Sorry for the light blogging this week; I can only handle so much Obamania. Having pegged him as a gorgeous, charismatic empty suit a couple of months ago, watching the wheels wobble on his bus, in spite of all the fawning adoration of our supposedly non-biased press corps… well, it’s just tiresome. The crash is inevitable; it will be messy. His wife is a shrew, his associates are as embarrassing as the close associates of machine pols always are, and the professional black race-mongers will rally around him regardless. Yawn. I think I will have another cup of tea – I have a book review, two DVD reviews and the draft of an old-media article about city politics (in another city!)… and a book chapter to finish.

Personally, the book chapter is the most important. It’s the final chapter of the Adelsverein saga, AKA “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a lot of Sidearms”, for which I first sketched out some notes and a short plot outline eighteen months ago. It was going to be a single book, incorporating a lot of the elements for which “Truckee” was criticized as not having, in order to be commercial; a lot of suspense about survival of the main characters, a fair amount of violence, romantic tension and even a hint of sex. I decided that I might as well throw in operatic levels of everything, in the hopes of being more commercially appealing. I thought I could do another unknown dramatic story of the frontier, since hardly anyone outside Texas has ever heard of the German colonies. The more I discovered in the course of researching this little corner of the 19th century, the more that I was drawn into my characters’ lives.

I wanted to go farther than just a simple romance about the founding of a small town, and the heroine’s discovery of love and a new land, of marriage and the birth of her first child. I had to follow her and her family and circle of friends through the crucible of the Civil War, through loss and desolation, up to the dawning of new hope and the crumbling of the Confederacy. The last volume does not tell quite so neatly contained a story; it’s a story of building again, of the rise of the cattle baronies in post-war Texas, of middle age and seeing your children open their wings and flying, of letting go of illusions and coming to terms with life. At the very end, my heroine sits in the 20th century parlor of her younger daughters’ house, reflecting on it all. She has seen marvelous things, known fascinating people, seen the world move from one powered by horse and sails to one where men fly, in engine-powered contraptions of wire and canvas. She has also become an American.

Sometime this week, I will write that last chapter of her story, Oh, I won’t be done with it, of course – I will need revise and edit, polish and format. I will need to re-read a stack of books, classic and modern Westerniana, immerse myself in the coffee-table books of Western art that I bought at the library sale last month, make about a thousand notes of new inclusions, take in the feedback of all the people who have read all three volumes, and chain myself to a hot computer for a couple of months. But it is the beginning of the end. One of the other Texas IAG members takes beautiful scenic photos and likes to fiddle around with artistic effects. He is letting me use three of them as covers for the Adelsverein Saga – look for all three in December of this year. For a sneak peek at his work, I put some of them up on my book website.

What to do next? I don’t know, yet – I had thought of doing a sort of prelude, about pre-Republic Texas, and maybe an adventure to do with the Mason County Hoo-Doo War, the original farmers-and-cattlemen feud. I’d hate to milk a franchise to death, though. I’d almost rather start on something original.

On the literary front I have a signing for “Truckee’s Trail” at a local Borders next month, a place that not only has a very interested and supportive general manager, but a venue that jumps most evenings, being co-located in a complex which includes a huge movie megaplex and a lot of popular restaurants in a well-heeled part of town. Alas, the IPPY short-list has been released, and “Truckee” didn’t place. The other contest I entered it in won’t be announced until October, so I’m well served by putting it out of my mind entirely.

Back to the 19th century…

Just a small taste to whet the appetite, a climactic chapter from the final volume of the Adelsverein Trilogy. All three volumes will be availabe in December, 2008 from Booklocker.com and all the usual sources.

The Civil War is over, some little prosperity is beginning to return to the Hill Country and the Becker and Richter families.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Day of Reckoning

“It all seems very quiet,” Magda remarked, on the Saturday that she and Anna reopened the store. “And so empty!”
It was a week after Rosalie’s funeral, a week after Hansi and the boys returned, empty-handed and covered in trail-dirt, on horses trembling from weariness.
“I still keep expecting to see Vati in his room, or sitting under the pear tree,” Anna agreed, wistfully. “I wish Papa and I could induce Mama to leave her room – but she will not hear of it.” Hansi had exhausted himself, pleading fruitlessly with Liesel. He had finally lost his temper and left with Jacob, taking a wagon-load of goods to Kerrville. He had promised to deliver a load of cut timber to the Becker farm, where work had commenced on the house, after the spring cattle round-up. Magda didn’t know if Liesel would have forgiven Hansi by the time he returned, and was herself too grieved over Rosalie to care very much.

“It’s like one of those starfish,” Sam observed earnestly. He plied a broom with great energy, although Magda thought he was merely stirring the dust around. “When it loses one of its arms,”
“How is that, Sam?” his mother asked, much puzzled.
“It grows another one to replace it,” Sam scowled, thoughtfully, “Or maybe it’s one of those jellyfish things I am thinking of. It grows again into the shape it needs, even if it’s not in quite the same shape as it was before.”
“Clear as mud, Samuel,” Anna said, but secretly Magda thought her son was right. The household, her family – it was reshaping itself, like a starfish. Wearily, she wondered if the starfish, or whatever Sam was thinking of felt pain when part of it was cut off. For they all felt pain, but only Liesel was incapacitated by it, by the unbearable absence, the emptiness in the places where Willi and Grete should have been. She had withdrawn into her deep, deep cellar, leaving Marie to cope valiantly with the household, aided as always by Mrs. Schmidt in the mornings and by her sister and aunt whenever they could step away from the shop, and Hansi’s freighting concerns.

