Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

 It was always hoped, among the rebellious Anglo settlers in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas that a successful bid for independence from the increasingly authoritarian and centralist government of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna would be followed promptly by annexation by the United States. Certainly it was the hope of Sam Houston, almost from the beginning and possibly even earlier – just as much as it was the worst fear of Santa Anna’s on-again off-again administration. Flushed with a victory snatched from between the teeth of defeat at San Jacinto, and crowned with the capture of Santa Anna himself, the Texians anticipated joining the United States.

But it did not work out – at least not right away. First, the then-president Andrew Jackson did not dare extend immediate recognition or offer annexation to Texas, for to do so before Mexico – or anyone else – recognized Texas as an independent state would almost certainly be construed as an act of war by Mexico. The United States gladly recognized Texas as an independent nation after a decent interval, but held off annexation for eight long years. It was political, of course – the politics of abolition and slavery, the bug-bear of mid 19th century American politics. Texas had been largely settled by southerners, who had been permitted to bring their slaves. Texas, independent or not, was essentially a slave state, although there were never so many slaves in Texas as there were in other and more long-established states. Large scale agriculture in Texas – rice, sugar and cotton – was not so dependent upon the labor of large work gangs. Most households who owned slaves owned only a relative handful, and curiously, many slaves hired out and worked for wages in skilled or semi-skilled trades. But even so; they were still slaves, owned, traded and purchased as surely as any livestock.

By the 1830s the matter of chattel slavery, ‘the peculiar institution’ as it was termed – was a matter beginning to roil public thinking, as the adolescent United States spilled over the Appalachians and began filling in those rich lands east of the Mississippi, and in the upper Midwest. Slowly and gradually what had been a private, ethical choice about the use of slave labor began to have political and social ramifications. Would slavery be allowed in newly acquired territories and states? And if so – where? The rift between those who held slavery to morally insupportable, a crime against humanity, and those who held to be economically necessary and even a social benefit was just beginning to divide what had been fractiously united since the end of the Revolution – a Revolution that still green in living memory. But in 1838, the practice of slavery in Texas put a stop to Texas’ inital essay in annexation: Northern Abolitionists, led by John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts filibustered the first resolution of annexation to death, in a speech that allegedly lasted 22 days. In the bitterly-fought elections of 1844, Henry Clay of the Whigs opposed annexation mightily, Democrat James Polk came out in favor . . . but in the meantime – from that first rejection, until 1846, the Republic of Texas treaded water. Sam Houston, who favored annexation, was formally elected to the Presidency of the Republic. He and his scratch army had won the war of independence, extracted concessions and a peace treaty from General Santa Anna, and briskly settled down to conduct the business of the state in the manner which they had wished to do all along. Unfortunately, Texas was poor in everything but land, energy and hopeful ambition . . . and plagued with enemies on two fronts. Sam Houston would have to manage on a shoe-string, to fight off resentful Mexico, ever-ready to create trouble for the colony which had escaped it’s control, find allies and recognition among the Europeans . . . and either defeat or make a peace with the relentless and aggressive Comanche. His government was funded by customs duties on imported goods, license fees and land taxes. A bond issue was initiated, which would have redeemed Texas finances and paid existing debts, – unfortunately, the bonds went on the market just as the United States was enduring a depression and Houston’s term as president came to an end. He could not serve a consecutive term.

His vice-president, successor in office and eventual adversary, Mirabeau Lamar had more grandiose ambitions, apparently believing with a whole heart that Texas could and ought to be a genuinely independent nation. His goals were only exceeded by his actual lack of administrative experience. Lamar wanted to pursue foreign loans, foreign recognition, a strong defense, never mind begging for annexation, expelling the Cherokee from east Texas and settling the hash of the Comanche by any means necessary. He also set out the foundations of public education in Texas by setting aside a quantity of public land in each county to support public schools, and another quantity for the establishment of two universities. Lamar rebuilt the Army, and he established a new and hopefully permanent capitol city for Texas, at Austin on the upper Colorado River – at the center of the claimed territories, but in actuality on the edge of the frontier; excellent ambitions, all – but without any kind of solid funding, doomed to failure. Finally, an ill-planned expedition to route the profitable Santa Fe trade through Texas succeeded only in reigniting a running cold war with Mexico.

