Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

It is a country of dreams, fragile pavilions, airy courtyards, and meticulously planted gardens, cool trickling fountains and pools, refuges from the harsh summer heat of Southern Spain, that the Moors called Al-Andalus. In this country the bougainvillea vines make a splash of dark red or electrical magenta against whitewashed plaster walls, and curved roof tiles of a peculiar faded hue, somewhere between rose pink and honey. In the afternoon, the cicadas make a churring sound in the oleanders in the great enclosed garden of the citadel of the Alhambra high on the Albaicin hill, in the city of Granada.

The place seems deserted of people, only my daughter and I exploring the paths where the white dust settles softly in our footprints as we pass. Behind us is the ruined citadel of the Alcazaba, the fortress looking out over the city below, and the sprawling palace complex of towers and courts, whispering with myrtle leaves and the trickle of water. The Patio of Myrtles – the Comares Tower, the Hall of the Ambassadors, its interior walls covered with a fine tracery of intricate plaster lace. Our footsteps fall with a faint scuffing sound on the stone floors. The Lions’ Court, water bubbling from a great stone basin, born up on the backs of oddly stylized, almost Chinese-looking stone lions, at the center of a forest of slender pillars, branching into more elaborate arching trees of plaster filigree. To me it is a wonderland, a place of enchantment, but something about the rooms opening into the Lion’s Court creeps out my daughter. She feels a sense of oppression, the whisper of something bad having happened there, and runs ahead. I follow, doing my best to drink it all in, the fabled rooms and gardens, loggia and court. There was the Queen’s mirador, a tower with an airy latticed window, once with a view into the town below- all ornamented with plasterwork, with tile and magnificent woodwork, the last grand flowering of the Moorish kings in Spain, their paradise on earth, planted with flowers and shrubs to make a living carpet, ornamental trees swaying gracefully in the cool breeze. Boabdil, the last king of Granada, departed in 1491, asking of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs that the gate out of which he left be stopped up and never used again. At the head of the pass leading down towards the sea, he looked back at his glorious citadel and wept.

Granada, the last remnant of Moorish control on the Iberian Peninsula. Once, at the peak of power and glory, the great dynasties—the Umayyad, and after them the Almoravids and the Almohads held all but Asturias in the far north-west, and went over the Pyrenees as far as Tours before being pushed back by Charles Martel. Moorish rulers held the great cities of Toledo, Cordoba, Seville; shining beacons of learning and culture in the darkness of the European Middle ages. Gloriously adorned with gardens, running water, street-lighting, Cordoba boasted subtle philosophers, learned doctors of medicine, poets and mathematicians, and an atmosphere of toleration that drew on the finest scholars from all three religious traditions. Abd-al-Rahman III, who held supremacy as the Caliph of Cordoba built himself a great palace outside the city, called the Medinat-al-Zahra – palace, garrison and city all at once, splendid and sprawling – as glittering and ultimately as fragile as a blown glass sculpture. It existed only a bare half-century as the Versailles of Iberia, before it was razed nearly to the ground, and the Caliphate collapsed into a muddle of warring city states. The Christian Reconquest slowly gathered, retaking Toledo by the 11th century, brought to a glorious conclusion by Ferdinand and Isabella in this very city, in the shimmering fairy-tale palace that my daughter and I now explored. Within a few years and decades many others followed King Boabdil into exile, probably many of them looking one last time over their shoulders and weeping for that lost paradise, that splendid dream that was no longer theirs. The exiles took skills, intellect and trade contacts with them, and Spain glittered for a while, and then grew moribund, rigid, overtaken in intellectual, industrial and mercantile energy by other countries.

But some still dream, of colonnaded gardens, and fountains of clear water from the snow-melt of the Sierra Nevada, and of taking back the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, caring little that what made it so, was liberty from religious orthodoxy, and the free exchange of ideas, in the courtyards of Cordoba and Toledo, with the blossoms of orange trees perfuming the twilight air.