Vati might have coaxed Liesel to come forth – he had always been good with her, but then there was the Vati-shaped absence where he had always been, as well. Magda had the same sense that had haunted her in the months after Carl Becker’s death – that he had not really gone, but was somewhere in the house or close by. When she looked into the parlor, or into the garden she half-expected to see Vati there, dozing over a book with his glasses slipping down over his nose, or deep in some abstruse discussion with Pastor Altmueller.
Hansi insisted she move into Vati’s room; certainly she preferred that to her old room, which for her was marked forever as the place where Rosalie had suffered, and where the miasma of death still clung to the walls. Still, there was something restful about returning to the shop – restful and yet exhilarating. All the plans they had made while in Indianola, which had needed to be set aside for Vati’s final illness – all of them could be picked up again and coaxed towards fulfillment.

Very gradually, over the weeks and months of the summer – the summer of the first full year of peace, they were able to do just that, although Liesel still refused to come downstairs. Lottie began school that autumn, walking to the schoolhouse between Hannah and Sam, blithe and eager, with not a backwards look to Magda, who lingered in the shop door watching after them. Her older brother and sister had earnestly begun teaching her letters, marking out the shapes of them on Sam’s school slate and challenging her to sound out the letters of the shopkeepers’ signs along Main Street. Lottie stopped asking wistfully after Grete about that time. She was a sensible and sensitive child; Magda thought that her younger daughter had worked out the connection between the absence of her almost-twin cousin, and her aunt’s withdrawal into seclusion for herself.

There had never been any news of the children, in spite of all the letters that Anna wrote in careful English for her father, letters to the governor, to the officer commanding Federal Army troops in Texas and the territories, letters to the Indian agency. They received replies, expressing regret and occasionally even sympathy, but nothing more effective than that. Encouraged by Charley Nimitz, they placed advertisements in certain newspapers in Kansas and the Indian territories, asking for information and promising a reward should that information lead to the return of Willi and Grete Richter, aged seven and four years of age, taken by raiding Comanches from Gillespie County in the spring of 1866. They received some reply to those; mostly semi-literate scrawls asking for money, in exchange for information.
“They are extortionists, Papa,” Anna said firmly and burned the letters before Liesel could see them, and frantically beg her husband to pay anything, anything at all, to anyone who claimed to know where the children were.
(more…)

It was raining this morning. A storm front blew in to South Texas in the wee hours, a cool breeze and the patter of rain in the dark. Spring has been warm this year; sometimes up into the high eighties, where it begins to verge on being hot, rather than just pleasantly temperate. When everyone starts to think seriously about using the AC – that’s when we know in South Texas that it’s summer. I refuse – it’s only April, for pete’s sake!

We need the rain, though; it would be pleasant to have a repeat of last year, where it rained, drizzled, showered, spat, poured, misted or came down in buckets more or less constantly all through spring, summer and fall with the pleasing result that most of Texas was as green as Ireland is legendarily supposed to be and the wildflowers lasted all through summer… but I have a book-signing this afternoon at the Twig Bookstore on Alamo Heights. If it’s still coming down in buckets this afternoon, Blondie and I will be sitting there with a stack of books on a little table, embarrassingly doing nothing much for two hours but look at each other.

For all that they call it “Alamo Heights” certain streets in it are notoriously flood-prone; a better excuse for many residents to drive 4WD sport-utes than most people living in top-crust old-money suburbs have. I’m not yet in the Phillippa Gregory class of historical novel-scribblers, for whom the usual fans would turn out for a signing in anything up to and including a hurricane. I’m afraid that a mild drizzle by this afternoon will be enough excuse to keep readers away!

Sales of “Truckee” trickle along in a steady little stream, by the way. With luck that will increase, as a couple more reviews come meandering in. The Historical Novel Society has a copy for review… with a six-month window, so around about any time now…I also entered it in two independent book contests; the IPPY and the Writers Digest Independent Book contest. Entry fees for those two contests are there mainly to winnow the field slightly. Placing among the honorable mentions or higher means a nice bit of exposure and hopefully some more sales, all of which will go to fund the next book.

I have about decided to go ahead and shoot for December, 2008 as a date with Volume 1 of the Adelsverein Trilogy will be available. It’s pretty much edited and polished to a fine glossy gleam. I am coming down the home stretch of the first draft of the final volume, about six chapters or so from completing something that I began scribbling notes and outlining in October of 2006. I think of the initial research and chapter outline as sort of the skeleton of the book. The first draft is creating and applying the innards and flesh. That’s the slow and exciting part, because that’s when the characters come to life, some of them even developing a stubborn will of their own. Revising and editing – that’s like a little bit of nip and tuck there, a nice bit of couture styling there, a touch of makeup and a flattering hairstyle… and there you are.

