A Message from Bexar

13. July 2010 · Comments Off on A Message from Bexar · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

(Chapter 11, from the current work, Gone to Texas. The settlers in Gonzales are tensely awaiting word from the Alamo, in the spring of 1836… we know how it all ended, but they don’t …yet. I’m trying to come up with a better title, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, email me, as comments seem to be temporarily frelled)

The hours and days of March, dragged past at a snail’s pace; a week and a half since the Gonzales Ranging Company had ridden down towards the ferry and the road to Bexar. Surely they had achieved a safe passage into that crumbling and shabby fortress – and other reinforcements were on the way? Now and again, Margaret fancied that when it was very still – at dawn, or just after sunset, and the light breeze came from the north – that she could hear a faint continuous rumble, like distant thunder – the sound of cannon-fire. Toward the end of that time, rumors swept Gonzales, each more dreadful than the last: the worst of them had the Alamo fallen and all the defenders put to the sword, but that tale had been brought by a pair of Mexican cattle-drovers, who – as it turned out, not even seen anything of it, but had heard the dreadful tale from another drover. Within days of reading Colonel Travis’ declaration and plea in the Telegraph, soldiers, militia and ranging companies began arriving in Gonzales, singly or in companies. Colonel Neill, who had taken leave of his duties at Bexar, thinking that all would be in order and there would be time enough to finish reinforcing the Alamo began gathering those new recruits to his little army. Race, with his face seeming to be pale skin stretched over the bones of his face, had recovered enough strength to resume his duties as a courier and dispatch rider. Margaret herself went with Race to the sprawling encampment on the Military Plaza, on the pretense of extending the use of part of their house to the General, or whoever of his staff might have need of lodgings. The gathering volunteers had set up there, at some distance from the back of those houses along St. John’s Street. The morning sun sent spreading shadows all across the grass and the tents, grass and canvas alike sodden with morning dew. A line of small campfires sent narrow columns of smoke up into the air. Under the shelter of a spreading oak tree, a handful of rough-dressed men riding winter-shaggy horses were just dismounting and tying their reins to stakes and picket-posts, as if they were awaiting momentary orders sending them on some errand. Race greeted one of them, a rangy man with a long and slightly crooked nose. Thinning hair straggled over a high forehead, and ears which stood out from the sides of his head like the lugs on a sugar-bowl.
“Erastus,” Race said, and then repeated himself, slightly louder. “Erastus, is General Houston within?”
“He is, that,” the man this greeted answered, in a slightly flat voice, which at once sounded as if he spoke a little too loud. “He’s in his tent, but he’s mighty busy at the moment with Colonel Neill. I can bear him a message, though. How you been keepin’ Race? You don’t look so good.” More »

Gone to Texas – Chapter 8

04. June 2010 · Comments Off on Gone to Texas – Chapter 8 · Categories: General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, War

(As promised, another intermittent chapter from the next book – Gone to Texas, which will hopefully be finished this year and released by spring 2011.
Margaret has grown up, and married the schoolteacher. She and her husband and their children are living in Gonzales by the fall of 1835, while her father Alois – having quarreled with first Stephen Austin, and then some of his neighbors in Gonzales – has taken the rest of the family north, to a distant little settlement on the Upper Colorado. But matters are also coming to a slow boil between the American settlers, and the Mexican government, between Federalists and Centralists…)

Margaret took the boys and walked over to the Darsts, after Race shrugged into his coat and hurried away to the militia meeting. She found Sue Dickenson already there, with little Angelina; they let the children play on the floor of the verandah together. Maggie Darst was baking bread, and Sue had brought her knitting basket. The Darst boys, Jacob and Abraham had already gone to the militia meeting with their father.
“What do you suppose they will decide?” Sue asked, as Margaret brought out her own mending.
“They will take a vote on what to do,” she answered, “Return the cannon, as Colonel Ugartechea asked . . . or not. I think the answer they will decide upon is ‘not.’ And then, therefore, they will need to talk about what to do next.”
“And then?” Sue asked, and Maggie Darst was also looking at her, as if she wished to know. How very curious, to be considered as some kind of oracle, merely because she listened to the men talk, and her husband talked to her.
“I don’t know,” Margaret answered, “I expect they will stall, while they send for help from the other settlements. My husband thinks that help will come, very shortly – for even Mr. Austin has come around to agree with the War Party.”
“And no wonder,” Maggie Darst said, with indignation, “To be arrested and imprisoned for years – and for asking no more than was our right to ask for! There he was the most conciliatory of them all – and now agreeing with men he would have thrown out of San Felipe two years ago! The worm will turn, given time enough, I guess.”
“Will they truly come to our aid?” Sue whispered; her eyes large with apprehension. “Will they dare?”
“I think they must,” Margaret answered, soberly, “For the only alternative will be to graciously accept and bind themselves with the chains that General Cos is bringing with him. And I cannot see men like my husband, or either of yours, or Mr. Bowie – or any of them doing that. They must join together and soon, or be defeated separately.”
They talked for a while, while afternoon shadows lengthened, admiring their children, and Mrs. Darst’s house; how vividly Margaret was reminded – of how it was at the building of it that she met Race again, and how they had stood under the redbud tree, while the breeze shook down raindrops from the leaves. Presently the Darst boys came running along the street, shouting exuberantly. Margaret gathered up her sewing basket and Johnny, saying,
“I believe they are finished with the meeting – I must haste home and see to supper.” She bid a farewell to the others, and kissed tiny Angelina, thinking wistfully that she would so love to have her next child be a daughter. When she got home, Race was packing his saddlebags and rolling up one of the coarse-wool Mexican blankets. Bucephalus stood saddled and bridled, with the reins tied to a porch-post.
“I am sent as a courier to Mina,” Race explained, over his shoulder. “If you may fix me something to eat quickly, I told them I would be away before sunset.”
“So, the men have decided to defy Colonel Ugartechea?” She ventured, and Race nodded. “Three voted to give up the cannon, but the rest said ‘no.’ We have actually decided to stall for time,” he explained, “Take the damned thing down from the blockhouse and bury it in George Davis’s peach orchard, while Andrew respectfully asks for the request to be clarified by the good Colonel’s superior, those of us with good horses scatter across the countryside begging for aid, and everyone else pretends to go about their own business.”
“When will you return?” Margaret set down her basket, and the baby, swiftly taking up a knife, and the end of a knuckle of smoked ham from the kitchen safe. “Maggie Darst was baking bread, and gave me a fresh loaf. I wonder if she expected this?”
“Bless her – fresh-baked bread,” Race flashed a quick smile over his shoulder. “I expect to be back before the first demand arrives.” He ate what she prepared for him standing up, as if he were impatient to be away, as she made a few more sandwiches for the journey. “And bless you, my dearest Daisy. I will do my best to return swiftly, but you will be alone with the children tonight and possibly tomorrow. I will take my two pistols, so you should not fear for my safety. Latch the door, if you should fear for yours.”
“I will not,” Margaret tightened his warmest scarf around his neck. He had already put on a heavy hunting coat. She whispered, “Stay safe, my dearest.”
“I will,” he promised – and she was utterly confident that he would. He and Bucephalus were away in a clatter of hoofs; she could hear other hoof-beats drumming on the roads and track-ways leading north, east and to the south, the tracks that only the men familiar with the countryside could negotiate in twilight and at a fast canter.
More »

Personal Barsetshire

01. June 2010 · Comments Off on Personal Barsetshire · Categories: General, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

In January, 2007 I had just launched into the first book about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country – a project which almost immediately came close to overflowing the constraint that I had originally visualized, of about twenty chapters of about 6,500 words each. Of course I blogged about what I had described as “my current obsession, which is growing by leaps and bounds.” A reader suggested that “if I was going for two books, might as well make it three, since savy readers expected a trilogy anyway.” And another long-time reader Andrew Brooks suggested at about the same time “Rather then bemoan two novels of the Germans in the Texas hill country, let them rip and just think of it as The Chronicles of Barsetshire, but with cypress trees!” and someone else amended that to “Cypress trees and lots of side-arms” and so there it was, a nice little marketing tag-line to sum up a family saga on the Texas frontier. I’ve been eternally grateful for Andrew’s suggestion ever since, but I have just now come around to thinking he was more right than he knew at the time. Because when I finally worked up the last book of the trilogy, it all came out to something like 490,000 words – and might have been longer still if I hadn’t kept myself from wandering down along the back-stories of various minor characters. Well, and then when I had finished the Trilogy, and was contemplating ideas for the next book project, I came up with the idea of another trilogy, each a complete and separate story, no need to have read everything else and in a certain order to make sense of it all. The new trilogy, or rather a loosely linked cycle, would pick up the stories of some of those characters from the Trilogy – those characters who as they developed a substantial back-story almost demanded to be the star of their own show, rather than an incidental walk-on in someone elses’.

I never particularly wanted to write a single-character series; that seemed kind of boring to me. People develop, they have an adventure or a romance, they mature – and it’s hard to write them into an endless series of adventures, as if they stay the same and only the adventure changes. And I certainly didn’t want to write one enormous and lengthy adventure broken up into comfortably volume-sized segments. Frankly, I’ve always been rather resentful of that kind of book: I’d prefer that each volume of a saga stand on its own, and not make the reader buy two or three books more just to get a handle on what is going on.

So, launched upon two of the next project – when I got bored with one, or couldn’t think of a way to hustle the story and the characters along, I’d scribble away on the other, and post some of the resulting chapters here and on the other blog. But it wasn’t until the OS blogger Procopius remarked “I like that you let us see the goings on of so many branches of the same family through your writings. The frontier offers a rich spring of fascinating stories!” This was also the same OS blogger who had wondered wistfully, after completing reading “The Harvesting” about young Willi Richter’s life and eventual fate among the Comanche, first as a white captive and then as a full member of the band. And at that point, I did realized that yes, I was writing a frontier Barsetshire, and perhaps not quite as closely linked as Anthony Trollop’s series of novels, , but something rather more like Angela Thirkell’s visualization of a time and place, of many linked locations, yet separate characters and stories. Yes, that is a better description of how my books are developing – not as a straight narrative with a few branches, but as an intricate network of friends, kin and casual acquaintances, all going their own ways, each story standing by itself, with now and again a casual pass-through by a character from another narration. And it’s starting again with the latest book, I’ll have you know – I have a minor character developing, a grimy London street urchin, transplanted to Texas, where he becomes a working cowboy, later a champion stunt-performer in Wild West Shows . . . eventually, he is reinvented in the early 20th century as a silent movie serial star. The potential for yet one more twig branching out into another fascinating story is always present, when my imagination gets really rolling along.

So – yes. Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of side-arms, Barsetshire on the American frontier as the occasionally wild west was settled and tamed, a tough and gritty Barsetshire, of buffalo grass and big sky, of pioneers and Rangers, of cattle drives and war with the Comanche, war with the Union, with Mexico and with each other. This is going to be so great. I will have so much fun . . . and so will my readers.

Tales of Texas: Lexington on the Guadalupe

26. May 2010 · Comments Off on Tales of Texas: Lexington on the Guadalupe · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

A stern and unvarnished accounting of the bare facts of the encounter known as the Battle of Gonzales, or the “Come and Take it Fight” would make the proceedings rather more resemble a movie farce than a battle. But almost at once, that encounter on the banks of the Guadalupe River was acknowledged by those involved and historians ever since, as the Lexington moment in the Texas War for Independence. In brief – late in the fall of 1835, a party of about a hundred Mexican soldiers from the military presidio in San Antonio de Bexar attempted to repossess one small 6-pound iron (or possibly bronze) cannon from the civil authorities in Gonzales. It was the second request; the original one had been backed by only five soldiers and a corporal. The cannon was old, had been spiked and was generally useless for making anything other than a loud noise. It had been issued to Green DeWitt’s colonists out of the military arsenal some five years previously, when the American settlers on Green DeWitt’s impresario grant feared Indian raiders, and the Mexican authorities did not have such a high degree of apprehension over what those obstreperous Americans were getting up to.

The Anglo-Texian residents of Gonzales first stalled the request for the cannon’s return, suspecting that the true motive behind the request was an attempt to disarm, or at least intimidate them. They appealed to higher authorities on both sides, asked for an explanation, finally refused to turn it over, and sent to the other Anglo settlements in Texas for aid in making their refusal stick. They hid all the boats on the river on their side, baffling the Mexican commander, one Lt. Francisco de Castaneda – for the Guadalupe was swift and deep at that point. He struck north along the riverbank, looking for a shallower place where he and his force could cross – but in the meantime, companies of volunteers from other Anglo-Texian settlements had been pouring into Gonzales – from Mina (now Bastrop) from Beeson’s Crossing, from Lavaca and elsewhere. There were well over a hundred and fifty, all of whom had dropped whatever they were doing, as farmers, stockmen, merchants and craftsmen – and hurried to the westernmost of the Anglo settlements. That they arrived so speedily and with such resolve was of significant note, although their eventual encounter with Castaneda’s soldiers was somewhat anticlimactic. The two forces more or less blundered into each other in morning fog, in a watermelon field. One of the Texian’s horses panicked and threw it’s rider when the soldiers fired a volley in their general direction. The rider suffered a bloody nose – this was the only Texian casualty of the day. A parley was called for, held between Castaneda and the Texian leader, John Moore, of present-day La Grange (who had been elected by the men of his force, as was the custom – a custom which remained in effect in local militia units all the way up to the Civil War). The lieutenant explained that he was a Federalista, actually in sympathy with the Texians – to which John Moore responded that he ought to surrender immediately and come over to the side which was valiantly fighting against a dictatorial Centralist government. The Lieutenant replied that he was a soldier and must follow orders to retrieve the cannon. Whereupon John Moore waved his hand towards the little cannon, which had been repaired and mounted on a makeshift carriage. There was also a brave home-made banner flying in the morning breeze, a banner made from the skirt of a silk dress. John Moore’s words echoed those on the banner, “There it is on the field,” he said, “Then come and take it.” At his word, the scratch artillery crew, which included blacksmith Almaron Dickenson (who within six months would be the commander of artillery in the doomed Alamo garrison), fired a mixed load of scrap iron in the general direction of Castaneda’s troops. Honor being satisfied, Lt. Castenada retired, all the way back to San Antonio, doubtless already writing up his official report.

No, they won’t give the damned thing back, they’ve fixed it, and they’re bloody pissed off and demonstrated that with vigor. I have the honor to be yr devoted servant, Lt. F. Castaneda, and no, don’t even think of sending me out to truck with these bloody Americans again – they are really pissed off, they have guns and there are more of them than us!

So, yes – pretty much an anticlimax. The Texians had nerved themselves up for a bloody fight, and in six months they would get it. But why the “Come and Take It Fight” got to have the considerable press that it has in the history books – the history books in Texas, anyway – it’s a bit more complicated than the bald narrative of a couple of days in the fall of 1835 on the banks of the lower Guadalupe River might indicate.

By that year, the American settlers, or Anglo-Texians who had been taking up grants of lands in Texas for almost ten years were getting entirely too obstreperous for the peace of mind of centralist and conservative, top-down authoritarians such as General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In a way, it was a clash between two mind-sets regarding civil authority and the proper involvement of ordinary citizens in the exercise of it. One favored central, top-down authority by well-established and ordained elites. Those lower orders did as they were ordered by their betters – and no back-talk allowed. The other mind-set, that of the Anglo-Texian communities – had no truck or toleration for political elites, practically no stomach for doing as they were ordered, and felt they had a perfect right to concern themselves with the running of their communities. This appeared as the rankest kind of sedition to the central government in Mexico City, sedition and revolution which must be firmly quashed . . . only the more they quashed, the greater the resentment and deeper the suspicion, which resulted in more meetings, fiery letters and editorials, stronger determination to manage their affairs themselves, and finally drove even Stephen Austin into open rebellion. He had always been the conciliatory towards Mexican authority, and the most exasperated with American hot-heads looking to pick a fight with that authority, but at long last, even his patience had reached a snapping point. A year-long stint in prison on vague suspicions of having fomented an insurrection and another year of restriction on bond to within Mexico City had soured him on agreeable and gentlemanly cooperation between the Anglo-Texians and the Centralistas.

Pardoned and released, Austin returned to Texas just as the Mexican government led by Lopez de Santa Anna decided to crack down, once and for all. A large military force led by Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, General Martin Perfecto de Cos was dispatched to sort out why Texians were not paying proper import duties on imported goods, end all resistance to the Centralist government, and arrest the most vociferous critics of the Centralist administration and the Napoleon of the West, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. It was rumored among the Anglo Texians that among General Cos’ baggage train were 800 sets of shackles and chains, intended for the use of bringing prisoners back to Mexico for trial and execution. The demand for the return of the Gonzales cannon came just at the very time that General Cos had landed with his soldiers, and was marching towards San Antonio, as the seat of civil and military authority in Texas. Farcical, anticlimactic and slightly ridiculous as the “Come and Take It Fight” was – it was still the spark that set off serious and organized resistance among the Texians. And within six months, the war which threatened would become all too real and all too tragic, especially for Gonzales – which eventually suffered the loss of a good portion of leading citizens – and even the physical town itself.

