The Real Philip Nolan

11. February 2011 · Comments Off on The Real Philip Nolan · Categories: Uncategorized

Yes, there was a real Philip Nolan, and the writer Edward Everett Hale was apparently remorseful over borrowing his name for the main character in his famous patriotic short story, The Man Without A Country. The real Philip Nolan had a country –  and an eye possibly on several others, which led to a number of wild and incredible adventures. The one of those countries was Texas, then a Spanish possession, a far provincial outpost of Mexico, then a major jewel in the crown of Spain’s overseas colonies. Like the fictional Philip Nolan –  supposedly a friend of Aaron Burr and entangled in the latter’s possibly traitorous schemes, the real Philip Nolan also had a friend in high places. Like Burr, this friend was neck deep in all sorts of schemes, plots and double-deals. Unlike Burr, Nolan was also this friend’s trusted employee and agent. That highly placed and influential friend was one James Wilkinson, sometime soldier, once and again the most senior general in the Army of the infant United States  –  and paid agent of the Spanish crown –  acidly described by a historian of the times as never having won a battle or lost a court-martial, and another as  “the most consummate artist in treason that the nation ever possessed.”  Wilkinson was an inveterate plotter and schemer, with a finger in all sorts of schemes, beginning as a young officer in the Revolutionary War to the time he died of old age in1821. The part about “dying of old-age” is perfectly astounding, to anyone who has read of his close association with all sorts of shady dealings. It passes the miraculous, how the infant United States managed to survive the baleful presence of Wilkinson, lurking in the corridors of power. It might thus be argued that our founding fathers were a shrewd enough lot, to have prevented a piece of work like Wilkinson  from doing more damage than he did. It would have argued even more for their general perspicuity, though, if he had been unceremoniously shot at dawn, or hung by the neck by any one of the three countries which did business with Wilkenson –  and whom he cheerfully would have sold out to any one of those others who had offered a higher bid.

But it is Wilkinson’s particular protege who is the subject of this essay –  supposedly born in Ireland, and apparently well-educated, who worked for Wilkinson as secretary, bookkeeper and apparently general all around go-to guy. He was possibly also the first American to deliberately venture far into Texas  and return to tell the tale, not once but several times, at a time when an aging and sclerotic Spanish empire was looking nervously and very much askance at the bumptious and venturesome young democracy whose frontiers moved ever closer to its own. The welcome mat was most definitely not out; adventurous trespassers were either driven back –  or taken to Mexico in irons and put to work in penal servitude. (Certain exceptions had been made for Catholics, or those who could make some convincing pretense of being Irish, or otherwise convince the Spanish authorities in Texas of their relative harmlessness.)

In the year 1791, Nolan procured a passport from the Spanish governor of New Orleans, and permission to venture into Texas, ostensibly in pursuit of trade; goods for horses, which were plentiful, easy to catch and profitable. Still quite young, around the age of twenty, and not quite as wily as his employer, Nolan had his trade goods confiscated in San Antonio, and was forced to flee into the back country to evade arrest. Amazingly, he lived among the Indians (of which tribe is unknown) and earned back his stake by trapping sufficient beaver pelts to buy his way out of trouble with the San Antonio authorities –  and a herd of horses. Several years later, armed with another passport, Nolan ventured into Texas again, remaining in San Antonio long enough to ingratiate himself with the governor, Manuel Munoz, be included in the census,  and to court a local belle. This time, he returned to Louisiana with a larger herd of horses. For a time after the second trip, Nolan worked for an American boundary commissioner, surveying and mapping the Mississippi River, which seemed to have aroused the suspicious of other Spanish authorities, including the Viceroy, the King of Spain’s good right hand in Mexico. Obviously, some of these Spanish and Mexican officials were not quite as susceptible to Nolan’s charm and the ever-slippery Wilkenson’s conniving –  for he was still very much Wilkenson’s protege and possibly agent. Still –  he managed to get a legitimate passport for one more trading trip into Texas. Trading was the cover story, but Nolan was also supposed to map what he saw in Texas, although no maps have ever been found. He remained in Texas for two or three years, marrying and fathering a daughter, before leaving at top speed. The Viceroy had given orders for his arrest, but protected by his friendship with Manuel Munoz, he left Spanish Texas under safe-conduct, accompanied by a herd of nearly 1,500 horses.

Suspicions of his activities being aroused, there would be no more legitimate passports to do business in Texas for Nolan. He had separated from the wife that he left behind there. In the interim before he ventured on one more expedition –  an illegal one, unblessed by officials of any nation –  he married a young woman from an influential French-Creole family in Natchez. Late in the year 1800 he crossed the border north of present-day Nacogdoches, with a party of thirty or forty men, ostensibly to capture more horses. What Nolan’s aim was only became clear after that point –  and that was to explore and map the wildernesses of Texas with an eye towards conquest. Nolan had taken a page from one of Wilkenson’s plans for splitting off a chunk of western territory for himself.