This one will be a much easier sell in Texas – and I’ve already been told that most of Gillespie County will want to buy copies, just to see if I have worked in their ancestors. (I probably have, even if only in a brief mention.) I’ll be a bit down, when I finally finish the last revisions to “Barsetshire with cypress trees and a lot of sidearms”. I’ve been living with the characters for a year and a half, they’re real to me and I am nearly done with them now, and ready to set them loose on other people.

Blondie is already asking me, what the next book project will be, and I keep saying that I don’t know. She says I should stretch myself, and do a kid’s adventure set in ancient Britain, about three children who escape the massacre of the Druids by the Romans.
I just don’t know… but I’ll know it when I see it. Another relatively unknown story, for sure, something that reclaims an honorable past. Any suggestions?

Just for fun, another writers’ blog; this month, she is spot-lighting Westerns. If you are thirsting for something newer than Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, check it out.

Does anyone need an explanation for the title?

More western ranching and cattle-trailing trivia, for your weekend delectation. (part one is here )

The classical free-range cattle-ranching and long-trail-drive west actually only lasted for about twenty years, from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s when bad weather and a glutted market spelled the end of those ways. The cattle-towns depicted in western movies actually were limited to a very small time and space: Kansas, the terminus for those long drives from Texas, as the railroads crawled west. Abilene was the first of them, and Dodge City the last; in between there were others like Hayes, Ellsworth, Newton and Caldwell – some of whom only thrived for a single gaudy, raucous season as a cow-town.

Most of them were not nearly as lawless as portrayed in contemporary news accounts. Many of the towns were in economic competition with each other, and since each had a fairly freewheeling press and enthusiastic (not to say cut-throat) economic backers… any sort of ruckus in one town was quickly magnified by detractors in another. Two cowboys indulging in a bit of (relatively) harmless gun-play outside a saloon in Newton could be magnified into small war, riot and murder by a rival towns’ newspaper.

The first thing that a typical cowboy wanted, after three or four months in the saddle, alone with the cows and his fellow cowboys was not what you think. They wanted a bath and new clothes, first. Then what you think. Cowtowns offered very nice bathing facilities. Along with the other amenities which were what you think – but the bathhouse was invariably the first to be patronized enthusiastically by the newly arrived.

One very enterprising lady of the evening in Dodge City later went by the name of Squirrel-Tooth Alice. The name came from a gap in her teeth and a penchant for keeping a pet prairie-dog, on a little leash and collar. Her real name was Mary Elizabeth Haley. She married a part-time cowboy and full-time gambler and all around bad hat named Billy Thompson. Against most expectations, she and Billy prospered. She died of almost respectable old age, in a Los Angeles nursing home. In 1953. She had also, as a child of nine or ten, been a captive of the Comanche, until ransomed by her family.

Most murderous gunplay in cow-towns usually involved members of the professional gambling fraternity or local law enforcement professionals. On occasion, this meant the same body of personnel. These were small towns, any other time than the cattle-trailing season. People doubled up when it came to jobs.

The Cherokee tribe assessed a toll of 10 cents per head on cattle herds crossing their lands on the Shawnee Trail, which ran through eastern tracts of present-day Oklahoma, to various points in Missouri – Kansas City, Sedalia and St. Louis. A well-organized patrol called the “Cherokee Light Horse” enforced it; not for nothing were the Cherokee known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes.

One of the largest western cattle-ranch holdings were acquired in California by a hardworking cattle baron named Henry Miller, of whom it was said (with very little exaggeration) that he could travel from Oregon to the Mexican border and sleep on his own property every night. It wasn’t his real name: he was born Heinrich Kreiser. Emigrating to the United States in the 1840s, he was working as a butcher in New York, when he bought a second-hand ship passage ticket to California from an acquaintance who had got the gold fever in ’49, but decided at the last minute not to go. As he was boarding the ship, Heinrich Kreiser noticed that the ticket he had bought was stamped ‘not transferrable’, and became Henry Miller. Not that Henry Miller. This Henry Miller.

By way of apologizing for the light blogging here - may I offer a sample chapter from Book Three of the Verein Trilogy, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”? I’ve gotten about two thirds through the first draft of it, and am getting ready to revise Part Two and submit Part One to the usual publishing suspects.

