Tales of a Citizen Militia: Northfield

20. April 2007 · Comments Off on Tales of a Citizen Militia: Northfield · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

It would seem from the history books that most veterans of the Civil War settled down to something resembling a normal 19th century civilian life without too much trouble. One can only suppose that those who survived the experience without suffering incapacitating physical or emotional trauma were enormously grateful to have done so. Union veterans additionally must have been also glad to have won the war, close-run thing that it appeared to have been at times. Confederate veterans had to be content with merely surviving. Not only did they have to cope with the burden of defeat, but also physical wreckage of much of the South – as well as the wounds afflicted upon experiencing the wreckage of that whole Southern chivalry-gracious plantation life-fire eating whip ten Yankees with one arm tied behind my back- anti-abolitionist mindset. But most Confederate soldiers laid down their arms and picked up the plow, so to speak fairly readily – if with understandable resentment. In any case, the still-unsettled frontier west of the Mississippi-Missouri basin offered enough of an outlet for the restless, the excitement-seekers and those who wanted to start fresh.

The war had been conducted with more than the usual brutality in the mid-west, though, in Bleeding Kansas and even Bloodier Missouri, where the dividing line between murderous vigilante bandit-gangs and well-disciplined mobile partisan units was considerably more blurred than elsewhere and some of those who had participated in warfare on that basis, were even more reluctant to shake hands like gentlemen and go back to a peaceable life when it was all over.

Such were men like the James brothers, Jesse and his older brother Frank, and their friends, Cole and Jim Younger. Jesse and Cole Younger had both ridden with the Confederate partisans led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill. The Coles and the Youngers were so disinclined to give peace a chance that they hardly waited a year before holding up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. Over the next decade, they hit banks from Kentucky to Iowa, Kansas and West Virginia, varying the program occasionally with robbing trains. By July of 1876 they appear to have made Missouri too hot to hold them, even though they had sympathy and quiet support among kinfolk and local residents who gave them the benefit of the doubt for having fought for the Confederacy. Casting around for a new and profitable target for robbery which would get them away from Missouri, the James-Younger gang may have taken up the suggestion of one of the gang members: Minnesota. Not only was gang-member Bill Chadwell a native, and presumably familiar with the lay-out – but no one would be expecting such an organized gang, so far off their usual turf. And robbing a bank in Minnesota would have the added piquancy of taking money from the hated Yankees.

In August of 1876, eight members of the gang, Frank and Jesse James, Jim, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell and Charlie Pitts all arrived in Minnesota – by what exact means is not certain. They pretended to be legitimate businessmen, and scouted various locations in southern Minnesota, in groups of two and three. They spent some time shopping for horses and equipment in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and did some gambling, drinking and recreating. Although they gave false names, they wore long linen dusters, to conceal their weaponry, and this had attracted notice. After some weeks of careful consideration, they settled upon robbing the First Commercial Bank in Mankato. On the day of the planned robbery, they noted a large crowd in the vicinity of the bank, and wisely decided on turning their attentions upon their second choice, the First National Bank of Northfield. They split up into two groups, to travel to Northfield, and arrived there on the morning of September 7th, where an alert citizen noticed that two of them had passed through Northfield and cashed a large check at the bank, some ten days earlier.
More »

In the Interests of Pure Research

15. April 2007 · Comments Off on In the Interests of Pure Research · Categories: General, History, My Head Hurts, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

In the interests of pure research, over the last couple of days, Blondie and I have ventured into deepest, darkest downtown San Antonio… and also to a point well beyond the city limits. I can report that I have returned with a dozen pages of notes indecipherable to anyone but me, and Blondie came close to having her leg humped by a wolf. OK, so a wolf-dog hybrid. About fifteen percent dog, eighty-five percent wolf, said the owners and proprietors, who also said that he was very friendly. Yep, we figured out that much right away. He was chained outside a vendor of frontier clothing and accessories at a re-enactor’s event, on the grounds of a ranch in the Hill Country. Some people we talked to at the event said that something set him off howling, night before last, which was a sound enough to make your skin crawl. We figured that any coyotes in the vicinity must have been a) scared out of their next years’ growth and b) decided after careful consideration, that discretion was the better part of valor and removing to the next county was therefore an excellent career move. For the duration of the event, of course.

This all came about because I emailed The Fat Guy a couple of weeks ago, asking if he (as an enthusiast and Texas history buff) could put me in touch with any collector in San Antonio who owned an 1830s model Colt Paterson revolver… and who would be kind enough to show me how it was loaded, sighted and broken down for maintenance. So he gave me a link, which led to an e-mail addy, which led to a club-wide appeal from a certain organization, which led to some contacts… which led to the owner of a matched pair of replica Colt Paterson revolvers, the only person in San Antonio who possesses such, apparently. We set up a meeting at his place of employment on Friday afternoon, and Blondie drove me there after her classes. We spent a very informative hour or so, in a locked and windowless conference room. This is not exactly the sort of event where one welcomes the casual kibitzers. Even in Texas, someone walking in and discovering three period revolvers and the necessary tools are spread out over the conference table is obligated to make a comment to the building management. The fact that there was no ammunition involved would not have ameliorated the resulting excitement.

So, I was actually able to examine very carefully, all the resulting broken-down bits and pieces of a period revolver. It was necessary for the plot and character development to do this, so that I could write about it with authority and attention to tiny detail, and I am extraordinarily grateful for having had the opportunity to do this… all hail the power of the fully functional internet! It was rather a curious experience, because I had been able to write about it and get things mostly right, just from looking at diagrams and reading… but still, nothing beats the experience of actually holding the real thing.

Oddly enough, it was a rather small weapon, dull matte metal with a polished wooden stock. It fit my hand comfortably, and I have rather dainty hands. Blondie’s fingers are about half an inch longer than all of mine, when we match hands for comparison; when I did M-16 training, and side-arm training, I found that my hands were too small to grip and still reach things comfortably on the issue M-16 and the Beretta. And the Beretta was hard for me to hold steady after a while, even with two hands. So, the revolver that made things equal in a fight between Jack Hays Rangers and the Comanche was actually… rather small, especially in comparison with the next iteration, the Walker Colt. The collector who generously took time from his workday to show us all this told me he has a pair of those, as well. The Walker Colt is a massive weapon, weighing about four and a half pounds. After expending all six shots, anyone armed with one would have still had a dandy club/brass knuckles. No wonder they were immediately popular. But after wearing a pair of them on a gun-belt for a whole day of re-enactor events, he really, really felt every ounce of them, in a considerably painful way.

And after the re-enactor event, we went on up to Fredericksburg, where I bored the heck out of Blondie at the Pioneer Museum, talking about the early Fredericksburg settlers. I wanted to take a look at the various household implements on display. And the wooden trunks they brought them in. And the corner town-lot that I willfully assigned to the fictitious family that I am writing about, at the corner of San Antonio and Adams. There is a one-story, stucco professional building on that particular plat… but strangely enough, I described my fictitious family as leaving two trees on their townlot, shading the back of their house… and there are two trees, shading the back of that building.

Really, sometimes I do scare myself. It’s scarier than Blondie wanting a wolf-dog hybrid… well, one that doesn’t try to hump her leg.

Donations being accepted, via the Paypal button, to the left, underneath the ad for the memoir. They will be used to set up a website to market the books, and if I don’t get an agent and a traditional publisher, I plan on doing a POD book of “Truckee Trail” and the “Adelsverein Trilogy”. I just listened to a story this morning on NPR about how best-sellers are decided upon by the publishing industry, so I am feeling particularly sour about the whole literary-industrial complex.

Relatively Unsung Heroes

10. April 2007 · Comments Off on Relatively Unsung Heroes · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, World

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be always on the border between the Anglo Texians and the Mexican Tejanos, during his lifetime and after. He was born in the first decade of the 19th century, a native of San Antonio. He came of a prominent local family; his father Erasmo Seguin was a signatory to Mexico’s first constitution of 1824. Juan Seguin married into another prominent local family, and was himself elected to the office of alcalde, a sort of cross between mayor and justice of the peace while in his late twenties. Altogether, he was a promising young man in local politics, when Texas was merely a far-distant province of Mexico itself, and gradually becoming disaffected by the dictatorial actions of the Centralist President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and the self-styled Napoleon of the West.