This was more than some of Nolan’s men had bargained for. Three of them promptly deserted and hot-footed it all the way back to Natchez, where they freely talked about what Nolan was up to. Within a few months –  such was the speed of communications in a time where messages could travel no faster than a horse-courier or a sailing-ship – Nolan’s expedition was common knowlege in Natchez, and to the Spanish authorities in Mexico . By then Nolan and his remaining men had pushed through the pine woods, into the central grassy plains, the haunts of buffalo herds, wild horses and the Comanche Indians. In March of 1801, they were pursued by a detachment of regular soldiers from the Presidio of Nacogdoches, pursued relentlessly and with Jauvert-like determination. Eventually, Nolan and about twenty of his party were cornered in a roofless wooden and earth entrenchment near the Blanco River. Outnumbered four to one, they fought doggedly until Nolan was killed by cannon-fire. The Spanish lieutenant in command of the Nacogdoches company graciously permitted the defeated survivors to bury him in an unmarked grave, which has never been found –  after cutting off his ears. The losing survivors were sent to the mines, and the winners no doubt congratulated themselves on having seen off yet another free-booting adventurer, a filibustero, a rogue and all around land-pirate.

An ocean and half a continent away, on the same day that Philip Nolan was buried, the various treaties of San Idolfonso were being signed. These treaties would clear the way for the Louisiana Purchase. Before the first decade of the 19th century was out, more of Philip Nolan’s kind would be looking across the Sabine River and wondering if they would have better luck.

Relatively Unknown Heroes

10. February 2011 · Comments Off on Relatively Unknown Heroes · Categories: Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Seguin also appears as a character in my next book, Daughter of Texas, which will be released in April, to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the Texas War for Independence.

Britton “Brit” Johnson  was born a slave in Tennessee around 1840, and brought to Texas by his owner, who was a landholder in the Peters colony, an impresario grant in Northern Texas on the Red River. Johnson seems to have been able to read and write; although technically a slave, he worked as a ranch foreman. He must have been allowed a great deal of latitude, for in the last year of the Civil War, he was working as an independent freighter, owning his own team and wagon. He was married, and the father of four children. His home was in western Young County, in the Elm Creek Valley northwest of Fort Belknap, on property owned by the Carter family, brothers Edmund and Alexander. The Carters were free men of color, but the most prosperous family in the county, due to their ranching and freighting interests. Alexander’s wife Elizabeth Bishop Carter, was white, and after the deaths of her husband and father in law, she continued to manage their various properties and enterprises.  Johnson had worked for the Carters as a ranch hand and teamster, and continued to work for Elizabeth Carter, after her remarriage to a man named Fitzpatrick and her subsequent second widowing .

In mid October of  1864,  Britt Johnson and two of Elizabeth Carter Fitzgerald’s neighbors had gone to Weatherford, In Parker County,  to purchase supplies. They were returning, with their wagons well-laden with  when they received word that an large party of Kiowa and Comanche warriors (later estimated to be between 700 and 1,500) had gone through the Elm Creek Valley settlements like a  flash fire. They had burned homes, raided, stolen cattle and horses, killed a number of settlers and taken others captive. The three men left their wagons and hurried to their homes on horseback.

Britt Johnson came home to find that not only had his wife Mary and two younger children, Cherry and Charlie,  been taken by the raiders, but his teenage son Jube had been killed. Elizabeth Carter Fitzgerald’s widowed daughter Susan Durgan had also died, on the front porch of her mothers’ house with a shotgun in her hands. Elizabeth, her young son Elijah, and Susan’s daughters Lottie and Millie Durgan,  the latter then aged about  eighteen months were also captives. The raiders had also taken several thousand head of cattle and horses, and set bonfires as they went,  to discourage any immediate pursuit. By the time the cavalry came to the rescue, the Indian war party was long gone. When winter set in, the raiders had settled into winter camps along the Canadian River, near the ruins of an old trading post called  Bent’s Fort. The captives were taken into various camps, all but Elijah. He had fallen ill, from drinking tainted water, and been killed by his captors  – thrown alive into a large bonfire – when he had not been able to keep up. His mother was forced to watch the murder of her child.

According to legend, Britt Johnson stayed just long enough to see to the safety of his older daughter,  who had been visiting a neighbor on the day of the raid; a neighbor who had just enough warning to fort up and successfully defend his house and those sheltering in it. He had often delivered freight to Ft. Belknap, and was well known to many of the Penateka Comanche, who had lived there before being moved north to Indian Territory. Johnson managed to make contact with a Chief Asa-Havay, who agreed to help him search for his family and negotiate their return… in exchange for an exorbitant ransom. Johnson was able to raise the ransom demanded when he returned to the settlements. Early in 1865 he returned to the Indian agency on the Washita River, in company with Chief Asa-Havey and another man, David White, who hoped to ransom his son from the Indians.

