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

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

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

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

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

More about Seguin here :
His monument in Texas is the town of Segiun, a little south of San Antonio.
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From our POW Code of Conduct

“….I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy. If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.”

This code of conduct was created and adapted for all the American services in the wake of the Korean War, when American (and other nationalities) POWs were both brutally mistreated and exploited for propaganda purposes by their captors. While some service personnel may be a trifle foggy on the exact requirements of the Geneva Convention until the need for familiarity with those conventions floats up to the top of their personal “to-do” duty requirements, the POW code of conduct is branded on our consciousness. Well, that and the bitter knowledge that the last military opponent of ours who paid anything like strict attention to Geneva Convention requirements when applying them to captured American service personnel were the Germans in WWII.

So, we have quietly gotten our heads around a couple of facts, one of the most important being the brutal reality that Americans best not surrender. The odds of surviving long enough for the International Red Cross to make that all-important visit to verify your well-being are practically non-existent. Snuff videos made available through various pro-fundamentalist Islamic media throughout Middle East make it pretty damn clear that no surrender in the first place may be the most viable career option.

Even if a prisoner is lucky, and the market for death-porn is flooded, the odds of being used as a hostage, and paraded like a puppet in front of the video cameras are pretty much a given. Exactly how far one can or ought to go in resisting this kind of exploitation is a judgment call. Admiral James Stockdale, as the senior American POW in North Vietnam chose to mutilate himself rather than be paraded in public for propaganda purposes, and threatened suicide if the North Vietnamese continued to continue torturing other POWs.

Pvt. Patrick Miller, of the 507th Maintenance Company was taken prisoner during the dash into Iraq in 2003, (at the same time as Pvt. Jessica Lynch) and was one of the five surviving members of his unit paraded on Iraqi television. I remember seeing the clip of the five on the news, and thought that he was the only one of them who seemed to be defiant. He answered back with his name and rank, and looked like he was about to spit into the camera, even if he and the others were entirely at the mercy of Saddam Hussein’s goons. In the long run, ones’ response to the extreme of captivity and threatened (or actual torture) depends on training, and maturity. But sometimes it depends on strength of character, and maybe a large lashing of stubborn bloody-mindedness, which are harder to predict in advance and inculcate with training. But I digress. I have a point, and I am getting to it.

This week, it’s the fifteen British sailors and Marines, taken by Iranian goons, and paraded in front of cameras, while Tony Blair and the British media agonize over how to react, what should have been done, and what can be done to get them back without loosing any national self-respect, and their families try and maintain a stiff upper lip under the hot searchlight of media interest.

It pretty much looks like it was deliberate and well-planned, done expressly for the purposes of getting hostages to toy with, probably with an eye for a prisoner exchange, and building up their image internally. They announced their intentions to kidnap coalition personnel some weeks ago, but at this point in the war, American personnel are probably just too damn hard to catch unawares. So, go for the easily gathered harvest, and drag it out as long as possible. I am afraid that if it drags on for a long time, as long as the Teheran embassy hostage crisis that it will become as much of a political hot potato. I can see the Blair government in a cleft stick; having neither the means or the will to respond with gunboats, or the 21st century equivalent. Being that the war in Iraq is resoundingly unpopular (as near as I can judge from a distance) I wonder if there is any stomach for that kind of response anyway. And while the diplomatic alternative grinds slowly away, over weeks and months, and the hostages families fret and worry, and the national media pounds away, involvement in the coalition may become even less popular. Getting the hostages freed may come to seem to be such an overwhelmingly good thing that no one will care very much about the price paid for such an end.

I hope that there is a Stockdale, or a Miller among the captured British sailors and Marines. I hope that they are not being tormented, as Admiral Stockdale was, at the hands of the North Vietnamese… and I hope that they are resisting as best they can, for the sake of their own self-respect as members of a proud military with a long tradition of defiance and resistance to captivity. I hope they will return knowing in their hearts that they held to the code, and to their comrades, and never in their hearts surrendered.

