A 21 Story Salute

19. March 2010 · Comments Off on A 21 Story Salute · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

Take a look at this –

Looks nice, doesn’t it? Finally, in February, Alice and I finished the latest book project from Watercress Press, the tiny specialty subsidy press bidness which affords the both of us some kind of living and a fair amount of amusement, as well as entrée into what passes for the literary scene in San Antonio. Alice does the fine editing and some of the admin stuff, I do the rough editing and the author-wrangling, and keep the website updated. We hire an independent contractor to do the book design and layout, to ours and the author’s specifications; I must say that when the pocketbook permits, we can do some very nice, high-end books indeed: History, Texiana, memoirs, some poetry – that kind of thing.

A 21 Story Salute combines two of our favorites; history and memoir. Barbara Bir, the author/editor went around to twenty-one World War II-era veterans and a couple of spouses, and interviewed them about their experiences during the conflict, and about their lives afterwards. All were pretty interesting, in themselves, but a good few of them were downright fascinating; it depended, I think, on how good a story-teller they were.

Bob Ingraham, for instance: he had some great stories. He survived being shot down flying a Spitfire over Dieppe in 1942, and a round of imprisonment as a POW in Sagan, where he helped to dig the Great Escape tunnel. There were three American diggers, helping with Tom, Dick and Harry – he is the only one still living.

Clara Morrey Murphy, and her friend, Aleda “Lutzie” Lutz – Clara and Lutzie were two of the very first Army air-evac nurses – there is a picture of them in the book, trying out their flight gear, while in special training in 1942. They went on to air –evacuate patients during the campaigns in North Africa, Italy and France. Clara Murphy’s military uniform is now on display at the Brooks ‘Hanger 9’ aerospace medicine museum, in San Antonio. “Lutzie” died in 1944, when the air-evac flight she was on crashed into a mountainside in Southern France.

Eddie Patrick? He was the kid genius, when it came to radios and electronics: he wound up as a senior NCO at the age of 19, in charge of the comm gear, serving at a Flying Tigers airbase in China, well behind the Japanese lines.

Litzie Trustin was Jewish and born in Vienna. She escaped to England on one of the last Kindertransports, just before the war began in Europe in 1939. Returning to Europe to work with the American forces as a translator, she married a transport pilot and came to Omaha to settle down and raise a family – and to work for civil rights.

Bob Joyce kept a diary, all through his tour of duty as a B-17 radio operator, flying a series of nerve-wrackingly dangerous missions from Italy. He carried with him on those missions a pair of regular Army boots, his father’s rosary, a good-luck bracelet from his home-town girlfriend, and a $2.00 bill, so he would never be broke.

Ignatio “Nacho” Gutierrez never saw snow until he went into the Army for basic training. He and his unit came ashore on D-Day in the early evening of June 6th, 1944 – and he painted signs – and sometimes stapled them to trees himself – for the constantly-moving XIX Corps, First Army headquarters, all through Normandy and into Belgium and Germany.

During the war, Marshall Cantor directed the building of runways and scratch airbases on Ascension Island for Air Transport Command, and then moved on to do the same in New Guinea and in the Philippines. He met Ellen Berg, who was a nurse serving at a forward hospital in Papua, New Guinea. They married in 1944.

More excerpts and a few more pictures are at a section of Barbara’s website, here.

Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly

03. February 2010 · Comments Off on Zinnification – Or Through the Historical Glass, Darkly · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

If there is a phrase which makes my socio-political antennae begin to quiver, that will be anything that begins with the words “The People’s – whatever.” The People’s Park, the People’s Republic – the People’s Whatever. I suppose at one time – around the early part of the 20th century, perhaps – dubbing something as belonging to the ‘people’ sounded fresh, innovative, democratic, not the exclusive preserve of some elite or other. Alas, by the middle of that century, it usually meant some grim, joyless and grinding totalitarian establishment, with a rhetorical smiley-face painted on the front, which increasingly fooled only the starry-eyed true believers.

And so it is with the late Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” – not so much a straight history, but a grim and joyless Marxist slog through American history. Which in the end amounts to an unrelenting snorkel through the sludge at the bottom of the national sewer, as seen through the lenses of a late 19th century political thinker, with the helpless lumpenprolitariat being royally screwed over and over by the capitalist and plutocrats . . . oh, and we murdered the Indians! And lynched black people! And slavery – don’t forget about slavery! From the way the man banged on and on about imperialisms of every stripe, war, social injustice, and all the rest of the progressiveist bug-bears you’d have thought that no other nation in the world evah! had perpetuated any of those numerous crimes against humanity which the Zinneastas gleefully charged the United States with. And God help us – the whole grim polemic is frequently assigned as a history textbook.

And yes, we should know our history, including the inglorious parts – but all that, only that, and to the exclusion of anything else? Debunking is a worthy exercise to be sure, but there ought to be some bunk there in the first place, some basic knowledge and understanding, nay, even some appreciation for those people who built their little corner of America, who made a life for themselves, built towns and railroads, fought to end slavery, and to devise a political system which invested citizens with rights as well as responsibilities. That kind of history is endlessly fascinating to those of us imbued with ordinary curiosity about ‘what happened way back then,’ and lacking a mindset which insists on jamming the square peg of events and people into the round hole of ideology.