I am not quite sure when I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels; it was sometime in my teens. The public library had several copies of Rider on a White Horse, which I thought immediately was the most perfectly evocative historical fiction ever, knocking such lesser lights like Gone With the Wind effortlessly into the shade. Besides, I was a Unionist and an abolitionist; and I thought Scarlett was a spoiled, self-centered brat and Melanie a spineless simpleton and I usually wanted to throw GWTW across the room so hard that it banged against the opposite wall when Margaret Mitchell began complaining about Northern abolitionists. Anyway, the only book that came close to Rider was Sutcliff’s adult Arthurian novel – Sword at Sunset. This was the book that had me dragging my poor younger brother and sister to every significant site of Rome in Britain, the summer that we spent there. Here and now I apologize here for dragging them to the remains of Galava Roman Fort, near Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1976 it was on the map, a clear and distinct quadrangle … but when we went to see it then, there was nothing but some shaped rocks edging a grassed-over stretch of ditch in a field full of cows. A thing of less interest could hardly be imagined … but I wanted to see it, anyway, being haunted by the sense that Sutcliff conveyed in Sword at Sunset and in books like Lantern Bearers – that of men and women who were living at the end of things, among the half-crumbled ruins of a great and dying empire, wistfully seeing all the evidence around that things had been better, greater, grander once, and now they weren’t – and wishing there was something that could be done to call those days back again.

“…we clattered under the gate arch into Narbo Martius, and found the place thrumming like a bee swarm with the crowds pouring in to the horse fair. It must have been a file place once, one could see that even now; the walls of the forum and basilica still stood up proudly above the huddle of reed thatch and timber, with the sunset warm on peeling plaster and old honey-colored stone; and above the heads of the crowds the air was full of the darting of swallows who had their mud nests under the eaves of ever hut and along every ledge and acanthus-carved cranny of the half-ruined colonnades…” That’s from an early chapter, describing a visit to the horse fair at present-day Narbonne. Another chapter describes the arrival of Artos and his companions at Hadrian’s Wall.

“It must have been a fine sight in its day, the Wall, when the sentries came and went along the rampart walks and bronze-mailed cohorts held the fortress towers and the altars to the Legion’s gods were thick along the crest; and between it and the road and the vallum ditch that followed it like its own shadow … the towns were as dead as the Wall, now, for the menace of the North was too near, the raids too frequent for them to have outlived the protection of the Eagles; and we rode into a ghost town, the roofs long since fallen in and the walks crumbling away, the tall armies of nettles where the merchants had spread their wares and the Auxiliaries had taken their pleasure in off-duty hours, where the married quarters had been, and children and dogs had tumbled in the sunshine under the very feet of the marching cohorts, and the drink shops had spilled beery song into the night, and the smiths and sandalmakers, the horse dealers and the harlots had plied their trades; and all that moved was a blue hare among the fallen gravestones of forgotten men, and above us a hoodie crow perching on the rotting carcass of what had once been one of the great catapults of the Wall, that flew off croaking with a slow flap of indignant wings as we drew near…”

Sutcliff’s revisioning of King Arthur as Artos, the half-British, half-Roman cavalry commander, with his company of fighting horsemen – spelled out to me what it could be like; selling your lives dear to hold back the darkness for just a little longer, a long fight in twilight among crumbling ruins, with men and women who half-remembered the ways and habits of an older age. Sutcliff’s Artos and his comrades – they picked their hill, their Badon Hill and made their stand. They valued those ways and the memories of those institutions handed down, more than they valued their own lives, for living under the yoke of barbarian raiders … meant nothing at all. Better to die on your feet as free men and women, than live in chains … and to make the choice while it is yours to make.

I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be;
You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,
I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer.
To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,
Yet ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why! –

From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida

I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England – three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books – walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.

Ah, well – the Muse of History records mercilessly and without particular favor … although she does seem to favor the literate and those with a basic grasp of favorable marketing. She will have her ways with her humble devotees.

The historical character which I developed such an immediate and thoroughgoing dislike for was one John Robert Baylor: he is not the Baylor that Baylor University is named after. That Baylor was his uncle, Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor; a dedicated and relatively harmless Baptist minister, judge and politician, as well a co-founder of the university. John Baylor was another and completely unappetizing kettle of fish entirely. He  managed – in the middle of the Civil War – to be sacked from his relatively high and responsible position as the Confederate Governor of Arizona Territory, and to have his commission as an officer in the Confederate Army revoked. I read about him first in Alvin Josephy’s The Civil War in the American West, where the action that he proposed in time of war was considered to be so vile and unacceptable to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate high command … that he instantly became a military untouchable. What could have been so horrible, so beyond the limits of what was considered acceptable in fighting for the Confederacy that it cost Baylor so dearly?

