The Nueces Fight – Conclusion

03. August 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Old West · Tags: , ,

Late in the fall of 1862, under the mistaken assumption that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and allowed to depart Texas unmolested rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of Unionists gathered together at Turtle Creek in Kerr County. They elected a settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener as their leader, and Henry Schwethelm as second. Their number included Phillip Braubach, who had served as the sheriff of Gillespie County, and Captain John Sansom, a Texas Ranger before and after the war, and also the sheriff of Kendall County, two sons of Edwin Degener, a prominent free-thinker from Sisterdale, Heinrich Steves, whose large family had helped establish Comfort, and the Boerner brothers, one of whom had married a Steves daughter. Heinrich Stieler was also one of them; he was Henry Schwethelm’s brother-in-law and son of Gottlieb Stieler, an early settler whose family later established a ranch between Comfort and Fredericksburg which still exists today.

The Unionists in the group were bound by ties of kinship, by community as well as personal loyalty. There were sixty-eight of them: all German, save four Anglos (including Sansom) and one Mexican. They intended to travel on horseback westward towards the Mexican border; most meant to go from there to the United States and join the Union Army. Having a three-day head start and no heavy baggage wagons to contend with, they should have been well over the Nueces and into Mexico but for their belief in the non-existent amnesty … and so they made their way across country in a fairly leisurely manner. Duff was enraged when he heard of their departure. To his mind, they were deserters in time of war and deserving of death. He sent word to Lt. C.D. McRae in San Antonio that Tegener’s party was to be pursued at all cost; implicit in his orders was an understanding that he didn’t want to hear much about survivors. McRae led out a company of more than ninety men after the Unionists and prepared to follow Duff’s orders to the letter.

On the evening of August 9th, 1862, Tegener’s party camped in thin cedar woods, not far from the Rio Grande, between present-day Brackettville and Laguna. The built campfires and set out four sentries a good way from the camp. Sometime early the next morning, McRae’s scouts encountered Tegener’s guards, and the exchange of shots alerted the Unionists. There followed a short and confusing firefight. Some sources claim that McRae’s company had overridden the sleeping Unionists and caught them by surprise in their bedrolls. Other accounts have it that nearly half of Tegener’s party had decided to give it up as a bad job, and go back to the Hill Country to defend their families … or scattered when it seemed clear that Tegener had chosen a bad defensive position. John Sansom, certainly no coward and not unaccustomed to dirty fighting was one of the survivors; he urged Hugo Degener to come away with him, but the younger man refused. Most of those who stood and fought were killed outright. Eleven of the wounded were executed upon capture, to the horror of one of McRae’s volunteers who left an account; one survivor was taken to San Antonio and executed there. Others were hunted down and executed a week later by McRae’s troopers as they tried to cross the Rio Grande. The survivors scattered, including Sansom and Schwethelm; who both made it safely over the border. Others fled back to the Hill Country, bringing news of the fight to the families of the dead.

Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. Minna Stieler, the sixteen-year old sister of Heinrich Stieler, and her mother managed to get permission to go to where the bodies of her brother and another comrade had been left unburied, and cover them with brush and stones, the ground being too hard to dig a grave, and the bodies too far decayed to remove. The other remains lay unburied for three years. Exactly three years to the day after the Nueces Fight, Henry Schwethelm returned with a party of kinfolk and friends from Comfort, and gathered up the scattered bones. They brought them to Comfort, and buried them in a mass grave, on a low hillside on what then would have been the outskirts of town.

The stone obelisk is plain and stark, shaded by a massive oak tree: panels on three sides list the names of the 36 dead of Tegener’s party, all of whom were True to the Union.

The Nueces Fight and ‘True to the Union’

01. August 2012 · Comments Off on The Nueces Fight and ‘True to the Union’ · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , , , , ,

As I am going up to Comfort on the 11th, to take part in the 150th anniversary observences of the Nueces Fight, and since it has been a while since I wrote about this — herewith some background.)

