Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

The year of 1862 was a perilous one for those residents of Texas who had opposed the institution of chattel slavery, opposed secession, and finally opposed being forcibly drafted into defending the Confederacy with military service. It was especially perilous for those who were leaders in the various German communities in San Antonio, and in the tidy, well-organized hamlets in the Texas Hill country, those men who had not thought it necessary to guard their tongues when it came to discussing matters political and social. After all, many of them had come from the various German duchies and kingdoms during the two decades previous, deliberately shaking off the dust of the old country and embracing the new one with with passionate enthusiasm. They assumed they had left behind repression, censorship, authoritarian rule, required military service and economic stagnation. They had gained political freedom, good farmland, every kind of economic opportunity … even just the freedom to be left alone, to amuse themselves with harmless cultural pursuits such as competitive choral singing, nine-pin bowling, and community theater.

The German settlers of the Hill Country celebrated the 4th of July with verve … but when it all began to fall apart with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the German communities of Texas carried on; opposing secession when it was voted on, state-wide. Much of the Hill Country then qualified as the frontier anyway; who would want to leave their families alone and undefended against attacks from the Comanche, whose brutality was a byword, all along the frontier, even with the slight shelter of a peace treaty worked out between the southernmost Comanche division some years before? And who would buy their property at a fair price – the land or the enterprises improved or built with fifteen or twenty years of hard labor – if those opposed to secession took up the offer of Jefferson Davis (and the Confederate administration of Texas) to pull up their stakes and leave, if they didn’t support the Confederacy, all it’s works and all it’s ways? They would be cast away, with little money to support their families … no, of those Germans who had been against secession from the beginning, hardly any departed when the War Between the States broke out in earnest. Texas was a long way from the heart of the Confederacy, and the Hill Country a good way (then) from the seat of authority in Texas. Take a chance on hunkering down, staying close to home, keeping calm and carrying on … and hope that no one in authority took notice of you and your inconvenient opinions.

So that strategy worked out for a while – and then it didn’t. A number of well-respected citizens within the German settlements wound up being ‘up on charges’ when certain counties in Texas were declared as being in rebellion against the rebellion. These citizens had been noted as being particularly outspoken … and paid a price for not high-tailing it over the border or into the bush, as many others had done. Brought before a military tribunal in San Antonio in the late summer and autumn of 1862, three men were convicted by the commission and sentenced to be held for the duration of the war; Boerne merchant and former justice of the peace Julius Schlickum, Philip Braubach, formerly the sheriff of Gillespie County, Texas Ranger and militia company officer, and Friedrich Doebbler, also a Gillespie county merchant, the founder of Grapetown, Texas, and volunteer militia officer. The various charges against them are detailed in this account. Essentially, it appears what they were found guilty of by the military tribunal was that they were influential men in their community, their opinions were well-known, and they had been arrested by a militia unit sent specifically into their patch of country to pacify a region seen as being rebellions against the rebellion. One might suspect this was a case of “pour encourager les autres” among the other German Texans inclined to insufficient enthusiasm for the Confederacy. All three were already well-acquainted with each other, and conditions of their confinement were not terribly harsh. They were held under heavy guard in a building near the then-courthouse in San Antonio, but could order their meals from a local hotel and receive visits and gifts from friends, although before his trial, Philip Braubach had suffered the additional indignity of being in chains with cannon-ball weights attached to them. Julius Schlickum was tormented by worry over his wife – who was dangerously ill at the time of his arrest, although being cared for by the family of his good friend and business partner.

He was also a man who planned ahead; and even before his arrest, he had made certain arrangements with a friend ‘for change of air’ was how he put it in a letter to his father back in Germany afterwards. Schlickum notified his friend to set his plan in motion on the night of July 18th, being supplied with weapons for himself and his two friends, and a bottle of whiskey laced with a strong soporific to drug their guards, if neccessary. To his horror, on that very afternoon, his wife came to see him, knowing of his plans and wishing to see him one last time. Fearing that the authorities would suspect her of being involved in the escape, he was on the point of giving it up, but Mrs. Schlickum insisted that he go ahead with it, and not to worry about her.