All of these disasters put an end to Lamar’s plans, and left Texas with more than $600 million in public debt. Sam Houston, elected again as president of the republic, kept his cards as close to his vest as he ever had done in the long brutal retreat of the Runaway Scrape. This was the time of Mexican incursions into the lowlands around Goliad, Victoria and San Antonio under Vazquez and Woll, the ill-fated Mier Expedition . . . and while sometimes it seemed that Houston was being damned on one side for not making effective peace with Mexico, and on the other for not making vigorous war. But Houston was playing a deeper game, during the final years of his second term; he was having another go at annexation, only this time going at it indirectly. The British had recognized Texas as an independent nation in mid-1842. British diplomats were attempting to mediate between Mexico and Texas (this was following upon military incursions into Texas by the Mexican Army) and British mercantile interests were most ready, willing and able to support trade relations with the Texas market: manufactured goods for cotton. Houston instructed his minister in Washington to reject any approaches regarding annexation, as it might upset those new relationships with the British; to talk up those relationships extensively, and in fact, to raise the possibly that Texas might become a British protectorate. What he was doing, as he explained in a letter to a close confidant, was like a young woman exciting the interest and possessive jealousy of the man she really wanted, by flirting openly with another. This put a whole new complexion on the annexation matter, as far as the United States was concerned – no doubt aided by the fact that the clear winner of the 1844 presidential elections was Democrat James Polk. Polk’s campaign platform had included annexation of Texas, and sitting President John Tyler – who had been a quiet supporter of that cause as well, decided to recommend that Congress annex Texas by joint resolution.

The resolution offered everything that Houston had wanted – and was accepted by special convention of the Texas Congress. The formal ceremony took place on February 19th, 1846, in the muddy little city of Austin on the Colorado: Houston had already been replaced as President by Dr. Anson Jones. In front of a large crowd gathered, Jones turned over political authority to the newly-elected governor, and shook out the ropes on the flagstaff to lower the flag of the Republic for the last time – and to raise the Stars and Stripes of the United States. “The final act in this great drama is now performed – the Republic of Texas is no more.” When the Lone Star flag came down, Sam Houston was the one who stepped forward to gather it up in his arms. It was an unexpectedly moving moment for the audience; it had been a long decade since San Jacinto, interesting in the sense of the old Chinese curse; no doubt many of them were as nostalgic as they were relieved to have those exciting times at an end. But history does not end. Sam Houston would have his heart broken fifteen years later, when Texas secceded from the Union on the eve of the Civil War.

 You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

The English visitor, a lawyer and pamphleteer named Nicholas Doran Maillard landed up in Texas early in 1840, when the Republic of Texas had just achieved four years of perilous existence . . . and inadvertently provided the means for an exception to Humbert Wolfe’s stinging epigram. In that year, Texas was perennially cash-broke but land rich, somewhat quarrelsome, and continually scourged by Comanche depredations from the north and west, and the threat of re-occupation by Mexico from the south, Texans had first seen immediate annexation by the United States as their sure and certain refuge. But alas, that slavery was permitted and practiced within Texas – so and annexation was blocked by abolitionists.

This left the Republic seeking recognition and even strong allies elsewhere, namely with France and Britain – neither of whom particularly approved of the ‘peculiar institution’ but were more than willing to play the great game of international politics, especially if a foothold on the North American continent might come out of it. Both England and France eventually recognized the independent Republic; Sam Houston cannily referred to it all as a flirtation, in order to reinforce the relationship with the United States.

Into the middle of it came Nicholas Doran Maillard, who settled into the small town of Richmond, founded by settlers from Stephen Austin’s colony in 1822, in a deep bend of the Brazos River, near present-day Houston. By the time Nicholas Doran Maillard came along, Richmond had existed as a town for about twenty years, incorporating many elements and refinements such as a newspaper, the Richmond Telescope. The charming and cultured Mr. Maillard was heartily welcomed by the residents of Richmond – he was very popular for his ability in mixing drinks, for one, and he also served a stint as editor of the Telescope. He said that he was writing a book, and so he talked to everyone, making copious notes. Richmond at the time, was the home to a number of prominent figures in early Texas, to include Jane Long, the wife of an early adventurer, Sam Houston’s chief scout, Erastus ‘Deaf’ Smith, and Mirabeau Lamar – who would feud bitterly with Sam Houston. Mr. Maillard gave every evidence of enjoying his time in Richmond, and appeared to leave with reluctance after six months, pleading the death of a relative, back in England.

