I have two tee-shirts with the Adelsverein logo, and the motto “Barsetshire with cypress trees … and lots of sidearms” which I will be raffling off on August 10 – anyone who orders any of my books through my website or at a personal appearance between 1-9 August, 2011, will have their name put into the drawing. The shirts were provide by those nice people at oo.shirts.com. And if you don’t want to take a chance on winning a tee shirt, this is the link to order that design on a shirt directly.
All right – my publisher and I have decided to bring out a hard-bound copy of the Adelsverein Trilogy, all three volumes in one handy and perhaps rather cheaper yet more durable format. There are two versions of the dust-jacket being suggested: which do you think is more attractive on the shelf, keeping in mind, of course, that we cannot afford original art — because otherwise I would so hire someone like Don Troiani.
Which of these works better — version one, using a picture taken on the grounds of old Fort Martin Scott…
Or version two … which continues the South Texas landscape motif of the single -volume covers?
I can’t make up my mind, really — which is why I am throwing it out there. Your preferences and feedback are welcome.
There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture: an upholstered wing chair, a spinning wheel, a very elaborate trunk fitted out with a number of smaller drawers for silverware: the trunk is open, displaying a fine mid-Victorian assembly of knives and silverware. There are a couple of inlaid boxes— portable desks or sewing tables, what appears to be the head and footboard to a Jenny Lind bed, a butter churn and a lighted kerosene lantern hanging from the center, mid-peak of the inside. The series of hoops holding up the canvas cover is reinforced with a pair of horizontal lathes along the sides of the wagon, from which hang an number of articles of clothing; some dresses, a shirt, a baby’s dress and a couple of sunbonnets. This may be a wagon in which a family lived during their journey, late in the days of the emigrant trail. In this wagon interior, there is very little glimpse of what a typical emigrant wagon would have had to have carried in the opening days of the trails to Oregonand California, when the only possible means of re-supply along the way, other than hunting and gathering, were at Ft. Laramie and Ft. Hall.
The greatest part of the goods carried in a typical emigrant wagon was food. Assuming a six-month long journey, an early guidebook writer advised 200 lbs of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 of sugar and 10 of salt per each adult, at a minimum; a schedule providing a monotonous diet on variants of bread, bacon and coffee, three meals a day. More elaborate checklists afforded a little more variety, not to mention edibility, suggesting such things as dried, chipped beef, rice, tea, dried beans, molasses, dried codfish, dried fruit, baking soda, vinegar, cheese, cream of tarter, pickles, mustard, ginger, corn-meal, hard-tack, and well-smoked hams. Canned food was a science still in the experimental stage then… and such things were expensive, heavy, and seldom included. A number of resourceful families brought along milk cows, and thus had milk and butter for at least the first half of the trail. Recommended kitchen included an iron cooking kettle, fry-pan, coffee pot, and tin camp plates, cups, spoons and forks. Small stoves were sometimes brought along, but more usually discarded as an unnecessary weight. A coffee mill would have been needed; so would a canvas tent.
Prior to the great Gold Rush stampede over the trail in 1849, it was possible for those trains which included some experienced frontier hands to eke out their foodstuffs with hunting; buffalo, antelope, sage hen, and from gathering various berries and plums from thickets along the rivers, wild peas, wild onions, and various sorts of greens. Nutritional science may have been only dimly understood, but most emigrants (or at least their wives) had a good grasp on the prevention of scurvy, dysentery and other food related ailments.
Other necessary gear for the wagon itself: water barrels, chains, 100 feet of heavy rope, and spare parts to replace that which was most readily broken, such as tongues, axels and wheel spokes, although such added to the weight, and some emigrants preferred to take a chance on being able to find suitable wood to make a replacement along the trail. The wagon itself was too small for more than two adults or a couple of children to sleep comfortably in, so the overflow would need to be accommodated by a tent, and blankets spread out within them.
Since they would be on their own, as far as repairs of anything at all would be concerned, a veritable tool shop was advised: knives, a whetstone, ax, hammer, hatchet, shoves, saw, gimlet, scissors and sewing supplies to repair canvas and clothing, nails, tacks, thread, beeswax and tallow, twine, washbasins and water buckets. Some comforts were not omitted; candles and lanterns, patent medicines, extra clothing; most emigrants wore the same work clothes they would have worn for a day of work on the farm, or a day out hunting, and perhaps, tucked away in a small corner, some small cherished luxury, a favorite book or a teapot. Men with a trade took the tools necessary to practice it. Every party also took arms and ammunition, although as it would turn out, most had much less use for them than they had expected.