Enjoy… this one has a interesting climax to it, one that I’ve been hinting at, all through the first two books. Previous chapter here

Chapter Forty-Eight: Day of Reckoning

“It all seems very quiet,” Magda remarked, on the Saturday that she and Anna reopened the store. “And so empty!”
It was a week after Rosalie’s funeral, a week after Hansi and the boys returned, empty-handed and covered in trail-dirt, on horses trembling from weariness.
“I still keep expecting to see Vati in his room, or sitting under the pear tree,” Anna agreed, wistfully. “I wish Papa and I could induce Mama to leave her room – but she will not hear of it.” Hansi had exhausted himself, pleading fruitlessly with Liesel. He had finally lost his temper and left with Jacob, taking a wagon-load of goods to Kerrville. He had promised to deliver a load of cut timber to the Becker farm, where work had commenced on the house, after the spring cattle round-up. Magda didn’t know if Liesel would have forgiven Hansi by the time he returned, and was herself too grieved over Rosalie to care very much.
“It’s like one of those starfish,” Sam observed earnestly. He plied a broom with great energy, although Magda thought he was merely stirring the dust around. “When it loses one of its arms,”
“How is that, Sam?” his mother asked, much puzzled.
“It grows another one to replace it,” Sam scowled, thoughtfully, “Or maybe it’s one of those jellyfish things I am thinking of. It grows again into the shape it needs, even if it’s not in quite the same shape as it was before.”
“Clear as mud, Samuel,” Anna said, but secretly Magda thought her son was right. The household, her family – it was reshaping itself, like a starfish. Wearily, she wondered if the starfish, or whatever Sam was thinking of felt pain when part of it was cut off. For they all felt pain, but only Liesel was incapacitated by it, by the unbearable absence, the emptiness in the places where Willi and Grete should have been. She had withdrawn into her deep, deep cellar, leaving Marie to cope valiantly with the household, aided as always by Mrs. Schmidt in the mornings and by her sister and aunt whenever they could step away from the shop, and Hansi’s freighting concerns.
(more…)

At present I am about halfway through the first draft of Book Three, the Adelsverein Trilogy – or as has been called “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. I have gotten the various members of the Becker and Richter families up to the making of their various fortunes in the post Civil War cattle trade, when an acute surplus of cattle in Texas met the advancing trans-continental railroad.

Well, not exactly met, since the cattle were in Texas and the railroads were advancing at a good clip west from Chicago and St. Louis; the Union Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The actual tracks were stretching ribbons of iron track across Nebraska and Kansas, putting the four dollar a head Texas cow a considerable distance away from that forty-dollar a head market in Sedalia, Kansas City or Abilene.

Out of that not inconsiderable distance was born the enduring legend of the long-distance cattle drive. In the twenty years after the Civil War about 10 million cows walked north, most to the Kansas railheads, but a smaller portion went farther north, into Wyoming and Canada to be used as brood stock for ranches that eager entrepreneurs were falling all over themselves to establish.

Trailing cattle out of Texas to profitable markets elsewhere was not, by that time an entirely new phenomenon. Texas longhorns were brought north beginning in the 1840s, along what was called the Shawnee Trail between Brownsville and variously, Kansas City, Sedalia and St. Louis. Another trail, the Goodnight-Loving trail went from west Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming, following the Pecos River through New Mexico. But the most heavily trafficked trail was the many-branched Chisholm Trail. It’s tributaries gathered cattle from all across Texas into one mighty trunk route which began at Red River Station, on the river which marked the demarcation between Texas and the Indian Territories of present-day Oklahoma. The Chisholm Trail crossed rivers which, thanks to storms in the distant mountains, could go from six inches to 25 feet deep in a single day and skirted established farmlands farther east, whose owners usually did not care for large herds of cattle trampling their crops and exposing their own stock to strange varieties of disease.

Once into Kansas, the trail split again, over time as the railroads crept west. The end of the trail came variously at places like Dodge City, Newton, Ellsworth and Abilene – depending on the year, how far the railway had come, and the exasperation of local citizens with the behavior of young men on a spree after three months of brutally hard work, dust and boredom. The cattle were loaded into railcars, their drovers paid off… and next year, they did it again. The tracks can still be seen from the air, all across North Texas and Oklahoma.

So this is what I have been researching and writing about, these last few weeks – a world not much like that seen in TV westerns and old B-movies. It was a bit more complicated than it looks, watching an old TV show like “Rawhide”, with a great many more interesting characters, a lot more hard work and not nearly as prone to stupid gunplay and bravado. As one of my characters reflects… “The cattle drive was…uncommonly like the Army. The days combined long mind-numbing stretches of tedium interspersed with back-breaking labor and the occasional moment of innards-melting terror; all of it in the open air and in the exclusive company of men, day after day after day.”

Other curious things noted as regards the golden age of western cattle ranching:

The average age of a cowhand/drover was about 24. About one in six or seven was black, about one in six or seven Mexican. The work was seasonal, and most did it for only about seven years before moving on to something that paid a little more, or setting up as ranchers themselves.

They usually did not own their horse. Horses were provided as a necessary tool by the cowhand’s employer, to be swapped out when necessary. Which, depending on the work involved, might be two or three times during the working day.

In fact, at the end of a long trail drive, the horses were usually sold, and sometimes the cook-wagon, too. The cowhands returned to their starting point by rail; a ticket home being provided along with their wages.

In 1854 a drover named Tom Candy Ponting took a herd of longhorns all the way from Texas to New York City.

A French nobleman with a glamorous wife and apparently bottomless funds of money, the Marquis de Mores emerged with a small fortune after building a processing-plant and slaughterhouse… and a whole small town at Medora, in the Dakota badlands. Unfortunately, he had started with a large one. He also nearly fought a duel with Teddy Roosevelt.