Two years later, his book was published – and everyone who had thought Mr. Maillard a fine fellow was howling for his blood, once they read it: The History Of The Republic Of Texas, From The Discovery Of The Country to the Present Time; And The Cause Of Her Separation From the Republic of Mexico. It was not a history, save in the sense that an account of events was presented – it was more of a vicious and extended calumny against the Anglo settlers of Texas, presenting the very worst construction upon the events of the rebellion against Mexico, and casting aspersions against everything from the weather, to the ladies’ propensity to dip snuff, and the popularity of the Bowie knife. Of Stephen F. Austin’s attempt to smooth over matters between the Mexican government and damp down the ‘war party’ in the last years before open revolt, Maillard wrote: Colonel Austin, who was himself the most crafty of the “political fanatics, political adventurers, would-be great men, and vain talkers,  wrote in this bland style solely to escape from the clutches of the Mexican government, and not with a view to restore tranquility to Texas . . . In order to prepare my readers for these and many other assertions of a similar character put forth by the unprincipled Texans, I have in the preceding chapter shown what their conduct was while the federal system was in force in Mexico, and never did the history of a people brand them with greater treachery or grosser ingratitude and inconsistency.” Of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna – much hated in Texas and by those Mexican citizens who were of the liberal, or Federalist political persuasion, Maillard describe him as “ . . . the able and energetic measures of that extraordinary man, Santa Anna, who was at once the military leader and universal and patriotic pacificator of his country . . .” And if that were not sufficiently insulting, his account of the fall of the Alamo contained this sentence, describing the disposition of the bodies of its defenders, “I need scarcely apologize to the reader for this digression, as the record of the fate of all such monsters is due to the lovers of humanity.”

The rest of the account of the War for Independence is similarly slanted: names of various participants are misspelled, and the account of the culminating battle of San Jacinto is entirely from the Mexican side. As a history – an account of events written within a few years after the event, when many participants were still alive and their memories vivid – it was a lost chance. But it was not intended as a history, in spite of it’s title. The book was a bit of political theater, and perhaps a vendetta as well – for it was intended to discourage the British government from recognizing Texas.

Maillard might also have been a passionate abolitionist . . . but there was one other motivation – a monetary one. The government of Mexico was deeply in debt to various English banking houses and bond-holders, for loans made before 1836; loans that had been secured . . . by Texas lands. Those bankers were under the threat of Mexico defaulting on ten million pounds worth of loans . . . and since Mexico had no longer control of those Texas acres, the English banks would have to eat the loss. But if Texas failed to find allies, and Mexico regained control of it’s former property, all’s well that ends well, wouldn’t you say, old chap?

It didn’t work out as Maillard and his backers obviously hoped. Great Britain did recognize Texas, and five years after publication of his libelous little history, the United States annexed it as a state . . . which kicked off another war with Mexico. Nicholas Doran Maillard – if internet searches are any indication – labored in relative obscurity thereafter. His book is a curiosity, and given the historical inaccuracies contained therein, I would only trust it when describing the various mileages between the towns and cities in Texas.

Most people accept as conventional wisdom about the Texas frontier, that Anglo settlers were always the consummate horsemen, cowboys and cavalrymen that they were at the height of the cattle boom years. But that was not so: there was a learning curve involved. The wealthier Texas settlers who came from the Southern states of course valued fine horseflesh. Horse-races were always a popular amusement, and the more down-to-earth farmers and tradesmen who came to Texas used horses as draft animals. But the Anglo element was not accustomed to working cattle – the long-horned and wilderness adapted descendents of Spanish cattle – from horseback. Their eastern cattle were slow, tame and lumbering. Nor were many of them as accustomed to making war from the saddle as the Comanche were. Most of Sam Houston’s army who won victory at San Jacinto, were foot-soldiers: his scouts and cavalry was a comparatively small component of his force. It was a deliberate part of Sam Houston’s strategy to fall back into East Texas, where the lay of the land worked in the favor of his army. The Anglos’ preferred weapon in those early days in Texas the long Kentucky rifle, a muzzle-loading weapon, impossible to use effectively in the saddle, more suited to their preferred cover of woods – not the rolling grasslands interspersed with occasional clumps of trees which afforded Mexican lancers such grand maneuvering room. 

