Category Archives: Events & People

Examinations and meditations on interesting, catastrophic or meaningful events, and on original and fascinating historical characters

Doc – Mary Doria Russell: Book Review

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Doc is somewhat deceptively presented as a mystery – the violent death of a young mixed-race boy in a stable fire in frontier Dodge City during the boom years of the long-trail cattle drives. The solution to the mystery of the murder of John Horse Sanders involves the historical characters of Doc Holliday, gunslinging dentist and gambler, and frontier marshal Wyatt Earp in their early-pre dime-novel fame days. But that is not what Doc is really about. The murder mystery is an afterthought, a minor theme running through an exploration of characters in a fleeting but special time and in a unique and transitory moment. That would be Dodge City, at the height of the post-Civil War cattle boom, when endless herds of long-horned cattle walked the long way from Texas to wherever location the Union Pacific railhead had gotten to, and the herds of wild cattle and wilder young men on a spree after months of horseback drudgery and boredom hadn’t incensed the heck out of the sober local town fathers and their wives.

Doc, formally John Henry Holliday is a beautifully drawn and heartbreaking character, a southern aristocrat, exiled by his own failing health to the western prairies, trying to practice by turns the crafts that he loves, and is fairly skilled at: dentistry and card-dealing. By turns hot-tempered and melancholy – he is doomed to die painfully of the same tuberculosis that killed his mother and he knows it – that is, if drinking and gunfights don’t get to him first. He cares and doesn’t – but through it all, he is loyal above all to his friends, the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil and James. His companion and fellow-gambler, Kate Harony – the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat and revolutionary fallen on hard times loves and is exasperated by him in equal measure. They move in the circle of what passes for society in rowdy, noisy, and occasionally violent Dodge City; a society of saloon-keepers, gamblers, whores and exiles . . . most particularly exiles. Everyone is exiled from those places which formed them, from Doc himself, to the Chinese laundry owner, Jau. None of them are particularly fond of Dodge City, practically all of the characters are haunted by memories of other places, other times – but it is where they have come to make a living, or perhaps even their fortune. Some of these characters are real, some not: the conscientious and dedicated Wyatt, and his rather naive younger brother Morgan, the traveling Jesuit priest – the former Prince von Augensperg, the vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, Bessie Earp, who with her husband James manages a brothel, the tale-spinning Bat Masterson – all of whom, historically real or not, are delineated with sympathy and affection by the author. Their lives, their every-day business, the work that they do, the conversations they have with each other, those amusements and mundane concerns are made intensely real, and interesting on their own. If the expected ‘Western’ is a movie set, of false front storefronts along a dusty street, and decorated with a few suitable props – Doc brings you the real-life community, the rooms behind the façade and the real people who lived in them, once upon a time in the west.

“Doc was a dentist – not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun that I ever knew.” – Wyatt Earp, in an interview c.1896

Stand Off at Salado Creek

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Like a great many locations of note to the tumultuous years of the Republic of Texas, today the site of the battle of Salado Creek has changed from what it was in 1842 . . . however, it is not so much changed that it is difficult to picture in the minds’ eye what it would have looked like then. The creek is dryer and seasonal, more dependant 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 into Texas – 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. Texas did have sort of an army, and sort of a navy, too – but mere tokens – the window-dressing required of a legitimate nation, which is what Texas was trying it’s best to become, given restricted resources. 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, 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 on San Antonio, those volunteers and Rangers were veterans of every fight going since before Texas 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 through Texas 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 into San Antonio blocked by Mexican soldiers. Naturally, they did not let this event pass without comment or response . . .

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 was 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 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 hairsbreadth 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.

The Edge of Freedom – John Willingham: Book Review

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Things are not simple in the borderlands; not now, and when the Presidio la Bahia, or Goliad, was a key strong-point held by rebellious Texians in the War for Independence. A few years ago, I wrote that “. . . Ambivalence is the other name of the river that runs through the Borderlands.” That kind of ambivalence permeates this novel about the Goliad campaign – of which readers outside of Texas have hardly ever heard. Like the Alamo, it was garrisoned by Texian settlers and eager volunteers lately come from the United States, who came to fight for  . . .  well, what was it they were fighting for? Independence from Mexico, defense of a little patch of the United States established in the borderlands? To uphold the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and those hopes that that Coahuila y Tejas should be semi-autonomous – not ruled by an autocratic dictatorship from distant Mexico City? Or maybe, because many were Scotch-Irish borderers, who gravitated to any fight going like a trout going upstream?  All of these things, or some of them – the answer varies, depending upon the various characters in John Willingham’s sensitive and fact-based novel.

“Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember the Goliad!” became battle-cries on the field of San Jacinto, when Santa Anna was ignominiously defeated by Sam Houston’s scrappy army. Like the Alamo, the men of the Goliad were defeated by an overwhelming force.  Unlike the Alamo, they did not go down fighting, with a last handful of survivors executed afterwards. Perhaps that is why so few know of it. There is fame everlasting in a glorious last stand, but surrender and mass executions are only pitiful and sordid – even when relieved by small glints of luck and heroic mercy. Events as they played out at Goliad emerged as being much more complicated and human. The characters muddle through a tangle of cross-purposes and confusion in time of war, although the author is aided immeasurably by the fact that there were survivors and witnesses who left comprehensive eyewitness accounts. Distilling them into a single coherent narrative is the work of historians. What the author of historical fiction must do – as this author has – is to take the historical record about specific events and people, and use them as secure anchor-points. Then one must leap off from there and weave the story between them, as if with spider-silk, to catch our attention and involvement by adding conversation, observation and emotional insight.

There are three main characters – all of whom existed and took a very real part: ranchers John White Bower and his neighbor and business partner Carlos de la Garza, who indeed ran a ferry operation across the lower San Antonio River. Texian and Tejano, they remained friends and partners before and after the war, in which they fought as their primary sympathies inclined them – on opposite sides. In the end their loyalty is to their own Texas: to their families, their kin and their friends – no matter on what side.  Then there is James Fannin – militarily skilled, but ultimately and tragically doubtful of his abilities as a commander. He is the figure most clearly and sympathetically drawn. In the scramble that was the rebellion of the Anglo-American settlers in Texas, he had all the right qualifications for command of the garrison at Goliad. He had attended West Point, and taken part in early and successful actions against the Mexican forces in San Antonio. His tragedy was to be put in a situation requiring him to be resolute and decisive – even intuitive – in a rapidly changing situation. He was overwhelmed within weeks; his self-confidence dissolved by degrees. Finally he was only able to react to a situation that he could not control. His final act in command was to surrender what was left of his men, hoping to save their lives; the ultimate tragedy was that it did not. On Palm Sunday 1836, by the direct order of Santa Anna himself, Fannin’s surviving men were slaughtered at point-blank range by their guards. James Fannin was executed last of all, knowing what happened to them.

The characters of various Mexican officers are also carefully drawn, as much from what is historically known as from imagination; General Urrea, who had accepted Fannin’s surrender in good faith, Colonel Portilla, who carried out Santa Anna’s orders to execute the prisoners, and Colonel Garay, who risked his own life and career by sheltering certain of them from execution. They all justifiably feared Santa Anna, and what he was capable of doing to them and to their own families. To their credit (in reality and in this book), the author makes clear they obeyed with varying degrees of reluctance, and created various pretenses to spare certain prisoners. The character and motivations of Francita Alavez, the so-called Angel of Goliad are also explored; she is unambiguous, fiercely moral and fearless in her insistence that the executions are wrong. Unable to convince those in authority to ignore the orders, she acted boldly and openly in rescuing prisoners from the death march, and in sheltering them afterwards.

All in all, The Edge of Freedom is a completely satisfactory read. The writing is spare and polished, reminiscent of Hemmingway in describing a world that is almost completely masculine. The author also possesses that relatively rare gift of having a good ear for 19th century conversation. This fictional retelling is an excellent and painless introduction to a comparatively little known but dramatic episode in Texas history – which does have its’ own obsessive. I confess to being one of them; one of my own books opens with a young Texian soldier escaping from the Goliad massacre, and the signature photo of Goliad at the author’s website for The Edge of Freedom is from my own website.