Wyoming cattle baron Granville Stuart was married happily and successfully for nearly thirty years to a Shoshone Indian woman, Aubony (or Awbonny) Stuart.

Curiously, there didn’t seem to be all much cattleman-sheep herder warfare in Texas. Many Texas ranchers had stocked their lands with whatever herding animal was likely to make a profit. There was horrific bad feeling between cattle ranchers and ordinary farmers, though. See the Mason County Hoo Doo War, in which the farmer and the cowman were pretty evenly matched.

(more to follow - reposted to allow comments)

An extra and generous Christmas treat for a Friday, an early chapter from Book 3 of “Adelsverein”, better known around here as “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”, which gets into the adventures of the second generation of the German settlers, the rise of the Texas cattle baronies, and diverse other dramatic and interesting matters.

Chapter 40 - “The Death of Dreams”

Peter Vining’s patience with his sister-in-law Amelia Stoddard Vining lasted approximately three weeks; a period of time rather longer than he had expected immediately upon his return. He ate heartily of Hetty’s good cooking at every meal, sleeping deep and restfully at night in his own room, only a little troubled with bad dreams and the wistful conviction that he would step out of his room at any moment and encounter his mother, Doctor-Papa or his brothers. The memory of their voices, their footsteps echoed all the more loudly in the empty house where they had lived. For quite a few days his ambitions went no farther than that and to do nothing more strenuous than to put on some of his old suits of clothing, which Hetty laid out for him, still smelling faintly of the herbs and camphor in which they had been stored away.
He had wondered why Hetty and Daddy Hurst remained, when they so obviously got on so badly with Amelia but a visit from Margaret’s lawyer and executer for her will provided a partial answer; his mother had provided them with pensions, and the right to live on her property for as long as they cared to stay. Margaret had seen to that in her usual efficient manner; the will was air-tight and her bank account and investments secured, although thanks to the war pitifully smaller than they would have been otherwise. No wonder Amelia was on edge – Margaret had boxed her in very neatly, leaving her with no other place to live other than returning to her father’s house.

On a morning about two weeks after he returned, Peter bundled up the tattered coat, shirt, and the cavalrymen’s trousers he had worn home from the Army. He intended telling Daddy Hurst or Hetty to burn the filthy and ragged things. Amelia intercepted him at the bottom of the stairs, popping out of the doorway to the dining room like a dancing figure on an ornamental clock at the sound of his feet on the stairs. Lately she had begun doing that, turning up unexpectedly no matter what room of the house he was in.
“Oh, they shall do no such thing!” She exclaimed, heatedly, upon cross-examining him over what he had planned for what remained of his uniform clothes. “How could you think to do so! They are relics – sacred relics of our gallant struggle for liberty and rights! Burn them, indeed. Give them to me, Peter!” She took the bundle from him, and to his astonishment, held the unsavory things to her as if they were something worthy of protection. “I will see to it they are mended and suitably preserved, dearest brother… in memory of our cause!”
“Fancy talk for a bunch of rags,” Peter answered, nonplussed. He went out to the kitchen anyway, shaking his head, thinking that Amelia was being damn sentimental over something he wouldn’t have given to a tramp for charity. Daddy Hurst and Hetty were the only sensible people in the house, it seemed like. Daddy Hurst chuckled knowingly when he said as much.

“Miz Amelia cain’t never do enough for the cause,” Daddy Hurst said, “‘Specially now.” And Hetty sniffed as if she disapproved, adding with a pointed look over her shoulder as she laid a place for breakfast for him.
“You best beware, Mr. Peter – there are causes and there are causes. Once Miss Amelia sets her sights on sommat, she does not take no for an answer.”
“Most assuredly, I do not,” Amelia herself announced with enormous satisfaction, appearing in the doorway – again just like one of those mechanical dolls. Everyone started, as she stepped into the kitchen, her skirts rustling indignantly, and she looked at the single place at the kitchen table. Her lips trembled with crushing disappointment. “Oh, Hetty,” she added, “I thought it was understood – we take our meals properly, in the dining room!”
“I’d rather eat in the kitchen,” Peter answered mulishly, but his sister-in-law only laughed, a pretty tinkling laugh as she took his good arm.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Peter… one can’t take meals with the servants – even those who have ideas above themselves. It’s just not proper!” She added, over her shoulder to Hetty as she escorted Peter towards the dining room, “Another place – in the dining room, Hetty.”

On the whole, Peter would have preferred the kitchen, to the all-but empty table in the dining room, where young Horrie kicked his heels against the legs of a chair too tall for him. He and Horrie exchanged sympathetic looks; Horrie dogged his footsteps also, but it did not annoy Peter in quite the same way. Horrie craved attention and he was lonely for company, over and above Hetty and Daddy Hurst, who treated him with considerable affection. But they were old, and had their own work about the place. Peter wondered why Amelia did not want to send him to school. Privately he thought she wanted make a constant display of her maternal devotion, for she really seemed to care little for him, other than as an intelligent pet who talked. Horrie did not seem to care all that much either, to judge by the way that he squirmed out of Amelia’s lap when she took him up onto it, or the way he turned his cheek away from her kisses, enduring such demonstrations with a stoical face, “And you should rightfully sit at the head of the table,” Amelia added, as a tight-lipped Hetty carried in a tray with a fresh pot of coffee, and another place setting on it. “You may move my place to the right, Hetty.”
“It seems very dull without any boarders,” Peter took the chair at the head of the table, from which his mother had always presided, feeling as though he were usurping a place to which he had no real right. Behind Amelia’s back, Hetty’s lips twisted soundlessly in agreement, with a Gaelic imprecation added for good measure. “Had you not considered continuing as my mother did? It always made for the most interesting meals.”