The escape was set for 1 AM, that time when the guards changed. There were four windows into the room where the three were kept – three of them with guards posted. One door led into an open area facing the guardhouse, the other was supposedly locked and barred – but the prisoners had been able to open it. They slipped away, cocked pistols in their hands and prepared to use them, while the guards were distracted. Outside in the street, two of Schlickum’s friends waited in the shadowed side of the street. Several more friends waited in nearby doorways to cover the escape; not for nothing had all three served as volunteer soldiers. They were prepared to shoot their way out, if necessary. Fortunately it was not; their stealthy departure had not been noticed. They crept away, holding to the shadowy sides of the streets until they were safely outside town.
Someone whistled from the depths of a mesquite thicket – a signal. Schlickum gave the counter-signal, and half a dozen horsemen appeared, leading three spare mounts. They quickly passed around a celebratory bottle of cognac and galloped away. By dawn they had reached a hiding place; a cave in the bank of a dry river-bed, in the middle of dense thickets not more than twenty-five miles from San Antonio. Schlickum’s friends had already staged food and bedding there … and they took away the horses, which would betray their presence. For six weeks, Schlickum, Braubach and Doebbler hid out – never building a fire which would give them away, while the irate authorities fruitlessly turned the territory between San Antonio and the Rio Grande upside down and inside out. The searchers had orders to shoot or hang the fugitives on the spot, if apprehended. Another conveniently placed friend of Schlickum’s – who farmed a little distance away – brought them bread, salt-meat and groceries regularly.

As he had feared, Mrs. Schlickum was accused of assisting her husband and his friends to escape. She was interrogated and threatened, and told not to leave town on pain of having to forfeit a $5,000 bond – but she was not intimidated in the least. Eventually she was allowed to return to their home in Boerne.

Early in September, when the intensity of the search for them had abated somewhat, the three friends were joined by three other German-Texans desirous of a ‘change of air’. After several more adventures, they made it safely over the border into Mexico, where their ways parted. Phillip Braubach organized a Union guerrilla company to wage war along the Rio Grande. In 1864, he made his way to New Orleans and enlisted in a Union cavalry unit – the First Regiment Texas Cavalry. He survived the war, married and returned to Texas. Friedrich Doebbler waited out the war in Mexico and returned to the Hill Country when the war was over. Schlickum intended to return to Germany; in the mean time, he set up in business in Matamoras, and sent for his wife and children to join him. When they finally arrived in the following year, it was only to find that Schlickum had perished of yellow fever.

Taking it into consideration that costs of various foodstuffs appear to be going everywhere but down these days, my household is considering several different strategies as a means of keeping level. Oh, some items have not gone down in price, but the size of the package or the can they are in has certainly … shrunk, and don’t you think we haven’t noticed. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night, not by any means. The garden for seasonal vegetables is one front in this campaign, the ongoing effort to home-can any number of pickles, preserves, pie-fillings and relishes is another. Planting some small fruit-trees along the perimeter of the back fence of Chez Hayes is another. Buying fresh fruit and veg in season, when they are at rock-bottom price per-pound is one more, and buying dry staples and cooking oils in bulk is yet another. At the first of the month, we hit Sam’s Club; restaurant-sized packages of frozen vegetables – we vary the vegetable-type so as to ensure that we always have a good selection in the freezer, since there are always packets left over from the previous month. We keep bulk stocks of staples like twenty or thirty-pound bags of rice, beans, flour and sugar, restaurant-sized bags of macaroni and gallon jugs of cooling oil. We also buy case-lots of the canned goods that we use often; mainly tomatoes, tomato sauce and Rotel brand tomatoes and green peppers. A good few pounds of tea, at any one time – the Wagh Bakri international blend, at the local Asian food store is what we like. It makes a morning cuppa strong enough – as Grannie Dodie used to say – strong enough to trot a mouse over. All this somewhat reduces the cost per unit, which is pleasing … and there’s always something on hand to make an appetizing meal from. This makes my inner Explorer Scout very, very happy.