To begin to grasp an explanation one need to know a little about Baylor. Like many of his contemporaries in Texas, he had come there as a relatively young man of eighteen years, after the death of his Army surgeon father. In 1840, John Baylor and his brother settled on a farm near LaGrange owned by their uncle. Almost immediately he began participating in the local mounted militia company, defending the settlers against constant, bloody raids by Comanche Indians. The depredations of the Comanche on the Anglo settlers and Mexican alike were horrific – sufficient indeed to engender a considerable amount of hatred for them on the part of those who fought against them. But Baylor’s unvarnished and indiscriminant hatred of Indians seems to have been extreme even among his fellow militiamen and Rangers. Texians frequently depended upon Indian allies such as the Tonkawa, the Cherokee and the Delaware. A fair number of them observed the distinctions between tribes, divisions and even individuals, inclined to walk the path of peace and those who were not. Sam Houston himself was especially a partisan of the Cherokee, John O. Meusebach, leader among the German settlements along the frontier even negotiated a successful peace treaty between his settlers and the Southern, or Penateka Comanche. Robert Neighbors worked tirelessly to ensure the safety and security of such individuals and bands who were willing to follow the Cherokee example to settle down, and John ‘Rip’ Ford recruited fighters among the Tonkawa, Anadarko and Shawnee for an 1858 punitive expedition into the heart of Comancheria.

But John Baylor was of a different ilk – and not just because of a couple of narrow escapes. He arrived too late for the great Plum Creek fight, where companies of Rangers and mounted militiamen ambushed Buffalo Hump and his Penateka band after the sack of Linville. And he was a member of Nicholas Mosby Dawson’s company, come from La Grange in answer to Mathew ‘Old Paint’ Caldwell’s plea for volunteers to beat back the Mexican Army expedition which briefly took San Antonio in 1842. John Baylor somehow became separated from the main body of Dawson’s men, and so was not there when Dawson’s company was overrun and all but exterminated by the retreating Mexican force. Upon that narrow escape, he settled for a while in Oklahoma Territory, at Fort Gibson and took a job as a teacher – but it didn’t last long. He was charged as an accomplice when his brother-in-law murdered a local Indian trader, and hopped it back to Texas. By 1851 he had settled down somewhat to a life of farming and ranching, married and was elected to the legislature. In mid-decade, Baylor was appointed as Indian Agent to those Comanche who had settled on the Clear Fork Reservation. It was not a successful appointment, for he clashed bitterly and constantly with his supervisor, Robert Neighbors, who had long been a champion of Indians and had worked tirelessly to defend them. Baylor also accused several of the Reservation Indians of conniving with their non-settled brethren in carrying out raids. The area around the Reservation on the Clear Fork was rich land and was becoming settled by white men. When they were raided by Comanche, they blamed the Reservation Indians; some accounts have it that the raiders were quite pleased to leave tracks and evidence framing the Reservation Indians. On being relieved as Indian agent, Baylor took up an anti-Indian crusade; he traveled extensively across the settlements of Northern Texas, preaching hatred of Indians … all Indians, regardless of tribe or peaceful intent. He edited an anti-Indian newspaper and recruited vigilantes. He feuded viciously with Robert Neighbors and campaigned for his replacement and Indian Agent.

Late in December, seventeen peaceful Anadarko and Caddo Indians were attacked by white vigilantes as they slept. Although identified by name, the murderers were never tried. By 1859 it was clear that the Clear Fork Indians would be slaughtered if they remained in Texas and Baylor was chiefly responsible for the situation, in continuing to throw rhetorical kerosene on an already blazing bonfire. Those surviving Indians on the Clear Fork Reservation were evacuated to a new reserve in Indian Territory. Robert Neighbors and three companies of Federal troops accompanied them there. On his return, Robert Neighbors went to file his report on the matter at Fort Belknap, and was murdered there by a local man who disagreed with Neighbor’s advocacy of the Indian’s rights.