“Oh, really Peter,” Amelia laughed, that irritatingly sweet tinkling laugh, “I couldn’t possibly engage in a business as vulgar as running a boarding house! Imagine - all those strangers and their impositions! It’s just not suitable for a respectable woman to do!”
“It was respectable enough for my mother,” Peter answered, and Hetty added spitefully,
“Aye, so it was, Miss Amelia – an’ what d’ye say to that?!”
“Hetty!” Amelia sounded desperate. “I am talking about family…”
“And we’re not family?” Hetty answered crisply, and set down the coffee pot with a decided thump, “Sure and the mistress did not think herself too good to work in the kitchen next to me, or bargain with the tradesmen, while some as I could mention sat in the parlor, all airs and graces an’ la-te-dah! Not family?!! ‘Tis why herself did what she did, leaving Hurst and I our lifetime in wages… and said clear that we should live here as long as we liked! No one otherwise would do a lick of work, Miss Amelia, while the house fell down around ye…”

Horrie listened, round-eyed and wary. Peter wondered of he had often observed this kind of scene, while Amelia’s eyes filled as if being berated by Hetty were the greatest tragedy imaginable. Peter cleared his throat and asked,
“Hetty… might I have some breakfast now?” Hetty’s ill-temper vanished magically, and she beamed fondly at Peter and Horrie,
“Of course you may… here I am, forgetting myself again, with you and the little lad waiting on me!” She bustled away, as Amelia dabbed at her swimming eyes.
“She does so forget herself,” she quavered, “I know that your dearest mama carried on so bravely… under such a tragic loss! But times were so different, Peter. No one thought the tiniest bit ill of her, then. But times have changed and I am helpless…”
And quite willing to remain so, Peter thought, cynically. Mr. Stoddard’s gently raised daughter would rather sit in genteel poverty in the parlor of an empty house than carry on from where Margaret had been forced to lay down the labor of caring for her family. He reached across the tabletop for the coffee pot; Amelia touched his hand and raised her eyes winsomely,

“But now that you have returned, you shall be able to look out for our interests… all of our interests,” she added and it took Peter more than a moment to take in the implication. “Mother Williamson reposed such confidence and trust in you, Peter… she had such hopes of you returning safely, and of all of us being a proper family again.”
Peter gently slid his hand out from under hers, carefully to keep his face utterly blank; Amelia, setting her cap at him? Good god, what a thought! He poured himself coffee, while Amelia continued artlessly, “I would so much rather be guided by someone stronger and wiser… I have no head for such worldly matters…”
“There’s always your Pa,” Peter pointed out. He was amused to see a flash of irritation with him in Amelia’s lovely eyes. “Man of business… none better, to look after your interests.”
“Not like a husband would be,” Amelia said, as Peter thought with annoyance, As if her looking at me with eyes like a cow would make me change my mind – how much of a malleable fool does she think I am? That worked with Horace, but I’m damned if it will work with me!

“No, probably not,” he answered agreeably, “So promise me one thing, ‘Melia – Let me look over any of the suitors you are thinking serious about. I am Horrie’s uncle, after all.”
On the whole, he thought later, he was lucky she didn’t throw the coffee pot at him. She was that riled at him deliberately missing all the hints she scattered like handfuls of chicken feed. But Amelia swallowed her considerable fury, saying only,
“I shall be sure of consulting you, Peter – being that you are the nearest to a dear brother left to me,” which said much for Amelia’s powers of ladylike self-control. Still, Peter didn’t think she would give up the matter entirely.

His brother’s wife was single-minded that way. He had been named co-guardian of Horrie. The largest portion of Margaret’s proper was left to him, including the house. She was a widow with a small son, the second beneficiary and with little inclination towards managing her own affairs. Looking around for someone who would masterfully take all these burdens from her, Amelia’s eyes couldn’t help but fall onto him. Against all those practical considerations and what she perceived as her overwhelming need, his disinclination was merely a small obstacle to be overcome. No doubt she thought it would be only a matter of time before she wore him down as she had worn down his brother, with tears and tantrums, and pretty displays of forgiveness and reconciliation. Peter had observed this from afar, indulgently thinking his brother could be forgiven that kind of soft-headedness; he had loved her, after all. But he did not, and had no intention of being maneuvered into doing as Miss Amelia wished.
In the end, he took counsel with Daddy Hurst – correctly figuring that Daddy Hurst’s little cabin, at the back of the house, behind the stables and the vegetable garden was one of the places he was safe from Amelia’s ambush. He went down in the evening, after supper, when there was still light in the sky over the weighted boughs of the apple trees, as the sun went down in a dark red smear of sky and purple clouds behind them.