Who would have thought that deep in the heart of a staunchly Confederate state, there would have been a large population of Unionists? But there was; and not only did they vote against Secession, but the governor of Texas himself was a Unionist. He was none other than Sam Houston himself, the hero of San Jacinto, who more than any other Texas man of note had politicked and maneuvered for ten long years so that Texas could join the United States. In the end, Texas seceded; instead of going it alone again, the secession party joined the Confederacy with what some observers considered to be reckless enthusiasm – especially considering the perilous position of those settlements on the far frontier. Those settlements had been protected from marauding Comanche, Apache and Kiowa by the efforts of US troops – and who would guard them now? When the Texas legislature passed a law requiring all public officials to swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, Sam Houston resigned rather than take it. Being then of a good age, of long and devoted service to the people of Texas and held in deep respect even by citizens who didn’t agree with his stand, Sam Houston retired without incident to his home near Huntsville.

Other staunch Unionists in Texas were not able to refuse the demands of the Confederacy as easily as wily old General Sam. Among those who felt the wrath of the Confederacy most keenly were the German settlers of the Hill Country. Most of those settlers had come from Europe in the late 1840s; others had settled in San Antonio, Galveston and Indianola. In many cases they were the mercantile elite, as well as providing a solid leavening of skilled doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, teachers and writers in those communities. They were also Abolitionists; and in an increasingly perilous position as the split between free-soil states and those which permitted chattel slavery widened during the 1850s. Once Texas went Confederate, they were in even more danger, although they did not at first appear to realize this. Those citizens and counties which favored the Union and abolition could not easily separate, as West Virginia had from Virginia: they were stuck. The war began and ground on … and the breaking point came early in 1862 with passage of a conscription law. Every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five was liable for military service. This outraged those who had been opposed to slavery and secession, to the point of riots, evasion and covert resistance. Texas abolitionists and Unionists would be forced to fight in defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body they had opposed. Only a bare handful of men from Gillespie, Kendall and Kerr counties volunteered for service in the Confederate Army throughout 1861 and 1862, although good few more were perfectly willing to serve as state troops protecting the frontier, or in local volunteer companies of Rangers. Anyone who wanted a fight could take on the Indians, without the trouble of going east for military glory.

Before very long, the distinct un-enthusiasm in the Hill Country for the Confederacy and all its works and ways became a matter of deep concern to military and governing authorities. In a way, it was a clash of mind-sets: the German immigrants were innocently certain that the freedom of speech and political thought which they had always enjoyed since coming to Texas were still viable. The pro-Confederate authorities saw such thought and speech as disloyalty, clear evidence of potentially dangerous spies and saboteurs … and acted accordingly. In the spring of 1862, Gillespie and Kerr County was put under harsh martial law. All men over the age of 16 were ordered to register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Few did so – and many never heard of the order, until the state troopers arrived to enforce it, under the command of a peppery, short-tempered former teamster; Captain James Duff.

By summer, Captain Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not taken the loyalty oath. His troopers waged a savage campaign; flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking settler’s homes, arresting whole families, and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush near their homes, while their families smuggled food to them. Frequently parties of Duff’s men assigned to arrest certain men returned empty-handed, with the subject of the arrest warrant left dangling on a rope from a handy tree on the return journey. Four out of six men arrested near Spring Branch in the Pedernales Valley and taken to be interned with other Unionists were summarily lynched when two of them escaped while their guards were asleep. A state trooper serving in the Fredericksburg area at that time remarked, “Hanging is getting to be as common as hunting.” Suspicion followed by repression bred resentment and defiance, which bred violence… and resistance.