When Santa Anna soon dissolved the Mexican Congress, and threatened to come down like a ton of bricks on those who disagreed with his way of running Mexico, moderates such as Seguin were thrown into opposition, right alongside their Anglo neighbors. Stephen Austin granted a captain’s commission to Seguin, who raised a company of scouts. When General Martin Cos was thrown out of San Antonio at the end of 1835, Captain Seguin’s company of nearly forty men were among those doing the throwing. He and his company were among the small garrison of the tumbledown mission compound known as the Alamo. I have read of speculation that Seguin might have been detailed as it’s commander, given his local prominence and background… but that he personally was too valuable, first as a scout, and secondly for his local connections. He was sent out of the doomed Alamo as a courier. At Gonzales, when Sam Houston began gathering his ragged Army of Texans, Seguin gathered up the remains of his little band of Tejanos, who served as scouts and as rear-guard, as Houston fell back into East Texas.

When Houston finally turned to fight Santa Anna, at first he wanted to leave Seguin’s company out of his line of battle, fearing that in the thick of it all, Seguin’s men might be in danger from their own side. After the massacre of the defenders of the Alamo and the Goliad, many of Houston’s army were not inclined to make distinctions between Mexicans. Houston first suggested that Seguin’s Tejanos guard the camp and the baggage.

Seguin angrily refused, insisting on a place for his company in the line: he also had lost some of his men in the Alamo. All of those he had left to him were from San Antonio, and they could not return to their homes until Santa Anna was defeated; they had just as much or more cause to hate him as any Anglo Texian. It was their right, to take a part in the fight. Houston relented, asking only that Seguin’s men must place pieces of cardboard in their hatbands, to distinguish them.

In Stephen Hardin’s book “A Texian Illiad”— a history of the Texas Revolution, illustrated with careful sketches of many of the soldier participants — there is one of a member of Seguin’s Tejano volunteers. His clothes and equipment are of the borderlands: American shoes, short Mexican trousers, a fringed buckskin jacket, a rolled serape and a Brown Bess musket, a gourd canteen and a wide-brimmed vaquero’s hat with a rosary around the crown and a slip of cardboard with “Requerda el Alamo” scrawled on it.

More about Seguin here :
His monument in Texas is the town of Segiun, a little south of San Antonio.
More »

Fire on the Hill-Top

07. April 2007 · Comments Off on Fire on the Hill-Top · Categories: General, History, Old West, World

On Easter-evening, 1847, the hilltops around the new hill-country town of Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, on the far frontier of Texas suddenly blossomed with a crown of fire… bonfires that appeared, after sundown. The story is told that many people in Fredericksburg first thought that the fires were lit by Comanche Indians, to send messages about the movements of citizens of the town, to their chiefs far north in the Llano country, who were then negotiating a peace treaty with John Meusebach. Fredericksburg was then on the far frontier, a huddle of log cabins and huts in a clearing in the post-oak forest between two creeks in the Pedernales River valley, built by settlers newly come from Europe.

They came straight from comfortable, well-established towns and villages, where you could not travel a mile or two without encountering something— a wall, bridge, a castle or a church— which had been there for centuries. They came from a secure and orderly country, believing the promises of the entrepreneur who had recruited them with promises of land. They had packed up their belongings and taken ship— leaky wooden sailing ships— expecting to find something approximating in a rough way to what they had left behind. Which they did, eventually… but only after they had buckled down and built most of it themselves.

But on that Easter-eve, they looked up and saw the fires, and a fair number of them were afraid. Perhaps a quick-thinking mother told her terrified children that the fires had been built by the Easter rabbit and his helpers, to cook the eggs that they would have on Easter morning, all colored and decorated, and so that comforting story came to believed… among some of the settlers.

But in fact, the custom of setting fires on certain hilltops had been long-established in north-western Germany, in Westphalia and Saxony, from which areas nearly half of the Fredericksburg settlers had come. But the other half, from Hesse and the south, they would never have seen the Easter bonfires on the hilltops. And in any case, Meusebach had already met and negotiated the peace treaty with the Comanche by Easter of 1847.

They had brought more with them then their keepsakes and books and tools: they had brought their customs and habits. Some of them were refined and changed by new circumstances, but they endured. As did the people who brought them.

Why I Write, Continued

03. April 2007 · Comments Off on Why I Write, Continued · Categories: General, History, Home Front, Working In A Salt Mine...

Over these last five years, people who blogged on the side, or got bitten by some other bug have moved on, in various forms and manifestations. Some have even decided that they had said all they wanted to say and moved on to some other enthusiasm. One of my very favorite early bloggers, Stephen Den Beste, packed it on over health issues, and three others (Cathy Seipp, Acidman, and Mother Bear) died in harness, as it were.

Others are focusing on things that just do not pull my interest as much; only fair, because I have gone wandering off on a tangent of my own, back into the 19th century. It is the pursuit of literary creation that drags me there, at least as much indulging my own interest. And it’s a damned fascinating century for all that: it made America, in all it’s contradictory glory, over the span of a single person’s lifetime. The beginning of that century of marvels and wonders saw a just barely post-Colonial nation, clinging to the land between the Atlantic coast and the spine of the Appalachians, a rural nation, where necessary things were manufactured by craftsmen working by hand, cooking was most likely done over an open fire, and heavy cargo moved by horsepower, or the wind caught in the sails of ships. It took two months to cross the Atlantic, six months or a year to get a letter from halfway around the world. Water turned the wheels of mills, garbage was thrown into the streets of cities, and two states away was practically a foreign country. The early part of that century looked much like the century before, and the century before that, at least in the way that people commonly lived.

Yet, within a bare hundred years, electricity lighted the cities, telegraphs sent the news instantly from halfway around the world, factories churned out a constant stream of goods and materials and it might take a week or so to cross the Atlantic on a luxurious steam liner… and another week to cross the United States from one ocean to another. In a theoretical single lifetime, over that bare handful of decades, the United States spilled over the mountain barrier, rushed headlong across the plains and the desert to the Pacific, while new intakes of hopeful immigrants filled up the spaces between, built and filled up cities where nothing but woods and clearings had been before. The States fractured, nearly fatally and fought a desperate Civil War, reunified and kept on building, inventing, innovating.

Again, it was a century of marvels, and made us in many ways what we still are… but we need to keep the memory of it green, but not in that self-flagellating, politically correct wank-fest sort of way so beloved by the modern academic bean-counters, so busy with finding fault that they miss the grandeur of the whole creation entirely. More than the grandeur that needs to be brought to mind, also the optimism, the hard work and the sheer stubborn courage. My first book was about a pioneer wagon train, the first to bring wagons all the way over the Sierra Nevada, and I am sure there is some snotty academic historian somewhere (probably whole departments of them, actually) who will whine nasally that my pioneers were grasping, land-hungry and bigoted, careless of the pristine environment, unsympathetic to other cultures, and embarrassingly unrepresentative of our multicultural society that… et cetera, et cetera.

So what? They were 19th century Americans, some of then native-born and some recent immigrants. Some of them were barely literate, others not even that. They chewed tobacco and spat in the street, didn’t care much for Indians, barely tolerated Catholics, and didn’t give a toss what Europeans thought of them. Most women of the time wanted to be married to a good provider, and thought going to church on Sunday was a good thing. They probably had pretty rank BO, and ate crackers in bed, too. But held against all those 21st century high-culture misdemeanors… on a day in 1844, they stood on the back of the Missouri river, and looked clear-eyed at two thousand miles of trackless nothing. With no one but themselves to rely upon, they took their families and everything they owned… and walked out into the wilderness.

This is where we came from, what we need to remember, even if most of our forebears came a little too late for that part of the American adventure. So this is what I do: reclaim our saga and our heroes, against the day when we will need them again. And I am afraid we will need them again, and sooner rather than later.

