
Sunday afternoon.

————-
I really walked into this one.

I actually spend a lot of time on milblogs. I was careless in my
choice of wording when I wrote the piece. What I meant was the
whole community of blogs that have sprung up in the same universe
as milblogs — Hugh Hewitt, etc., who act tough about the war, but
have never served, and have never left the comforts of their
air-conditioned offices to see what might be going on in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

I’ve written a lot about milblogs, actually: Interviewed Matthew
Currier Burden for CJR, as well as a couple soldiers who were
blogging for the New York Times. I’ve also spoken to, and exchanged
emails with Yon and Bill Roggio and such, and I blogged the whole
time I was in Iraq back in ’06, which doesn’t make me a milblogger,
but hey, it’s something, I guess.

Like I said, I really stepped in it because I didn’t take the time
to clearly define what I was talking about.”

OK, so honor is served. Says something that he is replying to emails on a Sunday evening, and admitting to not paying proper attention to detail. On that account, I’ll give him a pass from being the milblogosphere’s chew-toy du-jour. Go ye therefore and sin no more, but what any other milblogger does is up to them, of course.

Way To Much Time On His Hands

27. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Navy, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Good God, Technology, World

A model of an aircraft carrier… made entirely out of Legos.

(link courtesy of Rantburg, the source for all things civil and well reasoned.)

Fortune and Mens Eyes

24. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Iraq, Rant, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

It is a curious coincidence that just as the milblogosphere is reveling in the righteous joys of thumping another credulous editor of a formerly-pretty-reputable legacy media venue… here we are dished up another heaping helping of military bashing from a couple of personalities that I have never heard of. Allegedly, this doofus is claimed to be a regular on Saturday Night Live. The hell you say… is that show still on? Wow.

Whatever A Whitney Brown’s problem is, I’ll bet it’s damned hard to pronounce. And this guy at least had a few remaining shreds of decency left to him… enough that he pulled his post about how the modern military was creating mass murderers and serial killers…

Ops, scuse me, while I go outside, and flag down that idiot with the car speakers which go whoop-whoomp-whoomp at such a deafening level that his car actually sounds like it’s farting. I’m going to chop up his inconsiderate ass into quarters with a chain-saw and Fed-Ex each quarter and his head to five different places…

No, just kidding. But not about the car stereo… it really does sound like the car is farting.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes… military = killers. Got it. Kind of the point actually, in an official, just-doing-our-job, ma’am sense. Yes, we kill those who have been designated as our enemies; neatly, efficiently, and without particular prejudice. Unsanctioned, off the books free-lancing is still frowned upon, however. Just so we’re all on the same page, here.

Still, to note all this is to wonder… why all this perfectly rotten press now? And without the obligatory “Of course we support the troops!” in this round of being pissed-on… guess they’ve noticed we’re not buying the claims of the stuff just being rain.

I do wonder what has brought the usual suspects to a fine frothing boil; I haven’t seen such hysterical insistence on the brutality and licentiousness of the soldiery since the putrid days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Makes a bit of a change from painting them as poor widdle disadvantaged and victimized cheeeldren who had no other way to get ahead than to listen to the siren allure of the recruiter, which is the alternate method of denigration to date At least the “brutal and licentious” bit will give the troops credit for being grownups. Sort of.

But no credit for anything else, and credibility is where this whole thing is going… oh, not by any deep-laid strategic plan. More like some kind of subconscious hive-instinct, an irrational passionate urge to make the Iraq war and the whole WOT thingy just go away. And to go away without any blame attaching to the usual suspects, win or loose. Loose is always in the cards, of course. The middle east has been a veritable snake-pit for decades. If it reverts to type… no skin off ours, as long as we’re safely out of the middle, and a repeat of Saigon, 1975 can all be safely blamed on the Bush cabal. With appropriate tisk-tiskings, of course.

But…. What if the “surge” is working? What if the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate, and taking real control of their lives and their country? What if all those nice hardworking reservists and those high school graduates from Nowheresville, and those Marines from flyover country have managed to pull of a shaky miracle, and in another fifteen or twenty years, Iraq looks like South Korea, only with palm trees and more sand?

Wow, wouldn’t that be a facer for people like Senators Kerry and Murtha, for the Kos Kidz and the staff of the Guardian, among a long list of others… like A. Whitney Brown? Their advice has been spurned, and they are in peril of being shown up by the people that they secretly, or in some cases, not so secretly, hold in contempt. Makes it kind of hard to maintain that effortless air of superiority over lesser mortals, so of course, something must be done!