There were peace talks being held between the Kiowa and Comanche, and representatives of the Confederacy, and the peace commissioner wrangled permission for Britt Johnson, David White and Chief Asa-Havey to travel among the Indian villages, searching for and ransoming captives.  Over the next year Johnson was successful in recovering some of them, including  his wife and daughters, and David White’s son. Lottie Durgan was recovered nearly a year later, and her grandmother another year after that. Millie Durgan was never found, although  Britt Johnson and her grandmother kept searching for her. It is thought that she was adopted into the family of the war-chief who took her family in the Elm Creek raid. An elderly Kiowa woman named Gain Toh Oodie interviewed in the 1930ies by an interested newspaper reporter may indeed have been the child Millie Durgan.

Sadly, Britt Johnson, who had continued to work as a teamster and freight-hauler was killed with two other teamsters by raiding Indians in 1871, near Salt Creek. Those who came upon the aftermath counted nearly two hundred empty rifle and pistol shells where Britt Johnson had made his last stand, behind the body of his horse. His monument is a different sort than Seguins’, being more of the virtual sort. His efforts to rescue his family, and others are supposed to be the inspiration for the movie “The Searchers“.

Britt Johnson appears in my own book, Adelsverein-The Harvesting – hired by Hansi Richter to search for his son and daughter, who have been taken by the Comanche into Indian Territory.

Ghost Town on the Gulf

28. January 2011 · Comments Off on Ghost Town on the Gulf · Categories: Uncategorized

Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay called Indian Point, and selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. So many settlers farming so many acres, and the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres for themselves.

That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, and moreover was the stomping grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes, peoples not generally noted in the 19th century for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors seems to have been overlooked in all the excitement. These factors seem to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for, so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions. Best to come straight off the trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his own choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant… and so it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.

Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels (that is another story entirely). Indianola was also the major port for supplying… among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road ran towards San Antonio, and south of the contentious border, to Chihuahua, Mexico supplying the interior mercantile needs of two nations . By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe. In the cattle glut after the Civil War, mercantile interests also experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.

But in September of 1875,  a great hurricane slammed Indianola, and it’s low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge. All the water piled up in the bayous in back of the town, and when the  first edge of the storm passed over, it all rushed forth, carrying a large portion of the lower town into Matagorda Bay. Still, there were enough left standing on higher ground, and it was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned. The city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. Eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again, by another massive hurricane. To add to the horror of the second storm strike,  at the very height of the hurricane, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in and a number of people taking shelter in that building were horribly burned to death. Several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable. There is still a bit of Indianola left; a few summer homes on very tall stilts, but mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with energy and enthusiasm,  but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of another hurricane, after the turn of the new century.

Indianola features rather prominently the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – since the Steinmetz and Richter families are among those left to fend for themselves on the bare shell-sand shore in Book One.  In Book Two, it is the city where Hansi Richter and his sister-in-law, Magda Vogel Becker come to purchase goods for the general store that they have opened, following the end of the Civil War.  In the final volume, it is the prosperous city from which they depart on a visit to Germany –  thirty years after arriving as nearly penniless immigrants.

One amusing thing I discovered, in doing research on life and times in 19th century Texas – by the 1850s, Indianola had a huge ice-house, to store ice shipped from New England in specially-built ships… and it was possible to enjoy iced drinks and ice-cream, well before the Civil War. Imagine that – out on the frontier, people ate salt-pork and beans, cooked over a wood fire while dodging Indian arrows… and three hundred miles away, you could sit in an ice-cream parlor, and sip cold lemonade.

Kitchen Matters – Shoo Fly Pie

26. January 2011 · Comments Off on Kitchen Matters – Shoo Fly Pie · Categories: Uncategorized

I made this dessert – which in the Pennsylvania Dutch country (which isn’t Dutch but actually a corruption of Deutch – or German) can be eaten at breakfast – for my English-Greek neighbors, when I was stationed in Greece in the early 1980’s. They were mystified on several levels, as it is not really a pie, although it is baked in a pastry crust, and can be baked until it is sort of a cake, or left with a soggy center like a pudding. It also does not contain flies. They were also baffled about who or what, exactly, were the Amish, although that was explained very neatly by release of the movie Witness at about that time.

Shoo-Fly Pie

1  8-inch unbaked pie crust, chilled or pre-made or from scratch.

Combine: 1 1/2 cup flour, with 1/2 brown sugar, a pinch of salt, 1/4 teasp ginger, 1/4 teasp nutmeg, and 1/4 cup soft butter. Rub together with your hands until it resembles soft crumbs.

Combine in another bowl: 1/2 teasp baking soda, 1/2 cup molassas, 1/2 boiling water. (the mixture will foam up, slightly) Add to it 2/3rds of the crumb mixture and pour into the pie shell. Top with remaining crumb mixture.

Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes, or less if you like it sort of pudding-soggy in the middle.

The Little House Books

22. January 2011 · Comments Off on The Little House Books · Categories: Uncategorized

A couple of weeks ago, when putting together a short story for an anthology of western stories, I was reminded yet again again of my own grade-school devotion to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books. My heroine in the short story 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. Llooking 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 Ingals 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.

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