(To be continued …)

Nat Love – Cowboy Rock Star

24. July 2012 · Comments Off on Nat Love – Cowboy Rock Star · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , , , ,


Nat Love, who was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1854, went west to Dodge City after the Civil War and cadged work as a wrangler and cowboy. He was already a pretty good rider and bronco-buster, and in a very short time had picked up the other requisite skills – with a six-shooter and lasso, earning the nick-name ‘Deadwood Dick’ through a contest of cowboying skills at a 4th of July celebration in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. He not only won the roping contest, but the the grand prize pot of $200 in the shooting contest. He was a hit with the audience, as well as with his fellow cattle drovers. He cut a striking figure in his star cowboy days; lean, slim-hipped and cocky, with a mop of long black hair to his shoulders, and a wide-brimmed sombrero with the front turned rakishly up – a Jimi Hendrix of the 19th century rodeo.

As a teenager, Nat Love worked the legendary long-trail cattle drives; when Texas cattle ranchers faced with a glut of native long-horned cattle and no other means of making money in the desperate years following the Civil War thought to trail them north to where the transcontinental railroad was slowly creeping across the upper Plains. There, in the open prairies of Kansas, there was no hazard of infecting local farmers’ cattle with tick fever, and for ten years, millions of Texas cows walked north to the stockyards of Abilene, Hays City, Wichita and Dodge City. For a few years he was employed on the Duval ranch, in the western part of the Texas Panhandle – near Palo Duro, the sheltered canyonlands that were last heartland of the wild Comanche.
His autobiography contained many stories of derring-do familiar to aficionados of classic Westerns; accounts of chasing bandits and Indians who had absconded with the best part of a herd of longhorns. On one memorable occasion, when under the influence of something stronger than lemon sarsaparilla, Nat Love tried to lasso and drag away one of the cannons that sat in the open compound at Fort Dodge; he told the astonished soldiers that he wanted to take it back to Texas to fight Indians with. He was one of those who also were enshrined in cowboy legend by riding his horse into a drinking establishment (a Mexican cantina, location unspecified) and grandly ordering drinks for himself … and his horse. He had cleared the way for himself and horse with a splatter of wild shots from his revolver – which rather excited some wholly understandable hostility from the local citizens, and so he had to depart at speed before having a chance to enjoy his drink. He even claimed to have been captured by Pima Indians while working at a ranch in Arizona. In the best tradition of adventure novels, he was thought so much of that he was adopted into the tribe and only made his escape a year later, presumably leaving several broken hearts behind him.

Even if his life as a cowboy had not been all that eventful … and many of his adventures remembered with advantages … it was still a life better suited to a young man. The work itself was physically hard, most of it in the out-of-doors, and not that well-paid. Most working cowboys only did it for a couple of years until something better came along. So after two decades, Nat Love wisely took up a second career. He became a Pullman porter on the railroad; apparently being just as well-respected by his employers and fellows as in his first career … and with more remunerative and regular paychecks. He died of respectable old age in the 1920s, after completing an autobiography which related his gloriously rowdy days as a cowboy.

I read a good few chapters of his autobiography – he comes across as a very appealing person; unusual in his charm and swagger, but not for his color; something like one in seven or eight cowboys were black, one in seven or eight Mexican. An actor like a young Will Smith could have played him, in the early days. There will be a character very like Nat Love in the next book – I promise.

Chapter from the Next Book – The Quivera Trail

24. June 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West

(This will very likely be the next book – tentatively called The Quivera Trail – which follows the experiences of Dolph Becker’s English bride, Isobel. They have married in haste, for all the wrong reasons. She was desperate to escape from her mother, and another endless Season on the marriage market, and he felt sorry for her. But she likes dogs and horses, so they might well make it work … if and when they come to know each other better. And what about Isobel’s loyal young ladies maid, Jane? Will Jane find a life and a love of her own, following her mistress to life on a Texas cattle ranch?)