John Baylor doubtless felt himself vindicated. With secession and the fortunes of the new Confederate States riding high, he shortly found himself as the commander of the Second Texas Rifles, with a mission to secure the overland route to the west. In short order he had captured Mesilla, forced the surrender of Union troops at Fort Fillmore, and established the Confederate Territory of Arizona, with himself as governor. It was one of whose early Confederate victories which gave overwhelming overconfidence to those who had championed secession and the military virtues of the Southern cavalier … but very soon, Baylor ran into trouble. He might have gotten the Union soldiers to surrender easily enough, but his old bête noir – Indians – were another matter. The various Apache tribes were every bit as adept at warfare as the Comanche. At the start of the war, an outbreak of Apache raids had forced the Butterfield Stage line to cease operations. The Apache were in no way inclined to make common cause with the Confederacy against the Union, on the principle of an enemy of an enemy being a friend. The Union Army had all but withdrawn from that part of the southwest. Impulsive, proud and intemperate in deeds and words, Baylor does not seem the kind of man who could deal tactfully and efficiently with a fluid and complicated situation. Proof of that is in what happened when Robert P. Kelley the pro-Confederate editor of the Mesilla Times criticized him repeatedly in in a series of articles. Baylor took violent exception – so violent that it came to physical blows. Kelley was so badly injured in this frank exchange of opinions that he died as a result of them, some days later.

But there is more. Baylor’s command was so harassed by Apache raids and by their inability to do anything effective about them, that he wrote a letter to one of his subordinates, directing him to take certain actions against the Apaches.  “I learn that the Indians have been to your post for the purpose of making a treaty,” Baylor wrote. “The Congress of the Confederate States have passed a law declaring extermination of all hostile Indians. You will therefore use all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together, kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them to defray the expense of killing the Indians.”  There were also reports of Baylor ordering that poisoned foodstuffs be given to Indians – but the contents of this letter became known to Jefferson Davis and his government. They had never ordered any such actions be taken, and as far as is known none of his orders with respect to exterminating Apache Indians were carried out. But the scandal was immense; as a matter of record, Davis had been trying for allies among the Oklahoma Indian tribes. Baylor was sacked from his office as military governor and his officer’s commission revoked. He appealed the decision, but Davis stood his ground.

Baylor did return to Texas, where he was later elected to the Second Confederate Congress. He served the remainder of the war as a private, regaining a commission only at the end of it. He ended his days as a rancher, near Montell, Texas. He ran unsuccessfully for the office of governor in the 1870s … which seems to have been a fortunate decision on the part of the voters. He continued to have a reputation as a man with a violent temper; he is supposed to have killed a man in a feud over livestock and been involved in at least one gunfight. Surprisingly, he lived to the age of 71 and died of natural causes.

I am almost sure that telling a historical story through a movie is fraught with as many perils for the story-teller as doing so through the medium of historical fiction – it’s just that the movie-maker’s pratfalls are so much more … public, I guess is the word that I’m fishing for. There are big-name, serious historical fiction writers who abuse history almost beyond recognition in their attempt to weave a tale of the past – Philippa Gregory, anyone? – but to my mind, the really, really egregious mainstream offenses are committed in the service of movie-making. I was reminded of this again, in reading yet another 100-year-anniversary-of-the-Titanic sinking, and how James Cameron had to apologize to the descendants of First Officer William Murdoch for the manner in which Murdoch’s character was maligned and his fate dramatized in Titanic … all in the service of punching up the drama a couple of degrees. Which was really not necessary, since – like most dramatic historical episodes – a strict accounting of the facts usually provides all the drama required. But Cameron isn’t the only movie-maker guilty of over-egging the pudding and re-making the characters of participants in events to suit the need for higher drama. The movie Zulu – also based on a supremely dramatic incident – felt obliged to portray one of the participants in the battle of Rorke’s Drift as an insubordinate drunkard and a malingerer. The man was actually a teetotaler and a model professional soldier, and his then still-living daughters were outraged, to the point of walking out of the premiere. The mega-flopperoo Heaven’s Gate did the same with Nate Champion, Jim Averill, and Frank Canton – real participants in the historical Johnson County war, but not quite as how they were drawn. I suppose the funniest take on the clash between historical accuracy and the needs of cinematic spectacle must be the old Alan Alda movie, Sweet Liberty.

Anyway – it’s a problem, using the names of real people, and it just seems to be worse with movies. Curiously, the worst offenders that I can think of make a great big deal about their fidelity to historical accuracy, but usually that means they will try very, very, very hard to nail down small details; the general appearance of things, but trip and fall over plot points as well as character development. I’m still shaking my head over Mel Gibson’s The Patriot – heck, they even scored a cover story about their fidelity to historical accuracy in The Smithsonian Magazine. At least, though – they had the decency to change all the names of the characters. The Patriot was only inspired by the adventures of certain historical characters in the American Revolution; mercifully, they didn’t even try to do an accurate rendering of the adventures of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox.