Gone To Texas – Chapter 4: Gonzales

08. May 2010 · Comments Off on Gone To Texas – Chapter 4: Gonzales · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

(I am pulling ahead full-bore on this WIP for now, as my partner and I at the Tiny Publishing Bidness are planning on using one of my books as our first venture into working with the printer-distributor Lightening Source. Enjoy!)

Every evening, sundown lingered a little later and a little later more, and for a week, Mama had been waiting. She never said as much, but Margaret knew. Papa had said he would return and take them all into the far west to Mr. DeWitt’s colony, and so when Mama finished reweaving the red-wool blankets, she did not start another weaving, for what would be the use of that? As soon as Papa returned, they would take apart the loom, re-pack the wagons and resume the journey. For several weeks, she and Margaret had occupied their afternoons, when school was done and she and Carl had finished whatever studying had been required, by firmly stitching a narrow binding of calico cloth around the raveled edges of the blanket-lengths. After supper every evening, she and Mama picked up their sewing once again, until it was too dark to see, and the swifts had begin their darting, almost unseen against the darkening indigo sky.

Margaret never forgot the day when Papa returned from the farthest west, cheerful and invigorated, as if all of his fury and disappointment with Mr. Austin had been but a bad dream. He was still resolved upon removing to Mr. DeWitt’s settlement, which news sent Margaret’s heart sinking down into her toes. He and Rudy arrived on an early evening in late April in company with a handful of other horsemen, when the trees had finally put out all of their tender green leaves, and the meadows around San Felipe were deep in rich grass, all touched with gold by the setting sun. Two of them were Mexican; young men clad all in black, their trousers and short jackets trimmed with many bright silver buttons, with sashes of brilliant silk knotted around their waists. There was silver on their horse’s saddles and bridles too; the men all waved farewell from the roadway, as Papa and Rudi tied the reins of their own horses to the rough-hewn wooden fence rails which marked the boundary between the street and the dooryard. Margaret and Carl had just come home from an errand bearing a message to Mr. Robbins, telling him that Papa would soon return. They were walking hand in hand from Mr. Robbins’ establishment, when they saw the three horses and the other men of a party departing, Papa rushing exuberantly towards the house and Mama, leaving the horses still burdened with saddles and blankets, although the third horse bore a large pack. Rudi was dismounting a little more slowly from his mount: he appeared tired, yet excited.

“Papa has a grant from Mr. DeWitt!” he shouted, “I have seen it, M’gret – and it is truly ours. Papa has a brand for our cattle and all – the Spanish governor an’ Baron Bastrop said so. It is ours, and Papa says we will live like lords . . . “

“We have missed you!” Margaret hugged her little brother and ruffled his hair – boy-like, he made a face at her. “Your neck is filthy, Rudi – did Papa not make you wash the back of your ears, ever?”

“What for?” Rudi answered, “Esteban an’ Diego say that I am a now a true buckaroo – that is what they call a vaquero, a horseman . . . I should see to my horse before I see to myself.”

Margaret sniffed disdainfully, “Than your horse would be nicer to sit next to at dinner. “And where is Rufe . . . did he remain at Papa’s new holding?”

Rudi’s face suddenly looked most somber.

“He’s dead, M’grete. We were coming along the road towards Bexar – Papa had him ride ahead a little way, to see if we were near to water for the horses. He was only out of our sight for a few moments . . . we heard a sound, as if he tried to shout to us. Then just silence – and when we came upon him, he was lying in the middle of the track, with two arrows sticking straight up out of his chest and the hair skinned off the top of his head. The other men – the men with us – said they were Comanche arrows. They steal horses, you know.”

Rufe dead, and so abruptly? Margaret felt cold chill, as if a winter draft had suddenly crept up on her. Papa had said nothing of this in his letters to Mama, as if he had not put any thought towards their hired man at all. Rufe had uncomplainingly come with them as a drover, all the way from Pennsylvania. He never had much to say for himself, but now he was dead. Obscurely Margaret felt now guilty for never having paid much mind to him.

“What did you Papa and the men do then?”

“They put his body over the pack-horse saddle, and took him to be buried in Bexar. Papa gave a priest a few silver coins, and Esteban swore that for all he knew, Rufe was a Catholic, so that he could put into a grave in the proper cemetery.” Rudi looked down at his feet, shuffling them wretchedly in the dust. “And then we came straight to San Felipe. Papa says he must hire another drover, of course – as if the Comanches killed Rufe just to spite Papa, or that Rufe was careless and caused Papa special trouble!”

“It wasn’t your fault, Rudi,” Margaret soothed her little brother with another hug, for he truly looked quite wretched, “And it wasn’t Rufe’s, either. Go to the well, and wash up – Mama will have supper soon.”

“I must see to the horses first,” Rudy answered, stoutly and repeated, “A vaquero always takes care of his horse – Esteban said so.” So there was nothing else but for Margaret and Carl to do, but to set their slates aside and help Rudi to unsaddle the horses, and turn them loose to graze behind the house, where the grass had grown lush and tall in the months that Papa and Rudi had been gone. Margaret lugged the first of the two deep willow-baskets to the log house, while Rudi and Carl dragged the other, full of the bedding and gear which Papa had taken with them. The pack-horse had born the baskets, lashed to the sides of a wooden frame, which sat on its back atop a thick sheepskin pad cinched twice around its belly.

In the porch between the two rooms of the house, Papa was taking bites out of some bread and cheese, as he talked excitedly to Mama about the new holding,

“Along the river, which runs deep and fast between tall banks,” he was saying. “The bottom lands are rich and well-watered . . . I have found a good site for a house, for we must cultivate within two years. I have been advised to herd cattle as well, on the uplands. Young Mr. Menchaca and his brother were most kind, to advise me. Alas, the DeWitt grant adjoins the tracts where the Comanche are accustomed to hunt . . . it is in my mind that you and the children should live in the Gonzales settlement for a time, as my lands are only at a short remove. Until some kind of peace can be made with the Comanche, as has been with the Karankawa and such – that would be best, I think, Marichen . . .” He appeared to notice Margaret and her brothers for the first time, embraced them with something of an absent air, as if he were already thinking of other matters. “Grete, my angel – are you ready to help your mother with the packing? We should leave by the end of the week, I think. I must speak to Robbins, for I sent a message that we would return and need our wagon…”

Margaret kissed Papa on the forehead, saying

“Must we depart so soon, Papa – Carl is doing so very well at school that . . . “

“There is a school established in Gonzales,” Papa answered, his attention already on those matters involving moving his family on towards his holding in the DeWitt grant. “And now I must hire another drover – perhaps Robbins can recommend a man . . .”

“What of Mr. Tarrant?” Mama asked, looking swiftly from Papa’s face to Rudi’s dolorous one. “I do not understand, Alois – did he not come with you?”

“He’s dead, Mama,” Rudi answered first, and almost tearfully. Mama’s mouth rounded into an ‘o’ of shock and sorrow, and she abruptly sat down. “The Indians killed him.”

“Alois,” Mama said then, sounding as stern as if she wished to admonish Papa and Rudi both, “You said nothing to me of this in your letters.”

“I did not wish to worry you, my heart,” Papa answered, “It was merely one of those sad things which happens out here, if one does not take sufficient care. And of course, I shall always take care – the boy and I were never in danger. We saw that Rufe had a proper Christian burial – the very least that I could do for him.”

“You should write to his father,” Mama said at once, and her lips tightened. “You should tell him at once, Alois – and before we depart this place.”

“Marichen, my heart, must there be such a hurry to write this? “ Papa remonstrated, “for it will take months for a letter to arrive back East . . .” but Mama repeated,

“You should write to his father at once, Alois. It is only fitting. His family – his parents – they are friends of long-standing to my family and yours.”

Margaret’s gaze went from her mother to her father; again, she felt that ‘standing aside’ feeling, as if she were a stranger watching them. Carl’s hand crept into hers, seeking reassurance, and Rudi looked as if he were close to tears, for Mama was angry at Papa. Mama was almost never angry at Papa, but in this instance she was, not just for his thoughtlessness in leaving that intelligence out of his letters, but in seeming to regard Rufe and his death as a matter of little importance. Papa was, Margaret realized then in a flash of comprehension, as hasty and careless about Rufe as Mr. Sullivan or any of the other slave-owners in San Felipe were, concerning the least of the slaves they owned – as if they were nothing more than a not terribly valuable tool, which once broken could be set aside without a second thought. And she wondered then, with a little flicker of foreboding; what kind of man would Papa be, if Mama was not there to anchor him to his better nature, to remind him of what was good and right, and to make amends when he had spoken hastily or in anger to men like Mr. Austin? Margaret tried at first to put this unsettling thought aside. Of course, Mama would always be there; she was the fire on the hearth, the calm presence that made this bare little log room their home, the center and core of the family.

“Shall we be returning to school, then?” Margaret asked. Before Mama could answer, Papa said,

“No, little Grete – we need to begin packing at once, in the morning. You and the boy will not miss any lessons, as there is a schoolmaster in Gonzales.” Margaret’s heart sank, at her fathers’ words. She had expected something like this upon Papa and Rudi’s return, and thus had taken care with the blanket that she had marked out as Schoolmaster Vining’s special gift. Still, she had nurtured some faint hope that Papa would not act so precipitously, or even that he would amend his quarrel with Mr. Austin. No, she accepted and facet the inevitable: they would leave San Felipe immediately – as soon as they could repack the wagons and Papa could hire another drover. Unconsciously, Margaret squared her shoulders.

“Mama,” she said, “Then I should go to the schoolmaster’s house and tell him of our departure. I should also take our gift to him; may I then?”

“Of course, my duckling,” Mama answered, and it seemed to Margaret that Mama spoke with tender sympathy, “And take Carlchen with you also, to convey our appreciation for the schoolmaster’s teaching, all these months.”

“Yes, Mama,” Margaret went to the large willow basket which held hers’ and Mama’s sewing. The one blanket which she had stitched the binding around entirely by herself was on the bottom, carefully folded into a neat square and tied with a narrow length of woven cotton tape, with which Mama secured all of her household linens. She tucked it under her arm, and took Carl’s hand with her other. He went with her obediently, although he looked back at Papa. Papa, now having stuffed the last of the bread and cheese into his mouth, was pacing up and down restlessly, as was his habit when deep in consideration. He did not spare any glance after Margaret and Carl as they walked away from the little log hut.

“Choo sad, M’grete?” Carl asked warily in the English that they used at school, as soon as they were out of earshot.

“I am,” Margaret answered, with a sigh.

“Why, M’grete?”

“Because I liked living here – even in a little house not our own. I liked our lessons – and I very much liked the master of the school.”

“I like too, M’grete,” Carl confided, with the air of someone confessing a great secret. “He ver’ nize.”

“I think I will miss our school here,” Margaret hugged the blanket to her chest. Yes, she would miss it very much. She would miss Edwina, and walking down the road with her brother every morning. San Felipe was safe, she felt certain – for Mr. Austin had made a kind of peace with the Indians, all but the Comanche, and they were far away in the west. Which, alas, was where Papa was going to take them.

The schoolmaster’s house looked very different, when school was not in session in the breezeway. All the benches were moved to one side, and the doorway to Mr. Vining’s parlor stood open. It was always closed, during school hours, and so Margaret and the other children did not know what the schoolmaster’s house was like, on the inside. She knew that he had a horse in a corral at the back of his town-lot, for he rode as well as any other man in San Felipe. She walked through the school-yard, half eager and half-hesitant. It sounded as if Mr. Vining had visitors, for there were several more horses in the corral, and several saddles piled in the breezeway. The sound of men’s voices and laughter came from within the parlor. She could see a little, through the opened window: a young man who looked like one of the Mexican men who had ridden with Rudi and Papa. With a firm hold on Carl’s hand, she walked across the porch and stood for a moment in the doorway, thinking to herself that the schoolmaster’s parlor looked quite pleasant. In one of her ‘thinks,’ she had considered very carefully the matter of what one could tell of a person by looking at their possessions, or conversely, of what you could expect someone to own, just by studying them. Schoolmaster Vining had very much the things she had expected of him. Although the furniture was no finer than any other household in San Felipe, there were several elements which Margaret found most pleasing, chief among them, a quantity of books. A very fine glass-shaded lamp stood in the middle of a round table in the center of the room, and the chairs in it appeared both capacious and comfortable. The lamp shed a good light, on the books lying upon the table. Schoolmaster Vining and one of his friends were taking turns, leafing through the largest of them, while the other friend leaned back in his chair, with a pipe in hand. The schoolmaster looked up, at the sound of Margaret’s gentle rap on the door-frame, and sprang up from his chair.

“Why, Miss Becker,” he exclaimed, in pleased surprise, “And young Master Becker, too. Good evening! I was not expecting a call at this hour. I thought your family would be enjoying your reunion. My friends tell me that your father returned with them from Bexar with them, and that he has a fine property now, in Mr. DeWitt’s land-grant.”

“Yes, sir,” Margaret answered, “Good evening, sir.” Suddenly, what she had wanted to say, those things that were proper for a young lady, went entirely from her mind. “Papa says that we will leaving soon, so we will not be coming to your school again. So we brought you a parting gift – this is from our family, of my mother’s weaving.” She held out the blanket, suddenly miserably aware that she had sounded childish. “We are grateful for your teaching, sir – especially for teaching Carl.”

“Convey my gratitude to your family, Miss Becker,” Schoolmaster Vining accepted the folded blanker, although he looked slightly puzzled. “I find teaching to be rather a pleasure, especially with willing and talented pupils.” At Margaret’s side, Carl tugged at her hand, and whispered,

“I t’ink school very nize, M’grete.”

“I am gratified,” Schoolmaster Vining answered. “Would you like to meet my friends? I think they are already somewhat acquainted with your father. Miss Becker, Master Becker – may I present Senor Esteban Menchaca de Lugo, and Senor Diego Menchaca de Lugo, gentlemen of Spain, and San Antonio de Bexar. Miss Margaret Becker and young master Carl Becker.”

“I am honored,” replied the young man with the book, who set it aside. The spurs on his boot-heels jingled musically, as he came towards the doorway. “And to make your acquaintance is my pleasure as well, senorita.” He bowed over Margaret’s hand very correctly, and smiled as if it really was an honor and a pleasure. Carl stared, wide-eyed as an owl. “We traveled with your father and brother, I think. Diego, recall your manners,” he added as an aside, over his shoulder to his brother, who took his pipe out of his mouth, and drawled,

“My head remembers my manners . . . but alas, the rest of me is telling my head that it does not wish to move a muscle out of this very comfortable chair. Consider that I also am most pleased, so on and so forth.” Senor Esteban said something chiding in Spanish, over his shoulder to his brother, who only laughed sardonically and puffed again upon his pipe.

“Forgive my brother, senorita, for he is a lazy swine . . . “

“Who has ridden a very long way,” Senor Diego retorted, while Schoolmaster Vining laughed, and confided to Margaret,

“They are both my very dear friends, but sometimes they put me into the mind of some of my younger pupils . . . but I am most grateful for this gift, Miss Becker. I confess that I will regret your departure from my school, and from San Felipe. If business or friendship ever takes me near to Gonzales, and your father’s new holding, might I presume to pay a call upon your family?”

“Yes, of course,” Margaret answered, and immediately regretted sounding so hasty. She should have sounded dignified, as Mama had in response to Mr. Austin. But Mr. Vining smiled, so that the deep creases on either side of his mouth appeared; by that Margaret knew that he was quite genuinely pleased.

“Then I shall live in anticipation of that pleasure,” he answered. Carl was still staring at the Menchaca brothers, rapt by the splendid display of silver buttons on their coats and trousers, and the pleasant jingling sound of the spurs on their boot-heels. “Good evening, Miss Becker.”

“Good evening, Mr. Vining,” Margaret did a small, and awkward curtsy, and fled, tugging Carl behind her.

That night, as she lay in her pallet-bed in the loft, she thought about that brief visit, and concluded that perhaps it had not been all that disastrous. He had looked on her and smiled, and promised to visit them in their new home. Margaret reposed tremendous confidence in the witch-woman’s prophecy. Mr. Vining was the man that she would marry; philosophically, Margaret set aside what the witch-woman said about two husbands. It would be enough, she decided, to settle the question of the one, the one which she would have ten years and one of happiness with. Ten years was forever-long, Margaret decided. Ten years was almost as long as she had been alive.