And bricks of cheeses – again, slightly varying every month. What I like to have a stash of in the fridge is enough different varieties to make just about anything that I would like to make for supper which has cheese as an ingredient; bricks of cheddar, mozzarella, jack, feta, smaller bricks of Emmenthal and parmesan … sometimes we made the dinner decision on the spur of the moment. Butter, cream, sour cream and yoghurt also figure prominently on the refrigerator shelves. We have also tried to establish the habit of hitting Granzin’s Meat Market in New Braunfels at or around the beginning of the month, and laying out about thirty or forty dollars each for hefty quantities of what we know we will use during the month; chicken breasts and quarters, hamburger in the five-pound family pack, beef ribs, ground turkey, pork chops and an assortment of Granzin’s made-in-the-store sausages. Granzin’s is an old-fashioned kind of place – yes, they do have groceries, but the meat counter is about half-a-block long, everything is superior in quality and at a good price. We also have plenty of meat left over at the end of month. Yes, that’s deliberate, too. The prices of beef and pork are likely to go up, although if the power ever goes out for a week we will be so screwed!
One of the other food-stashes is my daughter’s particular interest; from cruising the marked-down shelves at the grocery store, where they sometimes have bottled sauces, or mixes of faintly exotic items that we wouldn’t have bought at full price. Usually these are items nearing their ‘best-if-sold-by’ date … it’s an eccentric assortment, but handy for added-on seasoning. Note – best if sold by does not come anywhere near equal to ‘best if consumed by.’

Other items on hand in the well-stocked pantry? Seasonings, of course; herbs, spices and flavored vinegars. Many of the herbs come out of the garden, but there are always back-ups in small sealed jars in the pantry. Vinegars – an assortment of them, in quarts and jugs and small bottles; everything from pickling vinegar to the best syrupy balsamic of Modena. (Yes, a handy score from the marked-down shelf, and lovely stuff it is, too, measured out by the drop.)
Of course, there are still some items we should add to the bulk foodstuff inventory; honey, for one, and perhaps some more sealed containers of dried milk and emergency water. But at the moment, we cruise pretty finely through meal-times – and the side benefit is that we only rarely have to hit the grocery store upon considering the dinner menu. Right now, it’s for fresh vegetables and fruits only – and when the garden begins to bear, that chore will be reduced even more. In some ways, I think we are approaching a rather more 19th century frame of mind when it comes to putting by … just in case of that hard winter or zombie apocalypse or something.

You know, I will run a mile from the currently-popular princess stuff … but this artist is doing it with Mucha style. Alphonse Mucha, that is … turn of the last century French commercial posters … yes, that Alphonse Mucha. I did pay attention in the required college art appreciation classes, you know.

Main Plaza today, with San Fernando Cathedral

That is what they were called in towns and cities in Spain – the main plaza or town square, which served as the center of civic life, around which were ranged the important civic buildings, the biggest church; this the regular market place, the assembly area for every kind of public spectacle imaginable over the centuries. Every plaza mayor in every Spanish town is alike and yet different; different in size and shape, and in the confirmation of the buildings around it. Some are bare and paved in cobbles, and some have trees and gardens in them now. This custom carried over into the New World, and San Antonio is no exception. The town as originally laid out early in the 18th century was more or less in the shape of a cross, outlined by four intersecting streets, incorporating a large square with the church (later cathedral) of San Fernando in the center of it. This essentially split the plaza into equal halves – Main and Military plazas. The oldest streets in town – Soledad and Lasoya, Navarro, Dolorosa and the road which led out past the mission across the river, the Alameda – now East Commerce – are the heart of historic San Antonio. Well, that and the old mission, out at the then-edge of town and over a loop of the San Antonio River. The house belonging to the commander of the Spanish presidio’s garrison – which may have been the largest of the early dwellings – occupied part of the western boundary of Military Plaza. Late in the 19th century, San Antonio’s city hall would take up much of the center, where once soldiers had drilled, and General Lopez de Santa Anna’s soldiers had bivouacked. The Bexar county courthouse would take up another side of Main Plaza – but not until the Plaza had been the center of life for San Antonio de Bexar for more than a century.