And that is the honest and ethical thing to do when re-telling a historical story in a novel or a movie; if it would have been impossible for a historical figure to have done, or said, or behaved in way that advances the plot, then one is perfectly free to make up a character to carry out those functions. Just be absolutely straight with the real people. Always. The thing about it is – just telling the story absolutely straight is often more dramatic, improbable and fantastic than anything you might have made up.

Some time ago, as I was putting together the short story, Atalanta and the Erlking I was reminded yet again again of my own grade-school devotion to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books. My heroine is a thirteen-year-old girl, in the Texas Hill country during the Civil War, taking the first few steps toward being a responsible adult, in caring for her younger sister and friends, and bearing a warning to other households in the tiny settlement where she lives about the depredations of the ‘hanging band’, a pro-Confederate lynch mob. Much of the background activities in the story – cutting wood, making soap over an open fire – are all drawn from my memories of reading the Little House books. I have all of them, of course, from the hard-bound uniform editions that were published in the 1960ies, with Garth Williams’ illustrations. All of mine are sadly battered, and minus the dust jackets, but with flyleaf inscriptions in Mom’s handwriting; a present to me on my 8th birthday, a Christmas present in 1964, or 1965. Over five or six years, I acquired them one and two at a time, and read them avidly, often in one sitting. Little Town on the Prairie was the first, and is the most completely tattered. I think I got The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years next, at one fell swoop for my birthday, and then Mom and Dad filled out the collection with Farmer Boy and the others.

Mom had also been a fan. The books were originally published when she was in grade school, and her class had written a group fan letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was still then living, and she had sent them a very cordial reply, befitting a very proper Victorian school teacher. Later on, Mom tried emulating Ma, in being always calm and serene no matter what the situation, with mixed success as that degree of passive Victorian “Angel in the House” serenity was very much against her nature to begin with.

I read them out of sequence, as I received them as presents, and afterwards over and over and over again. I still hold the books (but not the TV series, which was marred by the constraints imposed by a weekly need for drama and irredeemable presentism) in considerable affection. Looking back now, though, one does wonder a little bit about Pa. Even allowing for Mrs. Wilder’s nostalgic affections, how on earth could a man make a bust of farming in Minnesota, for pete’s sake? And rushing out to stake a claim in a territory not yet open for settlement, and which turned out not to be, after all? It is not even certain that the books were entirely of her own writing, either. The Little House books are so different, much more immediate in the telling, and deft in the descriptions and characterization than those writings known absolutely to be by Mrs. Wilder. That was plain to me as soon as I had a chance to compare and contrast- say, by high school. As soon as the theory was raised by her biographer, I thought it quite likely that Rose Wilder Lane, a professional writer of long experience, had polished, added to and edited her mother’s memoir.

The books spoke to us, to Mom and I both. After all, when they were first published, the details of lives on the frontier in the 1870ies were in the living memory of grandparents, and even parents; Granny Jessie had been raised on a farm, where horses provided the main power, when pigs were slaughtered in the fall, for meat to last the winter, and it was expected that a housewife would make her own clothes and her own jam, and for the family to make their own music and entertainment of an evening. Wood burning stoves, kerosene lanterns and outhouses were, and are still a part of life in many parts of the country. My own Dad fixed things, and built things, just like Pa. Mom read to us, and made our clothes, and we sang long folksongs together – just like the Ingalls family did.

And even though they had lived in what was always seen as the Old West (and everything I ever knew about blizzards and the dangerous attraction of pump handles in mid-winter, I learned from the books) this was an Old West that was not the wild and wooly frontier of so much popular culture: although there were brief encounters with elements that are supposed to be typical (cattle drives, Indians, lawlessness and violence) most of the narrative is concerned with the prosaic business of making a life for a family, in the face of dangers more natural than man-made; blizzards, prairie fires, tornadoes, drought and plagues of grasshoppers, malaria and scarlet fever. Oh, and the problem of being snubbed at school by the girls with nicer clothes, and trying to keep a surprise Christmas present a secret, in a small house.

The Little House books still speak to us, because in that American way, they are profoundly optimistic. The common message running through all the books is that of being able to cope with whatever was set in your way, no matter how large or small: You yourself, your family, with your friends, and the community could do what needed to be done to resolve the problem, no matter if it was a bad-tempered teacher picking on your little sister, or the entire town snowed in and near starvation. There was a solution, sometimes a hard, and risky solution, requiring courage and daring –  but there was a solution, and it could be accomplished. This is a very empowering message, which I think explains the enduring appeal.