(Also posted at Blogger News Network)

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

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

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

Pace “Little House”, and a whole raft of western movies, I’d always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a ‘Lincoln-log’ house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.
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Growing up, my dad always had a vegetable garden. In fact, he always had a large vegetable garden. We had very few store-bought vegetables because Dad grew so many in the garden and canned them that we had enough some years to last more than just one winter. Unfortunately, though not at the time, I was not allowed in the garden because I might mess it up. I therefore didn’t get lessons on how to weed, the proper way to hoe a planted garden, how to thin plants, etc. I didn’t care either because I always figured I would just buy it from the store.

Now after years of buying from the store, I realize that my parents were right. Fruits and vegetables are better home grown. Now I am starting my own garden. So far, it’s really small, and really more of a test run to see if I can actually grow one. The small area I have chosen for my garden spot only has a small area fit for growing currently. The previous owners had put a bunch of wood chips down in the area to use for a play area for their kids. I haven’t managed to get a full half of the chips out of the area yet, so I only have about 1/3 of the area available.

I sat down back in January and decided what I wanted to plant. I finally settled on lettuce, spinach, broccoli, turnip greens, green peas, carrots, snap beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and yellow crookneck squash, eggplant, bell pepper, cayenne, jalapeno peppers, watermelon, and cantaloupe. Of those already planted, I only managed to get 4 pea plants up, a handful of turnip greens, a handful of lettuce, a couple of handfuls of carrots, and I’m not sure that any of the spinach has come up. I also put out some strawberry plants that still look as dead as when I pulled them out of the bag. I started the tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers indoors, and aside from what Notch decided to munch on, I have almost all of them to come up and look real good. I could probably put them out this weekend, but I am going to leave them outside in the containers over this week to harden them before transplanting.

Now flowers are another matter entirely. Mittens, the stray cat we adopted, has decided that every place I have put potting soil is a toilet. Now fortunately, she isn’t doing any “real business” in them, but still she’s digging. Bad kitty. I suppose I am going to be forced to put netting (like vinyl chicken wire) over all my flowers and pots until she takes her business back to the leaves. But I digress. I didn’t have good luck with flowers last year. I can only blame myself as I didn’t keep them weeded, watered, and fertilized as I should have. I will put some of the blame on the software engineering course I took as I had absolutely no free time during that term and it was spring term. This year, I will have the time to do proper weeding and watering. Then I will see if I do truly have what my mom calls “Susie’s green thumb” referring to my paternal grandmother who could grow anything anywhere.

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

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

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

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I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of “You Light Up My Life” was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read “The DaVinci Code”, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances… no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed — contemptuous, even — when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.

“300” looks to be one of those wildly popular things, for which the intellectual great and good have no explanation. This amuses me very much, because I think I do. As I wrote last week “the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years… Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country… those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for.”

It’s all about stories, and our human need for stories; stories about other people, stories that explain, that make things clear for us, that inspire us to great deeds, to set an example or spell out a warning. We need stories nearly as much as we need oxygen. And we will have them, bright and sparkling and new, or worn to paper thinness in the re-telling. We will have stories that have grown, and been embellished by many narrators, with heroes and minor heroes and splendid set-piece scenes, and side-narratives, like one of those sea-creatures that collects ornaments to stick onto its’ shell any which way, or a bower-bird collecting many brilliant scraps and laying them out in intricate patterns. A longing to hear such stories must be as innate in us, as it is to those creatures, for our earliest epic, that of Gilgamesh may be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture, and towns, and the taming of animals, and the making of a written language. It may go back even farther yet, but there is really no way to know for sure what those stories were, although I am sure the anthropologists are giving it the good old college try.

