Nine, Eleven

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

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

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

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

Forted Up – Continued

10. September 2007 · Comments Off on Forted Up – Continued · Categories: General, Good God, History, Old West, War, World

(part 1 here and part 2 here)

The execution of approximately a hundred and twenty men, women… and yes, children also… of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train party stands out particularly among revolting accounts of massacres in the old West, and not just for the number of victims. The most notorious 19th century massacres usually involved Indians and either settlers or soldiers in some combination, overrunning a settlement or encampment, or ambushing a military unit or a wagon-train and slaughtering all in or after a brief and bitter fight. Sometimes this was the overt intent of the aggressor, or just customary practice in the long and bitter Indian Wars; ugly deeds which can be given some fig-leaf of rationalization by attributing them to the heat of battle. But Mountain Meadows was carefully planned beforehand and committed in the coldest of cold blood. How it came to happen is a story almost unknown and incredible to modern ears; bitter fruit of the poisoned tree which had its roots in the persecutions of earlier Mormon settlements in what is now the mid-West. A recitation of the events and reasons for this would make this account several times as long. Sufficient to say as did the character of Dr. Sardius McPheeters, that the Mormons came to realize that they could only get along with their immediate neighbors if they had no neighbors, and they decamped en masse for the wilds of Utah Territory.

There they set about building their new city, on the shores of a salt lake at the foot of the Wasatch mountain range. Driven by zeal, missionaries for the Church of Latter Day Saints traveled and proselytized fearlessly and widely. Eager and hardworking converts to the new church arrived in droves, ready to build that new and shining society in the desert wilderness. It has been no mean accomplishment, outlasting all of the other 19th century social-religious-intellectual communes: Brook Farm and the Shakers, the Amana Colony and any number of ambitious and idealistic cities on the hill. Most of these places barely survived beyond the disgrace or death of their founder, and the disillusion of their membership.

That the mid 19th century Mormons did so must be credited to the iron will, organizational abilities and dynamic leadership of Brigham Young. President of the church, apostle and successor to murdered founder Joseph Smith, Young was also appointed governor of the Utah Territory by then president of the US, Millard Fillmore. Essentially, Utah and the Mormon settlements were a theocracy to a degree not seen since the very early days of the Puritan colonies. Young and his church continued to have a contentious relationship with the US government. Who would actually be in charge; the civil authorities represented by the US Government, or the religious establishment, personified by Young, in his position at the apex of LDS authority? Church-approved polygamy rattled mainstream Americans to no end, since many suspected that it was a wholly self-serving justification for the indulging of male lusts. (The Victorians generally entertained lively suspicions about male lusts, which would today not disgrace a university womens’ studies department.) On their side, memories among the Mormon settlers of their persecutions in Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas were still raw, even as more American settlers continued to move westwards to California and Oregon. Isolation in the far West turned out to be less absolute every year.

By 1857 rumors were flying thick and fast, shouted from every meeting place of Mormons in the Territory that an American military invasion was on the way, with the stated intention of deposing the theocracy, murdering every believing Mormon and laying waste to the settlements they had built with so much heartbreaking labor over the previous decade. And early that spring, shortly after the Bakers and the Fanchers had departed Arkansas, a popular and much-loved Mormon missionary, Parley Pratt had been murdered there by the estranged husband of one of his plural wives. As historian Will Bagley wrote in his account of the massacre, Brigham Young may have been respected – but Parley Pratt was loved. And when there were rumors passed around that some of his murderers were among the men in the Fancher-Baker train, there was stirred up a perfect storm of paranoia and millennial fears. Brigham Young had ordered that a number of outlaying Mormon colonies in California, Wyoming and Nevada to immediately withdraw, and for his people to stockpile supplies and steel themselves for all-out war.

And the Fanchers and the Bakers and all their friends and their children, their cattle herd and their wealth of wagons and property were right in the middle of it, all unknowning.

(next; how the plan unfolded… but at whose order?)

Forted Up – Part 2

06. September 2007 · Comments Off on Forted Up – Part 2 · Categories: General, Good God, History, Old West, War, World

(Part one is here)

The start of the trail season, spring of 1857 saw a number of prosperous but restlessly ambitious emigrants taking the trail west, many of them linked by ties of kin and friendship: the Bakers of Caroll County, Arkansas, and the Huff and Fancher clans, from Benton County, were joined at some point along the long trail from the jumping-off place at the edge of the sea of grass by families with the prosaic names of Tackett, Jones, Mitchell and Prewitt. Alexander Fancher, the paterfamilias and trail-boss of the Fanchers was experienced in the ways of the emigrant trail, having gone back and forth several times. He and his kin intended to settle for good in California and to that end had bought not only their wives and children, but much of their portable property and savings, and a large herd (estimated at 800-1,000) of long-horned Texas cattle. Some of the party were Argonauts, intending to look for gold, but the Fanchers’ cattle were their gold, and intended to market them at a profit to the hungry gold miners in California. They had already registered a brand, for their new ranch and herd.

By 1857 the emigrant trail was not the long and desperate march through unsettled wilderness that it had been ten years before. The US Army had managed to spottily garrison and patrol the Platte River Valley, and the Mormon settlements spreading out from Salt Lake City offered one last and often life-saving chance at rest and resupply before the final calculated leap into the desert and over the sheer mountain wall of the Sierra Nevada. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the other families, numbering about a hundred and fourty men, women and children, arrived in the Salt Lake City area at the end of August, and after consultation decided that they were too late in the season to venture the northern trail, following the Humboldt River into the desert where it sank eventually into the sand, and up the long rocky climb up the Truckee River to the steep mountain pass named after the emigrant party which had so famously left their own traverse too late.