Texiana

27. March 2007 · Comments Off on Texiana · Categories: General, History, Old West

Still working my way through the tall stack of books, provided by the San Antonio Public Library (may their stacks never fail, and their incredibly helpful staff go on saying “shusssh” yeah, unto generation after generation). This has put me in the way of a lot of interesting, or startling historical tid-bits, for instance:

Ice harvested commercially from New England began to be shipped to the Gulf-Coast town of Indianola in 1851. Ice cream and chilled drinks were wildly popular and freely available from that time on. (Except during the Civil War.) Kind of a mind-blower to know that ice cream parlors could exist in a state at the same time as people cooking beans over open fires and fighting with the Indians.

Commercial shipments of sides of beef, under mechanical refrigeration began in mid-1869, also from Indianola.

Texas politics during the time of the Republic can be described in three words: Tomcats. In. Sack. No one emerged unscathed; least of all Sam Houston.

Sam Houston; a fascinating and contradictory person, and almost too big for the 19th century. Autodidact, runaway, alcoholic, slave-owner and Unionist, brawler and dandy, soldier and politician, twice-divorced, and Indian-lover. Worshipped and loathed in about equal measure.

Houston’s worst enemy (except for a couple of hundred others) was probably a man named Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. With a sissy name like that, he had to come to Texas, of course.

At the Battle of San Jacinto, where Houston finally turned and fought, defeating a much larger and better-trained Mexican army, his army advanced to music played by a small scratch field band; a raunchy and suggestive ditty called “Come to the Bower”. It may have been the only song that all the volunteer bandsmen knew.

Everyone who was in Texas in the 1840s and 1850s knew Captain Jack Hays… mostly from having served with him. He was kind of the Kevin Bacon of the period, but I can only find two biographies of him. And one of them uses the phrase “beauty and chivalry of San Antonio” in a completely serious and un-ironic manner.

Several useful volumes put together by local historians of the Hill Country, with all sorts of interesting stories, and accounts of local haps and heroes. Some of the biographical sketches are so reverent in tone that it reminds me of the old joke about Charleston.

Why are the Charlestonians like the Chinese? Because they eat rice and worship their ancestors!

(More to follow, as I encounter them)

Log Cabin Days

25. March 2007 · Comments Off on Log Cabin Days · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, Technology

Among the books in my tall stack to read, in preparation to revise and polish the current epic is one with the very dry title of “Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture” – which has actually proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together- which is good, especially since I need to write a description of building such a thing as a log building. Little details like how many days it would take to build one, what size it would generally be, and the layout – these little details count.

Previously, the one description of the process that I could bring readily to mind was “Little House on the Prairie” – and it turns out that Pa Ingalls was not building that cabin to much of a standard. He may not even have been all that skilled as a carpenter, but since he was working on it mostly by himself, and in a place where the swiftness of getting a roof of some sort over his family counted for everything – allowances were made.

That was almost everyone’s first and most urgent need, upon settling on a new grant or homestead, that and planting some kind of crop in the ground; building a cabin, to meet immediate shelter needs. This book differentiates very clearly the difference between a log cabin, and a log house. A log cabin was small, twelve to fourteen foot square, windowless, with a dirt floor. They were scratch and hastily put up to use as a temporary dwelling place, whereas a log house was larger, permanent, and much more carefully constructed; even quite elaborate as to comforts. For much of the 19th century, at least in Texas it was a matter of some embarrassment to still be living in a log cabin after a couple of years; rather like living in a trailer would be. In fact, many log houses were covered with siding and paint as soon as their owners could afford to do so. If they had lived in a little cabin before building the permanent house, the cabin was frequently reused as a smoke-house, or a stable.

Pace “Little House” and a whole raft of western movies, I’d always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a “Lincoln-log” house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.
More »

Comancheria: The Meusebach Treaty

19. March 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: The Meusebach Treaty · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(earlier parts, here, here, here and here )

But first, before they were welcomed to Ketumsee’s main camp, the interpreter Lorenzo de Rozas told Meusebach’s party that as a demonstration of their good faith and confidence, they should empty all their firearms, firing them into the ground, or into the air.
For the forty men of Meusebach’s peace venture, it was a pivotal moment, for they were far beyond the safe frontier, and surrounded by what was estimated to be five or six thousand Comanche, the acknowledged warlords of the Southern plains. They had assembled on a hillside near Ketumsee’s encampment on the San Saba, mounted on their best horses, in all their finery and carrying their weapons, on either side of a flag on a tall staff; warriors on the right, women and children on the left. It was a splendid and heart-stopping sight. In the event of Meusebach having entirely miscalculated the Comanche’s desire for a peace treaty there would be no aid, no cavalry pounding to their rescue. About the only thing that would be a certain guarantee in that event… would be that every one of them would die, in as agonizing a manner as the most creative sadist could devise.

Meusebach quietly ordered all his men to empty their firearms. And in response, the Comanche warriors who carried firearms also emptied theirs. Chief Ketumsee and his senior chiefs came forward to greet them with handshakes and with elaborate ceremony; Meusebach and his party were conducted into the village. They were invited to stay within the Comanche encampment, in their skin lodges, but on the excuse of finding better pasture for their horses, Meusebach graciously declined. They set up their own camp, but might as well have not bothered, because almost all of Ketumsee’s tribe came to visit over the next day or so; men, women, children and all, and mostly on horseback As one of the German visitors later wrote “Horses play an important role in the life of the Comanches… when there is a scarcity of food, horses furnish a supply of meat…from early youth both sexes are taught to ride… we saw children who had been nursed by their mothers until their third year, leave their mothers’ breast, jump on a horse and light a cigarette…”

More »

Against Fearful Odds: 300

11. March 2007 · Comments Off on Against Fearful Odds: 300 · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, War

To all men living on this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the Temples of his Gods?”
— Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome

So Blondie and I were intrigued by several different premises – intrigued enough to actually go and see the movie 300 on opening weekend; she because it starred Gerard Butler and several acres of well-oiled, well-built male hunkiness, and me because – well, it sounded interestingly unlike the usual Hollywood bucket o’krep poured out for the plebeians. For a start, no car chases, or machine gun fire, and most definitely not a remake of a TV show which wasn’t that good to start with, or a movie which should have been left alone. Neither one of us had ever read the wildly popular “graphic novel” it was based on. (Do I have to call them graphic novels? I always slip and call them comic books, it’s the same way I call “mobile home developments” “trailer parks” and it’s a movie, dammit, not a film.) Blondie hated the movie version of Sin City BTW, and I would like to serve notice right here and now that I would usually avoid movies which incorporate buckets of splattered gore, and collections of human grotesqueries – but the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years. Every forlorn last stand, against overwhelming odds has harked back to the King of Sparta and his picked band, standing in a narrow pass. And that many of those so choosing would have known of it— like Travis at the Alamo— testifies to the enduring power of their story.

Through the rise and fall of Greece itself, and the Romes that followed it, into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and into this century, the story of Leonidas and his stalwart few resonates – as much as the righteous and politically correct would have it not so. (like this reviewer. Note to Mr. Smith; Bite me. Sincerely, Sgt. Mom). Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country – those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for. To have them set out unapologetically in a movie like this is as jolting as a triple-latte with a shot of brandy, after a diet of nothing but mineral water. Some years ago, I lamented that Hollywood just couldn’t bring themselves to make a movie about the war we are in. (here) Perhaps this may be the closest that they can bring themselves to do it, without running the risk of having the gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office.

This is not one of those movies where you go for authenticity about Greece, Sparta and the Persian empire. I can just imagine scholars of the classical world hyperventilating and gibbering incoherently for the next decade on that topic. Ancient Sparta was not anything like a democracy as we know it, Spartan women probably wore a few more clothes and took no part in public life, Greek warriors in battle wore little more than a leather Speedo and a flowing cloak, I very much doubt that anyone has ever been able to use a rhinoceros as a war-beast – and Xerxes probably wasn’t a 7-foot tall mulatto with a lot of body piercings. Some of the dialog clunks a bit, though. I can tell, because I was mentally re-writing it. All that is beside the point.