Our values are transmitted in the stories that we go back to, over and over. A long time ago, I read this book, which recommended, rather in the manner of the old Victorians, that children be given improving books to read, that their minds be exercised by good examples. I was initially rather amused… and then I went over the reading list in the back. I realized just then how many of those books the author cited I had read myself… and how many quiet demonstrations of honesty, courage, ethical behavior, loyalty to family, friends and community, of doing the hard right as opposed to the easy wrong had been tidily incorporated into such books as the Little House books, or Caddie Woodlawn, or “All of a Kind Family”, or Johnny Tremain. We imbibe all these values from stories… and lest we think that these sorts of moral lessons are obscure and tangled things, best suited for a long theoretical discussion of the life-boat dilemma in some touchy-feely ethics seminar, the author (or someone that he quoted – it’s been a long time since I re-read the book) brought up the old black and white movie “A Night to Remember”… the movie account of the sinking of the Titanic. The whole story of the unsinkable ship is laid out, based on research, and with the aid (at the time it was filmed) with many still-living survivors; running full-tilt into an ice-field, hitting an iceberg…loading the relatively few lifeboats while the band plays, and the ships engineers keep the lights and power going, of husbands putting their wives and children into the boats and stepping back to leave more room, knowing that the ship is doomed… of steerage passengers taking matters into their own hands and finding their way up to the boat deck, and deck-hands trying to launch the very last boat as the seawater rises to their knees. Twice a hundred stories, and at the end of it one has a pretty good idea of who has behaved well and honorably… and who has not.

Stories. We need them, and we’ll keep coming back to them. And to the best ones, we will come back again and again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sgt. Mom’s post got me to thinking about some of my past experiences in Europe. I first started travelling there on business in 1987, when I spent quite a bit of time in Burnley, Lancashire in northern part of the UK. At that time, we had just entered into a joint venture with Lucas, aka The Prince of Darkness, to develop a multifunction column switch for a U.S. auto company. Despite the seemingly endless rains (the sun broke through only one day on my first visit, with the local weatherman reporting that the temperatures “soared into the seventies” – this being July), it was quite a nice place with a small town feel to it. They serve a particular type of beer there called bitter, which, once one acquires a taste for it, is a pleasant way to end the workday. The locals were friendly and very welcoming of us Yanks to challenge them to a game of arrows (darts) at the local pubs. We had contracted some test equipment to a tool shop in nearby Nottingham, necessitating a trip to evaluate their progress. Accompanied by our hosts and some engineers from Chrysler, we took the motorway to Yorkshire, travelling by the Major Oak, which is alleged to have been used by Robin Hood as a hiding place. It turns out that the managing director of the tool shop had some sort of relationship (brother or something) with the curator of Nottingham castle, so after our business was concluded we enjoyed a personalized tour. What a neat place, whether or not you believe in the legend of Robin Hood. Afterwards we retreated to Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, a pub across the square from the castle that has been in continuous operation since 1189 with the name inspired by the start of the third crusade. At one point our host asked us what we thought of all that we had seen that day. The auto company engineer thought a moment, and replied (WARNING – UGLY AMERICAN MOMENT AHEAD) “Well, its all very nice, but what have you people done lately?” My only beef with England is their aversion to ice water. If you ask for a glass, you will get one ice cube. That’s it.

Another of my favorite places is the Principality of Liechenstein and its capital city Vaduz, located in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The hotel where we stayed is about a bucolic setting as can be imagined. There was a cow pasture just outside my hotel window, with (sorry California) some of the happiest cows I have ever seen, each wearing a traditional cowbell and munching on the prolific wildflowers. As we were leaving the hotel in the mornings, we would pass groups of children in their neatly pressed uniforms heading to school, singing and playing stickball. While the locals seemed quite friendly, they viewed us with a little suspicion, as though wondering whether we truly were the barbaric Americans that had undoubtedly heard about. One night, our hosts took us to a fine restaurant located high up on a mountain in nearby Switzerland, overlooking the upper Rhine valley, with the river itself being little more that a creek at that location. On our return down the mountain (WARNING – UGLY AMERICAN MOMENT AHEAD), I pressed our host to treat us to a yodeling performance. I was firmly informed in no uncertain terms that “We do not yodel!” I would like to return one day, although I am concerned about their national security.