Out in the breezeway, on the porch, Mama and Papa were still conversing. They would begin packing the wagons again in the morning. Mama had already taken down the delicate parts of her loom. It made Margaret sad to see that. When she considered her feelings, she had quite liked living in this little place. She had a friend in Edwina, a comfortable place and rhythm to the day – school, and chores, helping Mama with the weaving, supper, and then sitting on the verandah of an evening, doing schoolwork or sewing, until the light faded. The birds returned to their roosts, and the bats to their lair, and the stars wheeled in their orbit, white-silver in an indigo sky, the sun set in a smear of orange and purple, then the moon rose to take its place, pale and milk-colored as it waxed and waned. There was a lot to be said for that, Margaret decided. She had one of her ‘thinks’ about it; no, she had decided regretfully – she did not like days of constant adventure, of seeing a different aspect to every morning. She preferred a set place, under the sky, the march of the regular seasons and days. There was a joy to seeing things unfold.

“M’grete?” Rudi still lay awake, also. She could hear him turning over. The straw which stuffed the pallet upon which he and Carl slept crackled as he did so.

“Rudi – what is the matter?” she asked, for he sounded deeply unhappy.

“I’ve been wondering about something, M’grete. Do you think it would hurt to be dead?”

“You are thinking about Rufe,” Margaret answered. Of course, he would have been. He would have seen Rufe’s body, afterwards, seen everything but the Indians actually killing Papa’s hired man. “I can’t see how anything that happens after someone is dead can hurt their body. Their spirit is gone to heaven, anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Rudi still sounded unhappy.

“Of course I am – do you think that the pig objects to being cut up at butchering time, after it is dead? Can you imagine the fuss about hanging up the hams in the smokehouse if the pig was still squealing and wriggling?” That coaxed Rudi into laughing, at least a little bit.

“He looked . . . surprised. Rufe did. As if he couldn’t believe it had happened. Do you think that it hurts to die, M’grete?”

“I guess it depends on how fast it happens,” Margaret answered, carefully. “And I think it probably does hurt at least a little – but not for long at all. And then you go to heaven, if you have been good. I think I would like Heaven. Opa Heinrich always said Heaven was like a garden where there were never any weeds.”

“I wouldn’t like to be dead,” Rudi said, after a bit. “I would miss Mama and Papa, and you and Carl, and all my friends.”

“And we would miss you too,” Margaret replied. “But nobody else is going to die, Rudi. It’s late – go to sleep, now. Here’s my hand – hold it, and I’ll hold on to yours. Remember, Mama and Papa will always keep us safe.” But, thought Margaret to herself – Texas is large, and a wilderness. Papa and Mama are only two, matched against it. Best to not say so to Rudi or Carl; my brothers are still children, and children must believe that everything will be all right. I am twelve and will marry the schoolmaster someday. I am all but grown up.”

Five Years Later – Gonzales, in the State of Coahuila y Tejas

“Mama,” Margaret ventured one late summer afternoon, as Mama worked at her loom, which sat in the outdoor room of the house that Papa had built for them when they finally settled in Mr. DeWitt’s colony. “There is to be a roof-raising for the Darsts, on Sunday. Mrs. Darst and the Dickensons and their friends are planning to have a fiddler for dancing, afterwards. I promised that I should bring some pies and Benjamin said that he would like to dance with me.”

“Young Mr. Ful-fulka?” Mama garbled his name, as she usually did. Benjamin Fuqua and his brother Silas had arrived a year or so ago. He held a quarter-league of land in his own name. “But certainly, Margaret,” she flashed a quick and impish smile over her shoulder towards her daughter, although her hands had never stopped their rhythmical motion, sending the shuttle flashing back and forth. “Since your Papa is not here to withhold his permission, I give it very freely.” Margaret returned the smile. She and her mother had grown ever closer in the years since coming to Texas, united in a gentle conspiracy to bend Alois Becker into more sociability with his fellows. Most recently, Mama must work to soften or thwart his dictates, regarding Margaret and those young single men who had begun to flock to the Becker household, as soon as Margaret put up her hair and began wearing womanly longer skirts. His horror at suddenly realizing that Margaret had grown tall, as slender as a young willow-tree, and gravely pretty – and was indeed of an age to marry – was almost comic, if somewhat embarrassing to Margaret. Suddenly, Alois regarded every single man come to visit his household with wary suspicion, even if they were truly his own friends and had no intentions towards Margaret. But every admiring glance in her direction, or word spoken to her, even on the most mundane matter seemed to inflame his temper. Lately, Margaret was glad that Papa had reason to travel with his wagons, for he had gone into partnership with several merchants in San Felipe and Gonzales to haul goods arrived at the port of Anahuac upcountry, leaving Mama to see to household and social matters.

“How Papa can expect me to marry well, but yet never be courted, or even converse with a young man …” she sighed. “I think Papa just expects a husband for me to grow on one of the apple trees. And that one day, he shall pluck it from the branch, present it to me and say, ‘Here, Grete – a husband for you to marry, this very afternoon.’”

“Your Papa wishes only the best for you,” Mama answered, “Like all men – he thinks that only he may make a decision on such matters as affects the family.” She smiled again, over her shoulder, “I permit him to go on thinking that. It spares his feelings.”

“And then you work on him, so that he will do rather what you wish,” Margaret said, with another sigh. “But it takes such a long time . . . and the Darst’s roof-raising is Saturday.”

“Your Papa will allow it,” Mama answered serenely, “I will see to that. For most everyone will attend – how can we keep ourselves apart? He will see the sense in that. Do not worry, Margaret – your Papa will not be able to keep you as cloistered as a nun. Your Mr. F-fulka may accompany us to the Darsts, of course.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Margaret bent, and kissed her mother’s cheek. She had been seventeen for four months, having put up her hair on her sixteenth birthday. There were always more unmarried men, and adventurous young men in Texas than there were women of marriageable age; within the last few years, Margaret had begun to loose that conviction that she would marry Schoolmaster Vining. Now she considered the witch-woman’s prophecy something akin to a fairy tale for children. The schoolmaster had passed through Gonzales once or twice with his friends, the Menchaca brothers, on his way to San Antonio. He had paid a call on the Beckers, although he had not done such in a year or so. Rudi had heard from one friend or another that the Boston schoolteacher in San Felipe had returned to the East, and there was another schoolmaster there now.

Margaret wistfully hoped that he had taken the red Mexican-wool blanket with him, to keep him warm in the Eastern winters.

“I think the beans are ready for picking,” she said to her mother, “I will go and tend the garden for a while.” She took a wide straw hat down from a peg, and tied it over her head. The Texas summer afternoons were brutally hot – but she felt the need to be by herself for a while. Her father had bought several town lots, besides the one allotted to him for the family home in Gonzales. He and the men he had hired had built a log house very like one they had lived in at San Felipe, save that it was larger – and of course, the Beckers had all of it to live in for themselves. It sat on a low rise of land, a little east of most of the other houses and business concerns. A narrow creek watered what Papa had begun planting as an apple orchard. Most of the sapling trees were still now only a little taller than Margaret. An open space between house and orchard was plowed and planted in garden vegetables, of corn and squash and row after row of beans. From the veranda of Papa’s house, Margaret could see nearly all of Gonzales – split-shake roofs either new and dark, or weathered to silvery-grey, interspersed with trees and chimneys. A few threads of smoke rose into the sky; beyond town, a line of darker green trees marked the river. The river, pale green and deceptively placid, ran so deep and swift at Gonzales that it had to be crossed by ferry. Margaret had grown first accustomed to the town, and then to love it; for now it was home, and overflowing with friends. There were days when the sky was a pure, clear blue, arching overhead like a bowl. In spring, the meadows were starred with flowers, of colors that dazzled with eyes with their intensity – pure yellow or yellow and red with dark, coffee-colored centers, lacy clusters of tiny lavender florets, or those dark blue spires stippled with white that some of the other settlers called buffalo clover, or blue-bonnet flower. But now, the flowers had faded from the heat, all but the stubborn pale-yellow mustard, and the green meadows were burned dry by the summer heat, brown and lank, unless it were close to a water course, or a small spring, bubbling out from the ground.

“Where are the boys?” Mama asked, and suddenly the shuttle paused in it’s ceaseless back and forth journey, “They should be helping with the garden, instead of taking every excuse to play in the woods.”

“Benjamin was talking of going hunting along the river today,” Margaret answered, “He had seen a large herd of deer, so he and Silas and some of their friends were going. He talked of it to Rudi – and so I suppose they let Carl tag along.”

“Those boys,” Mama resumed weaving, “They should take care.”

“Don’t worry, Mama,” Margaret stepped down from the verandah. As soon as she moved from the shade, the hot sun struck a harsh blow. “They were going in a party, and they all have rifles and plenty of bullets. Rudi wouldn’t let anything happen to Carl.”

Her littlest brother had turned ten, just a few weeks ago. He was tall for that age, and so most took him for older. Rudi was tall now also; at fourteen nearly the height of shorter men, although still a stripling, next to Papa. Carl was quiet, Rudi outgoing and lively – very different in character, although still much alike in looks. Margaret wondered absently why Papa had not taken Rudi with him to Anahuac. She didn’t think Rudi particularly minded not going with Papa on that journey, for he would much rather have gone hunting with the older lads and the young men. She looped up the corners of her apron, and tucking them into her waistband, began plucking ripe green beans for supper.

When she straightened from picking beans, she could see her brothers and Benjamin walking towards the house; the two older boys were ebullient, although covered with dust. Rudi had taken off his hunting coat, tying it around his waist by the arms. He and Benjamin carried a long pole over their shoulders, from which hung the carcass of a deer, already roughly cleaned and gutted. Carl followed after, with a large turkey-cock slung over his, the head of it swaying limp and loose with every footstep.

“Dinner for tonight, and smoked jerky for winter,” Rudi called, as soon as the three had come close enough to the house. He was smiling, jubilant – as if they had just experienced the most wonderful adventure. “And Little Brother made the most amazing shot! You should have seen it, M’Gret! They all bet that he couldn’t do it, but he did – a wild turkey, gobbling up old corn, clear across the creek it was.”

“A regular leatherstocking, ma’am . . . Miss Margaret,” Benjamin added, with enthusiasm, “That’s what he is. Natty Bumpo couldn’t have bettered it, nor my grandfather in his young days – and he was a champion-shot. They say in the War, he shot a British soldier right in the place where his belts crossed at a distance of fifteen hundred yards.”

Carl only looked pleased, half-smiling as he ducked his head. Margaret thought it was as if he were unaccustomed to such praise. Perhaps he was, as he certainly got little of it from Papa. Papa had never really warmed to his youngest son, for all of Mama and Margaret’s efforts. Carl was still a quiet youth – and Papa often and cruelly upbraided him to his face as an idiot. Mama’s face had lit up, rapturously,

“Such clever boys,” she exclaimed, “And we thought to have nothing but a little bacon with our dinner tonight. Tomorrow, then – we will butcher the deer and hang it to smoke . . . as for the bird, we shall dine like the royalty do, tonight and for several nights hereafter.” Mama got up from her loom. “Come help me clean and singe it, Carlchen, Rudi – and then fetch water from the creek to clean yourselves with…” She collected the boys with a meaningful look, leaving Margaret and Benjamin for a brief moment alone. Benjamin touched the brim of his hat to her, saying hesitantly,

“Miss Margaret . . . did you speak to your parents about dancing with me, at the Darst’s roof-raising? Have I their permission …”

“Most certainly,” Margaret replied, and his countenance lightened immediately. “And you may escort us to the Darsts, as well.”

“Thank you, Miss Margaret!” he made as if to kiss her hand, as Margaret added, wryly, “We will be bringing some dried-apple pies with us – and you might have to help us carry them!”

“My duty as a gentleman, and my most sincere pleasure,” Benjamin added, looking inordinately pleased with this development. Margaret rather warmed to him then, for he was a handsome young man, clean-shaven but for a generous mustache. Indeed, he was almost as handsome as Schoolmaster Vining had been – only now, Margaret thought with a pang of regret, Benjamin Fuqua was here, and Schoolmaster Vining had returned to his home in the East, long since. And she did wish so much that she was not wearing a plain dress, and with a quarter-bushel of green bean pods bundled up in her apron. “I will call for you on Sunday, then, Miss Margaret.”

(This is in some ways, the prelude to the Adelsverein Trilogy, and most likely be available early in 2011. And if you have read and enjoyed the Trilogy, could you post a review at Amazon? The Texas Scribbler just did, and he lamented how few reviews there were for such a ripping good read!)

My Map of San Antonio

25. March 2010 · Comments Off on My Map of San Antonio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

I bought a map last month, when I got a slightly-more-than-usually generous check for work that I had done, a map that I had my eye on for a while: it’s a reprint of the 1873 birds-eye view of San Antonio, done by an artist-printer-mapmaker-entrepreneur by the name of Augustus Koch. There’s a very high-end reprint available from the Amon Carter museum, but I found a rather more affordable version from an antique shop, and bought a frame from a thrift shop for it. To cover the gap between low-rent map and low-rent frame, I had a matt for it cut at a big-box hobby store which does this at very reasonable rates. So there it is, hanging on the wall to my left at the corner of my bedroom chez Hayes which serves as my office. The magic happens here, people – adjust. Please ignore assorted dust bunnies and the very dirty and scrofulous Shi Tzu sleeping underneath my office chair, also the three levels of desk, piled with computer tower, monitor, speakers and reference books – the writers’ life is supposed to be so romantic and all, I would hate to demolish anyone’s fond illusions.

So – this is the mental foundation which serves me when I try and visualize mid-19th century San Antonio – a spaghetti-tangle of streets, eight public plazas of various shapes (the oldest of them being the most asymmetrical as to layout) and an aqua-blue river which can’t actually be said to cross it. Lord no – the river rambles like a spastic snake in the middle of a particularly energetic fit, although the course of San Pedro Creek, and the remaining constructs of the old Spanish aquicias describe a considerably more rational line. The San Pedro Springs once came leaping out of the ground, such was the pressure exerted by the Edwards aquifer: so much water seeping down into the limestone layer of the Hill Country – when it escaped, it escaped with a bang. There are still natural springs and seeps, visible for weeks after it rains, even in my neighborhood. In the 19th century, the San Pedro Spring was focus for a summer excursion, a nice relaxing afternoon in the park-like setting and in the local beer-gardens.

This map was drawn and published before the railway arrived, when the middle of all but the oldest city blocks were open – even if the streets were lined with Monopoly-block little houses, plain little cubes with pale walls and dark dashes for windows. Throughout, significant buildings and mansions are given a trifle more detail than the “Monopoly-house-and-hotel” treatment: a second or third story, a tower, ornate apse or merely an eccentric lay-out relative to the street adjacent. The Menger Hotel is clear, on Alamo Plaza – where it exists to this day.

The aspect is from an imaginary viewpoint somewhat to the north of modern downtown, looking out towards the south and east. It looks a very tiny town, my town of the past and my imagination. As such, it devolves very rapidly from a tight-packed huddle around Commerce Street and the old Main Plaza, dominated by the spire of San Fernando – which would be re-built in grey-stone neo-gothic splendor within a few years.
During the siege of the Alamo, the blood-red banner of ‘no quarter’ was flown from the stumpy tower which existed then – an event which would be well within the memories of anyone above the age of forty, who had been living in the town at the time. In my mind, and aided by this map, I can place so many landmarks now overbuild with steel, concrete and glass. Samuel and Mary Maverick had a house on the corner of Houston and Alamo. The last few structures remaining of the mission of San Antonio de Valero are relatively unchanged, save that they are now a shrine of another sort. The Veramendi Palace on Soledad Street just a little way from what the Main Plaza (would they have called it the Plaza Mayor, back in the day?) is gone now, but it still remains on this map – a long low, windowless building, so-called because it was the town-house of a powerful Tejano family. James Bowie married a Veramendi daughter, and lived there briefly: by the year of my map, the building housed offices, and around in back – a beer garden. The grand double front doors of the Veramendi Palace are on display in the Alamo.

Mid-19th century San Antonio’s city blocks devolved very rapidly from that core into city blocks, loosely lined with houses, then to blocks with just a scattering of them, interspersed with regular plantings of trees which could be seen as orchards. As the pale, buff-colored streets ravel out into the countryside, the houses become sparse – although some of them are distinguished by a bit more detail, a porch perhaps, or a row of miniscule dormers along the roof. The present King William district – almost the first high-end suburb – is a twelve-block stretch of town laid out to the south and adjoining the San Antonio River as it rambles off in a coast-wards direction, or at about 2 o’clock as I view the map. This is where the good German bourgeoisie magnates and men of business built their homes, when Texas began to recover some semblance of post-Civil War prosperity. C.H. Guenther’s Pioneer Flour Mill anchors this district today – but it does not appear on this map, although it is there and plain to see in the follow-up birds-eye map done a little more than a decade later, when the railway had come in, connecting the town with the greater world. But that’s what the 19th century American rail system did – connect far-spread communities with the larger world. There is another birds-eye view, by the same artist, done a bare ten fifteen later, in 1886, after the railway, after the Army had decamped to a new-built post somewhat to the north – the Fort Sam Quadrangle and the clock tower in it, all clear and neatly inked in. The houses are tinier, and even less detailed in the second man – for by then, San Antonio had become a city.
I think I will go and buy the second map, also – as soon as I have a bit more of the spare change.