When old-time autocrats didn’t like the message, proverbially, they shot the messenger. The new autocrats in the legacy media, the nutroots, or in the higher ivory-towers wouldn’t be so crude. They’d rather denigrate the messenger; the troops and the leaders alike. Taint them by association; paint them as sociopath degenerates, brutal and vengeful and incompetent. Shame them into silence, make them shrink back into the little Nowheresvilles they crawled out of, put away their uniforms and their medals, and hide their associations away in the corners.

Really, it makes it so much easier to betray allies and friends, when these pathetic little people and their stupid “duty, honor and country” just forget all of that and do as their betters like A. Whitney Brown tell them.

And that’s what I think is going on here. Your mileage may vary, of course

Question(s) of the Day (070721)

21. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General

Why do I know so much about the Atlanta Falcons? Don’t they suck? Would we care so much about the dog fighting thing if it wasn’t an overpaid NFL “gangstah” being indicted?

Did we really need to know the President was getting a colonoscopy?

A friend of mine insists that I need to see “Sicko.” I said sure, if you promise to watch a couple of night’s worth of Glenn Beck with me. Any guess on how that went?

Back to inappropriate coverage of political body parts…Why in God’s name is the press paying attention to Hillary’s cleavage?

Crescendo for the Writers Life Waltz

20. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Site News, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Just a quick update on the current book, scribbled between slaving over a hot computer, a couple of job assignments, and mundane things like… oh, I don’t know, cooking meals? Taking the dogs out for a walk. (Er, drag-around-the-block. They. Drag. Me. Just to make that point absolutely clear.)

The text is uploaded to the printers, and the cover is finished and approved… it has all taken nearly two weeks to accomplish this; much longer than I expected. I hope this might be some kind of indication that business is absolutely booming with the POD houses. I was clawing the walls with impatience all this week, but the cover is well worth the wait, thanks to B. Durbin’s very generous offer to let me use one of her photos of the Truckee River. (Appropriate credit is given, natch!)

So, once I have a hard copy in my hot little hands, and approve the whole thing, “To Truckee’s Trail” will be in the booklocker.com catalogue, all 272 pages and eighteen long chapters (with notes!) of it; a gripping read of adventure and discovery along the 19th century emigrant trail to California. I’ll be doing some more marketing, and scrounging for reviews and ad space here and there, and generally trying to sell a good few copies of it. At the very least, I can claim to write fewer clunky sentences per chapter than Dan Brown, of “The DaVinci Code” fame! (That blasted book was unreadable, to me… I kept tripping and falling headlong over sentences that sounded like entries in the current Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest!)

And I’ll be scribbling away on the Adelsverein saga, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. Going by my latest chapter outline revision I’m about halfway through volume two, although as complications and side-stories develop, this is guaranteed to expand to epic proportions, so to say. There are just so many interesting people, and fascinating scenes, dramatic and historic events; a kid in a candy store has nothing on me! Of course, I can’t help writing about them, I tell stories, it’s what I am driven to do. I just completed a tension-filled account of the local Confederate provost-marshal’s men searching a house for a draft-evader… on Christmas Eve… the searchers being unaware that the man they are looking for is dressed as Father Christmas. (In the parlor, with his family… and everyone who knows what is going on is frantically pretending that nothing is the least bit out of place.)

But three volumes of about twenty chapters each… and my chapters seem to clock in at 6,500 to 7,000 words each… that will mean 400,000 words.

So, back to slaving over the hot computer keyboard…

Later: Just realized upon consulting the archives, that today is exactly one year to the date that I was fired from (Boring Corporate Entity Inserted Here) and decided to try for that “best-selling writer brass-ring-thingy”! With the very book that is about to be launched upon a hopefully breathlessly-anticipating world. So, I have way to go to beat out that Harry Potter book… still, funny old world, innt it?

Committee of Vigilance

18. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

California in the Gold Rush era was by all accounts a wild and woolly place for a good few years after discovery of gold, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Until that moment in 1848 when John Marshall found gold in a mill-race under construction at Coloma, California had dreamed away the decades as first a Spanish and then a Mexican colony, remote from practically everything, lightly settled, and with a small economy based on cattle ranching… not for beef, in those days before refrigeration and the railway, but rather for their hides. Yerba Buena , which would soon be renamed San Francisco was a sleepy little village of at most about 800 residents.

But in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, everything changed. The world rushed in, both in a matter of speaking, and literally. By 1851 some estimates put 25,000 people in and around San Francisco; those seeking gold and those seeking to make a living in various ways from those seeking gold. For a few mad months and years, even otherwise respectable and responsible citizens were more interested in gold than in attending to civic affairs. This was not at first much of a problem. Most gold-seekers, or Argonauts as they were called, were basically inclined to be law-abiding… even in the absence of heavy law-enforcing authorities.