The trouble with Zinn and his ilk, when it comes to history – there is no place for complicated stuff, nothing meaningful exists outside the round hole of ideology. Which is a pity as well, for history is a treasure-store of riches, in the experiences of people, of fame and name, or no-name and no fame. I make a part of my living from telling some of their stories – and now and again readers have written to tell me how they wish they had been able to learn such stories in school, for then they might have taken more of an interest at the time. What is also a pity is that a relentless diet of Zinning our history is to leave us guilt-tripped, short-changed and ashamed – instead of seeing our history whole, and steadily.

It could be that this is what the Zinneastas intend – for how much easier it is to destroy a people, once you have demoralized them from within.

Snow Bound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Set of Foundations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Little Cannon – Come and Take It

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Many Decades of Hope

22. December 2009 · Comments Off on So Many Decades of Hope · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, That's Entertainment!, War

Bob Hope, that is.

(Link Found courtesy of the Belmont Club)

Historical Trivia Question

02. December 2009 · Comments Off on Historical Trivia Question · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, sarcasm

(Not an original – from one of those satiric e-mails going around)

Do you know what happened way back in 1850 – a hundred and fifty-nine years ago this fall?

More »

In Honor of the USMC Birthday – Marine Rules for Gunfights

10. November 2009 · Comments Off on In Honor of the USMC Birthday – Marine Rules for Gunfights · Categories: Ain't That America?, Devil Dogs, General, History, Military

1. Bring a gun. Preferably two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.
2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss.
4. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movement are preferred.)
5. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.
6. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
7. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.
8. Use a gun that works EVERY TIME. “All skill is in vain when an angel pisses in the flintlock of your musket.”
9. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
10. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
11. Have a plan.
12. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won’t work.
13. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
14. Flank your adversary when possible and always protect yours.
15. Never drop your guard.
16. Always tactical load and threat scan 360 degrees.
17. Watch their hands. Hands kill. (In God we trust…everyone else keep your hands where I can see them).
18. Decide to be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH…hesitation kills.
19. The faster you finish the fight, the less injured you will get.
20. Be polite. Be professional. And have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
21. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
22. Your number one option for Personal Security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.
23. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun the caliber of which does not start with a “4.”

Happy Birthday, Devil-Dogs! And as a bonus – Colonel Jessup’s speech!

Random Book Club Questions and Comments: Adelsverein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redline Overload

23. October 2009 · Comments Off on Redline Overload · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, That's Entertainment!

Sometimes, it’s a real pain in the ass, knowing history – kind of like one of those lines of telepaths in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels, who could see all the possible futures, resulting from any deliberate or random action and usually went mad, from it – not daring to take any step at all, seeing all the millions of possible results.
Knowing history is a bit like that. You know what happened before – sometimes many times before – as a result of specific actions or inactions – and even though those baleful results didn’t happen every single damn time, the unfortunate and unlooked for results happened frequently enough to make you jumpy when you start seeing certain things happening one damn more time. And saying, between slightly gritted teeth “No, as a matter of fact, I am NOT paranoid – I just have good pattern recognition!” is of no particular comfort, or defense.

I’ll leave to more qualified and credentialed intellects than mine to take a resounding thwack at the current administration – they’re being beaten like a cheap piñata at a kid’s party where everyone present has slipped off the blindfold, taken up a baseball bat and had a fair old go at it; hey ACORN – how ya doing, still facilitating setting up whorehouses stocked with underage Third-world staff? Lizard-Lips Lady, still adoring Mao and Mother Theresa … geeze, how did someone with a disability that makes you look as if you are trying to pry peanut-butter off the roof of your mouth mid-speech get a job as communications director? Oh, never mind – wife of old Chicago crony – I can do the math. Like I didn’t see that kind of deal coming, from when the serious politicking began, all these long months and years ago. And adding Fox News to the enemies list? Bad move, sports-fans … never pick a fight with someone who buys printer ink by the barrel or pixels by the cart-load. Besides, you are increasing their viewer-stats by degrees, and raising uncomfortable memories of Richard M. Nixon, he of the White House enemies list – and many of those so-called enemies have been dining out forever on their established reputation. You’ve made their reps well into the next couple of decades as ‘fearless chaps and chapesses who dared speak truth to power’ – at least, if they have a sinecure in broadcasting like the dear old croaking saint Daniel Schorr of NPR, in which case they will have a cause to go on croaking about unto the next generation or two. Yeah, like never give a hack a cause to harp on about, endlessly. Eternity, that is thy name.