It is a curiously restful place, these days, considering that invading and resident armies fought over San Antonio and around the Plaza several times. A momentous peace treaty between the residents of Spanish Texas and the eastern Apache was marked by a formal (and one assumes eventually rather raucous) ceremony in the Plaza involving the ritual burial of weapons of war … including a live horse, while the Apaches and the Bexarenos danced in celebratory circles. The catastrophic failure of 1842 peace negotiations with the Comanche at the Council House – a civic building on the Plaza set aside for that sort of thing – led to a running bloody fight in the streets and gardens of San Antonio and more than three decades of bitter warfare with the Comanche. The first stagecoach to arrive from the east stopped in the Plaza – the first commercial hotel was there. At the very beginning of the Civil War, according to some stories, a senior U.S. Army officer commanding the Department of Texas was unceremoniously hustled from his residence on the Plaza by Confederate sympathizers, taken to the edge of town and told in no uncertain terms to leave at once. As the story has it, the officer had voiced it as his opinion that assisting in a Texas withdrawal from the Union would betray the principles of the Founding Fathers. In a private letter, the officer had condemned the so-called Cotton States for a selfish and dictatorial bearing, and for wanting to re-establish the commerce in slaves from Africa. Kidnapped or not, Colonel Robert E. Lee went to spend some quiet quality time at the cavalry post at Fort Mason, before returning back East and withdrawing his services from the U.S. Army upon the secession of his home state of Virginia from the Union.

Everything happening in San Antonio until the arrival of the railway tended to happen in the Plaza Mayor; a lively and eccentric community split into three different ethnicities by the mid-19th century, as Frederick Law Olmsted realized during his visit to Texas in the mid-1850s.
One of the local peculiarities which Olmsted and other visitors noted were the numbers of open-air restaurants – moveable feasts in various public squares, beginning with the most august of them – the ancient Military Plaza – local cooks, most but not all Hispanic – set up tables and benches, and cook-kettles full of chili simmering over mesquite-wood fires. Local musicians played – often hired by the proprietresses to entice patrons … as if the taste of peppery meat and bean stew for hungry patrons wasn’t enough. The picturesque spectacle of the ‘Chili Queens’ tables – as they would come to be known – enchanted locals and travelers well into the 20th century. Imagine – good, simple – and tasty food – all eaten in the open air. The after-sundown breeze rustles the leaves of the trees fringing the swift-flowing San Antonio River, oil and kerosene lanterns flicker, the musicians play, while stars sparkle in the sky overhead and the evening business of certain establishments spill out into the relative cool of a South Texas evening …yes – that would be a draw, especially to people accustomed to cooler and less highly-spiced localities. The popularity of things like canned chili and specialty chili seasonings came about when an enterprising cook and owner of a saloon and beer garden in New Braunfels – Willie Gebhardt – developed a process for making and packaging a dried seasoning powder – chili powder. Up until then, the chili had been a local and seasonal specialty, but Gebhardt’s process, which preserved the flavor of the chili peppers, and which he sold himself from the back of a wagon, grew into a million-dollar business and inadvertently popularized Mexican food … including chili … when his company published a small cookbook instructing cooks who were unfamiliar with Tex-Mex cuisine in how to use his product.
From civic architecture – to chili powder; how eccentric is that?

Just this week and thanks to gaining a new book-publishing client, I was able to complete the purchase of a new refrigerator-freezer. Oh, the old one was staggering along OK, still keeping the refrigerated foods cold and the frozen food frozen … but there were so many dissatisfactions with it, including the fact that it had such deep shelves that in cleaning it out we discovered an embarrassingly large number of jars of condiments whose best-if-sold-by-date were well into the previous decade … not to mention a couple of Rubbermaid containers with leftovers in them that we had quite forgotten about. Well, out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. Truly, I don’t like to waste leftovers, but in this case, we had a good clean-out and as of now are resolved to do better, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die. The new and larger refrigerator-freezer has relatively shallow and many adjustable shelves in its various compartments; so that we dearly hope that the buried-at-the-back-of-a-deep-shelf-and-totally-forgotten-about syndrome will be banished entirely.

Anyway – enough of my failings as a thrifty housekeeper; the thing that I was marveling on this afternoon was that the new refrigerator-freezer has an automatic ice-maker. Better than that – an automatic ice-maker and ice-water dispenser in the door, and a small light which winks on when depressing the lever which administers ice (in cubes or crushed) and ice-water and then gradually dims once released. And if all that is a small luxury compared to the previous refrigerator-freezer, it is a huge luxury compared to the electric ice-box that made my Granny Jessie’s work and food-storage capabilities somewhat lighter than those of her own mother. It’s monumental, even – and no one thinks anything of it today, unless the electricity goes off.
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