Experienced and sensible, Alexander Fancher and his fellows would not chance being trapped in the snow; not with their long train of wagons, their herd of cattle and their horses. They would take the southern route, the old Spanish Trail that lead down through the Mojave Desert, through the less precipitous passes farther south. (Roughly following present-day I-15, from Salt Lake City, Los Vegas and San Bernardino) It would be a long haul through various deserts, and a couple of hard pulls through mountainous terrain, but nothing like the cruel snows which had doomed the Donner-Reed Party ten years before. By early September they had reached Cedar City, the last outpost for resupply before descent of the Virgin River George and the long desert crossing below. They met a cold reception from the Mormon settlers there, and were not able to purchase any supplies. Doubtless shrugging it off, they moved on south and camped in a pleasant mountain valley at the foot of the Iron Mountains and adjacent the Spanish Trail.

This camping place offered generous pasturage and water, but on the morning of September 7th the emigrants began to be attacked by a large war-band of Piute Indians. Dismayingly, it soon became clear that the Indians were unusually persistent; this was no quick smash and grab ambush, a sudden screaming foray at dawn, with a handful of casualties and a few cattle or horses stolen in a few minutes. This was a deadly, concerted siege. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the others swiftly forted up, chaining their wagons together and digging hasty trenches; they held out for five days. Seven of them were killed outright, another twenty or so wounded, and dismayingly, they began to run low on ammunition, and were tormented by an inability to reach water without being repeatedly sniped at. Of two men who attempted to fetch water from the spring closest to the encampment, one was shot down, and the other escaped… but not before seeing that the man who shot them was not an Indian.

But this was not very unusual… there were brigands all over the west who pretended to be Indians as a cover for robbery and murder, and there were whispers of white turncoats among the various tribes. Still and all, when the cavalry appeared on the horizon, probably everyone in the besieged encampment took a deep breath of relief. Here was rescue at hand; well armed frontiersmen like themselves. Not actually the cavalry, for this was still Mormon territory – it was the local militia, their leaders advancing under a white flag, with good news for the emigrants.

They could leave, the militia leader said… they had been able to call off the Piutes and negotiate some kind of truce with them. But they would have to disarm and leave their wagons and cattle and horse herd, and walk back under escort of the militia to Cedar City. Oh, the children and the wounded could be taken in wagons, but everything else would have to be left behind. No doubt the Fanchers and the Bakers, the Prewitts and the Tacketts and their wives and older children did not like the idea much… but they had their lives and what small valuables they could carry on them. And so they left the wagon encampment in three parties, trusting the men who had come to their rescue. First came some wagons with the wounded, some of the women with babies and small children in it, then another group of women with the older children on foot, and then the men, each of them escorted by a militiaman.

And when a prearranged signal was given by the militia leader, they turned and executed the men, and all of the women and children but for seventeen of them who were babies or assumed to be too young to ever remember what they had seen at the place called Mountain Meadows.

(to be continued)

World War Two Chat

04. September 2007 · Comments Off on World War Two Chat · Categories: Fun and Games, General, History, Technology, The Funny, War

Ran across this a couple of days ago, via Rantburg – if World War Two had been a real-time, on-line strategy game, this how the chat-room might have appeared:

Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha

The rest is here

Along the Emigrant Trail – Forting Up

03. September 2007 · Comments Off on Along the Emigrant Trail – Forting Up · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, World

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

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

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

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

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

It happened just before the Civil War…

(to be continued)

True To the Union Part 4

17. August 2007 · Comments Off on True To the Union Part 4 · Categories: General, History, Old West, War, World

(Previous parts, here, here and here)

Having made it clear who was boss among the Texas Hill Country settlers, Duff and his Partisan Ranger company were withdrawn late in the autumn of 1863 and assigned to afflict the lower Rio Grande. They left smoking rubble and several decades worth of hatred and distrust in their wake. Upon his unlamented departure, a scratch company of local men, both pro-Union and Confederate alike recruited by Major James Hunter effectively protected the frontier settlements in the Hill Country. It helped that a fresh outburst of Indian raids had re-directed everyone’s priorities towards meeting a more keenly felt and immediate threat. Hunter was respected by all, and trusted by the German settlers, and sensibly confined his attentions towards protecting those scatterings of hamlets and ranches from Indian marauders and left the enforcement of the conscription laws strictly alone.

Unfortunately, continuing Confederate reversals on the battlefields in Tennessee and Virginia led to a demand for more men to feed into the Confederate Army and a renewed outcry to enforce the conscription laws in the Hill Country. One of those new decrees insisted that the volunteers in the frontier company be immediately mustered into the Confederate Army. Opposed to doing any such thing, most of those volunteers promptly deserted, and Hunter’s remaining troops turned to hunting them down. A pair of deserters were killed while resisting arrest near Grape Creek in Blanco County, and shortly afterwards a relative of one of the men killed the neighbor who was assumed to have informed on them.

Meanwhile, a detachment of state troops went searching for Karl Itz, a survivor of the Nueces massacre, who was thought to be hiding near his family home in the Cherry Spring area. Unable to find him, they seized his two younger brothers and took them to Fredericksburg on the pretext of enlisting them forcibly into the Confederate Army. Instead, the two of them were murdered by their guards in the middle of Main Street, presumably as a means sending a message to other draft dodgers and bushmen. Another running fight between troopers and bushmen left authorities with the impression that the situation was truly getting out of hand. Major Hunter was effectively kicked upstairs and local command given to an excitable and impulsive man named William Banta.