Because it is not just the story by itself; there was the look of it, the whole visual spectacle. The word that kept coming up in my mind, over and over was “painterly”. That the story of 300 was created by some who is an artist was obvious in the very first frame. Every scene was set up as if it were a painting or a classical frieze, a vase-painting; all of it harking back to something that an artistically literate person would recognize. The flow of a cloak, the jut of a bearded chin, the fall of golden sunset on a craggy mountain pass, the way a man holds a spear and shield – all of it evocative and visually rich in a way that doesn’t happen much in movies. Without having read the book, I can’t say if the movie version was true to Frank Miller vision , but it definitely made for an arresting look. We did notice some little grace notes that seem to be quotes from other movies; the fields of wheat from Gladiator, Xerxes’ monumental throne looked the one from the Elizabeth Taylor vehicle in Cleopatra and the assorted war-beasts from Lord of the Rings. (Also Blondie was bugged throughout the movie as to where she had seen the actor who played Dilius – he was in Lord of the Rings, also. She could have asked me, of course!)

All in all… ticket price and time well-spent, especially for Frank Miller fan. There are also some bonuses for the straight women and gay male demographic as well. It seems to be going over very well in flyover country, too.

Comancheria: The Separate Peace

08. March 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: The Separate Peace · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

That there would ever be any sort of peace between the Comanche people, the horse-lords of the Southern Plains, and the settlers who steadily encroached upon the lands which they had always considered their own particular stamping grounds in 19th century Texas verges on the fantastical. That it lasted for longer than about a week must be accounted a miracle of Biblical proportions; but there was indeed such a treaty, negotiated and signed about mid-way through the bitter, brutal fifty-year long guerrilla war between the Tribes, and a group of settlers newly arrived in Texas.

The need for a little patch of peace became a matter of urgency upon the arrival of nearly 7,000 German immigrants under the sponsorship and auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein, or as it was formally known; The Society for The Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, in a brief space of years after 1844. The Verein, as it was called in Texas, was formed by a group of high-born and socially conscious German noblemen, who conceived the notion of establishing a colony of German farmers and craftsmen in Texas. Their motivations were a combination of altruism, and calculation. This settlement plan would generously assist farmers and small craftsmen who were being displaced by the dwindling availability of farm land, and by increasing mechanization. But it would also establish a large, homogenous and German-oriented colony in the then-independent Texas nation, from which they hoped to profit materially and perhaps politically.

Unfortunately, their organizational skills and economic resources were not anywhere near equal to their ambitions; ambitions which in turn were only equaled by their astonishing naivety about the frontier. Their first commissioner in Texas was well-intentioned, well-born, and utterly clueless: every scammer, con-man and shady land-speculator west of the Mississippi must have seen Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels coming for a considerable distance. In a remarkably short time, Prince Karl effortlessly managed to piss-off most of the elected officials of the independent State of Texas, spend money as if it were water, burden the Verein with the Fisher-Miller Grant, (a large and almost useless tract of land smack-dab in the middle of Comanche territory), and amuse (or appall) practically everyone with whom he came in contact. Among the most risible of his personal peculiarities was the fact that he traveled in state with a large and specialized entourage, including a personal chef and two valets to help him on with his trousers of a morning. This went over with the rough denizens of the frontier about as well as could be expected.
More »

Therapy Culture

26. February 2007 · Comments Off on Therapy Culture · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game

Among one of the small stories that I remember hearing, or reading after the monster tsunami that struck South-East Asia on the day after Christmas several years ago was the one about the clouds of mental-health professionals, breathlessly hurrying in to offer grief and trauma counseling to the understandably traumatized survivors… only to discover that… well, most of them were getting along fine. And if not fine, at least reasonably OK; yes, they were grieving, they were traumatized by all sorts of losses, their lives and livelihoods, their communities and their families had been brutally ripped apart, but a large number of the survivors seemed inclined to be rather stoic about it all. They seemed to be more interested in pulling up their socks, metaphorically speaking, and getting on with it. It appeared that, according to the story, their culture and religion predisposed them to a mind-set that said: the incomprehensible does indeed happen, wheel of life, turn of fate and all that, and when it happens, pull up your socks and get on with it.

The peripatetic grief counselors seemed a little at a loss, that their services were in so little demand in the face of (to them) such obvious need. I was also left wondering if wall-to-wall counseling was somewhat akin to taking a ton of over-the-counter remedies for a case of the flu or a cold. In most cases, you’re gonna get over it, anyway.

When my parents lost their house, lock stock and contents in the Paradise Mountain/Valley Center fire in 2003, Blondie and I were monitoring the whole situation from a distance. This was the house that my parents had built together, after owning the land for nearly twenty-five years previously. It had everything in it that I remember growing up with, from the spiky Danish Moderne teak dining room set, to a complete run of American Heritage magazines, from the days when it was in hard-cover and without advertisements, and every shred of mementoes and furniture inherited from our grandparents and Great-Aunt Nan… everything that had not been diverted to my sister Pip, my brothers and I. My parents were left with two vehicles, the clothes they stood up in, their pets, and a small number of things my mother put into her pockets when she did a final sweep through the house as the fire roared up the hill, or that the firemen grabbed off the walls when the heat of it began exploding the windows inwards.

They were rocked… for about a day. And then they borrowed a camper, and moved right back onto their hill, and began planning to rebuild the house. As my mother philosophically explained many times to us, their friends, and those members of the disaster-relief community offering counseling and therapy, she and my father had gotten off rather lucky in comparison to others. They were retired, and did not have to rebuild a business, they had escaped the fire with their pets and themselves physically unscathed, and they were completely insured. All they had lost were things. And one more thing: they had lived in fire country for many years, and always in the back of their mind was this very possibility. They knew the risks and accepted them willingly. The odds caught up with them, at last but they pulled up their socks and got on with it. I own to being quite proud of my parents for being so stoical about the whole thing… really, it harks back to my current obsession, the 19th Century. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs, and accounts of fairly shattering events, and yet the people writing them afterwards seem remarkably un-traumatized and quite grounded, following upon events that by twentieth-century mental health practice would have justified a life-time valium prescription and a couple of decades of survivor-support meetings. As I told Mom and Dad about one of the characters I am writing about , “Today, he’d be in therapy for post-traumatic stress… but he’s a Victorian, so he’s only a little haunted.”

I have to admit to a sneaking affection for the Victorians; at once terribly sentimental and operatic in their emotions, but at the same time fully aware that bad things could, and indeed happen fairly often. Husbands buried wives with depressing frequency, also wives burying husbands ditto, and parents buried small children ditto and vice versa; accidents of industry, transportation and war occurred with similarly discouraging frequency. Victorian death rituals are infamous for what we have thought, during the enlightened century just past, to be terribly over-wrought, indulgent and … well, just too morbid. But I do wonder, if maybe they might have been better able to cope, and emerge being able to function after catastrophic tragedies, knowing that the possibility of such experiences was always out there. Sure, there were people back then who were entirely shattered by various traumatic experiences, and self-medication with a variety of interesting substances was not something of recent invention— opiate addiction positively soared among injured Civil War veterans— but still and all, one does wonder.

Discuss among yourselves, if interested!

So How Is It Going With That Book Thing You Ask

23. February 2007 · Comments Off on So How Is It Going With That Book Thing You Ask · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Aside from a big fat nothing… not bloody much. The Stephens Party book (links to various chapters here and here) is been submitted to two small publishers (respectively one month ago and two months ago) where it seems to have been received with raptures of disinterest. Or at least I assume so, as the silence has been deafeningly… er, silent. Not even the usual form letter of rejection. And I included stamped-self-addressed envelopes, too…

I’ll give it another month or so and then submit it to Tor books, which is the only one of the semi-biggies who even accept direct submissions. However, they will not look at anything which has been sent to anyone else! Nein! That is Absolutely Verboten! Violate the Rules You Vill Be Flogged! Or something dire, like that, I assume. So, I can’t send it to them until the other two places exhibit even more obvious disinterest.

The other angle of approach is to Get An Agent. There are a lot of them, which is good. Show bits and pieces and chapters to enough of them, and the odds are that someone will like it enough… and think it is an easy sell to one of the Big Publishers, and at least there is someone on your side who knows someone, who knows someone who might be persuaded to look on your scribbling with favor. But still, it is pretty exhausting, firing off queries and letters, and sample chapters, as per their various requirements. I’ve been at this since November, actually.