No – the thing that seriously worries me is what I first started to notice, when I occasionally went spelunking through the deeper lefty-depths of regular bloggers at Open Salon. What initially unsettled me was the casual and usually much applauded (to judge by the appended comments) demonization of the “other.” The “other” in this case being – depending on the issue under discussion – conservatives, Republicans, Sarah Palin fans, Tea Partiers, church-goers, Obama Administration critics, or critics of health-care reform. And these same leftish OS bloggers were not – for the most part – the sort of screeching howler-monkey Kossacks that I would have avoided anyway. I’ve been blogging at OS for more than a year, and many of these exact same bloggers were in a way of being fans of my own OS blog and my writing in general – so the free-floating contempt for conservatives and non-Obama fans of every variation was a little disheartening. I post at OS for the literary exposure, more than engaging in political fisticuffs, so I haven’t made many attempts at open discussion. It’s kind of like your grandmother’s house at Thanksgiving, encountering some of their reactionary old friends: yeah, you could start an argument with them – but it’s not the time or the place, and the whole exercise would be kinda pointless anyway. The minds are already made up, and your Grandmother would be hurt over having a good dinner ruined. Just bite your tongue and have another helping of chestnut stuffing. This sort of thing has been going on since the first ur-blogger put on his saber-toothed tiger PJs, crawled up to his stone keyboard and pecked out “Urg-rok is a moron!” I may not want to get drawn into the discussion—but I’m fairly used to it, after blogging since mid-2002. Used to it – and tired of it. I just observe and analyze, these days and in that venue.

The automatic denigration of the “other” starts to worry me, though, when it slides seamlessly past an equally automatic disregard of whatever argument or position the “other” holds – merely because it is the “other” holding it. The default position becomes “There’s no need to even bother considering “x” because everyone who holds position “x” is *insert group identity label here* – say, a “Tea Partier”, or a “conservative” or “a Christian” or – going even farther “a Fox TV fan” , “a global warming denier” or “someone who wants the poor and uninsured to just die already!” It’s not good and it’s not healthy to have this kind of contempt normalized, especially among people who otherwise pride themselves on being right-thinking, tolerant and broad-minded. And then, a little farther along the continuum of contempt, I get a little more worried, when one starts to hear sincerely-expressed wishes that the “other” just go away, just vanish – so that the well-meaning and sensitive and caring sorts won’t even have to bother with considering those nasty “others” any more. I fear that a dangerous threshold has been reached, when this kind of emotion seep out into the commentary of a semi-mainstream commentator like Garrison Keillor – who most famously of late commented: “one starts to wonder if the country wouldn’t be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.” Kind of a sweeping statement there; would Mr. Keillor also recommend that people he disagreed with be subjected to a sort of modern political Nuremburg Law? I suppose he intended to be witty – but it comes off as sour, and angry – and more than a little unsettling, given that he would be talking about a third of his fellow citizens and countrymen.

This very week, the White House has made a fairly concerted and so far unsuccessful effort to de-legitimize Fox News as a news source, arguing that it is just dishing up too much ideological content to be a real news organization. One might suspect that the real problem is that Fox isn’t genuflecting deep enough for the White House press office’s taste, and has the embarrassing tendency to cover issues that the White House would rather be left uncovered. De-legitimizing Fox as a news organization is all of a piece with the tendency noted above; essentially, “what you think and say doesn’t matter, because all good-thinking people have decided that you are beneath notice, that you are ignorant at best and malign at worst, and maybe it would be best for all if you just weren’t around.”

Yeah, knowing history can make reading the headlines a little discomforting; sometimes paranoids really do have people out to get them.

Around in Back of the Alamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road Goes Ever On and On

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Road Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sunday Morning – September 3rd

03. September 2009 · Comments Off on A Sunday Morning – September 3rd · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, War

(this is a reprise of a post from five years ago, slightly re-worked, but still relevant, especially since probably no one but me could find it in the archives!)

A Sunday September morning, on one of those mild and gorgeous fall days, when the leaves are just starting to turn, but the last of the summer flowers still linger, and the days are warm, yet everyone grabs hold of those last few golden days, knowing how short they are of duration under the coming Doom of winter.

And there is another Doom besides the changing of the seasons on this morning, a Doom that has been building inescapable by treaty obligation for the last two days, clear to the politically savvy for the last two weeks— since the two old political opposites-and-enemies inexplicably signed an alliance— deferred by a humiliating stand-down and betrayal of the trusting two years since, a doom apparent to the far-sighted for nearly a decade. The armies are marching, the jackals bidden to follow after the conqueror, a country betrayed and dismembered, the crack cavalry troops of an army rated as superior to the American Army as it existed then charging against tanks, their ancient and historic cities reduced to rubble – and by obligation and treaty, the Allies are brought to face a brutal reality. That after two decades of peace, after four years of war that countenanced the slaughter of a significant portion of a generation, that left small towns across Europe and Great Britain decimated and plastered with sad memorials carved with endless lists of names, acres of crosses and desolation, sacrifice and grief, for which no one could afterwards give a really good reason, a decade of pledging Never Again – war is come upon them, however much they would wish and hope and pray otherwise. Reservists had been called to active duty, children had been evacuated en mass from the crowded city center, and Neville Chamberlain, who had been given a choice between war and dishonor, chosen dishonor and now had to go before the nation on radio and announce the coming of war:

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government an official note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and consequently this county is at war with Germany. You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful…. We and France are to-day, in fullfrnlment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack on her people. We have a clear conscience, we have done all that any country could do to establish peace. The situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel safe has become intolerable. Now we have resolved to finish it, I know you will all play your part with calmness and courage…

When I have finished speaking certain detailed announcements will be made on behalf of the Government. Give these ‘your closest attention. The Government have made plans under’ which It will be possible’ to carry on the work of the nation in the days of stress and strain which may be ahead of us. These plans need your help; you may be taking your part in the fighting Services or as a volunteer in one of the branches of civil defense. If so, you will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you have received. You may be engaged in work essential to the prosecution of war, or for the maintenance of the life of the people in factories in transport in public utility concerns, or in the supply of other necessaries of life. If so it is of vital importance that you should carry on with your job.