Banta soon exhibited a lamentable tendency to see enemies everywhere, encouraged by the whisperings of pro-Confederate neighbors at his headquarters at White Oak Creek, a little north of present-day Kerrville. He and a local pro-Confederate named James Waldrip were also encouraged in this tendency by the arrival of a small squad of men from Kansas, from William Quantrill’s notorious band. Fresh from assorted partisan atrocities in Kansas, they had come to Texas to purchase horses, cattle and supplies. In short order, Waldrip gathered a band of like-minded partisans together with Quantrill’s men and determined to root out Unionists, deserters, draft-evaders and any whose views of the Confederacy were less than wildly enthusiastic. They would become known as the “hangerbande” or “the hanging band”.
More »

True to the Union Part 3

12. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union Part 3 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True to the Union: Part 2

06. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union: Part 2 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, War, World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued)

True to the Union – Part 1

03. August 2007 · Comments Off on True to the Union – Part 1 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Local, Old West, World

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Here!!!

01. August 2007 · Comments Off on It’s Here!!! · Categories: General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Site News, World

Ta-Dah!

Roll of drums, please… the great unsung pioneer epic “To Truckee’s Trail” is now available, thanks to those lovely people, Angela and Richard at Booklocker.com… here, and in the sidebar ad… I think.

A great heaping pile of thanks also to reader B. Durbin for the lovely picture which was used for the cover, and the encourangement of reader KC and mobs of others… it would have never have happened at all, but for those fans of The Daily Brief who first read the essays about the Stephens-Townsend party a couple of years ago, and who said “Wow! What a terrific story… why hasn’t anyone ever heard of these people?”

If anyone would like an autographed copy, let me know by sending the cover price plus $2.50 postage to my Paypal account by next Thursday, when I will be ordering a box of copies of it from the printer.

Later: Whoo-whooo! As of 4 PM Thursday, three copies sold, through Booklocker! Another 1,999,997 to go, and then I can think about buying a castle next to J.K. Rowlings’ !!

Even Later: As of Sunday morning, it’s added to the Amazon.com catalogue, here

Pause Between Dances

29. July 2007 · Comments Off on Pause Between Dances · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Old West, World

This weekend is a pause in the mad waltz of the writers’ life marathon; between the kerfuffle-du-jour of Pvt. Beauchamp, the milblogs’ rebel without a clue, and me spending a couple of days at an assortment part-time jobs… and next week when proofs of The Book will be finalized, and I have to start marketing it. Yes!!! It’s nearly here, “To Truckee’s Trail”! Any day now… please buy a copy, when I post the link to Booklocker’s catalogue! I need to buy the software to update my literary website, a decent new printer to generate my own marketing material and letters, and to buy the advertising on websites where they just can’t afford to give it to me out of the goodness of their own hearts and appreciation for my talents as a fairly OK genre fiction writer!

My friend, Dave the Computer Genius has referred me to a handful of his clients who have need of admin-secretarial help a couple of times a week. They are most often small entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who maybe have taught themselves a little with the computer that they bought from Dave to use for their home business, don’t quite understand how to generate what they need and want out of it, and are willing to pay me to come and do it. Or for me to show them how to cut and paste in pictures, pretty up excel spread-sheets, enter useful contact data in their personal scheduling software, and to perform heavy-lifting… like do Google searches. Eh… it’s part-time, pays enough to make going to their workplaces (usually a home office) and leaves me the afternoons to write.

Yeah, writing… still have time to do that. By my calculations, I’m about halfway through “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. That is the epic about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Right now, I am plunging into rather interesting territory, with an account of the storms of the Civil War, as they were weathered in Gillespie County. When I talked to my parents on Friday, I was reminded of how interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese saying, that completing this volume is likely to become. One of their circle who they let read all my manuscripts as they are written, is a retired professor of English. She’s a very experienced teacher and editor, and I particularly value her critical feedback. Mom let me know that she has just finished reading the first volume, and has made many, many notes… but that one was a long critique about settler-Indian relations, as I had written about them.

Which… since I am trying to write as accurately as I can about the Texas frontier, circa 1845-1885 means that the opinions and beliefs of the characters that I am writing about are not particularly socially correct by today’s lights. I will not commit the literary sin of “presentism”; that is, putting the attitudes and opinions of a late 20th century person into a 19th century character and either imputing that this person is very brave and non-conformist to be so advanced, or implying that 19th century people were just like us but dressed up in funny costumes and with horses instead of automobiles. Most 19th century Texans hated and feared the Indians; it’s an anachronism to pretend otherwise. There were curious exceptions to this, and all sorts of interesting shadings. Sam Houston and Robert Neighbors were distinguished in their lifetimes for their friendships among various tribes, and for their effective consideration of Indian interests. Members of the Lipan Apache and Tonkawa bands fought alongside Jack Hays’ Ranger companies, and the German settlements negotiated and kept to a peace agreement with the Southern Comanches that was never broken, even though other Indian tribes eventually began raiding at will in the Hill Country. It’s all a great deal more nuanced than someone looking backwards from the late 20th century might give credit for… and I haven’t even gotten to slavery and racial relations, yet. About all I can promise to do is to clean up some of the intemperate language. Which puts me up to the same challenge as Robert Lewis Stephenson, of writing about obscenity-spouting people… without actually using obscenities.

That’s going to be fun, since I am running into all kinds of interesting people and situations, in my first quick pass through Civil War period memoirs and histories. Texas was on the far fringe of the Confederate South. According to one of my notes, the biggest slave owner in the state on the eve of the Civil War owned 300 slaves. The second and third biggest owned far fewer than that… which meant … Off on another track here, which will be reserved for another post.

Bottom line, I am having fun with this. Especially since I have always hated Gone With the Wind, and that romantic lost cause and noble Confederate cavalier crap.

Committee of Vigilance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renaissance Man

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

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

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

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

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

04. July 2007 · Comments Off on Another Independence Day Message · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Local

Independence Day celebrations in small towns haven’t changed all that much over the years, and the one here is no exception. Our town is the county seat, with a large lawn on the town square that is perfectly suited for such festivities. Of historical significance, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas spoke on the courthouse lawn on October 11th and 22nd respectively.