Snow Bound

11. January 2010 · Comments Off on Snow Bound · Categories: General, History, Media Matters Not, Old West

I’ve been offered an opportunity to review a new movie about the Donner Party – which seems to be one of those arty flicks, with some moderately well-known actors in the cast, which appeared at a couple of festivals and then went straight to DVD. I can’t find much on line about it – certainly no hint or clue that it ever had a general release. The plot as outlined actually appears to focus on a small group of fifteen, who called themselves the Forlorn Hope. As winter gripped hard, in November of 1846, they made a desperate gamble to leave the main party, stranded high in the mountains, and walk out on snowshoes. They took sparingly of supplies, hoping to leave more for those remaining behind, and set out for the nearest settlement down in the foothills below. They thought they were a mere forty miles from salvation, but it was nearly twice that long. (Seven of the Forlorn Hope survived; two men and five women.) Although the poster art makes it seem as if it verges perilously into horror-movie territory – which I usually avoid, having an extremely good imagination and a very low gross-out threshold – I am looking forward to watching the movie, and doing a review. The subject – a mid 19th century wagon-train party, stuck in the snows of the Sierra Nevada – is something that I know a good bit about. And I’m interested in what this cinematic take will be; being that ghastly experience of the Donners and the Reeds, and their companions in misery, starvation and madness has horrified and titillated the public from the moment that the last survivor stumbled out of the mountain camp, high in the Sierra Nevada, on the shores of an ice-water lake.

Their doom unfolded inexorably, like a classic Greek tragedy. It seemed to historians, no less than the survivors, that in retrospect, every step taken closed off an escape from the doom of starvation, of murder, betrayal and grisly death which waited for them in the deep mountain snows of the Sierra Nevada. They had departed from the established emigrant trail on advice of a man who had never actually traveled along the route which he had recommended in a best-selling guidebook. They lost precious time, wandering in the desert, lost supplies, lost a portion of their draft animals – and what may have been a worse misfortune, at a critical point, they lost a large portion of their faith and trust in those outside the immediate family circle. (Comprehensive website about their journey, here.)

And yet, two years earlier, another wagon-train party, the Stephens-Townsend Party had also become marooned in the mountains, on the very same spot. Ten wagons, carrying fifty or so men, women, and children had also gambled against being over the wall of the Sierras before winter blocked the passes. They also had suffered in the Forty-Mile Desert, had also taken short-cuts along the trail, consumed nearly all of their supplies, become lost, and occasionally distracted with personal disputes, and had made the same hard choices. They also had split their party – but by choice rather than chance, exhaustion and accident. They also built rough cabins – barely more than huts and brush arbors – and slaughtered the last of their draft oxen for food. And yet, the Stephens-Townsend Party, with the Murphys and the Sullivans and the Millers, and young Mose Schallenberger and the rest of them – they survived. Better than survived, for they arrived in California with two more than they started with, two wives in the party having given birth along the way. But hardly anyone has ever heard of them. The eighty or so of the Donner Party, the Reed family, with the Breens, the Graves and the rest – under the same circumstances, same kind of gear and supplies – they lost nearly half their party to starvation and perhaps murder, and became pretty much a byword in the annals of the West.

What made the difference; why did one group manage to hold together, under challenging circumstances, and the other fall apart, spectacularly? I don’t suppose anyone could give a definitive answer at this point, although I wrote a fictional account of the Stephens-Townsend emigrant journey experience in an attempt to explore that question.

It was my theory that the Stephens-Townsend people were fortunate in two respects and that would be their salvation. (Of course, they were also hampered in one respect – of not actually having a trail to follow once departing from Ft. Hall, save the faint tracks of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party from three years before.) Against that handicap, of having to scout the longest and most perilous section of the trail to California themselves, they had men among them who were knowledgeable about what they faced generally, if not specifically. Hired guide Caleb “Old Man” Greenwood was one of the old breed, a mountain man and fur-trapper, who had married a Crow Indian woman. Another member of the party, Isaac Hitchcock, who was traveling with his widowed daughter, had also spent much time in the far west. He is thought by some of his descendents to have been an associate of Jedediah Smith, and to have ventured to California, sometime in the late 1820s. In any case, he also had vast experience, existing in the untracked wilderness which lay beyond the ‘jumping off’ places, all along the Mississippi-Missouri. Their elected leader, Elisha Stephens, one-time blacksmith and all-around eccentric may have been a teamster on the Santa Fe Trail; he appeared to have superior skills when it came to maging the daily labor of moving a number of heavy-laden wagons over rough trails.

The other fortunate aspect which strikes me, in reading the accounts of these two emigrant parties, is that the Stephens-Townsend group was a more cohesive organization. Over half the party was an extended family group, that of Martin Murphy, Senior – his sons and daughters, son-in-law, and various connections. But although they had lived for a time variously in Canada, and in Missouri, they seem not to have been accustomed to the west in the way that the two old mountain men were, and sensibly accepted the leadership of Elisha Stephens. Indeed, Stephens appears to have been trusted implicitly by everyone in the California-bound contingent, even before splitting off at Ft. Hall from a larger group bound for Oregon. The Donner Party was also made up of family groups, but in reading the various accounts of historians, it becomes plain that during the increasing hardships attendant on crossing the worst stretches, they fractured, with each family left to look after their own. James Reed, who emerges as the strongest and most able leader, killed another emigrant in a violent dispute, during the arduous passage along the Humboldt River. Exiled from the wagon-train, he borrowed a horse from his friends, and went on ahead, later bringing back help and spearheading the eventual rescue of his friends, family and friends.

But at the time when active leadership was most required – the ill-fated emigrants were deprived of it. As historian George R. Stewart described it, their crossing of the 40-Mile Desert – that deathly stretch between the last potable water at the Humboldt Sink, and the Truckee River – turned into a rout. They had lost draft animals, wagons, supplies, many were on foot, straggling up the twisting canyon of the Truckee River. They had no margin for making considered choices after that point. They could only make a desperate gamble on whatever chance seemed to offer slim odds of success over none at all.

It makes for terrific drama, after all. Still, it has never seemed fair that one party should be infamous, and the other barely known at all.

Another Set of Foundations

31. December 2009 · Comments Off on Another Set of Foundations · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Yep, I am starting again, on another book – so here I go, into that kind of giddy and receptive stage, doing research and reading the usual tall stack of relevant books, where the details of plot and character are not quite nailed down yet, where I might at any moment read or hear about a fascinating someone, or tiny detail of an event, which will be that something that will suddenly set a lock on my imagination, whispering seductively ‘this HAS to be in “The Book.”’ (It’s always “The Book,” even though I am actually juggling two of them, set in Texas but fifty years apart.)

The basic characters are there – a selection of minor characters from Adelsverein that I never got a chance to really develop; either whose characters whose stories were either fascinating in themselves because it was hinted at here and there of what they had seen and experienced, or because they were just introduced in the final chapters, and I had already hit a certain word-count and had to simply wrap up the existing narrative, and not take any more time to explore who they were, and what would happen to them.

Margaret is the subject of the earlier book, time-wise, and the one that I am now doing the most research for – Margaret, who was Carl Becker’s sister, political hostess extraordinaire, who survived two husbands, her brothers, and three of her sons, and who knew everyone important in mid-19th century Texas; she’s an imperious survivor, who scared the c**p out of Sam Houston in his prime – among others. As outlined, she comes to Texas in the early 1820s, marries a wandering schoolteacher from Boston, and settles in Gonzales with him – just in time for the War of Independence, the “Come and Take It” fight, and the horrors of the “Runaway Scrape” – and the tomcats-in-a-sack aspects of Republic-era Texas. So, I am studying up first on the days of early settlement, which will mean basically becoming as much of a walking encyclopedia about those aspects, as I already have about Fredericksburg and the Gillespie County German settlers. I’ve even spent the day in Gonzales, on a research trip – I have to say, it’s easier to carry off this sort of thing, having already been a “published Arthur.”

I have to form a kind of mental map of Gonzales, and indeed all of the landscape of that time. How did people talk, dress, how much did they keep in touch, how did they furnish their houses, find their fun, what did they worry about, how closely were the Anglo settlers entwined with the Tejanos: if you wanted a printed book, a length of calico or a bottle of patent medicine, where would you go to get it, and what would you pay for it? How drastically did the changing political situation affect everyday life, from the mid-1820s on? What did people talk about, what were the day-to-day concerns – and most importantly, from my point of view – who were those very local people, those characters that their neighbors talked about, wondered about, worried about? What were they like, can I somehow dredge up a few small personal quirks from the great well of historical memory, and build a believable and interesting character out of those small shreds of verifiable fact?

In one way – the field is wide open to me. I am still not much interested in writing about the Alamo; simply everyone seems to have written about the Alamo, but if I touch on it in this new book, it will be to put it in perspective. And sometimes it seems as if no one who does a novel about early Texas has written about anything else BUT the Alamo. I think to pay more attention to the second and third-rank spear carriers, especially the thirty or so volunteers from Gonzales who answered the plea for reinforcements, sent out just as Santa Anna’s siege began to choke off a garrison too small to chew what they had bitten off. Granted, Jim Bowie has a sort of dark, violent glamor about him. He was perhaps Mexican-Texas’ very own Lord Byron: mad, bad and dangerous to know. William Travis was a hot-tempered pain in the ass, with an elevated sense of his own magnificent destiny – but they were only two, among all the personalities at the time. And there are so many stories – again, like the German settlements, there were so many likely and unlikely heroes and heroines, so many incredible happenings . . . some of them have appeared in fiction, many more not. And no one has ever heard of those who have not, although their stories are at least as gripping.

Among the militia volunteers from Gonzales who went to the Alamo, three of the youngest were teenaged boys. The first husband of my heroine, Margaret, is a schoolteacher, when the war for independence begins. Those boys would have been his pupils, for at least some of the time. Like just about every other fit and able-bodied male settler, he is also a member of the militia, of the company of horse-mounted volunteers. All the others are his friends, neighbors and the parents of his students; Margaret is a friend and neighbor of their wives. But on the day assigned – he is too ill to climb on his horse . . . and so he remains behind.

Something like a fortnight later, the exhausted and traumatized young wife of a Gonzales neighbor stumbles into town, riding on a mule and carrying her toddler daughter in her arms. She is accompanied by two black slaves, and the leader of a troop of scouts, whose men have found her wandering along the road from San Antonio; she is one of a handful of survivor-witnesses. She has been sent as a messenger from General Santa Anna . . .

Oh, I can hardly wait to get started.
But research first . . .

One Little Cannon – Come and Take It

30. December 2009 · Comments Off on One Little Cannon – Come and Take It · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War

It was small – up on that, everyone agrees; a six pound cannon, most likely of Spanish make, very likely of bronze, or maybe iron, perhaps of brass. It was called a six-pound cannon because it fired a missile of that weight; pictures of an iron cannon of that type and thought to have been the original show a rather small – barely two feet long, from end to end, and hardly impressive piece, since it had been spiked and otherwise rendered nearly useless. Really, it appears to have been intended mainly for show, or as one early chronicler observed in disgust, for signaling the start of a horse race. Nonetheless, this little cannon – or perhaps another of similar size and made of bronze was issued to the settlers of Gonzalez, Texas early in the 1830s, for defense of the infant settlement. Texas was wild and woolly – plagued by raids from various Indian war parties – Tonkawa, Apache and most especially, the feared horse-stealing, slave-trading Comanche. Anglo settlers newly come to an entrepreneur-founded settlement near the Guadalupe River, and their Tejano neighbors succeeded in making some kind of peace with all but the Comanche. Knowing this, the Mexican authorities in San Antonio de Bexar approved issuing that one small cannon to the settlers.

Their town was called Gonzales, after the then-governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Called informally the Dewitt Colony, it had been established after a couple of false starts by Green DeWitt, who spent a great deal of his own personal funds in recruiting families and adventurous single men to an outpost on the farthest western fringe of the various Anglo settlements. Eventually Green DeWitt’s settlement was laid out in a neat grid of city blocks, each block divided into six lots. This layout is still preserved in present-day Gonzales; including a row across the middle of town set aside for civic purposes, although the historic buildings lining those streets are from much later. Only one building – a dog-trot log cabin with a shake roof – remains to give an idea of what this thriving little town would have looked like in 1835, when a small party of Mexican soldiers sent by the military governor in Bexar came to get the little cannon back.

The political situation in Mexico, which had once been favorably-inclined towards Anglo settlers, and entrepreneurs, like Stephen Austin and Green DeWitt had deteriorated into a welter of mutual suspicion. For a while, it had appeared that Mexico, with a Constitution modeled after that of the United States, would evolve into a nation very similar, with fairly autonomous states, a Congress, and a central federal authority which administered with a light hand. Unfortunately, a newly-elected President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had other plans – plans involving tight central authority, revoking liberal reforms, dissolving the Congress, and establishing rather a kind of dictatorship backed by armed force. Out on the far frontier, even with shaky and irregular communications with the larger world, the settlers in Gonzales may not have known much for sure, but their suspicions had a firm basis. Resistance to the central government, especially in the outlying regions – accustomed to managing their own affairs in the face of more or less benign neglect from the governmental authorities in Mexico City sprang up at once. Rebellious provinces included Zacatecas, Jalisco, Durango, Nueva Leon, Tamaulipas . . . and Texas. Santa Anna, a brutal and efficient commander of armies utterly smashed the rebels in Zacatecas, taking 3,000 prisoners and allowing his soldiers to loot, burn and rape at will – making it abundantly clear that any other acts of organized defiance would earn the same punishment meted.

In September, 1835, Col. Ugartechea, the commander of Mexican military forces in Bexar sent a corporal with five soldiers and a small oxcart, to retrieve the cannon from Gonzales. Andrew Ponton, who was the alcalde (mayor and justice of the peace) cagily stalled for time, not wanting to give up a cornerstone of local defense, and suspecting – along with may other Anglo citizens of Texas, that the little cannon might very well be turned upon them, next . . . “Cannon, you say? What cannon – are you sure there is a cannon around here? I don’t see anything of the sort . . . “ The cannon was hidden, buried in a peach orchard near the river. Baffled of their aim, the soldiers returned to San Antonio, empty-handed – but Colonel Ugartechea did not give up as easily as all that. He sent an officer and a hundred mounted troopers, with a more strongly worded request. There were only eighteen settlers, standing on the riverbank at the edge of Gonzales when Ugartechea’s soldiers appeared on the far bank of the river – but that handful had hidden the ferry-boat, and anything else which might be used to cross the rain-swollen Guadalupe River. Again, they pointedly refused to hand over the cannon – and wisely, they had also sent out word to other settlers.

Frustrated, the soldiers from Bexar retired northwards along the river-bank to a more defensible position, but on the night of October 1st the Texian volunteers – who now outnumbered the Mexican force, with more arriving every hour – crossed the river in force. They brought with them the little cannon, repaired and mounted on a make-shift gun carriage – and a banner made from the skirt of a silk wedding dress – adorned with a single star, and a rough outline of the cannon which was the cause of the whole ruckus – with a taunt “Come and Take It”. There was a slightly farcical face-off between the two sides, among the corn and melon-fields, aided and impeded by morning fog, and a well-meaning go-between, during which the cannon fired a load of scrap-metal in the general direction of the Mexican dragoons, but in the end, they retreated, leaving the Texian volunteers in possession of the field, and the little cannon . . . for the moment. The time had not yet come for open war; Colonel Ugartechea did not wish to press the issue too far – and for a time, neither did the citizens of Gonzales. But still – the first shot had been fired. Within the space of six months, a good few of the Gonzales volunteers who had stood on the riverbank and taunted Ugartechea’s soldiers, telling them to come and take the cannon, if they could – would be dead. Thirty-three of them would answer a desperate plea to come to the aid of another strongpoint under siege – the Alamo, and Gonzales would be deserted and burned to the ground . . . but that is another story.

Random Book Club Questions and Comments: Adelsverein

29. October 2009 · Comments Off on Random Book Club Questions and Comments: Adelsverein · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

I’ve done three book club meetings so far with groups who have read one or anther of the Trilogy, and have another two scheduled in the hear future, so I thought I’d get around to answering some of the questions that I have been asked about the setting and the characters – both the real ones, and the ones that I made up.