Now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting, against brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution, and against them I am certain that Right will prevail.”

The filmmaker John Boorman in the movie “Hope and Glory” noted the queer occurrence of all the lawnmowers in the suburb suddenly falling silent, everyone listening to the sad speech of a man who has seen his worst fears realized followed by the sound of air raid sirens. It was a false alarm, that morning, but within a year the alarms would sound for real. The docklands would be reduced to rubble, historic churches would fall, the city would burn, but in the aftermath, defiantly humorous signs would appear “More Open Than Usual” and “I Have No Pane, Dear Mother Now.” It would be entirely possible for men who had served in the Western Front to see grim and tragic duty again as firemen and wardens in the streets where they lived in this new war. By the time the Blitz became a reality, most everyone had gotten more or less accustomed to the idea. My Grandpa Jim, though, would take the bombing of London as a personal insult, and be restrained from going downtown and assaulting the German Consulate in Los Angeles, while his son and namesake collected newspaper clippings about the war, and aviation for his scrapbook. I do not think the news of war that came to them on another Sunday morning, nearly two years later came entirely as a surprise, only the direction form which it came— east, and not west.

In any case, the news would have come, late on a Sunday morning, after the early service. I like to think this is a hymn that might have been sung in the last few quiet hours before the storm— as it was at the service I attended the day that the ground offensive began in the first Gulf War.

God of Grace and God of Glory, on your people pour Your Power;
Crown your ancient church’s story, Bring it’s bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, For the facing of this hour
For the facing of this hour.

Lo, the hosts of evil round us, Scorn the Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us, Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of these days,
For the facing of these days!

Cure your children’s warring madness, Bend our pride to your control;
Shame our wanton, selfish gladness, Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant is wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss Your kingdom’s goal
Lest we miss Your kingdom’s goal.

Set our feet on lofty places, Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces, In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee

Save us from weak resignation, To the evils we deplore;
Let the gift of Your salvation, Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Serving You whom we adore,
Serving you whom we adore.

Tune: Cwm Rhondda
Words: Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1930


September 3, 1939: 70 years ago today.

Talking about the C-C-Camelot Generation

29. August 2009 · Comments Off on Talking about the C-C-Camelot Generation · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Good God, History, Politics

The title of this post really should read “Talkin’ ’bout the C-C-Camelot Generation” but unusual punctuation in the title freaks out the whole entry, and prevents anyone posting comments.

No – for whatever reason, I was never much enamored of the Kennedy clan, all their works and all their ways, even during the so-called Golden Age of Camelot. Blame it on Mom and Dad, who were moderate Republicans at the time, and politically aware, if not particularly active. Blame it on the fact that we weren’t big TV-watchers, in any sense of the word, blame it on the fact that generally we were resistant to going along with the flow: no, we were never spectacularly non-conformist, we just dug in our heels whenever everyone else seemed to be urging us to go along with the flow. In the words of Granny Jessie, “Would you be jumping off a cliff, if everyone else were doing it?”

Whatever the appeal of Camelot was, perhaps we just had a sense that it was glamour, in the old sense of the word, of a fair appearance created by a magic spell, of something shimmering and marvelous in appearance, cast over an unappealing, and even ugly reality, something tinsel and fake, manufactured by experts to beguile the susceptible. And so it eventually turned out to be, as the spell faded and more and more of the ugliness began to show. The Kennedys were, in the words of P.J. O’Rourke, just a rich, bad, arrogant family who thought the world would be a much better place if only they were in charge – and they ought to be in charge, of course, because they were so handsome, rich and clever. But overweening pride – or hubris, as the ancient Greeks used to call it – leads the proud to their own downfall, and so we have been watching the Kennedy drama unfold for the last forty years or so. Sophocles couldn’t have done any better, although I think only one of those spectacularly overwrought and multi-generational telenovelas could have done the Kennedy saga true justice, in every twist and turn – of trials, divorces, and sudden deaths, dizzying ascents, and the sudden hand of tragedy sweeping the chessboard, of lackeys and lick-spittle toadies, death in war, in accidents and by assassin, sex and drunkenness, dirty political deals and corruption, of unspeakable heartbreak and infidelity, of behaving like a drunken lecherous boor in public or in semi-public, and yet being able to a compliant press draw a nice tidy veil over it. It is the stuff of soap operas, to have a have a daughter with emotional or developmental problems lobotomized and ‘disappeared’ for decades, to have cavorted with movie stars, relatives by marriage, and campaign volunteers, flirted with Nazis in the days when it was (barely) politically possible to do business with Herr Hitler, to have contributed to organizations underwriting terrorism in Northern Ireland, and to walk away from an auto-wreck leaving another human being to drown.