Earlier that year, on July 10th, Lincoln gave a speech that rings with relevance even today, although framed in the notoriously contentious debate with Douglas about slavery. He said, in part:

“If they (the immigrants that arrived in the U.S. after its independence) look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Just three blocks from where Lincoln spoke, and fourteen years earlier, Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormon Church) and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob that had shown much animosity toward the Mormons settled in nearby Nauvoo Illinois since there arrival from Missouri. This led to the Mormon migration west into present day Utah. When I moved to this community (into a house just a block from the jail where the killings took place) twenty-nine years ago, there still was considerable animosity toward the Mormons; not for any particular reason that I could discern, but rather traditional distrust passed down through the generations and the typical blather we hear today when referring to concerns about Mitt Romney (which, by the way, does not at all fit my own experiences with members of the LDS church with whom I work and do business) and, in 1960, John Kennedy.

Since that time the LDS church rebuilt their temple in Nauvoo that had been burned soon after the exodus to Utah, and they purchased the entire block where the old jail is located and built a very nice visitor center. None of it came easy, for either the Mormons or the local inhabitants. Over the years, however, I have noticed a sea change on both sides. Individual members of the Mormon Church have moved to, and become assimilated into, our community. The discovery that we all share the same fundamental values, as Lincoln so eloquently expressed in his 1858 speech, has I think finally started healing the poison that spread some one hundred sixty years ago.

Today was a landmark occasion, however. A small troupe of Mormon singers, accompanied by a bagpiper and pianist, traveled from Utah and took to the stage during the activities on the square to perform patriotic and traditional American music for an audience of several hundred people. The concert, lasting a couple of hours, left not a dry eye in the house. Between musical pieces, various of the performers spoke of defining moments in our history and memorialized the true heroes comprising our national identity, from the founding fathers to the men and women who have worn the uniform since those early days, to the every day Americans who understand and appreciate the gift of liberty and equality bestowed upon us. While not wanting to sound like an apologist for either side of the events that led to such a terrible schism, these performers gave what I consider to be the ultimate offering of friendship, that being a poignant reminder that all of us who hold the truth to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are, as one, Americans. How ironic that such an event should take place literally yards from where Abraham Lincoln likely delivered the same message, albeit in a different context, so many years ago.

Happy Independence Day

On This Day in 1776

04. July 2007 · Comments Off on On This Day in 1776 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

(It was the custom in many 19th century communities to have a public reading of the Declaration of Independence as part of the 4th of July Festivities. It’s a good tradition, and I hold to it on this site.)

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

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A Mad Gallop

21. June 2007 · Comments Off on A Mad Gallop · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Or more measures from the accelerating writer’s life waltz! One day of paid work at the office yesterday, but two weeks left to myself on such projects as a couple of reviews, and a couple of books to read for upcoming reviews…. And a CD that I simply must listen to and come up with some cogent observations, even though I have never heard of any of the artists. Even Blondie hasn’t heard of most of them; it’s a soundtrack CD for the TV show Kyle XY. So far the only ready observation that has come to my mind is “gosh, where does the poor lad put the salt when he eats celery in bed?” which will only amuse people about a third of a century older than the main demographic for the music.

I’m here all week… try the veal, and don’t forget to tip your waitress

I am galloping away on the Civil War segment of the current epic, having completed the first six chapters, slowly building up to the tragedy which drives the rest of the book (and the subsequent volume) , the murder of a fairly major character by a vigilante gang. And no, I would not be talked into a reprieve; I had always planned this, since I began jotting down notes on various striking incidents and people, and working out how to weave characters and a plot around those particular points. The death of this character sends everyone around – friends, family, and distant connections off on various abrupt tangents… and that accounts for about 75% of the rest of the plot. I have more than just the bare-bones idea on conversations, subsequent incidents and scene descriptions, so I expect the rest of the first draft will move along pretty briskly. This is the Civil War… when the story starts to drag, I can always arrange to have someone in a battle. Or to sneak around on a dangerous mission, or something… the possibilities are nearly endless. I suspect that if I hadn’t broken it out into three parts “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and Lots of Side-Arms” would be about the thickness of a concrete block when finished. The Fat Guy, who has read some bits of it insists that it would sell in Texas like $3 a pound chicken-fried steaks, and asks what are they thinking of that I don’t have any more nibbles from publishers than I do?

I ran across another writers’ webside, who does historical fiction also (different period) and was amused to note that she also sets out a humongous chart, tracing incidents and accidents, and character’s development, and when children are born (or conceived!)… when you are dealing in a story that spans several decades, and pivots around historical events, keeping track of it all is absolutely key! I have a chart that contains about six different historical time-lines, from national down to local, maps out three different families, four romantic pairings, two towns, one feud… and the rise of the Texas cattle industry. At the very least this means that when two characters meet in an Austin saloon in March of 1847, I know what their small talk would have been about!

But as soon as I finish the draft, then I will need to sit down and read… a lot. If the chart and my chapter outline are rather like the bones, and the first draft is the inner organs and muscles and skin and all… then the final draft is getting it into shape, doing a bit of nip and tuck, and applying the couturier outfit, manicure makeup and hairstyling. All these details that show, and I like to get them right; as a matter of pride and of not wanting to be nibbled to death by those ducks who are mad for that particular event or period. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than having an expert enthusiast look at a particular episode and say, “No, it didn’t happen that way, it’s quite impossible,” and then refer me to about a dozen authoritative tomes that would have set me right to begin with. And this applies to smaller stuff, as well: what was the name of the fanciest retail store in Austin, on the eve of the Civil War? Who did daguerreotypes, and where was that studio, or was there more than one? When did the various militia troops recruited by the Committee for Public Safety begin to wear gray uniforms, and who supplied them? Where was the stage stop in various towns, and how often did the stages run… and what was the average travel time? What were people talking about, after church on a Sunday, or in a tavern, or on a long scout into the Llano? All this and a thousand more questions potentially come out of just about every paragraph, when you are trying to write it looking through the lens of a different century than the one you know first and best.