Paris may be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but I find its residents to be among the most hostile toward Americans – not in any specific way – just a general distaste. I found Toulouse, on the other hand, to be quite the opposite. My last visit was on short notice, so the hotel where we stayed was an unknown quantity, though proving to be a hidden gem. The rooms were quite small – the building dated to the eighteenth century – though most of them opened into small interior courtyards. The owner made a general-purpose room available for us to work on our presentation. He had never seen the sort of hardware we had – laptops, projectors, PowerPoint, etc. – and was fascinated with the process. Each day, he would go to the market to buy fresh breads and pastries for us, serving them with the most wonderful espresso I’ve had before or since. In exchange for showing him the finer points of creating a presentation, he responded to my curiosity about the espresso machine with a compete tutorial on its complicated operation. I remembered enough French to get the basics, but I suspect that, on my own, I would have blown it to smithereens.

In general, I have found that positive attitudes toward Americans are inversely proportional to the sophistication of the city in question. I suspect that much of this is because cities like London and Paris are not so different from cities like New York or Los Angeles, where cynism is the currency of the realm. American influence has shaped much of post-war Europe and, to the extent that things are not going well, Americans are getting the blame. The irony of all this is that, as I alluded in my comment to Sgt. Mom’s earlier post, many of the ideas imported from America by Europe are those held so dearly by the left in America – secularization, liberal immigration policies, socialized (name the government program), etc. The further irony is that the fury of those attitudes is largely directed to those in the U.S. who are most likely to resist the very policies that have failed so miserably in Europe. I am looking forward to my upcoming first trip to Iaşi Romania. Their recent history suggests a more likely aversion to these far-left liberal influences.

One last point I would make is that the Europeans also blame crass commercialization, another bane of society, on Americans. It is, more accurately, a by-product of capitalism, and I would accept it over the alternatives any day. More than any other region, Europe should have learned this (anybody remember the Dark Ages?)

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

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

Unfortunately, their organizational skills and economic resources were not anywhere near equal to their ambitions; ambitions which in turn were only equaled by their astonishing naivety about the frontier. Their first commissioner in Texas was well-intentioned, well-born, and utterly clueless: every scammer, con-man and shady land-speculator west of the Mississippi must have seen Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels coming for a considerable distance. In a remarkably short time, Prince Karl effortlessly managed to piss-off most of the elected officials of the independent State of Texas, spend money as if it were water, burden the Verein with the Fisher-Miller Grant, (a large and almost useless tract of land smack-dab in the middle of Comanche territory), and amuse (or appall) practically everyone with whom he came in contact. Among the most risible of his personal peculiarities was the fact that he traveled in state with a large and specialized entourage, including a personal chef and two valets to help him on with his trousers of a morning. This went over with the rough denizens of the frontier about as well as could be expected.
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Some heartburn noted this week in some quarters about the Washington Post story about the treatment and the living conditions of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and why the milblogosphere is not having a conniption-fit over that, with many dark hints about how we would be screeching like a cage of howler-monkeys if it had happened under another administration.

Not having a background in medical administration, or any particular knowledge of the set-up at Walter Reed, or even personal knowledge of anyone undergoing treatment there, I’d have to defer involvement in this fracas… except for a comment on the reported decrepitude of the building where many of the out-patients were living. From the description it sounds like, and most probably is, a dump.

All of these might come as a surprise to the dear little civilian writers of the WaPo and it’s ilk, who see the nice, shiny public side of the gold-plated bases, and assume that the rest of the base, post or fort is similarly bright and shiny and new. Au contraire, as they say in France, and ‘twas ever thus: George Washington lived in a house at Valley Forge, but everyone else lived in something considerably less commodious.

The reason that no one in the mil-blogosphere is hyperventilating over that aspect of the story is that most of us have lived in, or did business in worse, during our time in service. Peeling paint, leaking plumbing, sagging floors, corroding pipes, herds of rampant vermin wandering untrammeled in cheap and badly-maintained structures that are two or three decades (or more) past their best-if-used-by date? Been there, done that, got a raft of horror stories of my own.