Thus far, I have sent out six or eight queries per week, to various agents who are supposed to have a special interest in historical fiction. Thus far, I have racked up one agent who has looked at the whole manuscript and who loved it, but didn’t think there was enough suspense, or sex in it… and that also no one had ever heard of those people, and another who read two chapters, and said it would be a hard sell… but that I could definitely write, and please let her look at my next book. She also sent me a list of what sort of historical fiction has sold recently. This is not exactly a brush-off, seeing as that was an improvement over the usual raptures of disinterest, and/or form rejection letters, but not all that much immediate help. I think I am handicapped by not having been married to, or had an affair with anyone notorious, plus zilch interest in writing about the supernatural. Or porn. The next book is also a pretty massive project.

I already have a draft of the first fifteen chapters, out of a projected 45. (75,000 words, for anyone who keeps track of this kind of thing.) This will certainly expand to more, as characters and situations take my interest, and as other elements of the story occur. My daughter, among others, has also suggested breaking it into several parts. It would fracture the story arc a little… but it would let me pitch the first segment, already revised and polished, and let me finish the rest of it in something like peace and quiet.

Sorry for the vent, but this has been a crappy week. I didn’t even much enjoy a trip to Borders, to spend the gift card that my sister sent for my birthday: I kept picking up books that were written by crappier writers than me, and thinking that they could get an agent, and a publishing deal, and I can’t even get arrested by the literary establishment. This is probably the reason that writers turn to drink.

Oh, just for grins and giggles, the first chapter of Adelsverein is below the jump. Share it with anyone who might be able to help me get somewhere with it.

More »

IN SEARCH OF ROOT CAUSES…

18. February 2007 · Comments Off on IN SEARCH OF ROOT CAUSES… · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, History, Pajama Game

I am not alone in obsessing what fuels the radical elements of Islam in their apparent desire to hasten the end of days. The various mechanisms that contribute to its propagation (indoctrination in the schools, grinding poverty, corrupt leadership and so forth) are nothing new, but this whole thing seems to be something of a different phenomenon. While I do not by any means consider myself to be a scholar of theology, anthropology or, for that matter, history, all of these topics provide insight into the pickle we find ourselves in. Nor is it my intent to write a scholarly paper on the things that I’ve been reading, but to rather tell a little about them and why they are interesting. More »

Comancheria: Part 3

18. February 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: Part 3 · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, Technology

What did a well-known naturalist, a daring mail-coach driver on the hazardous route through West Texas, a fiery newspaper editor, a tireless peacemaker and advocate for the Indians, and an amateur tinkerer/inventor all have in common, besides all being present in Texas in the 1840ies? Frederick Lindheimer, William “Big Foot” Wallace, John Salmon “Rip” Ford, Robert Neighbors and Samuel Walker all served at various times under the command of Jack Hays, the legendary Ranger Captain.

The Rangers of that time were nothing like their present-day iteration… an elite State law-enforcement body. And under Hays’ captaincy, they became more than just the local mounted volunteer militia, called up on a moments’ notice to respond to a lightening fast raid on their settlement or town by Indians or cross-border bandits. They took to patrolling the backcountry, looking specifically for a fight and hoping to forestall raids before they happened, or failing that, to track down raiding parties, recover loot and captives, and to administer payback. There was only one abortive attempt to have them wear uniforms. Ranger volunteers provided their own weapons and horses, and usually their own rations, although the State of Texas did supply ammunition. They were famously unscathed by anything resembling proper military discipline and polish, as the regular Army would discover to their horror during the Mexican War. A contemporary newspaper caricature of a typical ‘Texas Ranger” featured a hairy and ragged creature resembling “Cousin It”, slumped on a horse and wearing a belt stuffed all the way around with knives and pistols.

All that Hays asked of his Rangers was that they follow him… and fight. And so they did, for Texas attracted young and restless males with a taste for adventure, a bit of ambition and no small propensity for administering violence when called upon. They came like moths to a flame, before, during and after the Texas War for Independence; many of them gravitating like a trout going upstream into an enlistment as a Ranger or service in the local militia. During the early 1840s Hays commanded a company of fluctuating size, operating out of San Antonio, which turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and made his name a legend in Texas. Many who had only heard of him were utterly flummoxed upon meeting him in person for the first time. He was slight and short, quiet-spoken and almost shy, appearing to be (and a contemporary sketch and various descriptions conform this) about fourteen years old. In between forays and patrols he drilled his company tirelessly in shooting and horsemanship, copying many of the tricks of fighting from horseback used by the Comanche and other Plains warriors. Meeting the Comanche on anything like equal terms in a fight at short distance had to wait on a single technological innovation, and Hays was the first to put it to effective use.

Until 1844, the Rangers fought primarily with the same kind of weapons that Americans had always used: single-shot flintlock or percussion rifles of various type and design, augmented by single-shot pistols. While such rifles in well-trained hands were punishingly accurate, they were awkward and slow to reload, and nearly impossible to use from horseback in a running fight. Even single-shot pistols took time to reload, time during which an opponent with a bow and arrow could get off any number of accurate shots. But in 1839, motivated by some mad, god-only-knows, pie-in-the-sky, by-god-it’s-crazy-but-just-might-work impulse, the State of Texas ordered a quantity of 180 patent .36 caliber 5-shot revolvers from Samuel Colt’s factory in Paterson, New Jersey. A portion of them were actually issued to certain Texas Navy fighting ships, where they served about as well as expected, but they began to be largely used by the Texas Army… and increasingly by Ranger units, to astonishing effect.

The early Paterson Colts were delicate, and needed constant care and maintenance: loading the cylinder and reattaching it to the barrel was a finicky and careful business. To modern eyes they are over-long in the barrel, heavy and clumsy in appearance. In 1843, they were expensive… but worth every penny to the men who carried them into a fight with mounted Comanche warriors. Being able to fire five shots before needing to reload evened the odds considerably; and Hays’s Rangers usually carried two; it was also possible to purchase extra cylinders, have them loaded and change them out quickly. Colt’s reputation in Texas was made, especially after Hays and a party of fourteen Rangers armed with Paterson Colts charged and routed a party of eighty Comanche, in a running fight along the Pedernales River.

A subsequent design improvement for military use in the Mexican War saw Ranger Samuel Walker working with Samuel Colt on improving the original design. This new design, a six-shot .44 revolver which weighed a whopping four and a half pounds made Colt’s reputation and his economic future secure. Subsequent iterations of the Colt revolver proved enduringly popular in Texas to this day. Traveling there in the early 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote “There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.”

For all it’s various shortcomings, the Paterson Colt, and its descendents filled a very particular need— the need of a horse- mounted fighter for a repeat-fire weapon that was relatively accurate at short range, rugged, easy to use, and capable of evening the chances of survival against a hard-fighting, and similarly mounted enemy. In the hands of Rangers, soldiers, lawmen and citizens, a Colt revolver was all that.

Except on occasions where a shotgun was called for, but that’s another story.
(Next: An unexpected peace treaty with the Comanche)

Saving the Irish

11. February 2007 · Comments Off on Saving the Irish · Categories: General, History

Found at Photon Courier, a long and fascinating story about the redemption of the Irish underclass in 19th Century New York City, and the man known as ‘Dagger John’, who almost single-handedly worked miracles for a desperatly disfunctional community.

Comancheria: Part 2

04. February 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria: Part 2 · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game

(Part 1 is here)

It was not as if the Texans were entirely defenseless against a surprise attack like the Great Linnville Raid. Poor in cash, poor in practically everything but land, the conditions of the frontier had attracted large numbers of the restless and adventurous, who were not inclined to accept any sort of insult lying down. With no meaningful standing army, defense of local communities depended on their militia… usually composed of every able-bodied male. The sheer size of Texas and the nature of war waged by the horse-lords of the Southern Plains made it imperative that at least a portion of the militia be mounted. Over the twenty years after the founding of Stephen Austin’s colony the practice evolved for a mounted militia, ready to ride in pursuit of raiders within fifteen minutes after an alarm being sounded. Sometimes they were able to catch up and retrieve captives, or stolen horses. More often, the raiding Indians split up and melted like smoke into the wilderness, leaving their pursuers frustrated and fuming, their horses exhausted. It became quite clear, as more Anglo settlers poured into Texas, that the best defense was in the offense, to field a mounted patrol out ranging the back-country, looking to forestall Indian raids.