All this is part of making a convincing venture into the past, and showing it to the present, making it real and breathing, dust-covered and glorious… which is a way of saying that I need some books now, either that the library doesn’t have, or that I will need for months longer than they will check them out to me… should any of our readers want to help me make it a little farther down this trail. I posted a list here, and will add to it as the need occurs, or subtract as I am able to buy them myself. More happy blogging this weekend. I promise.

The Passing Parade

18. June 2007 · Comments Off on The Passing Parade · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Military, Reader Mail, Wild Blue Yonder, World

Regular reader Robert D. emailed me overnight, letting me know that an ace in two wars, General Robin Olds had died over the weekend.

In my early time in service, General Olds was famous for a defiantly non-reg mustache, and for having flown with Chappie James over Vietnam, forming a duo nicknamed “Blackman and Robin”.

He was a colorful character; these days seeming like a character in a swashbuckling adventure novel, or a movie serial.

More here.

Houston and Lincoln

13. June 2007 · Comments Off on Houston and Lincoln · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, World

It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, to look at the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of them almost entirely self-educated, as lawyers among other things, and from reading accounts by their contemporaries, it is clear that each possessed an enormous amount of personal charm. To put it in modern terms, both would have been a total blast to hang out with. In their own time, though, each of them also acquired equally enormous numbers of bitter enemies. In fact, for a hero-founder of Texas, Houston attracted a considerable degree of vitriol from his contemporaries, and a level of published vilification which was not bettered until Lincoln appeared on the national scene as the presidential candidate favored by the north in the 1860 election. And both of them had ups and downs in their political and personal lives, although it’s hard to argue that Lincoln’s personal story arc was anything as eventful as Houston, who appears as the ADHD child of Jacksonian-era politics.

But they were also opposites in at least as many ways as they were similar. The family of Samuel Houston had at least some pretensions to property and gentility, whereas that of Lincoln had not the slightest shred of either. Born in 1793, Houston was just barely old enough to have served actively in the War of 1812. He seems on that account to have been representative of an earlier generation than that of Lincoln, a generation only a half-step removed from the founding fathers. He came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, and thereafter spent much of his life when not strolling up and down the corridors of power, loitering meaningfully in the vicinity. He served variously in the Army or state militia of Tennessee, as an Indian agent, in Congress and as elected governor of Tennessee. He was married three times, was an absolutely legendary drunk and lived with the Cherokee tribe for a number of years on at least two occasions. He was brave, impulsive and addicted to flamboyant gestures and attire, being talked with great difficulty out of wearing a green velvet suit to one of his inaugurations as the President of independent Texas. He was also, to judge from portraits and photographs a very handsome man, resembling a rather rugged Colin Firth on a bad hair day.

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Sixth of June 1944

06. June 2007 · Comments Off on Sixth of June 1944 · Categories: General, History, War, World

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have
striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The
hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on
other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war
machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of
Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well
equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of
1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats,
in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their
strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home
Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions
of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men.
The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to
Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in
battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great
and noble undertaking.

SIGNED: Dwight D. Eisenhower

(link to more, including a pic of document)

The Ghost of South Presa Street

06. June 2007 · Comments Off on The Ghost of South Presa Street · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

On a mild spring day, my daughter and I walk on a narrow trail, trampled out between tall grass and wildflowers grown knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high. A light breeze ruffles the flowers, around which orbit a fair of butterflies. We are on a quest, looking for the past, and exploring the ruins of the old Hot Wells resort, a sort of architectural sleeping beauty. There is no crystal coffin protecting this place, just a prosaic chain-link fence… but the place exudes quiet enchantment nonetheless. A feeling of serenity wraps around us; nothing threatens us. It is quiet, restful… even soothing.

Hot Wells today lies in a clearing among a grove of trees, across the railroad tracks, between South Presa and the San Antonio River. Someone casually driving by might think the ruins are of a factory, or a mill… but they would be judging by what the neighborhood nearby is now, little knowing that once there was a long elegant promenade, which terminated in a circular carriageway in front of the bathhouse and the hotel, a carriageway ornamented with a planting of flowerbeds, hedges and footpaths on either side. Little is left of that glory now, only the ragged stand of palms and some pomegranate shrubs grown lank and wild, far back in the scrub trees. The central ruins seem to float in a rippling green sea, a wrecked ship of buff-colored brick.

A few ranges of wall go as far as their original three stories. Some walls support a cob-web fragile roof over what had been changing rooms. Everywhere in the crumbling walls there are regularly-spaced openings for windows and doors. Faded flecks of aqua paint still adhere to the otherwise weathered grey wood. Mats of dark green vines shroud some walls, as if trying to pull them down to ground level. Trees of a good size grow up through what were once interiors; a prickly-pear cactus perches on top of a high wall, above a narrow interior courtyard

And yet, if you close your eyes, sit quietly and hold your breath in this place, one can almost hear the sound of ragtime music floating on the air from a nearby bandstand under the trees, or a wind-up Victrola paying in a high-ceiling room behind a deep verandah. Gravel crunches under the narrow tires of tinny little sedans and open touring cars, sweeping up to the front of the sprawling grand hotel, and a train-whistle blows, from the spur where a wealthy magnate has his private parlor car waiting. The past is just barely out of reach here at Hot Wells, the sounds of it just beyond our hearing, in this twenty-first century.
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For Memorial Day-

27. May 2007 · Comments Off on For Memorial Day- · Categories: Domestic, General, History, War, World

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Just because…

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Just seemed to be especially relevent, this Memorial Day.