When did this begin to change for the Anglo-Texans? Always hard to say about such things, but I suspect that the Anglo-Texas began morphing into becoming what they fought almost as soon as Texas declared independence in 1836. The war with the Comanche was unrelenting for fifty years, and conflict with Mexico was open for all of the decade that the Republic of Texas existed, as well as simmering away in fits and starts for even longer. And one of the agents taking an active part in that metamorphosis from settler to centaur was John Coffee “Jack” Hays, during a handful of years that he led a company of Rangers stationed in San Antonio. The Rangers were not lawmen, then – they were local companies organized to protect their own communities from depredations by raiding Indians, and as close to cavalry as the perennially broke Republic of Texas possessed. Jack Hays, who with fifteen of his Rangers had narrowly escaped being caught in San Antonio when Woll’s troops took the town – was one of the most innovative and aggressive Ranger company captains. He had already begun schooling his contingent in horsemanship and hard riding, and in use of five-shot repeating pistols developed by Samuel Colt. It was Hay’s contingent who spread the alarm, and militia volunteers began to assemble from across the westernmost inhabited part of Anglo-Texas. Colonel Matthew “Old Paint”Caldwell, from Gonzales began gathering a scratch force at Seguin, east and south of San Antonio. He collected up about a hundred and forty, and set out for a camp on Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from San Antonio, before settling on another camp, on the Salado, seven miles north of San Antonio. He gathered another seventy or eighty volunteers – and more were on the way. But “Old Paint” was in any case, outnumbered several times over, and being a sensible man knew there was absolutely no chance of re-taking San Antonio in a head-on assault. But what if a sufficient number of Woll’s force could be lured out of the town – which may not have been a fortified town in the European sense of things, but certainly was set up to enable a stout defense against lightly-armed infantry. Caldwell arranged his few men efficiently, among the trees, deep thickets and rocky banks of the creek, with the water at their backs, and the rolling prairie, dotted with trees all the way to San Antonio spread out before them. Could any part of Woll’s invaders be lured into a kill-zone?  The Texians grimly proposed to find out.

 There were only thirty-eight horses counted fit enough for what would be an easy ride to San Antonio, but undoubtedly a hard ride back. Jack Hays and his Rangers, and another dozen men were dispatched very early on the morning of September 17th. At a certain point, still short of San Antonio, Hays ordered twenty-nine of the men with him to dismount and set up an ambush. He and the remaining eight then rode on – to within half a mile of the Alamo, where the main part of Woll’s force had camped. They would have been clearly seen from the walls of the old presidio; it would have been about sunrise. What else did they do besides show themselves? Perhaps they fired a few shots into the air, shouted taunts, made obscene gestures clearly visible to anyone with a spyglass. It was their assignment to provoke at least fifty of Woll’s cavalrymen into chasing after them, hell for leather  . . .  instead, two hundred Mexican cavalrymen boiled out of the Alamo, along with forty Cherokee Indians (who at that time had allied themselves with Mexico) and another three hundred and more, led personally by General Woll. Hay’s provocation had worked a little too well – it was a running fight, all the seven miles back to the camp and the carefully arranged line of Texians with the Salado and the green forest of the trees and thickets at their back. Caldwell and the others were just eating breakfast when Hays and his party arrived breathlessly and at a full gallop. Over two hundred shots had been fired at them, none with any effect – not particularly surprising, given that it would have been extremely difficult to hit a moving target from a position on a galloping horse, and that reloading would have been near to impossible.