Such a Corps of Rangers was formally established on the eve of Texan rebellion against Mexico. Distinct from the militia and the regular army, the mounted ranging companies continued to serve after the war, in various forms and degrees of effectiveness, most of them locally supported. The citizen-rangers of the local companies assembled for short periods of time in response to specific dangers, their numbers ever-flexible. They supplied their own arms, horses and equipment. By the time of the Linnville Raid, most of them were veterans of the War for Independence, and had years of experience in the field otherwise; men like Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell of Gonzalez, and the McCullough brothers, who had handled Sam Houston’s two artillery pieces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ben McCullough had even been trained in outdoor skills by no less than Davy Crockett himself. Companies from settlements along the Colorado assembled under Edward Burleson, including Chief Placido and twelve Tonkawa Indians, who had their own score with the Comanche to settle, and twenty-one volunteers from Port Lavaca. Other volunteers gathered from Bastrop, Cuero, Victoria and other towns scattered along the river valleys between the coast and the start of the limestone hills.

Barely a week after the burning of Linnville, companies of volunteer Texans were closing in inexorably on the withdrawing Comanche raiding party, at an open plain by Plum Creek, a tributary of the San Marcos River near present-day Lockhart. Burdened by loot, captives and a slow-moving herd of stolen horses and mules, the raiders, a huge party of Penateka Comanche, led by a war chief called Buffalo Hump, had not split up and scattered as was their usual custom. Unknowing, Buffalo Hump’s war party were closely pursued by part of McCullough’s Gonzales company, who began seeing exhausted pack animals shot and left by the wayside. Caldwell and the other leaders had deduced the route by which they were returning, and had arranged their forces accordingly. They let the Comanche column pass, under a great cloud of dust and ash, for the prairie had recently been burned over.

Not until the Texans rode out from cover in two parallel lines converging on them, did the Comanche warriors even know they had been followed. Some of their gaudily adorned chiefs rode out to put on a show, intending to cover the withdrawal, taunting the waiting Texans, riding back and forth. A Texan sharp-shooter brought down the most flamboyant of the chiefs, and when several warriors rode out to carry his body away, the order for a charge was given. The Texans smashed through the line of Comanche fighters from both sides, and into the loot-laden horse and mule herd. As the herd stampeded, the whole raid dissolved into a rout, a hundred bloody running fights, with the Comanche fighters penned in and ridden down. The battle ran for fifteen miles, with some of the survivors chased as far as Austin. It was later estimated that the tribe lost about a quarter of their effective fighters. They never raided so far into the settled regions of Texas again, in such numbers… and after the Plum Creek fight learned to give a wide berth to volunteer Ranger companies.

One such company was based in San Antonio, composed of local volunteers and funded by local businessmen, many of whom also participated in the patrols. The captain of that company was a surveyor by profession, born in Tennessee and raised in Mississippi, who would live to a ripe old age as a politician and lawman in California. Quiet, modest, self-effacing, Jack Hays became the very beau ideal of a captain of Rangers. He had been among the volunteers at Plum Creek, but made his name in the decade afterwards, astounding people who knew only his reputation upon meeting him for the first time. He was slight, short and refined in appearance, and looked about fourteen years old. But he was a also gifted leader of irregular fighters, possessed an iron constitution, and procured for his men an innovation which allowed them to carry the fight against the Comanche Indians on something like equal terms… the Colt Revolver.

(to be continued)

Comancheria

30. January 2007 · Comments Off on Comancheria · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

In his one-volume history of Texas “Lone Star”, T.R.. Fehrenbach cites one particular reason for Texas having such a distinctive culture relative to the other states. And there is a distinctly different “feel” to living here; of all the places in the States where I have lived or visited; only Utah and Hawaii came even close to it, for similar reasons. Hawaii is an island, and was once itself an independent kingdom. So was Utah, metaphorically speaking: an island of Mormon separatists in empty vastness of the Great Basin. They are still generic American places, although one has frangipani and fabulous beaches, and the other has spectacular mountains and religious conformity.

Texas is more of a reduced and concentrated American essence; a demi-glace as it were. Like Utah and Hawaii, Texas started as independent political entity and did experience a certain degree of isolation, especially in the early years of settlement by Spanish, Mexican and American arrivals, but Fehrenbach cites one more reason; that Texas was at war for a good fifty years.

This war was fought mainly on one front (occasionally varying the program with other hostile factions), and a bitter and protracted fight it was too, beginning with the early days of Stephen Austin’s colony in the 1820ies. It had something of inevitability about it, for it was fought mostly against the Comanche Indian tribes; only in the early days of the American colonies east of the Appalachians s had there been a war as prolonged and vicious. In most of the other territories later become states, either the Indians were not particularly warlike, settlements were sparse and easily defended— leaving the resident Indians to withdraw to the back country— or such conflict between settlers and tribes was briskly concluded within a few years and to the settler’s decided advantage. But in Texas, war with the Indians lasted until the last ragged band surrendered to the reservation life in 1875; a period of fifty years during which no settler ever felt entirely secure, even in the center of what were larger towns at the time.

There was a dreadful inevitability in the collision of restless Anglo-American borderers, many of them that contentious Scots-Irish breed of whom it is usually said that they were born fighting, with the Comanche. But the Anglo-Texan borderers occasionally took a break from fighting; to farm, or ranch, to plant cotton or practice some more peaceful trade; the Comanche never did. For the Comanche lived entirely by war, by ransom and plunder—especially for horses, which they valued over practically anything else. They were restless and ever-moving, accustomed to hardship, feared by other tribes, whom they pushed out of the way, taking what they wanted, when they wanted it. There was no other occupation; no other means of advancement save by being a fearless warrior and raider. Such a harsh life eliminated the unfit brutally, as brutally as they eliminated their own enemies. At the high noon-time of their peak, they were the lords of the harsh and beautiful country of the southern plains, from the Arkansas River, to the Balcones Escarpment. They ranged and raided as far as they pleased, occasionally interrupted by a fragile peace treaty.

One of these treaties came to a spectacularly violent end, in the middle of San Antonio in the spring of 1840, during the course of what had been intended as a peace conference. In token of their good faith, a contingent of Penateka Comanche chiefs were supposed to surrender a number of captives, and sign a treaty. They turned over only a few, one of them a teenaged girl who had been savagely abused during a year of captivity. She told the Texan officials that the Comanche held more than a dozen other captives, but intended to extort a large ransom for each, one by one. When the chiefs and the peace commissioners met in a large building known as the Council House, the commissioners asked after the other captives who whose release had been promised. The leader of the chiefs — who had promised to bring in all the captives— answered that they had brought in the only one they had. The others were with other tribes. And then he added, insolently, “How do you like that answer?”

The short answer was the Texans did not. There were already soldiers standing by: they were ordered to surround the Council House, and the chiefs informed that they would be held hostage until their warriors returned to their camps and brought back the rest of the hostages. Almost as one, the chiefs drew knives and rushed the soldiers guarding the doors. The fat was then in the fire, as the warriors who were waiting outside in the yard entered the fray, and a short and vicious running fight erupted in the street leading down to the San Antonio River. The Council House fight vigorously re-ignited the war between Comanche and Texan, when a huge Comanche war party came down from the hills in the fall, sweeping down the empty country between the Guadalupe and Lavaca Rivers. They terrorized the town of Victoria and burned Linnville on Lavaca Bay. The citizens of Linnville watched from the refuge of boats offshore, as the Indians looted the warehouses and homes. They departed, with two hundred horses all laden with plunder, but what happened on the return from that spectacular raid set in motion a gathering of forces and personalities who would eventually reduce the proud lords of the Southern Plains to a handful of desperate, starving beggars.

(to be continued)

Literary Distraction

27. January 2007 · Comments Off on Literary Distraction · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

As promised, a snipped from my current obsession, which is growing by leaps and bounds. As reader Andrew Brooks suggested “Rather then bemoan two novels of the Germans in the Texas hill country, let them rip and just think of it as TheChronicles of Barsetshire, but with cypress trees!”