Question: How could a very intelligent and observant girl like Magda – who grew up on a farm – be so clueless about sex when it comes to her wedding night?

Answer: Firstly – because it wasn’t something that girls in the 19th century were supposed to know anything about; and yes, she might have noticed animals mating on the farm, but still not have had any clue that the same applied to humans. There wasn’t a lot of general information about sex commonly available in most respectable middle-class circles, especially where it concerned unmarried young women. Secondly, if one wasn’t especially interested in the subject in the first place, one wasn’t moved to go out looking for it – because the information just wasn’t there, in the way it is today. Magda was bookish and intellectual, not terribly interested in a subject which wasn’t being thrust at her, 24-7 anyway. My parents had a very dear friend, who had been a young woman in the 1920’s, and in her mid-twenties was dating a young artist. She also did not know anything about what sex involved, and as she told us, her boyfriend drew pictures for her, by way of telling her – and this was in the 1920’s! If a young woman in the 1920’s could have not known about sex, it’s no great leap to project backwards and assume that a woman in the 1840’s – who wasn’t much interested in the prospect – wouldn’t have known much more.

Her sister Liesel, on the other hand – had a healthy sexual appetite and a passionate interest in the man she adored, and so she was able to find sufficient information, and to act on it. One reader commented that Liesel may not have known much – but what she did know, she knew very, very well.

Q: In interviews, actors often claim that they love playing villains – more of an opportunity to pull out all the stops and chew up the scenery; is it as much fun for you to to write a menacing, and hateful villain, like JP Waldrip?

A: Ugh – no, not really. I wrote JP Waldrip as a sadist and sociopath, and not quite sane, a very ugly person, and it was not fun, but more of a grim duty, writing him. That kind of madness frightens me in real life, and spending even a little time in an imaginary space with him was quite unpleasant. I did make up the part about him having odd-colored eyes – but not about wearing a fine-quality hat. Historically, there isn’t really much known about him, for sure – including his reason for he came back to Fredericksburg, two years after the Civil War was over, when he and the other hanging-band members had terrorized Gillespie County during the last years. One local historian says he was brazen, a bully – and he was essentially daring the people in Fredericksburg to make their move. Which they did – although no one knows who shot him dead in the street under an oak tree by the Nimitz Hotel Stables. For dramatic purposes, I came up with my own reason, and version of who shot J.P.

Q: How could Magda have accepted Trap Talmadge’s sword, when it was brought back to her after the war by Robert Hunter – and even had it hanging on the wall of her parlor, given how Trap Talmadge had betrayed her husband? I’d have wanted to throw it at him! Speaking of Trap Talmadge, since he was such a serious alcoholic, however did he mange to serve as a scout for the Confederate Army?

A: Well – it was sent with Trap’s dying confession, and carried by the young man who was courting Magda’s sister Rosalie; I visualized her as being first a little stunned, and then unwilling to say anything hurtful to the man who was about to be part of the family, a man who obviously worshipped Trap as a hero. I think she would have put the sword away for a good long time. She brought it out and had it hung in her parlor, when she was an old woman, and able to remember that Trap was her husband’s good friend, and employee for years, before he made that one horrific mistake – and that he had done his best to atone for it. And I described him as the intermittent sort of alcoholic, who functions for weeks or months, then goes on a horrific bender. As for being able to serve in Benjamin Terry’s regiment – by the time his enlistment was accepted, the Confederacy was getting rather desperate for men: warm, breathing, and possessing three out of four extremities would have been accepted for military service.

Q: Where did you get the character of Mrs. Brown, who came after Magda and the children, brought them food and assistance when they were evicted from the farm by the Confederate authorities? She was fearless, and kind, and didn’t look for any reward – and was the only one of the Becker’s friends who dared come forward and help, when they were in such need.

A: I thought that Mrs. Brown and her family could stand in for the more typical edge-of-the-frontier settler, the roaming Scotch-Irish type, perennially cash-poor but proud, who preferred hunting and herding, never put much effort beyond the minimum in their homestead, lived pretty much in squalor and moved on when the fit took them. They were pretty much looked down upon as shiftless poor whites by the better-off traveler and commentator like Frederick Law Olmstead, sort of the 19th century equivalent of trailer trash – and of course, Magda would have been secretly horrified by the Browns. But it was a kind of a lesson to her – that when the chips are down, the people who will astound everyone by their courage and clear sight are the ones that you don’t really expect heroism from.

Q: I just had to stop and cry, after Chapter 9! That was just so shattering!

A: Umm, yes. Quite a lot of readers have had to stop and have a quiet weep – as they had rather fallen in love with that particular character. But I had always planned it to happen that way, from the very beginning. Some of the elements in Magda’s story are based on reminiscence by Clara Feller, who arrived in Fredericksburg as a teen-aged girl, and lived into the 20th century.

Q: The story reminds me very much of Cold Mountain – that it was about an aspect of the Civil War that I had never heard about; that there were so many Unionists in Confederate states, who were disinclined to fight for the South.

A: Oh, yes – the Civil War was much more complicated than it appears – and the astonishing thing is that there was so much happening out in the West which is generally left out of the standard Civil War narrative. The beginning of the fighting meant a range of difficult and thoughtfully considered choices for all the male characters. And that’s the essential tragedy of the Civil War – every choice made perfect sense to the man making it. I tried to show the whole range of possible reactions: everything from enthusiastically joining the Confederate cause, like the Vining boys, to wanting to serve in the Frontier Battalion to protect against Indian raids like Fredi, and Dolph with the Cavalry of the West. Then there is Charley Nimitz, calculatedly playing it straight down the middle, and Carl, who can’t bring himself to take up arms because he has friends on either side. Hansi wants just to be left the heck alone, and Johann detests slavery and what the Confederates have done to his family – so he joins the Union Army.

Q: When the heck did Charley Nimitz get married? He was such a charming and amusing fellow, I think Magda should have chosen him?

A: He got married towards the end of Book One – The Gathering, having begun courting another girl – the girl which the historical C.H. Nimitz actually married – almost as soon as Magda turned him down. I did take a few liberties with his character, since he had to be at least an appealing a potential husband as Carl Becker, but in the accounts which I read of him, he seems to have been the most notorious teller of tall-tales and perpetrator of practical jokes in all of Gillespie County. And he was a well-respected man in Fredericksburg for all of his life – before, during and well after the Civil War, so painting him as a sort of Scarlett Pimpernel may not have been too far off the mark.

Q: So, what are you working on now, and how soon will it be available?

A: Another trilogy about the frontier, spinning off on some the minor characters in Adelsverein, but only very loosely linked to it. I’m planning all three as ‘stand-alone’ narratives. The first will follow Margaret Becker, in pre-independent Texas, during the War for Independence and in Republic-era Austin, when she keeps a boarding-house and becomes a political hostess. Parts of her story are hinted at, all through Adelsverein; she was one of those peripheral characters who kept threatening to take over. Her life was very interesting – two husbands, experienced the Runaway Scrape, had a career of sorts, and knew all sorts of fascinating people – so she should have her own book. The second one will be the adventures of Fredi, Magda’s younger brother, taking cattle to California during the Gold Rush. I’ve always wanted to write a picaresque Gold Rush adventure, and this is my chance. I had never heard of a cattle drive from Texas to California, in the early 1850s, until I read of it in “The Trail Drivers of Texas” – so there’s another grand unknown frontier adventure for you. The third book – which may very well be the first available because I have four chapters roughed out already – picks up the story of Dolph Becker’s English bride, coming to Texas in the middle of the great cattle boom. I’m hoping to have that one done by Christmas, 2010.

Around in Back of the Alamo

14. October 2009 · Comments Off on Around in Back of the Alamo · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

The front of the Alamo is instantly recognizable; almost like a stage set. Everybody knows the bed-stead outline with what would have been a pair of towers on either side, a pair of shell-supported niches on either side of the door, and the window over it … were there ever statues in those niches? I’ve always wondered about that. It was a mission church, when first built, then a chapel for the Mexican Army garrison, and at some point the roof over the nave and sanctuary collapsed in. When the Alamo achieved fame everlasting, in the space of 14 days and a murderous hour and a half of pitched battle on a dark April morning, the church building had made into a bastion, filled with a platform and a ramp of packed earth and rubble to make a gun-platform for three cannon at the apse end. Later, it was repaired, and re-roofed, serving for decades as a US Army garrison and warehouse, as what was left of the mission compound was torn down, and the town of San Antonio de Bexar crept closer and closer to the old mission buildings. Eventually, the Army decamped to a new-built compound a little way north of town, and the old chapel became a shrine again.

What hardly show in the usual pictures are the trees and gardens on either side, and in the back, which served as a backdrop for the San Antonio Living History Association’s “Fall at the Alamo” last weekend. My daughter thought there would be quite a few more re-enactors than there were – and as it turned out, I was much more interested in the re-enactors who had demonstrations and talks about early Texas than she was.

She was enchanted by the lace-making demonstration, however. Two ladies were hand-making thread lace, weaving thread from dozens of slender ivory or wood bobbins, each bobbin trimmed with a bauble of beads. The lace pattern was mounted on either a pillow or a little round drum, studded with pins in a precise pattern, and the threads were woven around the pins and twisted with other threads – it was fascinating to watch. There was a spinner, with a basket of hanks of yarn, dyed with natural dyes, all in very muted shades, including a pink made from cochineal … which according to another re-enactor, dressed as a Delaware Indian, was one of Texas’s main exports, in the early days. He actually had a bottle of cochineal insects, little grey-whitish scale bugs that feed on cactus plants. When dried and pulverized, a red dye is extracted from these little insects, a red dye which takes superbly to wool. He had a table full of samples of commodities harvested or produced in Texas in the early days – by early, meaning Republic of Texas or earlier. Some of them I had already known about – like pecans. And leather goods, rice and salt.

I think very fondly of re-enactors when I am working up a book; there is no better way to get an idea of actually how something was accomplished, like starting a fire from flint and steel. Another re-enactor showed us how – not just with a chip of flint rock and what looked like a link from a steel chain, but also with the aid of a little scrap of carbonized cloth to catch the spark, and a wad of vegetable fiber – from, of all things, a mouses’ nest – to feed that little spark and nurse it along. I would have never thought of that, so accustomed to using matches or a lighter in these days.

As nearly as I could see, the gentlemen re-enactors took it all very seriously, being turned out in the finest early 19th century finery; waistcoats, high-buttoned jackets, tall books and all – even to fancy spurs with jingle-bobs on them. My, their spurs really do go jingle-jangle! One of the marked differences in the two movies about the Alamo (The John Wayne one, and the Billy-Bob Thornton version) is that the more recent one seemed to be a bit more authentic as to costuming. I recall reading an interview with the costume designer, who was asked some sort of question about if the cast was dressed in the usual sort of western gear, and the designer replied that, no – nothing especially western, just what would have been the proper fashion for 1836, or maybe during the decade or so before. Kind of interesting to contemplate – that the Texians at the Alamo, when dressed in their best, may have looked very much more like Mr. Darcy than Shane. So – no cowboy hats or boots, no jeans, nothing like what people are used to think of as “western” dress, which is rather more a creation of the later 19th-century west. These gentlemen of early Texas wore tall top-hats, or billed caps, tail-coats or hunting coats made of heavy canvas or buckskin, trimmed with fringe – and very fancy waistcoats. That was a very male bit of a splash- the fancy waistcoat, especially when accessorized with a huge hunting knife.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

29. September 2009 · Comments Off on The Road Goes Ever On and On · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Or at least it seems to go on ever and ever in Texas, under a sky that also seems to go on ever and ever, infinitely blue, with clouds floating in it like puffs of cotton. The tops of the clouds are white, the bottoms slightly gray and absolutely flat, as if they were floating on the surface of some airy, invisible sea. The horizon is not masked by atmospheric pollution, or haze, or dust – it’s as clear and as sharp as if there were a line drawn by a compass, or a pencil on the end of a string. This last weekend, I drove to Abilene, in company with another writer, a lady from Kerrville. We had arranged to share expenses and a table at the West Texas Book and Music Festival – a farther journey than to the Richmond Folklife bash the weekend before. This road-trip went west and north, rather than east, out into the fabled lands that I described in Adelsverein as the Llano country – as one character explains,” You should know there are really three parts to Texas. This part is the first: flat and rich, with many rivers and easy to farm. This is shaped like the palm of a hand, with rivers for fingers, running down through it. Then there is the second part, the hills where those rivers begin. Just north of San Antonio de Bexar, it begins: a line of hills like a palisade, a curving wall. Limestone hills with forests of oak trees – meadows in the spring that are nothing but wildflowers, blue or red, or pink. . . . then behind the hills is the last part … they call it the Llano Estacada. In Spanish it means ‘the Staked Plain’ . . . an empty plain covered with short grass, mostly. It is not quite flat, but it looks as if it would go on to the ends of the world. There is also a sort of bush growing there, with leaves like the points of a spear. It sends up a single flower stem, taller than a man; that is what looks like stakes, for miles and miles. I do not think it would be good farm country. All the land can grow is grass – too harsh, too dry – even if it were not for the Comanche.”

This is the country, running north from Junction, set into a river-valley on the far side of the Hill Country, into which few white men ventured, after the Comanche claimed it for their own. Eventually, after the Civil War – with railways, and the US Army, with little towns clustered around crossroads, and river-crossings, and where the iron rails intersected both – this part of Texas became endless pasturelands for the white man’s cattle, rather than the red man’s buffalo. We did not see many yucca plants growing, as we followed the more or less straight arrow of secondary highway, to Menard, and Paint Rock, Bellinger and Winter, all those little towns set out about every thirty or forty miles, towns where the oldest extant buildings seemed to be from the last quarter of the 19th century, and to huddle close around Route 83, which became the Main Street for a couple of blocks, and then the last sheds and signposts flew by and we were out in the country again, with now and again a cultivated field, or a handful of black, or red, or fawn-colored cattle drifting lazily in a fenced pasture, among the scrub-mesquite and patches of cactus.

We stopped here and there – for it is my considered opinion that if you stop every hour and fifteen minutes or so, and get out of the car and walk around, the trip does not seem nearly as long or tiring. At Menard we stopped out of curiosity at a little place on the outskirts of town called the Country Store, which advertised baked goods, jam and handicrafts of all sorts – true to form, it smelled wonderfully of baking, inside. The proprietors sell cookies, pies both sweet and savory, and home-made frozen casseroles. We bought a bag of so-called “cowboy cookies” – stuffed with oatmeal and coconut flakes, and raisins.
In Paint Rock, we took some pictures of the Concho County courthouse, and a down-town that seemed to be completely deserted on a weekend. I don’t think we saw a single person; the town square, such as it was, looked like an abandoned Western movie set.

Both of us had forgotten to bring a tablecloth, for our book table in the Abilene Convention center exhibition hall; so we thought we might buy an inexpensive one, somewhere along the way. We kept our eyes peeled for a second-hand store – which we never found, but in Ballinger, we spied an antique store in an old hotel building, and thought – well, these sorts of places always have old linens, and why not? It would probably cost less than a new plastic one at Walmart, so what the heck? The shop had an interesting miscellany piled up out front, and seemed to be just two rooms at the front of an old storefront – but the proprietor directed us to go down a long, dim corridor lined with more shelves and bits of furniture – and rooms on either side of it were filled, filled to the brim with tables and cabinets and chairs, with vintage clothing and china and glass – beautifully jewel-colored Depression-era pressed-glass. We decided, after working our way down the rooms on one side, and back up the other, that the building must have been a hotel. It possibly could have been an enterprise slightly less savory – but not on a main street. When we found a suitable tablecloth, we asked the owner about this. She laughed, and said that it was rumored that a good few decades ago, some of the upstairs rooms housed an establishment of negotiable affections.

And so, on to Abilene, and a tiny cabin at the local KOA campground, in a grove of pecan trees out on the northwest of town; probably the only thing that would have ever brought me to Abilene besides the book festival, was Dyess AFB – but since my military job specialty was an overseas imbalance, I would never have had reason to be assigned there.

On the Road Again

21. September 2009 · Comments Off on On the Road Again · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

I took a break from all things Tea Party this last weekend, and hit the highway – this in support of the book thing. You remembered the book and author thingy, that I work on, in between blogging for this and that, managing this and that, editing or reviewing this and that, designing this and that? Anyway, months ago I had been invited to participate in a one-day multi-cultural festival at the Fort Bend Museum in Richmond on Saturday. It used to be more of a strictly Hispanic festival, but the director wanted to incorporate something of the German and Czech element, and I thought it might be fun, and they said I could sell copies of the Trilogy … so there I went. It was the first long road-trip in the GG, the new-to-me Acura Legend that replaced the VEV last month, three hours on IH-10 East, almost-but-not-quite to Houston.