And as it also turned out, even with all the preparations and supplies, a fair number of the early emigrants arrived in California orOregon on foot, with little more than what they stood up in, thanks to the difficulties of the trail. Having eaten just about all of their food supplies, jettisoned the non-essential gear, lost their oxen and animals to bad water and the cruelties of the desert, and abandoning their wagons in the desert or high in the Sierras, or along the Snake River… they arrived in the place where they wished to be, carrying their children… and thought it had all been a fair exchange.
I have a guest post here, at Blogging Authors, about marketing opportunities for authors at other than bookstore venues!
… Where do you find the readers who might be tempted to take a look at your book? The conventional event is a book signing at a bookstore. This can pay off, given sufficient publicity and local interest. Or it can result in you sitting at a table in the entryway of the bookstore for two hours, watching the occasional customer sidle into the book store, desperately hoping to evade your eye and your chirpy greeting of, “Hi, I see you’re a reader!” This can be ego death-onna-stick, and I seriously urge indy and small-press writers to consider alternatives . . . such as venues that are not full of books. What about doing a signing in shopping venue where there aren’t other books? …
The rest at link.
Once there was a little town, a little oasis of civilization – as the early 20th century understood the term – in the deserts of New Mexico, a bare three miles from the international boarder. The town was named for Christopher Columbus – the nearest big town on the American side of the border with Mexico was the county seat of Deming, thirty miles or so to the north; half a day’s journey on horseback or in a Model T automobile in the desert country of the Southwest. It’s a mixed community of Anglo and Mexicans, some of whose families have been there nearly forever as the far West goes, eking out a living as ranchers and traders, never more than a population of about fifteen hundred. There’s a train station, a schoolhouse, a couple of general stores, a drug-store, some nice houses for the better-off Anglo residents, and a local newspaper – the Columbus Courier, where there is even a telephone switchboard. Although Columbus at this time is better than a decade and a half into the twentieth century, in most ways it looks back to the late 19th century, to the frontier, when men went armed as a matter of course. Although the Indian wars are thirty years over – no need to fear raids from Mimbreno and Jicarilla Apache, from the fearsome Geronimo, from Comanche and Kiowa, the Mexican and Anglo living in this place have long and bitter memories.
In this year of 1916, as a new and more horrible kind of war is being waged on the other side of the world, while a more present danger menaces the border; political unrest in Mexico has flamed into open civil war, once again. Once again, the fighting threatens to spill over the border; once again refugees from a war on one side of the border seek safety on the other, while those doing the fighting look for allies, supplies, arms. This has been going on for ten years. One man in particular, the revolutionary Doroteo Arango, better known as Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa had several good reasons for broadening the fight within Mexico to the other side of the border. Pancho Villa had (and still does) an enviable reputation as their champion among the poorest of the poor in Mexico, in spite of being a particularly ruthless killer. He also had been, at various times, a cattle rustler, bank robber, guerrilla fighter – and aspiring presidential candidate in the revolution that broke out following overthrow of more than three decades of dictatorship by Porfirio Diaz.
Once, he had counted on American support in his bid for the presidency of Mexico, but after bitter fighting his rival Carranza had been officially recognized by the American government – and Pancho Villa was enraged. The border was closed to him, as far as supplies and munitions were concerned. He began deliberately targeting Americans living and working along the border region, hoping to provoke a furious American reaction, and possibly even intervention in the still-simmering war in Northern Mexico. He believed that an American counter-strike against him would discredit Carranza. Such activities would renew support to his side, and revive his hopes for the presidency.
In this he may have been egged on by German interests, hoping to foment sufficient unrest along the border in order to keep the Americans from intervening in Europe. A US Army deployed along the Mexican border was a much more satisfactory situation to Germany than a US Army deployed along the Western Front along with the English and the French. Early in April, 1915, Brigadier General John “Black Jack” Pershing and an infantry brigade were deployed to Fort Bliss; by the next year, there was a garrison of about 600 soldiers stationed near Columbus, housed in flimsy quarters called Camp Furlong, although they were often deployed on patrols.