From Chapter 7 – The Voyage

“’Ere’s the last of the Big Smoke, then!” exclaimed the boy Alf with an enormously satisfied air, as he and Jane followed their employers onto the boat train at Waterloo Station early the next morning. The boat-train platform was awash with departing passengers, many of them bidding such tearful farewells, and burdened with so many trunks and carpet-bags that it was clear to Jane that they were immigrants. Now she sniffed, and Alf added, “Say, Miss G. – ain’t you happy, too? Now, the Missus, she looks like a cat who been at a bowl o’cream this morning!” he nudged Jane with his elbow, and leered suggestively, an expression which set very oddly on his thin little face, “Marriage agree w’er, wot say?”
“You are a disgusting little guttersnipe, Alf,” Jane returned, equably. She had come to know Alf rather better than she would have liked to, being alternately horrified yet somewhat grudgingly sympathetic to the plight of a boy only a little older than her brothers, who never seemed to have had a proper bath, slept in a bed or sat at a table for a good meal until Mr. Becker took him into employment. “And you would never have been allowed to polish the boots in a good household. The only reason the Master hired you is that we’re going to Texas where it doesn’t matter.”
“’E promised horses,” Alf answered; very little of what Jane said to him had the capacity to dent his scrappy self-possession. “Good ‘ousehold, Miss G? I don’t care none for a good ‘ousehold. Wotever the Sir says, that’ll do for Alf Trotter.” Now his countenance practically glowed, the face of a worshipper at a shrine. Jane reflected that of Alf’s qualities, the only remotely endearing one was that his adoration of Mr. Becker was absolute and unswerving. Of all the adults who had passed through Alf’s grubby and chaotic world, Mr. Becker appeared to have been the only one ever to have been kind and generous to him. Now Alf repaid that kindness tenfold with dogged and dog-like devotion.
“To the ends of the earth,” Jane remarked, almost to herself. “He and m’lady have seats in First Class, Alf – we’ll be in Second, of course. When we reach Southampton Station, Alf – you must fetch a porter . . . most of the luggage has already been sent ahead to the Wieland. Oh, I wish they had chosen to sail on a British ship, but the passage had been booked months ago on Hamburg-America . . . Try and behave like a proper servant, Alf. Keep your hands clean; don’t blow your nose on your shirt-sleeve, and only speak when you are spoken to.”
“’Ere, Miss G – is that wot a proper servant does?” Alf looked as if that question had never before occurred to him
“Yes, Alf,” Jane answered, with sudden insight and calculation. “That’s what the Master would want, I think; for you to be a credit to him and to reflect well on his household and m’lady, too.” More »

Old Time General Store

01. June 2012 · Comments Off on Old Time General Store · Categories: Domestic, Old West · Tags: , ,

Visiting the Bergheim General Store and Post Office is a bit like going back in time to what a general mercantile over a hundred years ago. The Bergheim General Store is itself 109 years old; it stocks a a little bit of everything, and everything in it’s place on densely-packed on the shelves. The aisles are narrow, much of the place is erratically lit — in places with neon beer signs. No where is there any shred of conventional 20th century marketing wisdom … nor does there need to be, as there doesn’t seem to be any other retail outlet for ten or fifteen miles in any direction save for the gas station quickie-mart about a block away. So it is the best source for catfish bait, a couple of potatoes, soft drinks, jeans, work cloves, odd bits of hardware, cured sausage, vegetable seeds, a quart of milk and a pair of pliers for all those people who don’t want to drive to Boerne or Bulverde for it. Four generations of the same family have been running the place since 1903, so it’s pretty safe to say that they know what they are doing. Aside from having electricity and air conditioning introduced sometime in the last 109 years, the inside is pretty much as it was when built: plain narrow-board floors, plain whitewashed/painted stone walls. It’s a trip back in time – and I found it very useful in visualing the various general stores that the Becker and Richter families started at the end of the Civil War. And there will be more in the next book, too – about Magda and Hansi’s commercial ventures. I don’t know when I’ll have The Quivera Trail done, but it’s up to eight chapters this week.

« Older articles
Newer articles »