From the epic tenatively known as “Adelsverein”, this is Chapter 8, “The Home Place”

More »

Strange Report – World War II Version

26. January 2007 · Comments Off on Strange Report – World War II Version · Categories: General, History, Military, War

(The following lifted from a message posted on a Yahoo group for military broadcasters: a collection of oddball factoids about World War II. I do know the one about the Koreans is true, as it was written up in one of Stephen Ambroses’ books about D-Day. All others, salt to taste and discuss amongst yourselves.)

1. The first German serviceman killed in WW2 was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps. . . . So much for allies.

2. The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress.)

3. At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was Called CINCUS (pronounced “sink us”), the shoulder patch of the US Army’s 45th Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler’s private train was named “Amerika.” All three were soon changed for PR purposes.

4. More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions your chance of being killed was 71%.

5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot.You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a Cargo plane.

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.

YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE THIS ONE….

7. When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act), found the photo (hand tinted black and white).

8. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn’t worth the effort.

9. German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

10. Among the first “Germans” captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the US Army.

AND I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST….

11. Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands. 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese on the island.

In Living Color…

25. January 2007 · Comments Off on In Living Color… · Categories: General, History, Technology, World

The past, of course. Near distant and far distant… and more alive than you would think, here.
(Check out the other links for other color photo archives. Courtesy of Photon Courier, and company.)

Into the Borderlands

18. January 2007 · Comments Off on Into the Borderlands · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

And I met a kind man
He guarded the border
He said, “You don’t need papers,
I’ll let you go,
I can tell that you love her
By the look in your eyes, now”.
She’s the rose of the desert
In old Mexico….*

I wrote here once before of the shifting cultural terrain of the borderlands, of how the wash of people back and forth across the Texas-Mexico border over the last century or so made it extraordinarily difficult to have some kind of firm opinion about the current rush of illegal aliens from Mexico. Most people are truly torn about it, but the current rash of cross-border incidents and the open and ongoing warfare in those towns just to the south of the border give pause for concern. Just this last week a post on the American side of the border, guarded by National Guard soldiers had a brief, tense encounter with a heavily armed party on Mexican intruders… the first time this has happened with the National Guard.

But not the first time in history, either recent or long-past; the borderlands are fluid. I realized this only when I started doing the heavy research for the next book (“The Company of Noble Men” – A Thrilling Epic of the Settlement of Texas’ German Colonies, with operatic levels of drama, passion, murder, stolen children and revenge… plus a heroine who can beat the crap out of Scarlett O’Hara every day of the week and still have energy to slap around that simp Melanie. I’ve a detailed chapter outline finished, and six of them completed already…Where was I? Oh… border. Texas. Two way traffic. Gotcha)

I mean there was a heap of traffic here, going back and forth: a lot of it not strictly open and above-board in the legal sense for practically the last 200 years. Some was open, with the blessings of the governments involved, some with only quiet sanctions. The Texas War for Independence was just a particularly fractious divorce, the opening round in a long and contentious relationship… which if it were between two humans would likely show up on one of these Jerry Springer episodes where they throw the furniture at each other. It’s the sort of love-hate relationship which can exist when you know each other really, really well.

The historian Charles Robinson, in writing a history of the Texas Rangers, remarked that by the mid 19th century, Anglo Texans and Mexicans had become more like each other than they each would be comfortable admitting. Anglo Texans absorbed a taste for tortillas and hot chili, and a preference for working cattle from horseback from Mexican vaqueros— the touchiness about personal honor and affinity for violence was already there, courtesy of the Scots-Irish borderers. And perhaps the Mexican borderers absorbed something subtler from their Anglo neighbors, or maybe it was just the distance from Mexico City; one senses a sort of energy, a striving for something better than what they had, and a willingness to do the necessary to get it, even if a political culture that would have made it possible was tantalizingly just out of reach.

So, in between open war are all the incidents consigned to the footnotes of the history books:
Who knows that the Mexican general Adrian Woll raided San Antonio in 1842, capturing the entire district court which was in session; lawyers, judges, defendants and all… and was pursued all the way back to the border by a harassing force of Texas Rangers? Or that a retaliatory expedition after Woll’s raid was captured, marched into the interior of Mexico, and ordered “decimated” by none other than General Santa Anna; that is, one in ten to be executed, those to be chosen to live or die by drawing black or white beans from a pitcher?
Has anyone save those who live around Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley know of “Cortinas’ War” in 1859, when a hot-headed rancher, Juan Nepomuceno Cortinas raised a party of bravos and the flag of rebellion and took over Brownsville for a time? Or that his actions set off a cycle of retaliation that was only halted for the time being by the diplomacy (and let it be admitted, a very large club) wielded by the US Army commander in Texas, one Robert E. Lee?

During our Civil War, the Union blockade was broken by transporting supplies through Mexico: During the Mexican Civil War, Pancho Villa, and his men raided Columbus, New Mexico… probably for supplies to carry on with his war. Each of these conflicts sent refugees from the fighting and once the fighting was done, die-hards from the loosing side over the border. And some of this is only a little removed from living memory: a frequent reader emailed recently, that her grandfather ranched in west Texas, and used to buy cattle from Pancho Villa, who would drive up in a Model A Ford to collect payment, after his men had delivered the cattle. And when I was a senior in high school, I met an elderly man at the local Republican Party HQ who while we were supposed to be stuffing envelopes, told me how as a very young cavalryman, he had been part of Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa. And so it goes. I sense that what is happening now is just more of the same old, same old.

No, history isn’t past. And it isn’t even over.

(*Evangelina – Hoyt Axton)

Five Thousand Miles for a Camel

12. January 2007 · Comments Off on Five Thousand Miles for a Camel · Categories: Critters, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

In the annals of the US Army, are recorded many strange and eccentric schemes and scathingly brilliant notions, but none of them quite equals the notion of a Camel Corps for sheer daft logic. It was the sort of idea which a clever “think outside the box” young officer would come up with, contemplating the millions of square miles of desolation occasionally interrupted by lonely outposts of settlements, stage stations and fortified trading posts which the United States had acquired following on the Mexican War in the mid 1840s. The country was dry, harsh, desolate… logically, what better animal to use than one which had already been used for thousands of years in just such conditions elsewhere?

The notion of using camels in the American southwest may have occurred to others, but it was one 2nd Lt. George Crossman who first raised a perfectly serious proposal for their use. One senses initially that the notion had people falling about laughing at the off-beat nuttiness of it all, and then slapping themselves on the forehead with a strange gleam in their eyes and saying, “By George, it’s a crazy idea… but it just might work!”

Crossman and other military men kicked the idea around for a couple of years; it had the backing of a senator from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and was in the position to advocate in favor of an experimental use of camels by the US Army. The senator also thought “outside the box” although it would not be clear for another ten years how far outside the box he would eventually go. But Jefferson Davis was not in a position to make a study of camels, US Army for the use of (experimental) happen until he became Secretary of War in 1852. Within three years, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose, and a designated ship set sail for the Mediterranean, carrying one Major Henry Wayne who had been personally charged by Secretary of War Davis with procuring camels. After a couple of false starts, a selection of 33 likely camels were purchased in Egypt. Wayne had also hired five camel drovers to care for them on the return voyage and to educate the Army personnel on the care and feeding of said camels.

The camels arrived at the port of Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast with one more than they started with, since one of them was a pregnant female; a rather promising beginning to a project so close to Secretary Davis’ heart. The herd was removed to Camp Verde, sixty miles west of San Antonio by easy stages from Indianola, where they were eventually joined by a second shipment later that year. At a stopover in Victoria, the camels were clipped and a local woman spun yarn from the clippings and knitted a pair of socks for the President of the US out of them. Once at Camp Verde they mostly transported supplies and amused and impressed skeptics by carrying four times what a single mule bear, without visible effort. (But a lot of grumbling.) They were also used for an expedition to the Big Bend. Late in 1857, Edward F. Beale, explorer and adventurer, friend of Kit Carson and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada took a contingent of camels on a long scout to explore the southwest along the 35th parallel, all through the vast deserts between New Mexico and California. Beale took twenty-five camels and two of the drovers, who were nicknamed Greek George, and Hi Jolly. The camels performed heroically all the way to California with Beale, and were used for a time to transport supplies from Fort. Tejon.