Let’s see, there was the old high school on Misawa AB, back in the days when it was a sleepy little Security Service base; it was housed in three long sheds which had been stables when Misawa AB was a Japanese Army cavalry post in the late 1930ies. On a hot summer day the place still smelled distinctly of horses. It was slated to be replaced during the Carter Administration, except that Jimmeh passed on the defense spending bill which would have paid for it; another good reason to despise him even before bungling the Iran Embassy hostage crisis. Even the relatively newer facilities on MAB then were no prize: famously the hospital barracks was in such bad shape that a guy once walked into the upstairs shower room and crashed straight through the floor into the downstairs shower room. This was the place where I developed my life-to-date habit of storing all non-refrigerated foodstuffs in sealed jars, since the barracks I lived in then had roaches. Lots and lots of roaches.

The infrastructure on Zaragoza AB wasn’t too awful— this was an Air Force Base, where we do cling to some standards— but the water pipes were so corroded that tap-water on base came out colored orange, about the color and consistency of Tang. People living in base housing spent a lot of money on bottled water.

The infrastructure at the Yongsan Garrison, ROK was not that much better. A couple of decades of living with the expectation of relocating the mission elsewere had left the electrical grid in such shakey condition as to make power-outages a part of the expected routine. The water pipes were so corroded that I earned fame everlasting on the day I walked into the Air Force female dorm bathroom and noticed that the shower-heads emitted a bare trickle. I took out my trusty Swiss-Army knife, unscrewed the shower-head-plate and emptied about a quarter of a cup of crud out of each. This was also the place where some of the Army troops were domiciled in Korean War-era Quonset huts. In the fall, CE had to hold training classes for the dorm managers to teach them how to run the antique kerosene heaters that warmed them… the heaters were so old that the average soldier would never in his or her life laid eyes on artifacts of such antiquity.

The AFRTS station building in Greenland had mice so tame that one of the board operaters tried to train them to sit up and beg for food. A broadcaster friend of mine who was stationed at a Pacific Island Navy base was warming a pan of canned chili in a saucepan, when a huge rat jumped into the hot chili… and jumped out again, and skittered down the hallway of the dorm, leaving little rat-footprints of chili con carne.

Maintenance of facilities; it’s one of those dull, dull issues that hardly anyone ever pays attention to except those who have to deal directly with it on a daily basis. It’s not one of those sexy military spending issues; it is more of enduring headache, for there is never quite enough money approved for a tenth of local needs. What there is, winds up being spread as thin as a pat of butter on an acre of toast.

Overseas bases, and facilities that are on the verge of being closed generally get last call; and I’d note that politicians and investagative reporters are usually among the first to make a lot of hay when there is money spent on an aging military facility about to be closed.

So call me grimly amused, when they are making hay about money not being spent on an aging military facility.

Just for the heck of it though, the next time I have an appointment at BAMC, here in San Antonio, I’ll snoop around and take a look at what the outpatient troop quarters look like… but the last time I looked, six months ago, they all looked pretty good.

Any recollections of infamously awful troop billets are invited, of course. Misery loves company.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss among yourselves, if interested!

So we whiled away an overcast Friday afternoon by going to the movies. There were three reasons for this: I feel I am duty bound to boost the first-weekend attendance of any intelligent and interesting-looking bit of historical film going, Blondie will watch Ioan Gruffudd in anything; double points and drooling slightly especially if he is costumed in tight trousers, tall boots and a shirt romantically opened halfway down the front… and where was I? Oh, third reason. No car crashes, explosions and machine gun fire.