“I’ve come for that drink of whiskey you promised,” he said, from below the porch, where Daddy sat at ease, slapping at an occasional late-season mosquito. One of his mother’s rules instituted firmly when he was small and adventurous; Wait until you are invited, Margaret told him sternly. But why, Mama – he’s jus’ an old nigra slave. Nonetheless, Margaret said – Hurst or anyone else, black or white, is due the courtesy of deciding when and whom he might invite into his home.
“’Bout time,” the old man chuckled richly, “Come on up, set a spell…” he gestured casually at the other chair, before fixing Peter with a shrewd and stern look. “How long you think befoah Miz ‘Melia, she track you down?”
“Don’t much care, Daddy – long as I can face up to her with a couple of drinks in me first!”
Hurst shook his head and rose painfully and in several stages from his chair,
“Marse Peter, it don’t do you no good a’tall to pour sperrits on your problems.”
“I guess not,” Peter agreed with a sigh, “But it does render them temporarily more amusing!” He settled into the other chair – surprisingly comfortable it was – as Daddy Hurst vanished into the dim doorway of his little house. He emerged with a dark glass bottle and a pair of battered tin mugs, silently pouring out a tot for each. Peter savored it in silence.
“To home,” he lifted the tin cup in a mock toast, and the old man echoed it. After a long moment, Daddy Hurst added,
“It ain’t the place, so much as dey people in it, Marse Peter.” Peter made a noncommittal sound, for Daddy Hurst had unerringly put his finger on it. He might be home, but the people who counted in it most – they were all gone. Margaret, Papa-Doctor, Horace, Johnny and Jamie; of all those who had fixed his mother’s house in his memory, and for whom he cared, only Daddy Hurst and Hetty remained… and little Horrie the only one of his blood family left.

“It’s not as if I can send her away from here,” Peter said, a little surprised to find himself thinking out loud. “She was my brother’s wife, after all. And Horrie – this is all the home he’s ever had.” Daddy Hurst nodded thoughtfully in the twilight. He topped up the tin cups, the bottle clinking gently against the rim. “Suit me right down to the ground if she sets her cap at some other fellow. Let him marry her, the poor bastard.”
“Meantime, they-ar Miz Amelia be, like a cuckoo in a nest.” Daddy Hurst sounded like he was savoring the whiskey. “Mebbe you might have some bizness of yo’ own, tahk you away for a time. Might give Miz Amelia a notion that you ain’t so much interested.”
“Something that would keep me way for a while,” Peter mused, thoughtfully, after a long moment. “I like that thought. I could say I’m looking for work, got itchy feet.”
“Mmmm,” Daddy Hurst topped up the cups again. “Got me jest the idee, now! You could say you wuz goin’ up to Fredericksburg, to see ‘bout Marse Carl’s fambly. They wus lef’ in a hard way, Miz Margaret she felt real bad ‘bout that. Don’ know if they is all dat better, even if de war is ober…”
“If they’re still in a bad way, I can hang my hat there for a while and help them out,” Peter ventured slowly. Daddy Hurst chuckled again and nodded
“An if dey ain’t – wal’ yo’ kin jes’ stay wit ‘em for a bit, and Miz ‘Melia, she’ll nebber know de difference.”
“Any port in a storm,” Peter agreed, philosophically. The more he thought on that, the better the notion sounded; away from his mother’s house, haunted with the memories of old happiness.
(more…)

I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows… given that the classic “cowboy” functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final years of the frontier per se offered all kinds of interesting potential story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives… but still.

For the generic cowboy was a himself hired hand. Yes, indeed – working for wages as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle – of all the domesticated animals only very slightly brighter than sheep. Your average cow is pretty much a functional retard. If if has had one functioning brain cell to rub against the other, all that would happen would be smoke trickling out of their ears. And, not to put too much of a fine point on it – herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-skill, low-paying labor, most often seasonable, and most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn’t do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, mostly until better employment opportunities came along.

You have to wonder, especially when there were so many other truly heroic epic adventurers available to hang the hero worship on. How did the cowboy even begin to loom so large – especially when the cattle business (and it was a business!) didn’t really begin to thrive until all the excitement was practically over? What about the mountain men, living on their wits in the early days, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? And surely the miners in the various gold and silver booms – they worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves in the earlies and for their employers later on. And what about my own personal favorites among the frontier archetypes, the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were quite a bit more likely to have adventurous encounters with the lawless element, or particularly hostile Indians… although even the stereotype of the Western towns being particularly lawless falls down a bit in contemporary comparison to elements of big cities in the East. Why one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, moves and television shows is enough to make you shrug your shoulders and say “que?!” to the camera, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

So how did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? Damned if I know, although I can take some guesses. The popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. Right time, right place; and it has often been noticed that the typical Western TV show or movie perpetuated ever since is more often set in about the 1865-1885s time frame. Telegraph and the transcontinental railroads are in place, the Indians are reserved (with sporadic exceptions necessary to the plot of the moment, of course) and all the little towns have wooden sidewalks and glass windows, suitable for a reckless cowboy to ride his horse down one and crash through the other. But still – a pretty limited visualization of the frontier west – surely there was more, even in the late 19th century for popular culture to fixate on?