This weekend, the regular media are full of elegies for Camelot, and the last and least of the sons of Old Joe Kennedy, who groomed them all with brutal energy to assume the highest offices in the land, but never got farther than a comfortable berth in the most exclusive gentleman’s club in the land. And so the story has come full-circle, the spell of glamour – if not broken – at least in tattered and unconvincing shreds. As hard as the Kennedy machine, and the Kennedy magic could work, they never managed to pull him much farther than that – and one senses the wheels and gears within are about stripped. The generations of Kennedys following after have barely managed to accomplish even that: not even Caroline Kennedy could talk herself into assuming a vacant seat, not after coming off like a ditzy East-coast Valley girl in television interviews. I think my last word on Ted Kennedy would be what I wrote in a comment at Chicagoboyz last week –

“That’s the failing that people – across the board, politically – can never forgive. Not so much because his initial actions, his drunkenness and stupidity put his car off the road in a relatively shallow body of water – it’s because he panicked, and thought only of himself.
And if he had any scrap of self-awareness, any sense of the obligations that are due from anyone who has a pretense of calling themselves a responsible human being, he wouldn’t have been in the position that he has been, ever since that fatal night.
He must lived the rest of his life knowing that if he had only thought heroically, thought of someone else besides himself, been a sensible, sober and responsible human being – gone to the nearest house and called for help – she might have been rescued in time. He might have been able to live down the temporary embarrassment, had a heck of a lot to explain the next morning but … He was a Kennedy, and one of those-so-called charismatic Kennedy-generation Kennedys, after all, of whom much is expected and a lot forgiven – but no. He thought first, foremost and always of himself, drunk and sober.
What we want, I think, of our politicians, is that they at least make a good pretense of thinking of the better good, and of making a more convincing show of caring abut of the people they make a great show of pretending to care about. Ted Kennedy couldn’t even be bothered, in that particular instance and that particular crisis, and so the very nakedness of that ‘don’t care-think-of-myself’ resonates after all this time.
His older brother, for all you might say about him politically – swam a good distance in a South Sea ocean, towing an injured crewman from his PT boat, after the same was sunk in a collision with a Japanese warship. JFK didn’t leave a friend/crewmate/acquaintance behind. And Teddy did. And had to bear that knowledge for all time.
No wonder he turned into a drunk – if he hadn’t already been one before.”

Resolved…

04. July 2009 · Comments Off on Resolved… · Categories: Domestic, General, History

…That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances. That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

The above resolution was unanimously passed in Congresss on July 2, 1776. On July 4, 1776, the following men pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to accomplish the resolution they approved on the 2nd. Remember them today, in the midst of your barbecues, car races, and family reunions. Remember their courage, and be grateful for the wonderful gift they gave to us, 233 years ago.

Connecticut
* Roger Sherman
* Samuel Huntington
* William Williams
* Oliver Wolcott

Delaware
* Caesar Rodney
* George Read
* Thomas McKean

Georgia
* Button Gwinnett
* Lyman Hall
* George Walton

Maryland
* Samuel Chase
* William Paca
* Thomas Stone
* Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Massachusetts
* John Hancock
* Samual Adams
* John Adams
* Robert Treat Paine
* Elbridge Gerry

New Hampshire
* Josiah Bartlett
* William Whipple
* Matthew Thornton

New Jersey
* Richard Stockton
* John Witherspoon
* Francis Hopkinson
* John Hart
* Abraham Clark

New York
* William Floyd
* Philip Livingston
* Francis Lewis
* Lewis Morris

North Carolina
* William Hooper
* Joseph Hewes
* John Penn

Pennsylvania
* Robert Morris
* Benjamin Rush
* Benjamin Franklin
* John Morton
* George Clymer
* James Smith
* George Taylor
* James Wilson
* George Ross

Rhode Island
* Stephen Hopkins
* William Ellery

South Carolina
* Edward Rutledge
* Thomas Heyward, Jr.
* Thomas Lynch, Jr.
* Arthur Middleton

Virginia
* George Wythe
* Richard Henry Lee
* Thomas Jefferson
* Benjamin Harrison
* Thomas Nelson, Jr.
* Francis Lightfoot Lee
* Carter Braxton

Movies & Memories

23. May 2009 · Comments Off on Movies & Memories · Categories: General, History, Memoir, Military

TCM is showing war movies all weekend – right now is one of my favorites: “Battleground” about the Battle of the Bulge. As I sit here watching the 101st spend winter in Belgium, surrounded by Germans, with the fog keeping them from seeing much of anything, I remembered my own trip to Bastogne – not my first, but the one that meant the most to me.

It was November, 1988. I forget the exact date: either the 10th or 11th, a Thursday or a Friday. I know that I had graduated from NCO Leadership School the day before, at Lindsey Air Station in Wiesbaden. This was my travel day to drive back Florennes Air Base, where I had 60 days left on my tour, and I thought Bastogne was an appropriate place to visit at that particular time of year.

I didn’t pay much attention to WWII history before I was stationed in Belgium. In my high school history classes, we rarely got past the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, if we got that far. I had heard of the Battle of the Bulge, but had no idea what it was, why it mattered, or where it was fought. Then I spent a year in Florennes, not far from the Ardennes Forest, maybe a 90 minute drive from Bastogne.