The Long Hot Summer of 1860

22. May 2007 · Comments Off on The Long Hot Summer of 1860 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Media Matters Not, Old West, Politics, Technology

The summer of 1860 culminated a decade of increasingly bitter polarization among the citizens of the still-United States over the question of slavery, or as the common polite euphemism had it; “our peculiar institution”. At a period within living memory of older citizens, slavery once appeared as if it were something that would wither away as it became less and less profitable, and more and more disapproved of by practically everyone. But the invention of the cotton gin, to process cotton fiber mechanically made large-scale agricultural production profitable, relighting the fire under a moribund industry. The possibility of permitting the institution of chattel slavery in the newly-acquired territories in the West during the 1840s turned the heat up to a simmer. It came to a full rolling boil after California was admitted as a free state in 1850… but at a cost of stiffening the Fugitive Slave Laws. And as a prominent senator, Jesse Hart Benton lamented subsequently, the matter of slavery popped up everywhere, as ubiquitous as the biblical plague of frogs. Attitudes hardened on both sides, and within a space of a few years advocates for slavery and abolitionists alike had all the encouragement they needed to readily believe the worst of each other.

Texas was not immune to all this, of course. Of the populated western states at the time, Texas was closer in sympathy to the South in the matter of slavery. Most settlers who come from the United States had come from where it had been permitted, and many had brought their human property with them, or felt no particular objection to the institution itself. In point of fact, slaves were never particularly numerous: the largest number held by a single Texas slave-owner on the eve of the Civil War numbered around 300, and this instance was very much a singular exception; most owned far fewer. Only a portion of the state was favorable to the sort of mass-agricultural production that depended upon a slave workforce. In truth while there were few abolitionists, there were many whose enthusiasm for the practice of chattel slavery was particularly restrained especially in those parts of North Texas, which had been settled from northern states and around the Hill Country and San Antonio, similarly settled by Germans and other Europeans.

One of the subtle and tragic side-effects that the hardening of attitudes had on the South was to intensify the “closing-in” of attitudes and culture towards contrary opinions. As disapproval of slavery heightened in the North and in Europe, Southern partisans became increasingly defensive, less inclined to brook any kind of criticism of the south and its institutions, peculiar or otherwise. By degrees the South became inimical to outsiders bearing the contrary ideas that progress is made of. Those who were aware of the simple fact that ideas, money, innovation, and new immigrants were pouring into the Northern states at rates far outstripping those into the South tended to brood resentfully about it, and cling to their traditions ever more tightly. Always touchy about points of honor and insult, some kind of nadir was reached in 1854 on the floor of the US Senate when a Southern Senator, Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Charles Sumner following a fiercely abolitionist speech by the latter. Senator Brooks was presented with all sorts of fancy canes to commemorate the occasion, while Senator Sumner was months recovering from the brutal beating.

And even more than criticism, Southerners feared a slave insurrection, and any whisper of such met with a hard and brutal reaction. John Brown’s abortive 1859 raid on the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry sealed the conviction into the minds of Southerners that the abolitionists wished for exactly that.

When mysterious fires razed half of downtown Denton, parts of Waxahatchie, a large chunk of the center of Dallas, and a grocery store in Pilot Point during the hottest summer in local memory, it took no great leap of imagination for anti-abolitionists to place blame for mysterious fires squarely on the usual suspects and their vile plots. Residents were especially jumpy in Dallas, where two Methodist preachers had been publicly flogged and thrown out of town the previous year. The editor of the local Dallas newspaper, one Charles Pryor wrote to the editors of newspapers across the state, (including the editor of the Austin Gazette who was chairman of the state Democratic Party) claiming “It was determined by certain abolitionist preachers, who were expelled from the country last year, to devastate, with fire and assassination, the whole of Northern Texas, and when it was reduced to a helpless condition, a general revolt of slaves, aided by the white men of the North in our midst, was to come off on the day of election in August.”

The panic was on, then, all across Texas: Committees of Public Safety were formed, as so-called abolitionist plotters were sought high, low, and behind every privy and under every bed, and lynched on the slightest suspicion. Conservative estimates place the number of dead, both black and white as at least thirty and possibly up to a hundred, while the newspapers breathlessly poured fuel on the fires… metaphorically speaking, of course… by expounding on the cruel depredations the abolitionists had planned for the helpless citizens of Texas. When the presidential election campaign began in late summer, Southern-rights extremists seamlessly laid the blame for the so-called plot on the nominee and political party favored by the Northern Free-States; Republican Abraham Lincoln. Texas seceded in the wake of his election, the way to the Confederacy smoothed by rumor, panic and editorial pages.

It turns out that the fires were most likely caused by the spontaneous ignition of boxes of new patent phosphorous matches, which had just then gone on the market, and the usually hot summer. But speculation and conspiracy theories are always more attractive than prosaic explanations for unsettling and mysterious events… and were so then as now.

More here on the Texas Troubles

Obviously…

21. May 2007 · Comments Off on Obviously… · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, World

…Europe was a quagmire, and we just should have pulled out our troops and brought them home!

(Courtesy of Instapundit.)

Once Upon Another War

17. May 2007 · Comments Off on Once Upon Another War · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Military, War, Wild Blue Yonder, World

A meditation upon one of WWII’s most unusual missions… which in even at the time seemed almost as if it were a movie…

From Richard Fermandez, “Wretchard” at The Belmont Club, courtesy of PJ Media.

Fall and Rise, Part 2

11. May 2007 · Comments Off on Fall and Rise, Part 2 · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Memoir, Military, War

The summer that I was sixteen and a half was the one spent in Britain and Europe, doing the Eurailpass/Youth Hostel/$5.00 a day adventure… which upon reflection at a point nearly four decades later seems nearly as long ago as luxury steamship travel and the Grand Tour. I learned many useful and useless things during that summer, and acquired a certain sort of fearlessness about travel and new places, and strange people, as well as the ability to manage a 70-pound backpack in all situations, including the narrow confines of the little stairway to the top level of an English double-decker bus. It’s an awkward thing to manage, of course, and sometimes total strangers were moved to be of assistance, especially when we were shedding our packs (which were our entire luggage) or taking them up again.