Alas for the demise of what looked like a brilliant solution; although it might have come to something eventually, but for the Civil War. Just about everyone who was a strong advocate for the use of camels suddenly had much greater problems to worry about than overcoming the resistance of Army muleteers and diverse other potential users. For the camels as draft animals were not readily biddable; they were even less cooperative than mules, which is saying a lot. They spat, nastily and accurately, stank to high heaven, and scared the living daylights out of horses and mules unaccustomed themselves to their presence, and generally did not endear themselves to most of the men who had to work with them. The California herd, those of them which had not been allowed to wander away, was sold mostly to small enterprises and circuses . Those camels, or their descendents who escaped into the desert southwest were spotted for decades afterwards, well into the early 20th century. Beale even took a few of them to his own ranch; a sort of camel refuge as it were. The Texas herd was also sold off or left to wander the range near Camp Verde; although according to this source, one of them found its way into the possession of an Army officer who used it to carry the baggage of his entire company all during the war. The drover, Hi Jolly eventually took a small herd of camels sold as surplus after the Civil War to the Arizona territory and used them to hall water for a time, before turning them loose. And so passed the end of an experiment, and the last of the US Army Camel Corps.

There is one small footnote to this; the story of the Red Ghost, which terrorized south-eastern Arizona Territory, for about ten years after 1883; a huge reddish camel… with the dead body of a man tied to its’ back. No one ever who he was, or how he came to be secured to the back of a camel, with knots that he could not have tied himself.

Ghost Town on the Gulf

05. January 2007 · Comments Off on Ghost Town on the Gulf · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay, called Indian Point, some miles to the north, selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. So many settlers farming so many acres, and the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres for themselves.

That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, and moreover was the stomping grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes… peoples not generally noted in the 19th century for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors… these things seem to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for… so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions; best to come straight off the trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his own choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant… and so it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.

Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels (that is another story entirely). Indianola was also the major port for supplying… among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road ran towards San Antonio, and south of the contentious border, to Chihuahua, Mexico supplying the interior mercantile needs of two nations . By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water… and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe, and in the cattle glut after the Civil War, experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.

But in September of 1875… September being a fateful month in those parts… a great hurricane slammed Indianola, and it’s low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge. Still, there were enough left, and it was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned; so the city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. Eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again. To add to the horror of it all, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in. At the height of the hurricane several of the survivors taking shelter in that building were burned to death, and several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable. There is still a bit of Indianola left; a few builtings, but mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with queenly grace; but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of a hurricane in 1900.

A Little Light Classical Travel Reading

04. January 2007 · Comments Off on A Little Light Classical Travel Reading · Categories: General, History, World

Found this lovely article here, about a writer who ought to be more well known in the US. I first read his books “Roumeli” and “Mani”, at the urging of my next-door neighbor in Athens, Kyria Penny. She about swooned when describing “A Time of Gifts”, and I was so enchanted when I read it that I bought the sequel “Between the Woods and the Water” in hardback and sight-unseen when it was first published. (I seem to have a first edition of it, but the dust-jacket is a little worn, and there are two dribbles of brown stain across the page edges and one edge of the book jacket)

At the age of 18 and on the budget of a pound a week, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This was in 1933; He kept a diary, and made notes, which were not written up until decades later; a third volume has been promised, but yet to be delivered.

Excellent reads… and as a side-note, Leigh Fermor had an extremely interesting time during World War II, working with Greek partisans on Crete, where he and another commando, W.Stanley Moss, kidnapped the German Army divisional commander, and spirited him off the island, a short way ahead of a massive German manhunt. This is a very good account of it, written by Moss some years afterwards.

Found courtesy of Photon Courier

Un-Civil War

28. December 2006 · Comments Off on Un-Civil War · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game, War

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

In hot pursuit of my next “book”, I continue to plough through a great stack of readings, all about the German migration into Texas in the mid-19th century. Yes there is a great story there, of which practically no one outside Texas has ever heard, and given any sort of encouragement I will bore you rigid with all sorts of trivia. Like, for instance, the aristocratic patrons of the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas fell, hook, line, sinker and obscene amounts of cash to two of the biggest land swindles ever known. Three words “Fisher-Miller Grant”. That little fiasco was right on par with the sale of Manhattan Island, by a tribe that didn’t even own it. Ah, but it came out all right in the end… if the aristocratic members of the Society had possessed business acumen on par with their ambitions… well, let’s just say if that had been so, the second language of the state of Texas would not be Spanish. And it might not have joined the Union at all, but continued as an independent entity or quasi-German colony, which would have pleased a whole constellation of German princes and nobles, but really have annoyed the Confederate States, and deprived a great many Southern generals in the “late unpleasantness” circa 1861-65 of a great portion of their fire-eating, romping-stomping cavalry.

Texas joined the secession, to the heartbreak of Sam Houston, and enthusiastically entered into the whole spirit of the Confederacy… to be expected, since the Anglo (read American) settlers were mostly from southern states, and of that Scots-Irish breed of whom it has been oft-acknowledged that they were “born fighting”; Indians, British, the French or each other, whichever were most convenient at the moment. To read of the enthusiasm with which Texans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy is to wonder if it was just that they were spoiling for a fight, and the issues which impelled the secession were a minor bagatelle.

But this was not true of the considerable district around the German-settled areas around Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, all through the rolling lime-stone hills between San Antonio and Austin. This was the high country, the less-good land of hard-working farmers and small cattle ranches, solidly opposed to chattel slavery and who had opposed secession from the very beginning. They may have settled in Texas relatively recently, but they were a cohesive block, had put down deep roots, knew their rights and were prepared as stubborn and stiff-necked Americans to insist on them. If the Hill Country had been geographically contiguous with the Union at any point, doing a “West Virginia” and seceeding from the Secession would have met with solid approval.

As it was, the Hill Country Germans pretty much stood apart from the fray until a year into the war, in the spring of 1862, when the tide began to subtly shift against the Confederacy, to those who had the strategic sense to see the long picture. New Orleans was taken by the Union, whose forces began a slow progression up the Mississippi, slicing the Confederacy into two portions. Those who had been opposed to the whole secession thing were confirmed in their judgment, and those who had wavered began to wobble in the direction of loosing confidence… while the die-hard Confederates began to see the skull-grimace of death and defeat grinning at them from the corners.

Texas was put under martial law, and the supreme military commander was a foppish and overbearing little martinet named Hebert, who did much to make himself detestable to even supporters of the Confederacy. But what ignited resistance in the Hill Country, and farther north, around present-day Dallas, was the institution of conscription. Texas had poured 25,000 volunteers into the Confederate Army during the first year of the war. But volunteers were not enough, and in the spring of 1862 legislation passed which authorized the drafting of every Anglo (white) male between the age of 18 and 34… shortly thereafter, it was changed to 17 through 50. Resistance was instant and furious among Unionists. A party of 65 Unionist men from the Hill Country attempted to flee across the Rio Grande; they were ridden down by Confederate troops along the Nueces River, and half were killed outright or executed out of hand. In following weeks, another fifty men in Gillespie County, around Fredericksburg, were executed… many of them by Confederate vigilante gangs. It was said bitterly for decades afterwards, that more were killed in the Hill Country by such gangs during the Civil War than were ever killed by Indians, during the war or after it. A footnote in the history books, if even noted to begin with.

The experience of the Civil War had, I think, the effect of drawing the Texas German colonies into themselves, and emphasizing their distinct character, rather than diffusing amongst their neighbors as similar German enclaves did in the northern states. For they were long in forgetting what had been done to them, by their neighbors, and fellow Texans.

More about the German settlers, here and here, from the archives.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

07. December 2006 · Comments Off on A Day That Will Live in Infamy · Categories: History

Goliad

03. December 2006 · Comments Off on Goliad · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game

The Texas Revolution in 1835 initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. “Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,” summed up the attitude. The Mexican government, beset with factionalism and seeing revolt against it’s authority everywhere, sent an army to remind the Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ train was 800 pairs of iron hobbles, with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did not win any friends, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, which was supposed to re-establish and ensure Mexican authority was ignominiously beaten and sent packing.

Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from another attack, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were not much fitted to face the terrible wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February, and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of volunteers… San Antonio de Valero, called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.
More »

« Older articles
Newer articles »