I learned about WWII history, that year. It was all around me, in my face no matter where I turned. Then one late-summer day, some friends & I stopped in Bastogne on our way to Luxembourg, and I learned about America. About determination, steadfastness, and courage. About a single word answer that an American General gave to a German emissary, when invited to surrender. My hazy memory is telling me that my friends climbed on the tank in the village square, and we took their pictures (I didn’t, but only because I have acrophobia, and it was too high off the ground for me).

But that’s not the trip I was reminded of when I saw the fog surrounding the men in the movie. It was the Veterans’ Day trip. The trip with snow on the ground, with fog. And a deep silence, which is why I think it was the 10th, not the 11th. I cannot imagine that the Bastogne Memorial would be empty and silent on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of any year.

I walked silently on that hallowed ground, thinking about the soldiers who had bled & died there. That day’s fog was their shroud, and seemed to also be a time-machine. I stood on one side of the road, and all I saw on the other side were the ghostly shadows of trees poking through the fog. I could almost see the frozen, exhausted, out-numbered GI Joes, mostly hidden by the fog, dodging from tree to tree, ducking & covering, with the weather as deadly an enemy as the Germans.

I said a prayer for them, those who fought and died, and those who fought & survived to fight again elsewhere, before I got back in my truck and headed towards home.

I pray for them again this weekend, a weekend that will be spent remembering them and all like them, and honoring their sacrifices.

Another Taste of Good Stuff: Gone to Texas

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

Prelude – In Margaret’s House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horrie’s eyes rounded even more.

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

It’s That Time Again!

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

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

Wild West Monday!

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

Sunday Afternoon at the old German Free-School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Is Here – Wild West Monday Has Arrived

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

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

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

More here, from “The Tainted Archive“.

Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming!

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

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

Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion

19. February 2009 · Comments Off on Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Rant

To: Atty-Gen Holder
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Not having open discussions about the r-word

1. Well, thanks, your attorneyness. Just thanks. After about forty years about being called racists when we open our mouths on any topic remotely to do with race, now we get whipsawed by being called cowards for not opening our mouths. Look, we got wise about noisy race-hustlers long since… is it OK to lump yourself in with them? With Al Sharpton, Jesse the baby-momma-banging-hypocrite Jackson, and Spike Lee and all the rest of the easily offended crowd with the dark year-round tans?
2. Frankly, no one really digs being screamed at when we had one of these mandatory equal-opportunities encounter sessions, and no, it never much changed anyone’s mind, and these little sessions hardly ever cleared the air much. It just took up however many hours were mandated by whoever dictates those matters.
3. It did, however, shut up most of the virulent white bigots… forty years ago. I have a heck of a time recalling the last time in real life that I actually heard someone in a social setting uncork some casual racism, misogyny, or anti-Semitism, so mad props for social pressure and all that. Pity one can’t say the same of thug-rap music, but then I’m white so I’m probably disqualified from commenting on that.
4. Let it be noted that we do, in fact, have discussions about racism with friends and acquaintances of all color – but they tend to be those people who we are fairly sure will not come f&$#@ing unglued and begin screaming and calling us racists when we decline to blame ourselves personally for everything to do with race relations in the United States over the last couple of centuries.
5. Hoping this memo will prove of help in assisting you to understand this, although I am not gonna hold my breath about it. Will we have to listen to you bang on about this for the rest of the Obama administration? (God, it’s going to be a long four years!)

I remain,
Sgt Mom

PS – Just as a reminder, a good chunk of the Founding Fathers were not slave-owners, and very much disapproved of chattel slavery… and seventy years after the founding, we fought a particularly bloody civil war over that very issue. Do history much. AG Holder?

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2)

15. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2) · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, World

One of the most curious instances of the rich American heiress for old European title exchanges was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough; the wedding itself was covered with breathless interest by the media of the time – which since it took place in 1895, meant coverage by newspapers only. However, the wedding was as lavish, and the interest in every tiny detail as intense as that paid to the nuptials of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It took place at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on New Yorks’ 5th Avenue, and the crowds of spectators outside the church and for a good way down the avenue was so thick that squads of policemen could barely force enough of an open way between them for the invited guests. The inside of the church was lavishly decorated with flowers – pink and white roses, swags of lilies, ivy and holly, arches of ferns, palm leaves and chrysanthemums. No expense was spared – even more astonishing was the fact that Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke had only been engaged for about six weeks and only known each other for barely a year. She was barely eighteen, reserved and sheltered, the very pretty daughter of a woman with a will of iron and ambition to match. After her marriage, she would blossom into one of the acknowledged beauties of that era: Playwright James Barrie supposedly said he would wait all day in the street just to watch her get into a carriage.