I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn’t based on a melding of one particular and very old archetype and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight – able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in the lively yet strangely scholarly tome “Cracker Culture”, the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock rather favored herding barely domesticated animals (and hunting wild game) rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench – even if it didn’t pay very much at all.

It is fascinating to go back to the roots of the cattle industry – as I am doing for the final volume of Adelsverein ( or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”) – just to discover how very, very different it was from what has always been popularly presented. Owen Wister didn’t get the half of it.

I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in at any time.

Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. There was no place for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating. I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving - didn’t find it a little bit of a relief, to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline. Curiously, the very first American female law officer was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming… in 1869. When it came right down to it, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage in Cheyenne quite as violently as it did in Westminster, or arouse a backlash anywhere near as vicious; curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.

But someone like Lizzie Johnson could have had the life and career that she did, nowhere else. She was born in Missouri in 1840, and came to Texas with her parents six years later. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Johnson was a schoolteacher and devout Presbyterian, who brought his growing family to Texas. Eventually he set up a boarding school in Hayes County, south of Austin and some distance from San Marcos, which drew pupils from the area – and astonishingly, a fair number from other Southern states. Lizzie’s father, known as the Professor had originally intended it to be a boys school but so many girls applied that it morphed into a coeducational secondary school. The school prospered, and Lizzie (along with her brothers and sisters) taught classes – including bookkeeping. Lizzie turned out to be particularly gifted at mathematics.

This talent would have an unexpected bearing on her later career, which began to blossom in the decade following the Civil War. She taught school in a couple of small towns near Austin before opening her own primary school there in 1873; in a two story house on property she had purchased in her own name. She did more than teach school, though: complaining of boredom with the same old teaching routine and social affairs in letters to her brother, she had begun to write popular fiction under various pen names for the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper… and she also did bookkeeping. Her brother John had kept the books for the Day brothers, who had extensive ranching interests in Hays County, and were old neighbors of the Johnson family. There were seven Day brothers; inevitably they were known as the “Weeks”. John never entirely recovered from battlefield injuries incurred during his service as a soldier, and when he died, Lizzie took over in his stead. Her father had kept a small herd of cattle to supplement his income from the school, and Lizzie was now in possession of an income of her own, which she could invest in whatever she chose.

And she chose to invest in real estate, and in cattle, about which she became startlingly knowledgeable, for a maiden lady schoolteacher. By the time she opened her own school; she had registered her own brand, owned land and cattle, and was sending substantial herds north to the Kansas railheads. Her life seems astonishingly modern, the farthest thing imaginable from the repressed and constrained fictional women in novels by serious writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. She worked at what pleased and rewarded her, and no one – not her father or other male relative had anything to say about her household, her income, and her considerable business interests. Well, her surviving brothers - all younger – might have had a lot to say, but little enthusiasm for attempting any means of control over a formidable woman like Lizzie.

I think of her as the anti-Lily Bart. Another astonishingly modern touch – she married well beyond the age that a woman was expected to have committed in matrimony, and it was not for lack of serious suitors. For Lizzie was – to judge from contemporary formal daguerreotype portraits of her, in which the length of film exposure made any facial expression except the kind you could hold for some length of time out of the question – a rather attractive woman. Victorian standards of beauty differed considerably from the modern one, admittedly; they favored round-faced blondes, and Lizzie was dark-haired and looked rather like a 19th century Demi Moore. She was no frump, either, but dressed elegantly and in the latest fashion. She was courted assiduously over several years by one of the Day brothers and a number of other prosperous men, every one of whom knew her as a woman of property… and moreover, exactly how she came by it. Brains, beauty and business sense apparently had considerable allure.

At the age of 39, this frontier Kate married her Petruchio. He was a handsome and raffish widower with several children, named Hezekiah Williams. Although a retired Baptist preacher, and a moderately unsuccessful rancher, he was also a bit of a gambler and drinker. Sensibly, Lizzie married him with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement in place. She would control her own property acquired before the marriage, as well as anything she acquired in her own name after it. It seems that Lizzie Johnson Williams chose as well in her marriage as she did everything else, for they maintained a devoted and happily competitive relationship, both in business and in their personal life for thirty-five years. They went up the cattle trail to the northern railheads three times, Lizzie and Hezekiah each with a separate herd; it is thought that Lizzie was the only woman rancher who trailed cattle that she herself owned wholly, in the post-war cattle boom. When she died in 1924, ten years after Hezekiah, her neighbors were astonished to find out that she owned property worth a quarter of a million dollars. She had lived in a modest, not to mention miserly style since the death of her husband.

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

“BACK IN THE BOOKWORKS A’GIN”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(part 1 here and part 2 here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part one is here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

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

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

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

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

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

It happened just before the Civil War…

(to be continued)

(Previous parts, here, here and here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just because Abraham Lincoln was heinously unpopular across the South as president-elect did not mean that every Texan, slave-owner or not,