 Having succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in drawing the Mexican force to follow them, Jack Hays and the others took up their position in “Old Paint” Caldwell’s line – carefully screened and sheltered among the trees. Caldwell sent out messages saying that he was surrounded, but in a good spot for defense, if any at all could come to his aid – and so it turned out to be. The canny old Indian-fighter had a good eye for the ground, and for an enemy. The pursuing Mexican cavalry drew up short, upon seeing his positions, or whatever evidence they could see from their position on the open prairie, looking into the trees along the Salado – but they did not withdraw entirely. Instead, Woll, and most of his command lined up and prepared to sling a great deal of musket-fire and a barrage of artillery shot in the direction of Caldwell’s force, none of which had any noticeable effect at all – on the Texians. Instead, Anglo-Texian skirmishers went forward with their chosen and familiar weapon and from their favorite cover sniped at leisure all through the next five hours, inflicting considerable casualties, before scampering back to safety on the creek-bank. Some sources claim at least sixty dead and twice that number wounded, against one Texian killed, nine or ten injured and another half-dozen having had hairbreadth escapes. At one point, General Woll ordered a direct attack – a few of his soldiers got within twenty feet of the dug-in Texians. Being a fairly rational man, and a professional soldier, the General knew when it was time to cut his losses. Leaving his campfires burning, he and his forces silently fell back to San Antonio under the cover of night, and then withdrew even farther – all the way back towards the Rio Grande.

This would have been a complete and total victory for Caldwell   . . .  except for one unfortunate circumstance: a company of fifty or so volunteers from Bastrop, on their way to join him, had the misfortune to almost make it – to even hear the sounds of the fight, from two miles distant. The company of Captain Nicholas Mosby Dawson, from Bastrop and the upper Colorado was caught by Woll’s rear-guard, as they retreated. Only fifteen of Dawson’s men would survive that battle and surrender to superior military force. Caldwell’s men would find the bodies of the dead on the following day, as the pursued Woll towards the somewhat amorphous border. The fifteen Dawson men would join those Anglo-Texians taken prisoner in San Antonio in chains in Perote prison – some of those would be held in durance vile until early 1844.

(These events take place off-stage, in my next book – Deep in the Heart. The younger brother of my heroine, Margaret Becker Vining, is one of Jack Hays’ Rangers, and participates in the Salado Creek battle. Deep in the Heart will be out in December of this year.)

So, after Saturday’s signing event for Daughter of Texas, I am coming to a decision – not to do any more single-store/single author events this year that are not already on my schedule. We packed it up after an hour and a half of sitting behind a table in an almost-deserted bookstore. Not the bookstore’s fault – there was another afternoon event which drew a large chunk of the normally expected Saturday crowd. I did manage to get through one-third of a book about the Irish on the 19th century frontier; which I might have bought, if the author had written more about the Irish in Texas.  Honestly, only two people even came up and talked to me during the whole hour and a half . . . and there were a great many other things that I could have been doing in that hour and a half;  working on chapter 12 of the sequel, Deep in the Heart, posting and commenting to various websites, working the social media angle. The excellent thing is that Daughter of Texas has sold big, during April, especially in the Kindle format. Working through Watercress and by extension, Lightning Source has let me price it at a competitive level and at an acceptable discount for distribution to the chain stores – and it is selling, a nice little trickle of sales, through thick and thin. In the last month there was also a massive up-tick in interest for the Trilogy and for Truckee, through the halo effect. All of my books have very high level of presence in search engines on various relevant terms . . . so, honestly, I believe now I would better be served by working more on internet marketing, on continuing to do book-talks, library talks, and book-club meetings – and the internet stuff. Doing a single author-table at a store does not pay off without massive local media interest. I have managed to score a little of that, but not enough to make an appearance at a local bookstore a standing-room-only event. I have one more such on the schedule, at the Borders in Huebner Oaks in June, but after that I will probably pull the plug on any more single-author book-store appearances.  I only have so much time and energy to allot to them. Joint appearances with other local authors; yes, indeedy, I’ll be there. Book-talks, book-club meetings, special events, special events like Christmas on the Square in Goliad, and Evening with the Authors in Lockhart, the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene – and any other events that I am invited to . . . I’ll be there with bells on, and with my full table display and boxes of books. But the individual store events – at the moment, they’re just not paying off for me, relative to the time and effort spent on them.