Alva Smith had married for money herself – having pursued, wed and just recently divorced the oldest grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, called ‘The Commodore’, who had founded the family fortunes in shipping and branched out into railways. Her own father’s fortunes were sadly diminished by the Civil War, and Alva resolved to secure her own future and those of her family by marrying rich. She emerges as a domineering, driven and stubborn woman with a fiery temper. Very few people ever said ‘no’ to Alva Vanderbilt, least of all her own family; neither her parents, either of her husbands, or any of her children. Her own mother, a cultured Southern belle spoke French, and traveled widely in Europe with her children in those distant days when it meant a long voyage on a sailing ship. In a fragmentary memoir written late in life, Alva recalled that her mother had made a yearly order of clothes for herself and her daughters from a Paris dressmaker. All the clothes they would need for the next year would arrive one time – a means which was sufficient for that era, but not when Alva was raising her own children. By that time, being rich and in the social set meant a degree of ostentatious competition that is purely mind-boggling to contemplate today. Everything about those at the very top of the social network still astonishes, beginning with the ‘summer cottages’ built at the edge of Newport, Rhode Island. Alva was responsible for one of the most lavish, ‘Marble House’ which seemed like nothing much but a couple of square acres of the Sun King’s Versailles, set down in the New World. The balls and parties that prominent members of this high society threw for each other also defy belief. At one infamously grand banquet, an artificial river filled with live fish ran the length of the dining table – and guests were provided with little silver shovels to search for jeweled party favors in the sand at the bottom of the river. Such a grand dinner ran to course after course of elaborately prepared dishes, and an ordinary day for a society woman might involve changing clothes four or five times over. And Alva Vanderbilt was one of the leading social lionesses by the time her daughter was of marriageable age, despite having divorced William Vanderbilt.

Divorce was almost unthinkable in that milieu – and yet, Alva went ahead with it; she would marry her daughter off to a nobleman, and having achieved that apotheosis, would marry again herself, to Oliver Belmont – another wealthy member of the Gilded Age’s highest social circle. Incredibly, she would have a contented marriage with him – and maintain her high position in that society – until his sudden death from complications of appendicitis. Almost without a moment’s hesitation, Alva would involve herself in the campaign for women’s rights to vote, using her considerable wealth to fund suffrage organizations and publications, to lobby in Washington and among the highest levels. She would fight for women’s property and political rights with the same stubborn intensity that she applied to any of her previous enthusiasms. In fact, she became something of a militant – and after her own death in 1931, had a full suffragette’s funeral, with women pallbearers and choir. Never mind the contradiction, of being for women’s rights, yet having dictated Consuelo’s marriage and overruled any of her daughter’s considerable misgivings.

Consuelo married reluctantly, in obedience to her mother. In spite of that, she serenely adorned the great estate of Blenheim Palace – which her marriage settlement helped repair and renovate – and the highest levels of British political and social circles equally. She was one of the noble wives who carried the canopy over Queen Mary at the coronation of King George V. She would produce two sons, and is thought to have been the originator of the expression ‘an heir and a spare’. The marriage was not happy; she and the Duke were of different and incompatible temperaments and Consuelo had something of her mother’s spine. They separated barely ten years after their lavish wedding day, and divorced in 1921, upon which Consuelo married a wealthy French aviation pioneer named Jacques Balsan. She achieved no small victory in managing to remain on easy and affectionate terms with her ex-husbands’ family, which included his redoubtable cousin, Winston Churchill. Her further life adventures included escaping with her husband from France in 1940, and returning to live in the country she had departed nearly half a century before. Amazingly, she lived until 1964 – and if pictures taken of her are any guide – she was still amazingly beautiful.

(No particular reason for writing all this – I had heard of these women in a vague sort of way, but the entire book about them was rather fascinating.)

Wild West Monday

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

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

Gary says, in part:

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

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

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

The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers

09. February 2009 · Comments Off on The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History

I am immersed in a schedule of reading over the next few weeks, devouring omnivorously a stack of books from the local library branch, another stack from my sometime employer at Watercress Press – she has a splendid collection of Texiana – and re-reading some of my own not-inconsiderable collection. This is where the stories, characters and incidents are planted and begin to grow and entwine; but the soil they sprout from is composted from all this reading, if I am allowed to milk out the gardening metaphor as far as is possible… well, anyway, circling back to the beginning again – I’ve got a tall stack of books about Texas, about the Gold Rush, and the 19th century in general. Too many to stack up on the nightstand, so the overflow is piled up on the flat-topped cedar chest, in three or four tall stacks. One of the potential story-lines in the projected trilogy is about how the American cattle business boomed and collapsed in the 1880s, which is about the very same time that many of the most popular envisionings of the Wild West were laid down in the form we have come to know best. It is also the setting for the concluding volume of my projected new trilogy; picking up the story of the next generation of the Becker family, once the Texas frontier calmed down a little.

There were a lot of other things going on at about that same time, including a veritable explosion in the number of American millionaires. In the post-Civil War years, enormous fortunes were being made in industry, from building railways, in steamship lines, in mining, in mercantile interests. The post-Civil War decades increasingly came to be dominated by ‘new money’ men, beside which the ‘old money’ families – with fortunes based on land, banking, the fur trade, sailing ships, or cotton and rooted in the earlier decades of the 19th century began to appear pale, and dull to everyone but each other. Mark Twain called the latter decades of that period ‘The Gilded Age’ – and he didn’t mean it particularly as a compliment, even if people have used the expression ever since as implying something rather fine. Twain meant it in the sense of something cheap, of a microscopically thin layer of gold overlaid on cheap metal, something flashy, over-ornamented, an object which would not wear very well, but caught the eye and impressed no end in the short term.