Blondie was supposed to go with me; we were to stay Friday night at the director’s house, do the festival and stay Saturday night, and come back early Sunday morning. I guess we could have gone up early Saturday morning, as the festival didn’t start until noon, and come back that night – but it did seem like an awful lot of driving in one day. But our next-door neighbor’s grandson wasn’t available to look after the animals, and Blondie had a big test on Wednesday – so, there I went, off on my own. Driving back on Saturday night was simply out of the question, after a long afternoon at the festival.

What a joy to drive a car where everything worked, reliably – especially the air conditioning, even if I lost the classical music station a few miles east of the turn-off for Gonzalez. And even more of a joy – getting to Katy and only having run through half a tank of gas.
That part of East Texas is subtly different from the area around San Antonio, and the Hill Country that I know – it’s more heavily wooded, with stands of massive, spreading oak trees interspersed with meadows of tall-grass – and much, much greener, especially after a summer where we haven’t had all that much rain. I zipped over rivers – the Guadalupe, the Colorado, and finally the Brazos – all running deep and placid. Around Richmond, suburban lawns are lush and green – not half-dead and crispy brown as they are around San Antonio. In East Texas, tall oaks loom over the houses, and the smaller trees form tangled thickets, stitched together with wild grapevines. There are creeks with water running in them, lakes and waterways – it reminds me of England, a bit. This was the bit of Texas that was historically more Anglo; there was never much Hispanic presence here. It was the closest to the then-United States in the 19th century, and presumably offered those American settlers in Texas a little more of what they were accustomed to, as far as landscape and plant-life went; a little more Southern rather than Southwest, flatter rather than gently rolling.

Richmond is pretty much now a bedroom suburb of Houston. Enough remains of the town to show what it once was like, when it was a discrete entity to itself , anchored by the railway and a bend of the Brazos, adorned with stately, white-pillared homes, rambling Victorian cottages trimmed with yards of wooden gingerbread trim, and dignified old two-storey commercial blocks on the main street. Here and there, during the last half-century, someone with lots of money and no sense of fitness shoe-horned in a structure of concrete-shoe-box style modern – every example of such being as jarringly out of place as a juicy fart in church. Which is a good thing, I guess, that Richmond was prosperous enough over the years that institutions and businesses could to rebuild – but still, it must make it a challenge to pull off a historical district, when the district is broken up with indigestible chunks of Brutal Concrete Moderne.

Anyway – I had a lovely time, talked to a fair number of people, sold three sets of the Trilogy – including two sets to members of the local German heritage society, both of whom knew very little about the Hill Country settlements and the Adelsverein scheme generally. There were a lot of early Texas connections in Richmond – meaning, from the 1820s and 1830s. Jane Long – the widow of one early pioneer/adventurer lived there for many years, as did Carry Nation, she of the saloon-smashing temperance brigade. So did Mirabeau Lamar, sometime president of the Republic of Texas, who fought with Sam Houston like two tomcats in a sack. Sam Houston’s master of scouts, Erastus “Deaf” Smith is also buried there – ostensibly on the current museum’s grounds, but possibly underneath the nearby street intersection. And Benjamin Franklin Terry, of Terry’s Texas Rangers Civil War fame, came from nearby and recruited locally – his saddle, out of which he was shot in fighting around Woodsonville, Kentucky, is in the museum. And after the end of the Civil War, the Woodpeckers and the Jaybirds – gangs formed by partisans of Reconstruction, and of Southern sympathizers fought at least one pitched battle for control of Fort Bend County.
Some of this – people, places and events will eventually become part of my new trilogy, but you will probably have to wait a couple of years to find out exactly how much.

Another Taste of Good Stuff: Gone to Texas

16. May 2009 · Comments Off on Another Taste of Good Stuff: Gone to Texas · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Prelude – In Margaret’s House

Over that winter, which was the fifty-third year of her life, and the last winter of the war that folk had begun to call “The War Between the States”, a slow creeping paralysis at last confined Margaret Williamson to her bedroom. It was not her original bedroom, upstairs in the newer wing of a sprawling house in a park of meadows and fruit trees, which were all that was left of the farm that her father had established when the nearby town had been called Waterloo on the Colorado. Cruelly, the paralysis had advanced over the last two years, remorselessly taking control of her body and her life – she who had always appeared to be a domestic general in command of a small army, a whirlwind of activity in her vast, sprawling house; a hostess of no small repute, with many friends and the mother of sons. It was a particularly cruel twist of fate that her body should be first and worst affected, leaving her mind, her will and her memory unaffected. Margaret resisted being transformed into a helpless invalid, fighting as she had always fought, with resolute calm and by giving up as little as possible, every step of the way. When she could no longer climb the stairs, when she could no longer command her own lower limbs, and sat most of the day in a chair with wheels, in which her maids pushed her from room to room as she saw about the business of running a boarding house, she ordered that the room next to the private family parlor be cleared out, and that her own bedroom furniture and all her private possessions, her clothes and ornaments be brought downstairs and installed there.

“You and poor Daddy Hurst cannot be put to the bother of carrying me upstairs, morning and night,” she said to Hetty, who was her cook and long-time friend.

“I wish you would do as the doctor advises, Marm,” Hetty answered, “And take the water cure… sure and ‘tis the best thing…”

“Too much trouble,” Margaret answered, with indomitable cheer, intended to comfort Hetty as much as herself. “This way, I need not tire myself, and perhaps I may begin schooling Amelia in the art of keeping a large house full of guests and boarders… as well as being a political hostess.”

Hetty mumbled a Hibernian rudery under her breath, and Margaret sighed. Blunt, practical and Irish, Hetty had about as much in common with Margaret’s daughter-in-law as a wild mustang from the Llano did with a pedigreed Kentucky racing horse.

“She is my son’s wife,” Margaret answered, “And the mother of my grandson. So I do have some hope of her. I want so much for her to take my place… for her sake, as much as anything else.”

“An’ them as are in Hell want cold water,” Hetty riposted. Margaret sighed again and patted Hetty’s work-worn hand.

“As I can testify, Hetty – there are so few respectable avenues for a woman of good family to provide for her children, for her family,” Margaret said, momentarily distracted. Her hand felt numb, stiff and lumpish, as she moved it. There was a new chill striking her to the heart. So had her good friend Colonel Ford warned her – he who had once practiced medicine, who had worn himself ragged attending on the wife that he loved so dearly. So might her own husband have seen to her needs and to her care… alas that he had been twenty years older than herself, and struck down by camp-fever two years ago. Margaret had mourned for him as she saw to the necessary rituals, for she had loved him – not as dearly as she had loved the husband of her youth, the father of her sons, but she had loved him well… and he would have recognized and mapped the progress of her affliction. That was his way, for he was a logical man. She took her hand from Hetty’s and surreptitiously flexed her fingers. No, it was only a momentary, fleeting thing – but so had it seemed those many months ago, when she began to feel that numbness in her feet and ankles, began to stumble and falter. So had it progressed, relentlessly over the months, independent of events… which were as catastrophic to that world outside as these small, inexorable limitations that her illness placed upon herself.

In the end, as winter turned haltingly to spring, as the fortunes of the Confederacy began to falter, it seemed that Margaret’s body, her strength – and her very will, as indomitable as the will of the men who fought for glory, for the bonny star-crossed flag of the Confederate States – all began to fail at once. Which Margaret, in that private corner of her mind, found ironic in the extreme, for she had always been a Unionist. In her secret heart, she was an abolitionist as well – a dangerous sympathy, indeed, which practically none in her wide circle of friends had ever suspected. Margaret had much skill and long experience in keeping her true feelings veiled. The old black fortune-teller had said as much, the conjure-woman with her hands like wrinkled monkey-hands, who looked into the lines of Margaret’s hand and revealed the future mapped in them for her, sitting on a weather-bleached tree-trunk cast up on the muddy shore of the river. That very day that Margaret’s father had brought his six yoke of oxen, his heavy-laden wagon, and his family, across the great River at Nacogdoches and come to take up the land that had been promised to him by Mr. Austin and by Alois Becker’s friend, the Baron de Bastrop.

“I was just ten years old,” she remarked one chill day in February. A bitter cold wind stirred the bare grey limbs of the trees outside. The sun cast their eldritch shadows on the scrubbed pine boards at the foot of the French doors that led out to the verandah. Margaret’s daughter-in-law Amelia had wanted to draw the curtains against the icy draft that seeped around the cracks. But Margaret had demurred, saying that she wished to see the outside, not be closed away like an invalid. Amelia did not say anything in reply, but Margaret read her thoughts, as she settled Margaret against the pillows. Amelia rustled away – even her crinoline sounded disapproving, Margaret thought.

“When were you ten years old, Gran-mere?” asked her grandson. Little Horace, just four years old; although the smallest, he was yet the most tenacious of her attendants these days; like a particularly devoted and affectionate lap-dog. He laid on his stomach on the hearth-rug among his toys, heels in the air and carefully setting up a row of painted tin soldiers.

“When we first came to Texas, Horrie,” She answered. “And the conjure-woman told us our fortunes. Well, my fortune, for that day was my tenth birthday. That is why I remember so well. My brother Rudi was just eight, and my little brother was three, a little younger than you are. The conjure-woman did not tell much of my brothers’ fortunes – I thought that I was being especially favored, since I was the oldest… but later I began to think that perhaps she did truly see their futures and wished not to tell us of what she had seen.” Horrie’s eyes rounded in astonishment.

“Where did you live before then, Gran’mere?” he asked, breathless with curiosity. “and where did you meet the conjure-woman?

“We lived in the North, Horrie,” Margaret answered. “The conjure-woman… I don’t know where she came from… we met her the day that we crossed the river into Texas. Only it was part of Mexico, then.”

Horrie’s eyes rounded even more.

“You lived in the North, with the Yankees?” He breathed, as if this were the most horrible circumstance imaginable. “Gran’mere… was your papa a Yankee?” Margaret added hastily, “It was a very, very long time ago, Horrie. Before the war was even thought of… there was no talk of Yankees and Rebs, then. We thought of all as one country, the United States.” Margaret sighed a little, for Horrie’s father, her oldest son had fallen on the first day of battle at Gettysburg, not fifteen miles away from where she and her parents had lived, long ago. “It seems a little unreal to me… that time before. Sometimes I think I was not really born until then, that all before we crossed the river were just dreams.”
More »

It’s That Time Again!

13. May 2009 · Comments Off on It’s That Time Again! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

The return of that tall mysterious stranger with the big hat and the jingling spurs – can it be? Yes it is – it’s almost time for

Wild West Monday!

More here, at “The Tainted Archive“: the third one is supposed to be the charm, you know.

Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School

16. March 2009 · Comments Off on Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, ages ago, Karen M. who manages the speaker’s schedule for the German Texan Heritage Society emailed me to ask if I would like to come and do a talk about the history of the Adelsverein in Texas, and how I went about writing three historical novels based on those events – which are dramatic to the nth degree and which hardly anyone outside of Texas has ever heard of. Of course I said yes, how could I resist any organization which contains a large number of people who are, or might be interested in my books, and whose’ tag-line on their website is “Guten Tag, Y’all?” Besides, they offered refreshments for afters; I will work for cookies and punch. Perhaps someday I will be able to throw all sorts of hissies and demand Perrier on tap, a fruit tray and a private dressing room before engagements, but that day is not yet – really, my sense of entitlement is all but stillborn. Either that or I haven’t become jaded – darn it, I still enjoy these things, once I get over the initial panic of standing up and looking at all those strangers or almost-strangers in front of me, waiting for me to say something deathlessly witty. This is where having been a broadcaster comes in handy. I know that I have spoken, through a microphone or a TV to larger numbers of people, but those audiences were not ‘there’, not in the same room. On those occasions, I could fake myself out, pretend that I was only speaking to a handful of people, be casual and friendly, informative and remember to stand up straight, not pick my nose and not cuss in front of them … but having them all look back at you – that is another kettle of fish. Fortunately, I am getting accustomed to a live audience…

Blondie programmed the GPS unit, and I did a google-map search for the venue, which was described as being “The Old German Free School” in beautiful downtown Austin, Texas… which is, I feel only fair to point out, really quite beautiful, as it is spread over a number of scenically lumpy and rather nicely-wooded hills on either side of a lovely deep-green river. A lot of the streets were strategically and alternately one-way, but – thank god – there was no particular festival going on, which might have clogged traffic unbearably – but we did have to go to one exit and then zig-zag through another couple of streets which afforded us some nice views of assorted college students enjoying their last day of spring break, and one particularly large complex which seemed to be ‘street-people central.’

The old German Free-School turned out to a lovely antique two-story building, constructed of stone, and stone and plaster, and stone and plaster over rammed-earth, a long structure just one room deep and turned sideways to the street, with balconies and terraces overlooking a series of pocket-gardens connected by stairs. Most of the rooms opened onto balconies or the terraces, with long windows on either side, which reminded me irresistibly of 18th and 19th century townhouses in Charleston or Savannah or Beaufort, built up on narrow town-lots with the narrow end of it to the street. All of the rooms had tall windows on either side – to ensure a good draft through the room, essential in those far-distant summer days before the invention of air conditioning. It had just gotten over being unbearably chilly and rainy, so the rooms were quite pleasant. The German Free School was the first institution of public education in Austin, according to one of the members of the society who came for my talk. In the mid-1850s, there were sufficient numbers of German-speaking settlers who were totally exasperated with the lack of educational resources; the only option for educating their children was to hire a private tutor, or send them to the Anglo-American ‘Sunday Schools’. According to my informant, one of the founders was totally fed-up, (possibly with listening to all his fellows kvetching about the subject) so he threw down a thousand dollars in gold and growled, “So, build a school!” and there you go – apparently the Free School predated the Austin Independent School District by at least a decade.

There were about fifteen or twenty attendees – and the room was fairly small, so I went ahead and used the podium, with my notes and my pictures of certain relics and locations, 81/2 by 11 pictures mounted on foam-core board, with little hinged supports to hold them up – all of essential items or evocative locations in Fredericksburg. It really went well, this time – I have quite a sort-of-planned talk-with-notes that I use for these occasions, a list of notes, names and things that I simply must cover, and in the proper order; not a set script, for that is the absolute death of this kind of event, just a memory-jogger of the high points. This is the best and most-spontaneous seeming kind of talk, I am not bound by an every-single-word script and can play up or play down things, and respond immediately to what the audience seems to be most interested or engaged in. I wing it, every time – but a wing-it with some sturdy yet invisible supports! Finished with a reading – a couple of pages from “The Gathering” – about the feast and bonfire the first settlers held among the trees of what would become Fredericksburg, and took questions until everyone repaired for punch, home-made coconut cake and a plate of little baked pastry and sausage nibbles.

The members of the audience were all enthusiasts – the very best kind of audience an author can ask for, for they had interesting questions and a lot of knowledge behind them – even if only one person among them had actually the Trilogy. Doris L. purchased the Trilogy and read it all – her husband is from one of the old Gillespie County families and by one of those interesting coincidences of history and the internet and all – it was her husband’s several-times great grandfather who owned the sheep-flock that a boy named Adolph Korn had been watching over, when he was taken by raiding Comanche Indians. Adolph Korn’s g-g-I don’t-know-how-many-times grand-nephew Scott Zesch wrote bout his life and the ordeal of a number of children taken by Indians from the Hill Country in his book “The Captured” – which was one of my references in writing Book Three “The Harvesting” – about the multi-leveled tragedy of young children taken captive by the Comanche or Apache and later returned to their white families. Some of the other questions asked of me were about Prince Solms – who I do still think was rather an idiot, in spite of what one of his particular partisans could say. Sorry, buying into the Fischer-Miller Grant was not an act bringing any particular credit upon Prince Solm’s financial or political acumen. Also, the train of personal servants and his insistence on his title of nobility – not a good move, all around, no matter what his qualifications as a serving military officer might have been in other fields. Although there was an excellent point made, about how perceptions about Germany and German settlers went to the bottom of the tank after about mid WW I or so.

Until that very point in time and history, and in most places in these United States – being from the German settlements and of German ancestry were seen as pretty favorable things. It was OK to be one of ‘the folk’, to remember Germany as it was… until history and Germany changed; the place that these hard-working and cultured immigrants came from, the place that they remembered with fondness and reminiscent affection morphed into something ugly. That Germany – or those duchies and principalities that they came from – all of those places changed during their absence, into something that they would not have recognized, these innocent and trusting immigrants, taking ship from Bremen, carrying their memories and those wooden trunks with them, hoping for new lives but recalling their old country. But in the 20th century, their new country would fight two wars against the old – against what the old country had become, while they were busy building lives and towns, bringing up their children as free citizens of their new country. Funny, how history happens, when you are just trying do your business and get by.