It’s of enormous help, you see, for someone to grab the pack and hold it steady as you slip the straps off your shoulders. Then you turn around and thank them, and taking the pack by the frame, you stow it away in the overhead, or set it down…or whatever. We came to know that there were two kinds of men who would instantly offer this assistance: the young ones were Boy Scouts… and all the older ones had been soldiers.

My travel buddy, Esther Tutwyler and I struck up a conversation with one of those helpful older sorts in an English railway compartment… who of course turned out to have been a soldier, and also confessed that he was always grateful to Americans because Patton’s army had liberated him from a German POW camp. This was an instant bond, as Esther’s father was a career Army warrant officer who had fought his way all across France and Germany and done his share of liberating various bits of personnel and real estate. But when I asked the Englishman where he had been captured, he answered with the name of his unit, and that he had been captured at Dunkirk as part of the British Expeditionary Force. I actually recognized the name of his unit, (I knew all sorts of useless trivia at this time) and remarked that they had been part of the defending force around the pocket where the British forces had been driven, upon the opening of the German drive into France,
“Oh, yes,” he said, with great good humor, “But if I had known then it was the perimeter around the bloody place, I would have made Jesse Owens look like a turtle!”

The German offensive of May, 1940 punched through the weak point— Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg— and split the Allies in two. The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force fell back towards the flat sandy coast between Calais and the Belgian frontier… towards Gravelines and La Panne, Nieuport and Bergues… and Dunkirk, with its inner harbor and much of the town smashed to rubble and rendered useless by German air raid. Black smoke from burning oil stocks shrouded the town, and set up a column of black smoke that could be seen for miles. But the outer harbor was sheltered by a long jetty, or mole; wooden gangways spanning concrete plinths reaching out from the shore and sheltering the outer harbor. The moles were not intended as a means of landing or loading personnel, but in a pinch, ocean-going ships could tie up and take on troops… but it was a tricky maneuver at best, and made even more of a hazard by constant German air raids. German artillery dominated most of the sea routes approaching the town… but still, according to most accounts, more than three-quarters of those rescued from Dunkirk were taken off from the moles, by ships who packed in human cargo wherever there was room. It took about seven hours to load 1,000 men on a destroyer, for example… and every minute of those hours, that ship and the men lined up on the mole, patiently waiting their turn to board would be a target of everything the Germans could throw at them. On the evening of 27 May, 1940 the Navy officer on station in Dunkirk sent a message to his superior, saying essentially that evacuating from the moles was too slow, too hazardous. He asked for ships to be sent towards the beaches, east of Dunkirk… and for all available small craft to serve as ferries between the beach and the larger craft.

There were already hundreds of regular Naval and merchant-marine vessels at hand to serve in the evacuation, plus a number of requisitioned Dutch coastal transports, known as “scoots”… but during the night of the 27th, Navy officers scoured boatyards, yacht-ports and wharves all through the south-eastern coast and rivers of England for small craft that could be of use. Fishing trawlers and tramps, tug boats, motor yachts and countless numbers of row-boats, fire-boats and cross-channel paddle-steamers were pressed into immediate service, with crews formed by a mix of reservists, regulars, volunteers, civilians and owners… hastily equipped and fueled up, sketchily armed, formed into convoys or taken under tow, they all went straight into the thick of it… to get their soldiers out.

The legend of the little boats was born out of Dunkirk, of civilian boat-owners sailing into hell … even though it wasn’t quite like that, there’s enough truth in it to stir the blood of anyone inclined to step forward in a time of crisis. Though most of the BEF that escaped did so through the harbor, the image of shallow-draft little boats sailing close into the shore, and of columns of soldiers standing chest-deep in the water, waiting for their countrymen to come for them and bring them safe home … oh, yes; there is the image imperishable, of nine days of glory in the midst of defeat. The British Army left their armor, their heavy artillery, their transport behind; with luck all of it spiked, scattered and burned all along the sandy dunes along the shore from Dunkirk to La Panne. They came away with what they carried, their weariness and pride, for they were still alive.

Arms and transport, armor and artillery, they could be replaced… at a cost, and in some little time; but in only a fraction of the time it takes to train an officer or an NCO, or to raise up an Army. And that was the victory of Dunkirk, delivered out of defeat and captivity at the hands of Hitler’s marvelous war machine; an Army that would return. And that was the victory of the little boats, the volunteers, and the organization of everything that could float, and head towards the column of smoke in the sky…and carry away a soldier or two. It must have been all the sweeter, a victory and an army, snatched from the wreck following on the defeat of an ally which had been until then thought stout and strong.

I couldn’t resist this coda, found from one of my reference books: A very junior Navy officer on the destroyer HMS Grenade was later asked by his commanding officer to write an account of his experience, after the ship was fatally disabled by a bomb which went straight down the funnel and exploded in the boiler. He wrote

“Dear Sir: there was a bloody great bang. I have the honor to be, Sir, Your Obedient servant.”

Fall and Rise, Part 1

11. May 2007 · Comments Off on Fall and Rise, Part 1 · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, War, World

Found at “Chicago Boyz“: a long evocative essay about the fall of France, which took place early in May, 1940. The writer takes a look at some of the factors which led to the gutting of France… factors which may look hauntingly familiar.

My own essay on a significant historical event which followed closely after, will follow.