Be warned though: when it comes out on DVD, it will make an excellent drinking game. Every time you see a British actor you recognize from Masterpiece Theater, knock back a shot for every presentation he or she was in. I guarantee everyone at the party will be paralytic by the end of the first half-hour, forty-five minutes max. It does have the distinct vibe of those lush and lovingly produced British television epics of a certain sort: all it lacks is the genteel host, sitting in a leather armchair, turning the pages of a book and setting the scene in orotund tones. The settings and costumes, and period details were as immaculate as they always are in these efforts. Rooms didn’t look like sets; they looked like rooms; many of them crowded and cluttered, and sometimes rather dim.

The first few minutes seemed a little awkward, rather jarring in setting up the characters and premise, and I mentally rewrote some of the dialogue. Bad habit of mine, having been intensely steeped in period literature, but either I adjusted or the writing got better. I think the latter, for a lot of the later dialogue was on-point.

The story was of that of William Wilberforce; a name not terribly familiar to Americans, and his long and discouraging struggle to outlaw slavery in the British Isles and in the British Empire as it was at the end of the 18th Century. The accounts of the abolitionist movement taught in our schools is pretty much focused on the American abolitionists at a later date, many of them inspired and even encouraged by Wilberforce himself, so this story is not a terribly over-familiar one to most Americans. William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, to give a couple of examples- them we have heard of. Often and at length.

The structure of the story might be a little hard to follow, initially: it hops back and forth, telling the story of Wilberforce, as a fairly well-born and well-connected young Member of Parliament, a forceful orator and able politician, and a good friend of William Pitt the Younger. He is young and dashing, beloved by his friends… even his household staff is fond of him, and accustomed to his eccentricities, among which is a fondness for all kinds of animals not normally considered as pets. He is also extremely and unashamedly devout, and in an effort by his good friend Pitt to find him a cause by which he might serve both God and Mammon (in the form of Pitt’s government) … he becomes devoted to the cause of abolishing chattel slavery, to the endangerment of his health and sanity.

Among Wilberforces’ first political allies in this effort who are not related to him by blood are the amazingly twisty Lord Charles Fox (Michael Gambon), political genius extraordinaire, and Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), a scholar with a bent for research and a passion for abolition. They are both given memorably amusing lines of dialogue: really, if I hadn’t seen “Cold Comfort Farm, I wouldn’t have thought Rufus Sewell had it in him to be a comic, and sometimes rather touching foil. (He usually gets the rather grim and earnest roles.)

Other noted moments: Ciaran Hinds, as one of the principal opponents to abolishing the slave trade, Lord Tarleton. Recently come from battling those rebellious Americans, he is the representative for Liverpool, and shows off his damaged sword-hand, as a war wound. Most Americans would have dearly loved a very much larger piece out of Banastre Tarleton than that, so he makes a very suitable villain.

And there it is: the movie makes clear what a long and dedicated effort it took to bring this about. For it meant a lot of work; writing, and preaching and persuading, not just of the high and the mighty, but of the ordinary people. Of this are solid, and very real grass-roots movements made, or at least, those of them that last, one person at a time being convinced against their economic self-interests. It does not happen overnight: it takes a while, and if anyone should be seeing this as some sort of politically correct fable, expecting the righteous cause to effortlessly sweep all before it… well, this should give pause. People grow old, grow weary and blind, loose their health and their illusions, and die before the cause is won. But when victory comes, it is sweet and just… and one which all can take comfort in, having been brought around by reason and persuasion. And the occasional political sly maneuver.

Money and time well-spent, overall. Not quite as literary as “Shakespeare in Love”, but not as drearily PC as “Amistad”. (Blondie says that the male leads are majorly studly and straight, which knocks out a certain theory about actors who can swish about in cloaks and swords and all that.)

So, yeah, my heart hasn’t really been in this blogging thing for a while… no, no nonono, I am not working up to pulling the plug, it’s just that I have been diverted by another mission. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, I’m just laying down to bleed a while, then up and fight again… but I know how Timmer feels. There’s a lot of stuff going on, which in days of yore I would have been perfectly at home, piling on with the rest of us. Some of it is just the usual blogger shit-fit: Marcotte who? At where? Ummm. OK… this is the blogger-face you want with your campaign? It’s always a bad sign when you piss off more than you make friends with. Didn’t anyone actually read hers and that other blog before taking them on board officially? Apparently not. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, as we used to say in junior high.