All in all, a most gratifying Sunday afternoon spent, in the company of book and history enthusiasts.

It Is Here – Wild West Monday Has Arrived

02. March 2009 · Comments Off on It Is Here – Wild West Monday Has Arrived · Categories: General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Oh yes – the day to go out and ask your local bookstore or library for a western novel – any western novel!

Not just mine, you know – but any of the classics, ancient (relatively) or modern. Although I wouldn’t take it amiss if you did go out and ask Barnes & Noble, or your local Borders or independent bookstore to order The Adelsverein Trilogy. There are piles and shelves of good classic westerns out there and a lot of people interested in reading them, so why not draw the attention of retailers to that market, today!

More here, from “The Tainted Archive“.

Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming!

25. February 2009 · Comments Off on Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

And more here, at “The Tainted Archive” – one-stop shopping for all fans of traditional westerns … which the Adelsverein Trilogy is, sort of, if you bend down and squint at it sideways.

Wild West Monday

10. February 2009 · Comments Off on Wild West Monday · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Veteran's Affairs

So, I belong to a number of different chat-groups about books, and historical novels and Westerns and all … and at one of them, fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns – any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. The thinking is, we can achieve a critical mass of fans, and maybe take the book-selling world – if not by the throat, maybe we can gum their ankles a little, when it comes to stocking genre Western books. Which are really madly popular, but you’d hardly know it, to look at the shelves in your local Borders or whatever.More here, thanks to Gary Dobbs of “The Tainted Archive“.

Gary says, in part:

“At the moment we are in a situation where bookshops control the market (a select amount of buyers chose the titles they think we want to read ) and they seem to think all we want to read are massive tomes with more padding that substance. The days of cheap paperbacks that existed to entertain, excite and delight are long gone. Strange when those are the reasons we started reading in the first place. But it doesn’t have to be so – so come on get involved, hit the bookshops, hit the libraries. All of us on MARCH 2nd.
Come on get involved.”

Not just my books, which count as Westerns if you get down and squint at them sideways, but a whole range of others. Some of the classics are being profiled at Gary’s blog, and I would like to throw in a mention of a book by the micro-publisher who helped me launch The Adelsverein Trilogy, Michael Katz at Strider Nolan. His Western is called “Shalom on the Range”, and is about the adventures of a Jewish railway detective who knows nothing about the west but what he has read in dime novels, investigating a train robbery in the 1870s. Think ‘Seinfeld on the Prairie’.

Mark it on your calendar, if you are a fan of Westerns: March 2 is Wild West Monday!

A Deep-dyed Villian

21. December 2008 · Comments Off on A Deep-dyed Villian · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, World

He really was a black hat, this particular villain; he was known and recognized throughout the district – around mid 19th century Fredericksburg and the German settlements in Gillespie County – by a fine, black beaver hat. Which was not furry, as people might tend to picture immediately – but made of felt, felt manufactured from the hair scraped from beaver pelts. This had been the fashion early in the 19th century, and made a fortune for those who sent trappers and mountain-men into the far, far west, hunting and trapping beaver. The fashion changed – and the far-west fur trade collapsed, but I imagine that fine hats were still made from beaver felt. And J.P. Waldrip was so well known by his hat that he was buried with it.

There is not very much more known about him, for certain. I resorted to making up a good few things, in making him the malevolent presence that he is in “The Adelsverein Trilogy” – a psychopath with odd-colored eyes, a shifty character, suspected of horse-thievery and worse. I had found a couple of brief and relatively unsubstantiated references to him as a rancher in the Hill Country, before the Civil War, of no fixed and definite address. That was the frontier, the edge of the white man’s civilization. Generally the people who lived there eked out a hardscrabble existence as subsistence farmers, running small herds of near-wild cattle. There was a scattering of towns – mostly founded by the German settlers who filled up Gillespie County after the late 1840s, and spilling over into Kendall and Kerr counties. The German settlers, as I have written elsewhere, brought their culture with them, for many were educated, with artistic tastes and sensibilities which contrasted oddly with the comparative crudity of the frontier. They were also Unionists, and abolitionists in a Confederate state when the Civil War began – and strongly disinclined to either join the Confederate Army, or take loyalty oaths to a civil authority that they detested. Within a short time, those German settlers were seen as traitors, disloyal to the Southern Cause, rebellious against the rebellion. And they paid a price for that; the price was martial law imposed on the Hill Country, and the scourge of the hangerbande, the Hanging Band. The Hanging Band was a pro-Confederate lynch gang, which operated at the edges of martial law- and perhaps with encouragement of local military authorities.

J.P. Waldrip was undoubtedly one of them – in some documents he is described as a captain, but whether that was a real military rank, or a courtesy title given to someone who raised a company for some defensive or offensive purpose remains somewhat vague. None the less, he was an active leader among those who raided the settlements along Grape Creek, shooting one man and hanging three others – all German settlers, all of them of Unionist sympathies. One man owned a fine horse herd, another was known to have money, and the other two had been involved in a land dispute with pro-Confederate neighbors. Waldrip was also recognized as being with a group of men who kidnapped Fredericksburg’s schoolteacher, Louis Scheutze from his own house in the middle of town, and took him away into the night. He was found hanged, two days later – his apparent crime being to have objected to how the authorities had handled the murders of the men from Grape Creek. It was later said, bitterly, that the Hanging Band had killed more white men in the Hill Country during the Civil War than raiding Indians ever did, before, during and afterwards.

And two years after the war ended, J.P. Waldrip appeared in Fredericksburg. No one at this date can give a reason why, when he was hated so passionately throughout the district, as a murderer, as a cruel and lawless man. He must have known this, known that his life might be at risk, even if the war was over. This was the frontier, where even the law-abiding and generally cultured German settlers went armed. Why did he think he might have nothing to fear? Local Fredericksburg historians that I put this question to replied that he was brazen, a bully – he might have thought no one would dare lift a hand against him, if he swaggered into town. Even though the Confederacy had lost the war, and Texas was under a Reconstruction government sympathetic to the formerly persecuted Unionists – what if he saw it as a dare, a spit in the eye? Here I am – what are y’all going to do about it?

What happened next has been a local mystery every since, although I – and the other historical enthusiasts are certain that most everyone in town knew very well who killed J.P. Waldrip. He was shot dead, and fell under a tree at the edge of the Nimitz Hotel property. The tree still exists, although the details of the story vary considerably: he was seen going into the hotel, and came out to smoke a quiet cigarette under the tree. No, the shooter saw him going towards the hotel stable, perhaps to steal a horse. No, he was being pursued by men of the town, after the Sherriff had passed the word that he was an outlaw, and that anyone killing him would face no prosecution from the law. Waldrip was shot by a sniper, from the cobbler’s shop across Magazine Street – no, by another man, from the upper floor of another building, diagonally across Main Street. He was felled by a single bullet and died instantly, or lived long enough to plead “Please don’t shoot me any more”. I have created yet another rationale for his presence, and still another dramatic story of his end under the oak tree next to the Nimitz Hotel. I have a feeling this version will, over time be added to the rest. Everyone who knew the truth about who shot Waldrip, why he came back to town, how the town was roused against him, and what happened afterwards, all those people took the knowledge of those matters to their own graves, save for tantalizing hints left here and there for the rest of us to find. The whole matter about who actually fired the shot was kept secret for decades, for fear of reprisals from those of his friends and kin who had survived the war. This was Texas, after all, where feuds and range wars went on for generations.

So James P. Waldrip was buried – with his hat – first in a temporary grave, not in the town cemetery – and then moved to a secret and ignominious grave on private property. The story is given so that none of his many enemies might be tempted to desecrate it, but I think rather to make his ostracism plain and unmistakable, in the community which he and his gang had persecuted.

As noted, the Adelsverein Trilogy is now loosed into the wilds of the book-purchasing public. All three volumes are now available through Amazon.com: Book One here, Book Two here ( wherein the Civil War in the Hill Country is painted in great detail) and Book Three, in which Waldrip recieves his just desserts, under a tree by the Nimitz Hotel Stables.

Still More Books

20. December 2008 · Comments Off on Still More Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, World

Another signing event, last night at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg, for the Adeslverein Trilogy. Berkman’s is one of those nice little independent bookstores, holding its own specialized little niche against the overwhelming tide of big-box-bookstores and internet sales; Texiana, lots of events with local authors, curiosities, antique and used books. The clientele is a mix of adventurous tourists and local residents who don’t care to drive to San Antonio or New Braunfels in search of their reading matter. And they have two cats on the premises – I promised that I would frisk Blondie on departure, to ensure that neither of them had stowed away to come home with is. Berkman’s in a rambling old house on Main Street, a little removed from the main tourist blocks along Main Street… which, however, is slowly spreading along the side streets, and east and west from Marketplace Square. David, the owner, had ordered ten copies of each volume, and there has been considerable interest – even some notice in the Fredericksburg Standard. Kenn Knopp, the local historical expert who volunteered (kind of glumly, as he is the first to confess) to read the manuscript of the Trilogy, only to be astonished and thrilled as he got farther into it – was going to meet us an hour before the signing started. He had a friend, Annette Sultemeier, whom he wanted me to meet. Ms Sultemeier is also a local historical enthusiast, and still lives in her family’s house nearby. James P. Waldrip, the infamous leader of the pro-Confederate Hanging Band, who persecuted local Unionists during the Civil War was supposed to be buried in the back yard of her family home. Waldrip figures as the resident villain in the Trilogy, and his come-uppance under a tree at the edge of the old Nimitz hotel property was described in Book Three. Supposedly, he was buried in that unmarked grave, outside of the city cemetery, to escape desecration of his resting place. He was an especially bad hat, with many bitter local enemies.

There was a nice crowd at the signing. David had thought there would be many more people at the signing than there were, but I didn’t mind. This way, I had enough time to talk to people and answer questions. Enough of them were coming specifically for the Trilogy anyway, so I didn’t have that awful experience of spending two hours, watching customers come in the door and sidling around the desperate author, sitting at a little lonely table with a pile of books. Almost everyone bought all three books, many intended as Christmas presents. The last customer of the evening was almost the most rewarding to talk to. This was a young college student named Kevin, fascinated by local history and majoring in it, who read about the signing in the Standard, checked out my website and came straight over with his mother. He asked a great many questions about research, and bought Book One… and his mother bought Two and Three. Christmas present, I guess!
Afterwards, Kenn Knopp treated us to dinner at the Auslander Restaurant, which we had eaten at once before, and recalled as being pretty uninspired foodwise, and kind of scruffy on the inside. Apparently it has since been renovated, for now it was very comfortable, and the food was terrific; jagerschnitzel to die for, accompanied by little crispy potato pancakes about the size of a silver dollar. Blondie and I walked back to the car, admiring the Christmas lights, all along Main Street. There seem to be many nicer restaurants along Main Street now – it was quite lively on a Friday evening. Blondie noted there were many more wine-tasting rooms, too. The Hill Country is slowly becoming the new Provence, as I predicted a while ago, or at least the newest Napa-Sonoma-Mendocino, as far as wine production is concerned.

It was a great way to finish up the day – the interest in my books being almost as much of a satisfaction as the food. I have been warned, though; the event at the Pioneer Museum, on January 3rd will be even bigger, and the local history enthusiasts will come armed with even more searching questions.

Launched!

12. December 2008 · Comments Off on Launched! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Local, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, there was a nice crowd at The Twig last night at my launch event for the Adelsverein Trilogy – even though all but one copy of Book One had sold, even before we walked in last night! Sort of embarrassing, since I then had to fall back on doing autographed book-plates for people to stick into the front of copies they ordered… And my daughter forgot her camera, as we wanted to have pictorial evidence.

Nice Q & A session from almost a dozen people; a nice elderly couple of ‘freethinkers’ from up Comfort way, who were familiar enough with the history to know what I was talking about and to be interested, two very knowledgeable and dedicated local fans, another couple- the wife of whom is the Queen of the Red Hat chapter I belong to, one of my current semi-employers… and a shaggy young man who had been hanging around on the back porch of Cappyccino’s – the little cafe next door, who followed us in. I think he started off being more interested in my daughter, but he seemed to become quite fascinated by trials of the German settlers in Gillespie County. I kept getting very happy vibes of approval and interest, especially when they asked questions about obscure local historical matters – like, about the massacre of Unionists at the Nueces during the Civil War, and I knew all the detailed ins and outs. One of the dedicated fans said he had read the sample chapters at my website and asked about the first chapter of “The Gathering” – had there really been German-American or German immigrants present among the Texians massacred at the Goliad? And yes, of course there were – half a dozen, according to records. I gave chapter and verse, practically page references. The fan looked enormously pleased – I had the feeling I had sailed easily over a pre-set challenge.

I read a bit from Book One, a couple of pages detailing what happens to the steerage passengers on a wooden sailing-ship, during a violent storm in mid-Atlantic. Nothing good, you may be assured – violent sea-sickness, hysteria and bodily fluids sloshing around on the deck are the least of it. Blondie says I read too much and too fast. Still and all, a much better signing than last time.

All three books are too available, here, here and here, from Booklocker.com. Amazon has them all up now, but most discouragingly shows them as being out of stock. Really, sometimes I wonder if they really want to sell my books at all. Apparently, there was a bit about the Trilogy in the Kerrville newspaper yesterday; so had an email query from a local bookstore there. They do mostly used and antique books, but they carry Texiana, and would like to carry the Trilogy. Bit by bit, sportsfans, bit by bit.

I topped off the evening with an interview on an internet radio station show run by another IAG member , even thought I was so tired I practically dropped in my tracks. Something revivifying about being ‘on air’ so to speak. In the theatrical world they call this “Doctor Footlights” – the adrenalin kicks in and you feel better almost at once. (For the interview, enter the site, go to archives, then the list of hosts, pick host Lillian Cauldwell – my interview is there already – Dec. 11)

Ready to Launch

09. December 2008 · Comments Off on Ready to Launch · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Timing is everything, they say – and if I knew six months ago that the economy was on the verge of tanking, I don’t think I would have tried to do anything different with my scheduled release of the Adelsverein Trilogy – the saga that I have been working on for two years and a bit. This will make my third-through-fifth book out there. The third time is supposed to be the charm. Thanks to the accumulated book-writing, book-marketing and book-selling experience at the Independent Authors’ Guild, I think I will come closer to getting it right, this time – like delaying the release so as to allow six months to get some seriously earnest reviews, from publications like “True West” and others. ( Reviews posted here. I’ll be pounding away on the “True West” review for years – decades, maybe.) Such was the wise counsel of writers who had done it before.

Taking their advice also, I worked a lot harder at getting local signings and attempting to interest local museums. It was a lot easier this time around, honestly. The only places that I could interest in “Truckee’s Trail” were a couple of outlets in Nevada and Truckee City – there’s only so much one can do at a thousand-mile-plus remove, especially if you can’t claim to be a local author. But having a book-three books – with several Texas settings, and fifty years worth of interesting and famous or obscure Texas characters contained therein – that something much more appealing to work with in generating local interest. My dance-card, otherwise known as my signing schedule is beginning to fill up, and praise be, I might actually have some local media interested. As in the old-fashioned, print-on-dead-tree kind, which people do still read around here. And let’s face, it Texans are passionately interested in history. They remember more than just the Alamo.

The kick-off is Thursday, at the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights. 5 PM. I don’t know which is my worst fear about this event: that I’ll sit there for two hours and sell maybe one book…. Or that Blondie and I and some friends of ours who have promised to come along for moral support will walk up to the place and the line to get into the Twig will be down to the next block, and they’ll run out of books before the first twenty minutes. I’d prefer the second, of course.

Wish me luck. I couldn’t have done it without you all.

PS: All pre-sold sets are in the mail. The final volume should be up at Amazon any time now. All three – The Gathering, The Sowing and The Harvesting are already at Booklocker.

The Mild, Mild West

02. December 2008 · Comments Off on The Mild, Mild West · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Old West

I succumbed to the blandishments of the overloaded bookshelves at Half-Price Books last Friday, whilst getting a good price on some redundant DVDs. I just knew I shouldn’t have wandered into the section housing assortments of ‘Texiana’ but I did and I was tempted. Since I can resist anything but temptation, I gave in and bought a slightly oversized volume (with color plates!) with the gripping title of “German Artist on the Texas Frontier: Friedrich Richard Petri” for a sum slightly less than the current price on Amazon.

Who was Friedrich Richard Petri, you might ask – and rightfully so for chances are practically no one outside of the local area might have heard of him, he finished very few substantial paintings, was only resident in the Hill Country of Texas for about seven years, and died relatively young.