That era seemed strange and uncomfortable to someone who remembered an earlier day – for all it’s comforts, convenience, riches and plenty. Changes came thick and fast; the telegraph, the transcontinental railway, the ease of taking a steamship passage across the Atlantic and being there in a week or so, where once it had taken months. Americans of the upper crust began traveling for pleasure and for education, rather than strictly business and in numbers, once the crossing became relatively pleasant and short. The United States had never, even before the Civil War, been particularly isolated, but the 19th century world became appreciably smaller. Mark Twain himself became a part of this trend, by participating in one of the first great American tourist excursions, the 1867 voyage of the “Quaker City” to the Holy Land and elsewhere, which was documented in one of the funniest travel books ever, “The Innocents Abroad”.

It was an interesting time, no two ways about it – and one of the interesting aspects is that there were so very many assorted experiences recorded in the years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the new century – rich pickings for someone like me, doing research. One of those collisions that I am interested in exploring is the same collision that Twain wrote about so humorously: the Old World and the New. There were quite a lot of opportunities for them to collide, and nowhere more than among the very newest of the new money, or even the semi-new money of the New World and the aristocracy of the old. One book I picked up at random was a joint biography of Alva and Consuela Vanderbilt – of whom I was sort-of-aware, mostly because the Vanderbilts are one of those filthy-rich families that you can’t help not having heard of, and because Consuela Vanderbilt was married off – mostly unhappily – to an English Duke. It was kind of ick-making to think about; fabulously wealthy American heiresses married off to the impecunious inheritors of ancient name, royal favor – and crumbling stately homes. Their vulgar American new dollars in exchange for an old name, a title and a coronet with strawberry leaves on it; it’s hard to decide which is more awful, the decayed noblemen hunting for heiresses that they would condescend to honor with their titles and past-due bills, or the social-climbing and wealthy American families of a supposedly democratic and more or less equalitarian nation going all weak-kneed at the thought of a title in the family.

(to be continued)

Life and Times of a Bowerbird

27. December 2008 · Comments Off on Life and Times of a Bowerbird · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Working In A Salt Mine...

A bowerbird, or so I read years ago in National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of those other popular magazines with a bent towards science and nature, was a native bird species peculiar to Australia and the farther reaches of New Guinea, which had the curious habit of decorating its nest with all sorts of colorful bits of this and that – glass, shells, colored leaves, pieces of glass and plastic, berries – anything and everything which caught it’s eye and which it liked enough to pick up and take home, arranging it with all those other finds in pleasing patterns. This apparently makes sense to the bird doing the arranging, because they seem to be quite set on those patterns. They will, according to researchers, also restore bits that are deliberately disarranged back to the pattern which they chose. It also seems, according to the internet (which I turned to in confirming this tiny and almost useless bit of knowledge – hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true!) it is the male birds who do this, so this is where this simile falls apart. I am, and have always been of the female persuasion and pretty happy overall with that designation, although in a truly just universe, I would have preferred looking a hell of a lot more like Audrey Hepburn, as well as having her mad dancing skilz.

But I do have somewhat of a similarity to the bowerbird (of whatever sex) because I collect stuff, random stuff that is attractive and catches my eye, and which I can arrange in attractive patterns. I do this when I write, or more specifically when I am reading and researching for what I am preparing to write. I never know what particular bit will engage my interest – and some items are very odd bits indeed. I keep coming back to them, and by this I know that they must be an element in the story. For “Adelsverein” I kept returning to the Goliad Massacre of 1836, to the kidnapping of children from the Hill Country by raiding Indians, to a throw-away comment in an old memoir – a then-senior citizen recalling that his youngest sister actually wasn’t of his blood, she was an tiny orphan found and rescued from the Verein camp on the Texas Gulf Coast, never able to recall her real name. I also kept circling back to the recorded memory of an elderly woman, recalling proudly that she was 90-something and didn’t need glasses to thread a needle – and also recalling that the husband she loved, and had been married to for only 13 years, being taken away by the Hanging Band during the Civil War and hung, for the crime of being a Unionist in a Confederate state – all this, in spite of her attempting to sneak his revolver to him. Reading about these tiny events was like getting a small electrical shock, or perhaps recognizing something that I had known in another lifetime. These combined with any number of other bits and pieces of frontier lore, with small and humble items seen in museums, with paintings and sketches of scenery, daguerreotypes and memoirs, even a 1850’s travelogue by a famously observant political writer who did a horseback journey through antebellum Texas and the south. Thrown into this mix are my own visits to various places in the Hill Country, my own first-hand observations of clear green rivers, their beds paved with round marble-white gravel, sessions with subject matter experts in frontier arcane, the memory of certain people and conversations — and then arrange it all in a somewhat-logical pattern. Just like a bowerbird, although my own bower is a famously complex excel spreadsheet of a dozen and more categories, organized by month and year. All those pretty, shiny bits are plugged into the place where they seem to me to belong.

In a year or two, there is a book come out of it, all; a ripping good adventure yarn with the added benefit of having the very best bits of it based on historical fact; not bad for a bowerbird.

« Older articles
Newer articles »