But there was a minority amongst them who were not so inclined. In the absence of enthusiastic law enforcement, or even any law enforcement at all, they settled down to enjoy that happy (to them) situation to the fullest, forming a loosely-knit gang called the “Hounds”, which mainly targeted the non-Anglo, Hispanic miners and merchants, principally Mexicans and Chileans for bullying and general extortion. When a riot by the Hounds resulted in the destruction a part of town called “Chiletown” on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, a coalition of businessmen headed by long-time resident Sam Brannon concluded that up with this situation they would not put. They established a tribunal to housebreak the “Hounds”, arresting and punishing or exiling the gang leaders. Almost as an afterthought they also established a police department, charging a recently arrived Argonaut named Malachi Fallon with establishing a police department. Fallon had some tenuous connection with police business in New York City, in that he had been a prison-keep at the Toombs. On the strength of that sketchy resume, he went to work, establishing a force of about thirty constables operating from a single flimsy building.

Thirty police officers pitted against a shifting population of over 25,000 did about what could have been expected; at best, well-intentioned but ineffectual. Given that most of those 25,000 were young males, from a hundred different nations, hungry for adventure, riches and strong drink, touchy about personal honor and mostly well-armed… Malachi Fallon’s little band would have had as much luck emptying the Bay with a teacup as they did of keeping order. When crime eventually began to surge again, it was whispered that the police force was in cahoots with the criminal elements. Whether it was corruption or incompetence, the solid and law-abiding citizens were long out of patience by 1856 and not feeling inclined to debate the difference. Another committee of vigilance was formed, and when all the shouting was done, San Francisco had a reputation for being a place where lawbreaking was not tolerated. For long, anyway. And so it was, all across the West, especially in the mining towns, in the early years, when towns sprang up like mushrooms, practically overnight.

The people who lived in them would have law, and security of their homes, their persons and their possessions. They would demand it of the governments they instituted for themselves. And if those governments could, or would not deliver it, for whatever reason, the citizens would go and deliver it for themselves, however ham-fistedly.

Renaissance Man

15. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, World

Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and Sam Houston, his personal life was already fairly checkered, including one divorce. Unlike the first two, Ford would live through the tumultuous affair that was the Republic of Texas. Like Sam Houston, he would survive all the vicissitudes that an active life on the Texas frontier could throw at him, and die in bed at the ripe old age (for the 19th century) of 82. I assume he was mildly surprised by this happy chance. He had survived the usual accidents and epidemics of an age which predated antibiotics and germ theory in general, any but the crudest of surgeries, and routine vaccination for anything other than smallpox. He had also survived service in two wars and innumerable campaigns along the borders and against various hostile Indian tribes, several rounds of frontier exploration, election to public office… and as a newspaper editor, in the days when public discourse was conducted metaphorically with a set of brass knuckles.

He arrived in Texas in 1836 at the age of 21, having missed Santa Anna’s campaign against the recalcitrant Texans, and Sam Houston’s momentous victory over him at San Jacinto by a bare month. That was about the last significant historical event in Texas that John S. Ford would miss. He would be in the thick of it for the next sixty years, and at the end of his life he would sit down and turn his pen to writing his memoirs, which would fairly double as a history of Texas in the 19th century.

Over that time, Ford embraced a variety of causes with vigorous if sometimes unwise enthusiasm: unionism, temperance, know-nothingism, and secession, and education for the deaf. But he began his career in Texas with a medical practice in the settlement of San Augustine. He had studied medicine in Tennessee, with a local doctor, and under the rather sketchy standards of the time was qualified to hang out a shingle. He spent eight years there, practicing medicine, teaching Sunday school, and riding as a volunteer ranger with a series of local companies… including one commanded by Jack Hays. He also taught himself law. One supposes that San Augustine was a small town, where residents had to double-up on various jobs. In 1844 he was elected to the Texas Legislature as a pro-annexation platform, and took himself off to Washington on the Brazos. He served a term, married (for the second time) and decided to give up medicine for the newspaper business, specifically a weekly paper called the Texas National Register.

Ford was very much a partisan of Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, who was not all that popular in Austin; Ford leapt to his defense with gusto. He and his partner changed the name of the paper to the “Texas Democrat”, and campaigned persistently for such things as more and better schools, and effective defense of the frontier. It was for the time, a rather liberal newspaper… and Ford participated gleefully in every ruckus raised in a state where the political scene usually resembled the ‘tomcats in a sack’ model. But in late 1845, Ford’s wife fell ill, and soon died, in spite of all he could do. Grief-stricken, he took himself off to join the company that his old friend Jack Hays was raising… for Mexico was disputing with the United States over the Texas border. Ford eventually became the regimental adjutant, and from his practice of writing “rest in peace” or “RIP” below his signature on the required reports of casualties, the nickname of “Old Rip”, which followed him for the rest of his life.
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