Like a great many locations of note to the tumultuous years of the Republic of Texas, the site of the battle of Salado Creek does today look much like it did in 1842  . . .  however, it is not so much changed that it is hard to picture in the minds’ eye what it would have looked like then. The creek is dryer and seasonal, more dependant now upon rainfall than the massive amount of water drawn into the aquifer by the limestone sponge of the Hill Country, to the north. Then – before the aquifer was tapped and drilled and drained in a thousand places – the water came up in spectacular natural fountains in many places below the Balcones Escarpment. The Salado was a substantial landmark in the countryside north of San Antonio, a deep and regular torrent, running between steep banks liked with oak and pecan trees, thickly quilted with deep brush and the banks scored by shallow ravines that ran down to water-level. Otherwise, the countryside around was gently rolling grasslands, dotted with more stands of oak trees. There was a low hill a little east of the creek, with a house built on the heights. Perhaps it might have had a view of San Antonio de Bexar, seven miles away, to the south and west.

 In that year,San Antonio was pretty much what it had been for two centuries: a huddle of jacales, huts made from plastered logs set upright in the ground and crowned with a roof of thatch, or thick-walled houses of unbaked clay adobe bricks, roofed with rusty-red tile, all gathered around the stumpy tower of the Church of San Fernando. A few narrow streets converged on the plaza where San Fernando stood – streets with names like the Alameda, Soledad and Flores, and the whole was threaded together by another river, lined with rushes and more trees. The river rambled like a drunken snake – but it generously watered the town and the orchards and farms nearby – and was the main reason for the town having been established in the first place. That street called Alameda, or sometimes the Powderhouse Hill Road, led out to the east, across a bend of the river, and past another ramble of stone and adobe buildings clustered around a roofless church – the Alamo, once a mission, then a presidio garrison, and finally a legend. But in 1842 – the siege of it’s Texian garrison only six years in the past – it was still a barracks and military establishment. In the fall of 1842, the Mexican Army returned to take temporary possession.

General and President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had never ceased to resent how one-half of the province of Coahuila-y-Tejas had been wrenched from the grasp of Mexico by the efforts of a scratch army of volunteer and barely trained rebel upstarts who had the nerve to think they could govern themselves, thank you. For the decade-long life of the Republic, war on the border with Mexico continued at a slow simmer, now and again flaring up into open conflict: a punitive expedition here, a retaliatory strike there, fears of subversion, and of encouraging raids by bandits and Indians, finally resulting in an all-out war between the United States and Mexico when Texas chose to be annexed by the United States. So when General Adrian Woll, a French soldier of fortune who was one of Lopez de Santa Anna’s most trusted commanders brought an expeditionary force all the from the Rio Grande and swooped down on the relatively unprotected town  . . .  this was an action not entirely unexpected. However, the speed, the secrecy of his maneuvers, and the overwhelming force that Woll brought with him and the depth that he penetrated intoTexas– all that did manage to catch the town by surprise. Woll and his well-equipped, well-armored and well supplied cavalry occupied the town after token resistance by those Anglo citizens who were in town for a meeting of the district court. So, score one for General Woll as an able soldier and leader.

 Texas did not have much of a regular professional army, as most western nations understood the concept, then and later. Texas did have sort of an army, and sort of a navy, too – but mere tokens – the window-dressing required of a legitimate, established nation, which is what Texas was trying it’s best to become, given restricted resources. But what Texas did have was nearly limitless numbers of rough and ready volunteers, who were accustomed to respond to a threat, gathering in a local militia body and volunteering for a specific aim or mission, bringing their own weapons, supplies and horses, and usually electing their own officers. They also had the men of various ranging companies, which can be thought of as a mounted and heavily-armed and aggressive Neighborhood Watch. Most small towns on the Texas frontier fielded their own Ranger Companies. By the time of Woll’s raid onSan Antonio, those volunteers and Rangers were veterans of every fight going since beforeTexas had declared independence, a large portion of them being of that tough Scotch-Irish ilk of whom it was said that they were born fighting. That part of the frontier which ran throughTexas gave them practice at small-scale war and irregular tactics on a regular and continuing basis.

 One bit of good fortune for the Anglos of San Antonio and the various militias and of Texas generally, was that the captain of the local Ranger Company was not one of those caught by Woll’s lighting-raid. Captain John Coffee Hays and fifteen of his rangers had actually been out patrolling the various roads and trails, in response to rumors of a Mexican force in the vicinity. It was they who – upon their return in the wee hours of a September morning – found every road intoSan Antonio blocked by Mexican soldiers.

Naturally, they did not let this event pass without comment or response . . .

(to be continued)