American Century Mass Cas

01. May 2007 · Comments Off on American Century Mass Cas · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

I can pretty well figure out the source of my interest in 19th century American history; some of it can be blamed on the �Little House Books� of Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the larger portion can be laid squarely at the foot of my mother�s subscription to �American Heritage Magazine�. Which she still has, but the magazine is a pale, paltry and advertisement-poxed version of what it was when Mom first began subscribing� shortly after the beginning of the magazine itself. There were only a handful of the very earliest, dawn-of-time-issues which I did not know very, very well. It was a bi-monthly, or quarterly hard-back publication, with no advertisements and articles by serious, well-respected if seemingly obscure historians who managed to be interesting� without being the least bit sensational. I have the impression that most of them were passionately interested in their topic� whatever it might be, and wrote with enthusiasm equal to their knowledge of subject. The articles were well-illustrated with contemporary art or historic photographs, or an appealing mix of modern photographs, drawings and artifacts. I couldn�t have imagined a better introduction to the vagaries of our national history.

These articles and essays ranged over three centuries of American history, events and movements, personalities, triumphs and tragedies great and small, obscure or well known, all mixed together, and I pretty well sucked up every word. In hitting up the library shelves over the last couple of months, though, I�ve been reminded of some events that I first read about, courtesy of American Heritage. These events hit at a most peculiar nexus in our history; just at that point when a certain level of technological development combined with a decided carelessness as to consequences when people were encouraged to move to a part of the country where large numbers of people had not been before. Or in some cases, where too many people happened to gather in a venue where not so many of them could have been accommodated previously. At the same time, communications and travel were made much easier, while the appetite for national news grew ravenous. Did anyone think that �if it bleeds, it leads� was an invention of the present cynical age? Or that breathless coverage of a disaster was something that came along after the invention of radio and television?

Oh, no, my friends. From about 1870, until the beginning of WWI, our nation was rocked pretty regularly by horrific disasters, natural and otherwise. The astonishing thing is that most of them have been forgotten, save by local historians. For every one that is noted in the textbooks and in the memory of popular culture; the Chicago fire, the Johnstown flood, the sinking of the Titanic, there are a half a dozen others.

The Peshtigo fire, for example: a tornado of fire that roared through Wisconsin in 1871 and burned a thriving lumber town on Green Bay. That fire incinerated perhaps 2,000 people. Those who survived took refuge in a river, where they had to keep ducking under water, as the fire burned all around with such intensity that their hair kept catching fire. But that fire happened at the same time as Chicago was burning to the ground, and so a major city in flames grabbed most of the headlines. Twenty-three years later, another huge firestorm swept through another Minnesota lumber-town; Hinckley, where about four hundred saved themselves in a nearby gravel pit and a shallow, muddy lake, while another four hundred suffocated or were burned alive. The heroes of that day were the crews of three trains, who stayed to evacuate residents until their coaches were all but catching fire from the blowtorch flames around them.

Catastrophic weather took a toll in that last bit of the 19th century, accurate forecasting being more of a dream than a reality. On a January day in 1888, the temperatures across a wide swath of the upper Plains abruptly dropped nearly seventy-degrees in a few hours. It was a mild day until early afternoon, until a sudden blizzard swept over Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas. Farmers doing chores were a short way from their homes were suddenly isolated, and children were trapped with their teachers in their tiny schoolhouses. Over two hundred were dead of exposure� many of them children. One of the heroines of the Schoolhouse Blizzard was a young teacher who supposedly tied her 17 pupils together with clothesline and led them all to safety in a house a bare mile away.

Along the Texas Gulf coast, two hurricanes ten years apart destroyed Indianola, the Queen City of the West. At the turn of the century a third hurricane hit like a pile-driver through Galveston; it is thought at the cost of over 8,000 lives. The city fathers of Galveston rebuilt, raising the level of their barely-sea-level island behind a huge sea-wall� and the benefits of accurate weather forecasting and storm watches became clearly evident.

The loss of the White Star liner Titanic, colliding with an ice-berg in the mid-Atlantic is one of those things that practically everyone knows about� but barely ten years before, the steamship General Slocum burned within sight of New York harbor. It was an excursion ship, hired for the day by a large Lutheran church on the lower East side, to take the families of its parishioners for an all-day picnic outing on Long Island. The General Slocum burned while the captain tried to run it aground where the fire wouldn�t endanger anyone else� while his crew discovered that the fire hoses were rotten, the lifeboats couldn�t be dislodged from their places, or lowered away if they could� and the life-vests were filled with rotted cork. Over 1,000 people were lost� like the Schoolhouse Blizzard disaster, many of them children. Another excursion steamship, the Eastland, was hired in 1915 for the employees of Western Electric Company�s annual company picnic. The Eastland was an unstable and top-heavy ship, and while taking on passengers at a Chicago dock rolled over to one side in 20 feet of water. Almost 900 of her passengers died within 20 feet of the dock� but the Eastland has nothing of the enduring grip on the imagination that the Titanic does.

This is only a partial list of these sorts of disasters; I�ve probably missed at least this many and more� but they had an effect, even if the headlines did not last as long. The inquiries into the Slocum and the Eastland disasters resulted on at least as many safety improvements as regards their operations. The train of natural disasters caused by weather likewise resulted in such things as forecasting, and storm tracking being taken more seriously. The loss of whole cities and a good chunk of the countryside to fires became unacceptable, after Chicago and Peshtigo fires� and especially so after the Hinckley fire. It was all cumulatively too much. People got very tired of opening their paper every few years and reading of some horrendous loss of life� and then finding out that it might have been could have been, and should have been prevented. Just blindly trusting to luck, goodwill among men, and a benevolent nature would no longer cut it, now that disaster news could fly beyond a single town, or a neighborhood and touch people half a world away.

Still, it�s curious, how few people have heard of some of these I have listed. Blondie only knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and only because it was her freshman history textbook.

(- note: correction on location of Peshtigo fire noted – thanks!)

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