Anna Nicole Smith, news coverage of, 24-7. Umm, OK. Clear demonstration that the major legacy media are not serving us well, although the Princess Di-like coverage fairly well illustrates the adage about first time tragedy, second time farce. We’re kinda over served in the farce department here, although the astronaut Lisa whats-er-fern is probably grateful for it.

Britney Spears, bald. Sorry, I’m not stooping to the obvious here. (Although the remembrance of a cartoon entitled “Her First Masked Ball” keeps popping up in my mind. I think it was in National Lampoon in about 1979. You google for it, you pervert.) Girl, the trailer park is calling. It is your destiny!

Talk about flashbacks to the 1970s, though… watching our major political parties and politicians maneuver over the last couple of days. Tragedy and farce, tragedy and farce, people. Only this time it’s going to be a tragedy and a tragedy again. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. It’s been like watching a blindfolded person walk over a cliff; for the purposes of scoring domestic political points, just go ahead and kiss off and abandon our allies (yes, we do have some, here and there, although you wouldn’t know it from your abject flunkies in the legacy media) and pull our forces out of Iraq in 90 days or whatever other timeline you have pulled out of your ass which will look good in the polls. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

Sell out our national credibility and commitment to a long and difficult mission for a mess of pottage and polls. Do whatever it takes to keep you in that nice little office you have scored for yourself. Just keep thinking of your short-term interest. Just keep hoping that all that jihadist narsty stuff in the woodshed will all go away, when George Bush exits the White House. Yep, just keep hoping. Get your friends and mouthpieces in the legacy media to help you out with that. Everybody will love us once again, once the Bushhitlertyrant is gone, and our betters are in control. Take a nice long drink of the Koolaid, comrade, you will feel so much better.

Me, I am trying to take the long view. With luck the blogosphere will circumvent the “flee-all-is-lost-in Iraq” meme, as best we can. No more kindly and authoritative Uncle Walty declaring without opposition after the Tet Offensive , that “all is lost in Vietnam! Flee, flee for your lives!” And also there is a means of fighting the “our troops are bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-criminals” meme. Here’s hoping we can scotch that one, right at the starting post, although given that the so-called military expert for the Washington Post is singing that little ditty like his hope of heaven depends on it doesn’t necessary ensure that that particular meme will go down without a fight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride in the next two years: fasten your metaphorical seatbelt, and prepare to weather the shitstorm

Me… I have the feeling that bad stuff is going to happen. And that I can do my best part now by going back to our stories, or recollections of who we are, and what we had to overcome. We have had hard times, bad times, times when we might have given it all up. We have to remember these stories. Our past, those stories that some of us know, and that some of us have yet to be reminded of, we will need them, very soon. Things will start happening, in the next months or years. Events will overtake the best intentions of us all, and so we need to be reminded of our history, our stories and our heroes and heroines.

They are a talisman, our hope, our light in the dark when every other light has gone out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Part 1 is here)

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

I didn’t grow up in a military family, at least not active-duty military. But we were replete with veterans. Dad fought in Korea with the Marines, his dad was with the Army in WWI. Dad’s older brother was in the Merchant Marines. Both of Dad’s younger brothers served at least one tour with the Marines, and Mom’s great-grandpa served with the Ohio Infantry in the 1860s. Come to think of it, Mom’s baby sister joined the Air Force after she graduated high school, in the early 1950s. My brother joined the Marines in 1973 to avoid being drafted, but got a medical discharge before ever completing boot camp. The military was seen as a valid career option, a respectable choice, as well as a place to grow up. We saw it as a rung on the ladder of success, a starting point from which one could reach the moon, if one so desired.