By March, 1916, Pancho Villa’s band was in desperate straits; short of shoes, beans and bullets. Something had to be done, both to re-supply his command – and to provoke a reaction from the Americans. The best place for both turned out to be . . . Columbus. After a decade of bitter civil war south of a border marked only with five slender strands of barbed-wire, that conflict was about to spill over. The US government, led by President Woodrow Wilson had laid down their bet on the apparent winner, Venustiano Carranza. Carranza’s sometime ally, now rival, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, who had once appeared to be a clear winner from north of the border – was cut off, from supplies and support, which now went to Carranza. Pancho Villa had been so admired for his military skills during the revolution which overthrew the Diaz dictatorship that he was invited personally to Fort Bliss in 1913 to meet with General Pershing. He appeared as himself in a handful of silent movies . . . but suddenly he was persona non grata north of the border, and one might be forgiven for wondering if Villa took it all as a personal insult; how much was the deliberate killing of Americans a calculation intended to produce a reaction, and how much was personal pique?
Villa and the last remnants of his army – about five-hundred, all told – were almost down to their last bean and bullet. In defeat, Villa’s men increasingly resembled bandits, rather than soldiers. The high desert of Sonora was all but empty of anything that could be used by the Villa’s foraging parties, having been pretty well looted, wrecked or expropriated previously. There were only a few struggling ranches and mining operations, from which very little in the way of supplies could be extracted, only a handful of American hostages – the wife of an American ranch manager, Maude Wright, and a black American ranch hand known as Bunk Spencer. Some days later, on March 9, 1916, Villa’s column of horsemen departed from their camp and crossed the border into New Mexico. In the darkness before dawn, most residents and soldiers were asleep. At about 4:15, the Villistas stuck in two elements. Of those residents of Columbus awake at that hour, most were soldiers on guard, or Army cooks beginning preparations for breakfast, and the initial surprise was almost total. A few guards were surprised, knifed or clubbed to death – but a guard posted at the military headquarters challenged the shadowy intruders, and the first exchange of gunfire broke out – alerting townspeople and soldiers alike.
The aim of the well-organized Villistas was loot, of course – stocks of food, ammunition, clothing and boots from the civilian stores, and small arms, machine guns, mules and horses from the Army camp. To that end, Villa’s men first moved swiftly towards those general stores. Most of the structures in town and housing the garrison were wood-framed clapboard; in the dry climate, easy to set on fire, and even easier to break into, as well as offering practically no shelter from gunfire. But the citizens and soldiers quickly rallied – memories of frontier days were sufficiently fresh that most residents of Columbus kept arms and ammunition in their houses as a matter of course. Even the Army cooks defended themselves, with a kettle of boiling water, an ax used to cut kindling and a couple of shotguns used to hunt game for the soldiers.
Otherwise, most of the Army’s guns were secured in the armory, but a quick-thinking lieutenant, James Castleman, quickly rounded up about thirty soldiers who broke the locks in the armory and took to the field. Castleman had been alerted early on, having stepped out of his quarters to see what the ruckus was all about only to be shot at and narrowly missed by a Villista. Castleman, fortunately had his side-arm in hand, and returned fire. Another lieutenant, John Lucas, who commanded a machine-gun troop, set up his four 7-mm machine guns. The Villistas were caught in a cross-fire, silhouetted against the fiercely burning Commercial Hotel and the general stores. The fighting lasted about an hour and a half, with terribly one-sided results: eight soldiers and ten civilians, including a pregnant woman caught accidentally in the crossfire, against about a hundred of Villa’s raiding party. As the sun rose, Villa withdrew – allowing his two hostages to go free. He was pursued over the border by Major Frank Tompkins and two companies of cavalry, who harassed Villa’s rear-guard unmercifully, until a lack of ammunition and the realization they had chased Villa some fifteen miles into Mexico forced them to return.
Within a week, the outcry over Villa’s raid on Columbus would lead to the launching of a punitive expedition into Mexico, a force of 4,800 led by General Pershing – over the natural objections of the Carranza government. Pershing’s expedition would ultimately prove fruitless in it’s stated objective of capturing Pancho Villa and neutralizing his forces – however, it proved to be a useful experience for the US Army. Pershing’s force made heavy use of aerial reconnaissance, provided by the 1st Aero Squadron, flying Curtiss ‘Jenny’ biplanes, of long-range truck transport of supplies, and practice in tactics which would come in very handy, when America entered into WWI. Lt. Lucas would become a general and command troops on the Italian front in WWII. Lt. Castleman was decorated for valor, in organizing the defense of Columbus, and one of General Pershing’s aides on the Mexico expedition – then 2nd Lt. George Patton, would win his first promotion and be launched on a path to military glory.
Pancho Villa would, when the Revolution ended in 1920, settle down to the life of a rancher, on estates that he owned near Parral and Chihuahua. He would be assassinated in July, 1923; for what reason and by whom are still a matter of mystery and considerable debate.
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