He was one of those student intellectuals caught up in the ferment of the 1848, along with his friend and fellow-artist (and soon to be brother-in-law) Hermann Lungkwitz. Upon the failure of that movement to reduce the power of the old nobility in favor of something more closely resembling a modern democracy, the two of them resolved to immigrate to America, that promising new land. Once there, they settled upon traveling Texas, where the Adelsverein had previously established substantial enclaves of German settlers, and the weather was supposed to be particularly mild – a consideration, for Richard was plagued by lung ailments. Besides Hermann’s wife, Petri’s sister Elisabet, other members of their had families joined them: Hermann’s widowed mother, and his brother and sister, and Petri’s other sister, Marie. They would become part of the second wave of settlers in the Hill Country; probably just as well, because neither of the Lungkwitz men or Richard Petri had any skill or inclination towards farming, or any other useful pioneering skill. Hermann and Friedrich were artists, Adolph Lungkwitz was a trained metalsmith and glass fabricator.

Traveling by easy stages down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then presumably by regular packet boat to Indianola, the Petri-Lungkwitz families arrived in New Braunfels. They rented a small farm there in the spring of 1851, but did not intend to settle in New Braunfels permanently. It seemed they wished to look around; and so they did, house-hunting and sketching scenes and quick portraits of each other and the people they met. Hermann Lungkwitz later made use of these sketches and scenes in an elaborate lithograph of San Antonio. In July, 1852, the families settled on 320 acres at Live Oak, about five miles southwest of Fredericksburg – and there they settled in, trying to make some sort of living out of farm work and art. They were unaccustomed to the former, although from this account, they seem to have sprung from stock accustomed to hard work, if not precisely in the sort of agrarian work required to make a living in a frontier settlement.

They seem to have gotten along pretty well at that, for the book is full of sketches, watercolors and finished paintings by Petri and Lungkwitz; accomplished and vivid sketches of their friends, their families and the countryside around. There are landscapes of the rolling limestone hills, the stands of oak trees and meadows around Fredericksburg, a distant view of the town, with a brave huddle of rooftops, a poignant sketch of Elisabet, mourning beside the grave of hers and Hermann’s baby son, who lived for only three weeks after his birth. There are sketches of their farmstead, of neatly fenced areas around the two small log houses in which they lived, charming sketches of his sister’s children and their pet deer, of theatrical productions in Fredericksburg – all elaborate costumes and ballet dancers – and of the women in the family going to pay formal calls, balancing their parasols, sitting primly in the seats of an ox-cart. There are sketches of friends, of officers from the Federal army’s garrison at nearby Ft. Martin Scott, of sister Marie’s wedding to neighbor Jacob Kuechler. And there are elaborate sketches of Indians, mostly people of that Comanche tribe which had signed a peace treaty with the German settlers of Fredericksburg and the surrounding areas, for Friedrich Richard Petri had a sympathetic eye and considerable skill. Oh, this is indeed the American frontier, but not quite as we are accustomed to think about it – that never-never land that is the popularly assumed picture that comes to mind whenever anyone thinks “Old West”.
More »

Touching History

31. October 2008 · Comments Off on Touching History · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, History, Military, Old West, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

My… is it Friday already? The end of October, with tomorrow being the Dia de los Muertos… or as we plain Anglos call it, the eve of All Saint’s Day. Time does have when you’re having fun. And I am having fun this week. My hours at the Corporate Call Center just up the road were slashed to the bone this week, allegedly to accommodate their slow time of the year. Perhaps I’ll get them back in November, perhaps not. It’s a job that I am privately most unenthusiastic about, although you’d never know it to hear me answer the incoming calls with brisk and chipper enthusiasm. I would not mind very much actually – I’d miss the money but not much else, as I the local publisher that I am doing work for has actually begun to pay me on a regular basis and shoot interesting little jobs my way.

The two most recent are transcribing old documents – one not all that old, since there is a Star Wars reference in it, but the other might have some actual historical interest, being a pocket year-diary from 1887, bound in crumbling red leather. The owner of it plans to sell, and wants an accurate transcription – or at least, as accurate a transcription of the contents as is humanly possible. The reason he is willing to pay someone to do it – is because the diary-keeper wrote in occasionally illegible ink, couldn’t spell for s**t, had an uncertain grasp of the principals governing the use of capital letters and appears to have been completely uninterested in using punctuation. On the plus side, each entry is only about one run-on sentence long, and three-quarters of those entries are variants on ‘spent the four Noon at Ranch/town …. No news … fair and cloudy to day’

It’s the other entries that are mildly fascinating, for the diary-keeper seems to have been a manager for a cattle ranch in the Pleasant Valley of Arizona, and on the periphery of the murderous Graham-Tewksbury feud. His apparent employer was one of the owners of the “Hashknife Outfit” – famed in West Texas lore and in the books of Zane Grey, so perhaps this is why the current owner thinks the diary is worth something to a collector. I don’t see any evidence so far that the diary-keeper did anything more than pop around like a squirrel on crack all through that year, from town to the ranch and up to various line camps, to Flagstaff for the 4th of July celebrations, seeing to his various duties, which must have ranged from the office-managerial to overseeing round-ups and short drives of cattle from the back-country to the railway (which paralleled Route 66 through Arizona.) There were a few interesting slips of paper tucked into a pocket in the back of the diary, like a bank receipt from a bank in Weatherford, Texas, long strings of figures which appear to be a tally of cattle and a scribbled recipe for some kind of remedy, featuring a lot of ingredients that today are controlled substances (belladonna? Sulphate of zinc and sugar of lead, one drachm) Still and all, as Blondie said – he was dedicated enough to actually sit down and make an entry, every day, in a whole year of days in which one day was mostly like any other, full of work and responsibility, and very little in the way of amusement, or at least amusement worth mentioning specifically. Still, an interesting peep-hole into the past, and another life, distant and yet close.

The other document is a rollicking memoir written by a WWII veteran, who spent nearly 18 months in the China-Burma-India theater, flying cargo over the notorious “Hump” – the Himalayas. At that time, there were large chunks of the land below their air route that was simply white on their maps; never explored by land or by air. This writer lost some friends to the perils of high-altitude flight among mountains that were sometimes even higher, but his exuberance and energy come through in his memoir, quite unquenched. His personality is a little more accessible than the ranch manager of 1887, and he spent a little more time noticing marvelous things like a spectacular show of St. Elmo’s fire lighting up his aircraft during a flight through a high-altitude blizzard, or the white-washed towers of a mountain monastery, perched at the top of a 6,000 foot sheer drop. He wondered about the faint lights seen at night, from tiny villages far below the aluminum wings of his aircraft, wondered if the people living in those simple houses even knew that young men had come from so very far away, to fly a perilous re-supply route over the dark land below. Did it make any difference to their lives? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The flier went home, married his girl, lived a long and successful life. Among the little things to be included in the transcription of his memoir was an envelope of papers – receipts from a grand hotel in Calcutta… and a BX ration card, in which Blondie and I were amused to note that he had maxed out his beer ration for the month of September, 1943—but only purchased one bar of soap.

The history, the past, near and a little distant, in bits of yellowed paper, a year of entries bound in faded red leather or eighteen eventful and frequently nerve-wracking months racking up 800 flying hours. It’s all there, our history. We must remember where we came from, who we are – who our ancestors were, and how they built their lives and did their work. It’s not far distant, it’s more than a few tedious chapters in a history textbook written by an academic with an ideological ax to grind. Our history is real people, meeting challenges and accepting responsibility with courage, grace and humor. It’s why I write books, to try and get people in touch with that history again, to connect with our ancestors. To remember who we are, and where we came from.

(Still taking pre-orders for the Adelsverein Trilogy, here The official release is December 10, and I have lined up some signings locally – schedule is here. Also a review of Book One – The Gathering just appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of True West (dead tree version) ! It’s on page 91, for those that are interested, but alas, no links – the True West website only goes as far as… September)

A Literary Interview

20. October 2008 · Comments Off on A Literary Interview · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

This is the game that some of us ‘real arthurs’ are playing over at the IAG Blog; each author so inclined is doing an interview with his or her own characters. Some of us have done this already for our own sites, with most amusing results. I thought I should cross-post my own effort here. The corporate entity/sweatshop that I work at, of late for a steadily diminishing number of hours, just slashed my work hours again. Any income for readers wishing to buy “To Truckee’s Trail” , order a set of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” or even the little memoir cobbled together from my early entries (when this site was still called Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief – which entries are now, alas, almost impossible to find due to an inability on our part to work out where the hell they were hosted, but if you really would like to read again any of them that you are most fond of, let me know and I will pull them out of my archive and re-post… oh, hell where was I?) Interview with my book characters… got it.

Elisha Stephens (ES) and Isaac Hitchcock (IH) from “To Truckee’s Trail”

Sgt. Mom: So, gentlemen – thank you for taking a little time from your duties as wagon master and… er… assistant trail guide to answer questions from The Independent Authors’ Guild about your experiences in taking a wagon train all the way to California.

ES: (inaudible mumble)
IH: (chuckling richly) Oh, missy, that ain’t no trouble at all, seein’ as I ain’t really no guide, no-how. I’m just along for the ride, with my fuss-budget daughter Izzy an’ her passel o’ young ones. Heading to Californy, they were, after m’ son-in-law. He been gone two year, now. Went to get hisself a homestead there, sent a letter sayin’ they were to come after. Me, I think he went to get some peace an’ quiet… Izzy, she’s the nagging sort…

Sgt. Mom: Yes, Mr. Hitchcock… but if I may ask you both – why California? There was no trail to follow once past Ft. Hall in 1844. Neither of you, or your chief guide, Mr. Greenwood had even traveled that overland trail, before Why not Oregon, like all the other travelers that year?

ES: Nicer weather.
IH: Waaalll, as I said, Samuel Patterson, Izzy’s man, he was already there, had hisself a nice little rancho, an’ o’ course Izzy wouldn’t hear no different about taking a wagon and the passel o’ young-uns and going to join him. (Winking broadly) And it ain’t exackly true that I never had been there, no sirreebob. I been there years before, came over with some fur-trapping friends o’mine. But it was unofficial-like. We wasn’t supposed to be there, but the alcalde and the governor an them, they all looked the other way, like. Beautiful country it were then – golden mustard on all them hills, and the hills and valleys so green and rich with critters – you’d believe they walk up and almost beg to be made your dinner! (chuckles and slaps his knee) Missy, the stories I could tell you, folk wouldn’t believe!

ES: (inaudible mumble)
Sgt. Mom: Captain Stephens, I didn’t quite hear that – did you have something to add?

ES: (slightly louder) Most don’t. Believe him.

Sgt. Mom: And why would that be, Mr. Stephens?
ES: Tells too many yarns. Exaggerates something turrible.

Sgt. Mom: But surely Mr. Hitchcock’s experience was of value…
ES: Some entertaining, I’ll give him that.

Sgt. Mom: Would you care to explain?
ES: No.

IH: (Still chuckling) The Capn’ is a man of few words, missy, an’ them he values as if each one were worth six bits. The miracle is he was ever elected captain, back at the start in Council Bluffs.
ES: Doc Townsend’s idea.
IH: And the Doc’s doing, missy! Everyone thought he’d be the captain of the party, for sure, but he let out that he had enough to do with doctorin’, and didn’t want no truck with organizing the train and leading all us fine folk out into the wilderness.

ES: Sensible man.

Sgt. Mom: I take that you are referring to your party co-leader, Doctor Townsend. Why do you say that, Captain Stephens?

ES: Knows his limits.
IH: Ah, but the Doctor, he’s a proper caution! He’s an eddicated man, no doubt. Took a whole box of books, all the way over the mountains. I tell you, missy – everyone looked to the Doctor. Everyone’s good friend, trust in a pinch and in a hard place without a second thought. Did have a temper, though – member, ‘Lisha, with old Derby and his campfire out on the plains, when you gave order for no fires to be lit after dark, for fear of the Sioux? Old Man Derby, he just kept lighting that fire, daring you an’ the Doc to put it out. Onliest time I saw the Doc near to losing his temper…

Sgt. Mom: (waiting a moment and looking toward ES) Do you want to elaborate on that, Captain Stephens?

ES: No.

Sgt. Mom: Very well then – if you each could tell me, in your opinion, what was the absolute, very worst part of the journey and the greatest challenge. Mr. Hitchcock?

IH: Oh, that would be the desert, missy. They call it the Forty-Mile Desert, but truth to tell, I think it’s something longer than that. All the way from the last water at the Sink… Me, I’d place it at sixty miles an’more. We left at sundown, with everything that would hold water full to the brim, an’ the boys cut green rushes for the oxen. Everyone walked that could, all during the night, following the Cap’n an’ Ol’ Greenwood’s boy, riding ahead with lanterns, following the tracks that Cap’n Stephens an’ the Doc and Joe Foster made, when they went on long scout to find that river that the o’l Injun tol’ us of. A night and a day and another night, missy – can you imagine that? No water, no speck of green, no shade. Jes’ putting one foot in front of the other. Old Murphy, he told them old Irish stories to his children, just to keep them moving. The oxen – I dunno how they kept on, bawlin’ for water all that time, and nothing but what we had brung. We had to cut them loose when they smelled that water in the old Injun’s river, though. Otherwise they’d have wrecked the wagons, and then where would we have been, hey?

Sgt. Mom: In a bit of a pickle, I should imagine. Captain Stephens, what did you see as the most challenging moment?
ES: Getting the wagons up the pass.
IH: Hah! Had to unload them, every last scrap – and haul them wagons straight up a cliff. Give me a surefooted mule anytime, missy – those critters can find a way you’d swear wasn’t fit fer anything but a cat…

Sgt Mom: (waiting a moment for more from Captain Stephens.) Did you want to elaborate, Captain Stephens.

ES: No.

Sgt. Mom: Well… thank the both of you for being so frank and forthcoming about your incredible journey – I think we’ve managed to use up all the time that we have…

Getting to the Starting Gate

17. October 2008 · Comments Off on Getting to the Starting Gate · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Home Front, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

I’m almost there, with the Adelsverein Trilogy, or as Andrew B. called it so many months ago, “Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of sidearms”. I began doing work for a local small publisher here in San Antonio; most of it has been spec work, but I did earn something for re-vamping their website, and have a prospect of earning more, doing writing, editing, general admin work, customer hand-holding and building or maintaining websites. The final volume is being edited, the cover is designed and approved – I even put up all three on my literary website, here. (Don’t they look georgous? I am still taking pre-orders, for delivery just before the official release date of December 10. I have a signing at the Twig Bookshop in Alamo Heights December 11, another at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg on December 19th… and the first Saturday in January I will have a discussion of the books and a signing at the Pioneer Museum in Fredericksburg. A certain number of reviews are scheduled to come out in November – links to be provided when available. I would so like the Trilogy to hit big; tell all your friends, pre-order from me or from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Not just the Trilogy, too – Truckee’s Trail is still selling, and every once in a while someone buys “Our Grandpa was an Alien”.

I am taking a break from writing, from starting on the next project until after getting Adelsverein fairly launched. Just the odd bit of book and movie reviews, blogging and tooting my own horn, market-wise, and reading a tall stack of books to get ready for the first installment of a new trilogy; this one set in the last days of Spanish and Mexican Texas, when there were all sorts of odd characters wandering around… oh, and working for reliable (mostly reliable) pay at the corporate phone bank enterprise up the road, three and a half days a week, in an attempt to at least pay some of the bills regularly, while waiting for the publishing work, and the royalties for my own books to roll in.

It’s a corporate, customer service-type job, not as onerous as some, since it involves booking hotel reservations, so most of the people who call are happy, pleased to be going on a holiday… not furious and spitting nails because their (insert expensive bit of technology here) can’t be made to work and they have been on hold or navigating the phone tree for x amount of time. Alas, it seems that either the economy is beginning to adversely affect them; they were sending people home quite regularly for the last couple of weeks, some of them almost in the first few minutes that they walked in the door. Yesterday I find that all the part-timers’ work schedules have been cut by a day – which essentially reduces my paycheck by almost a third. I can’t say that I am entirely heartbroken about this. I am not entirely enjoying anything much about it; not sitting in a small cubicle having every word recorded, and down-graded because I spend so many more seconds on calls than the person in the next cubicle, or wrestling with entering data into a DOS based system at least twenty years old, (maybe thirty), a pointless dress-code and about thirty things you might do that would justify instant firing. I had reckoned on being able to stick it out for six months, past Christmas, but at the rate they are cutting hours, I think they may be just trying to let us go by slow degrees.

Just to put the icing on the cake, Blondie was let go from her 20-hour a week job, as that little company may be circling the drain. Hardly anyone wants to install permanent shade structures, since they are a fairly big-ticket item. There was barely enough business to keep the office open, so there went that source of income. I have taken her over to my own occasional office job at the ranch real estate firm, and trained her on that she can pick up work there on days when I simply cannot. She starts school again after Christmas.

Aside from all that, nothing much to report. You?

« Older articles
Newer articles »