I enlisted in the military twice - the Army National Guard while I was in college, and the Air Force after I graduated. Total time in service was just shy of 12 years, I think. Both times I joined for basically the same reasons - I didn’t see any other clear options for my life, and I wanted to serve my country. And both times, I would say the former reason carried more weight than the latter, but that doesn’t negate the desire to serve. And my time in the military, and the experiences I had there, crystallized and solidified my love of country, and strengthened my belief that while the U.S. isn’t perfect, it’s a damn good country.
(more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

It’s been kind of a frenetic waltz this week… which is a round-about way of explaining why I didn’t write much original stuff this week. I just got obsessed with the new book; yeah, this one has taken hold, and when I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll, and nothing else seems quite real, or very important.

See, the first book… well, it was actually the second book, if you count the memoir which you really can’t because that was all basically little scraps of reminiscence stitched together… the first book was pretty easy to write. I sat down and wrote the first draft in a pell-mell rush, all over the space of about two months. The plot was pretty much already there, from start to finish; being based upon real people and real events has the effect of handing me the hardest part on a silver platter already. All I had to do was flesh them out a little, do a little guessing as to how they might have related to each other, come up with some amusing conversation, and a lot of description… hey presto, there you go. 120,000 well-polished and carefully chosen words. As a celebrated wit whose name I can’t remember at the moment was supposed to have said, “It’s easy, just open a vein, and let it flow.”

It actually was easy, because I was able to think about them for a long time, before I actually buckled down and did the writing…. For me, that’s what I need to do about half the time; to work out in my head what needs to happen, and how to go about making it happen. Sometimes I need to bounce ideas off other people: believe me, that kind of feedback is above price. It’s were the best ideas develop. And sometimes the magic is happening. I sit down at the computer and stuff just happens. I cope up for air, and there’s half a chapter written, and it’s pure gold, and it’s already four in the afternoon, and where the hell did the time go?
Anyway, the last book was something I lived with for a long time, before I actually buckled down and put it all on paper.

(It’s still in front of a publisher, by the way … and there are two more I will submit it to, in case of rejection. (Have to wait and do it sequentially, these people are anal about simultaneous submissions!) As my writer friend on the West Coast says, trying to find a publisher for a novel is kind of like trying to find adoptive parents for a minority Down ’s syndrome child: they are out there, but it takes a bit of looking.)

The new book; now, the one about the German colonies in the Texas Hill Country? I have built the scaffolding of plot and character for that from scratch… although there are some real people in it, some of who are very interesting people in their own right and who will take over, if I don’t keep a firm grip on them… (You… sit down, and behave, this story is not about you!)
What is really curious to me is how many of the fictional people, and the plot events just seemed to spring up from something I read in the course of doing research. A sentence here, a paragraph there, even just a single name… and a whole character is launched, obstreperous, amusing, and fully alive to me. There were incidents and events that I just kept circling back around towards, without knowing quite why: I just had the sense that they would have something important to do with the story. I had to set them aside like pieces for a mosaic, and figure out how to fit them all together later. There are also some characters who start out in the plot as a sort of extra, with one or two lines, but one way and another they turn out to be a little more important and before you know it, there is a fully functional and almost essential sub-plot… when all I had really needed was… you know, like two lines! It may take a lot longer to work through the first draft, then sit down and expand, edit and polish to a high shine. I’m guessing six months, at least, especially if I have to take (bleah) more paid outside work!

At this rate of proliferation, there just might be two books in this epic: the first one to cover the immigration, the building of the settlements, and the peace treaty with the Comanche, and the second to cover the Civil War and aftermath. There is no end of incident to cover, not to mention operatic levels of drama, murder, revenge, stolen children, madness, true love, sudden death… all this and civil war, too. And maybe a cattle stampede, just to vary the program. Just by way of a tease, I think I shall post a sample chapter…. (Suggestions and feedback are welcome, always. And any introductions to a literary agent will be extremely welcome, being that the big publishers are closed to me, unless I have one… and they are even harder to find!)

Later: Entry deleted and re-entered, in order to allow comments. Something about punctuation in the title often screws these things us. Don’t know why - Sgt. Mom)