This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
The edge of the Permian Basin at the Guadalupe Mountains, as seen from the window of a jet. Photo: C.M. Mayo.
The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby (Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage) Edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephne M. Bynum. Shown: My copy of the seventh printing (1972) of the handsome edition published by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in 1942.
With time and patience and, presumably, approved government-issued identification and a credit card, you can easily drive or fly across Far West Texas. But just look out the window at this rough, bone-dry country and you’ll know, your path across it would be nigh impossible without fossil fuels.
For many thousands of years, as archaeological evidence attests, people came into its spring-laced mountains, and also camped in its ciénegas (oases), such as Hueco Tanks, for seasonal hunting and fishing, and processing that meat, and seeds, berries, and roots. When out hunting or moving on, they would follow the big river we call the Rio Grande or a creek, such as Toyah or Alamito— or if not, they would would have known, whether by direct knowledge or tradition, how far they would have had to walk until the next source of water, and how to find it. To extend their range, they wore sandals woven of lechugilla, and used gourds and baskets to carry food and water. In hot weather they would have walked by moonlight. But no one in their right mind would have set out walking for hundreds of miles over the open desert, on so straight and water-scarce a path as our asphalted highways.
The transportation technologies that harnessed the horse, mule, burro and donkey arrived in the Americas with the European colonists in the 16th century. For this form of transportation, fuel is forage. And you need water. You either have enough forage and water, and at regular intervals, or the animals collapse and die. You also need to give them a chance to rest.
Flash forward to 1858. The American Southwest, including gold-rich California, is the prize of the US-Mexican War, which had concluded a decade earlier. Texas, having revolted and won its independence from Mexico in 1836, had become the 28th state of the Union in 1845. The unfathomably vast deposits of petroleum and natural gas lie deep within in its Permian Basin, a complex of geologic structures and sub-basins named after the Permian Period of 299 to 251 million years ago. Part of the Permian Basin extends into Far West Texas, that is, Texas west of the Pecos River, the subject of my book in-progress. But in 1858 no one imagined that fabulous abundance of “black gold,” nor could they have dreamed of the material and, consequently, political power it would allow the United States to command over the world over so much of the twentieth century. The Permian Basin wasn’t even a concept in 1858. No one then saw anything much of value in Far West Texas, except some salt. As for the Pecos, as one old-timer told historian Patrick Dearen, it was so brackish “a snake wouldn’t drink it.”
Texas west of the Pecos was a brutal inconvenience to be crossed, as quickly and cheaply as possible, either on the way to, or the way back from California. In addition to the lack of water, there was the ever-present danger of attacks by bandits, and by Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowa. Fossil-fuel-powered transport—the railroad— was coming to Far West Texas, but the track would not be hammered into place until many years after the US Civil War, which outbreak lay three more years over the horizon. In 1858, for these parts, the cutting-edge transportation technology was the stagecoach: a wheeled box for mail and passengers, hauled over dirt roads by a team of mules or horses. The idea was, at the scheduled stops on its route, passengers could get on and off, have a rest and a bite to eat, the mailbags could be unloaded and loaded, and the animals refreshed.
In 1857, an act of Congress had authorized a mail and passenger stage line to connect St Louis / Memphis and San Francisco. The Postmaster General selected the route that swi=ung down into Far West Texas (among the many considered), and awarded the contract for the semi-weekly service to John Butterfield and associates. At 2,700 miles long, Butterfield’s Overland Mail would be not only the longest stagecoach line in the world, but a chapter, albeit brief—it ended with the outbreak of the Civil War— of signal importance in the economic development and cohesion of the United States.
The first through-passenger on the west-bound stage was Waterman L. Ormsby, a 23 year-old New Yorker, whose eight reports appeared in the New York Herald.
My pencil points to the Pinery, the stagecoach stop at the foot of the Guadalupe Mountains in Far West Texas.
The map from the book (above), shows the stagecoach stops for the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, from St. Louis (at the far top right, east) to San Francisco (far top left, west). That map is difficult to make out, I’ll grant. The map below is a close-up of Trans-Pecos Texas, from the same map. The Butterfield Overland arrived at the Pecos River at Horsehead Crossing, then traveled up alongside its the steep banks to Emigrant Crossing, and then on up the Pecos to Pope’s Camp. Then, heading west, the stage stopped at Delaware Springs; the Pinery, in the shadow of Guadalupe Peak (now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park); Cornudas by the salt beds; the oasis of Hueco Tanks; and finally, the tiny settlement of Franklin, now known as the city of El Paso—before heading to parts further west.
Overland Mail Company schedule, as of Spetmber 16, 1858, reprinted in The Butterfield Overland Mail by Waterman L. Ormsby.
The schedule shows that the stagecoach departed the Pecos River (Emigrant’s Crossing) on Thursdays and Sundays at 3:45 AM, averaging 4 1/2 miles an hour, to arrive at El Paso Saturdays and Tuesdays. The footnote reads, in part: “If they are behind this time, it will be necessary to urge the animals on to the highest speed that they can be driven without injury.”
The pressure to profit in the capitalist race against the clock comes through vividly in Ormsby’s reports. From his report near El Paso, Texas, September 28, 1858:
“We travel night and day, and only stop long enough to change teams and eat. The stations are not all yet finished, and there are some very long drives—varying from thirty-five to seventy-five miles—without an opportunity of procuring fresh teams.”
Ormsby’s report for the New York Herald of October 10, 1858, from San Francisco, is the one that details the crossing of Far West Texas. He begins:
“Safe and sound from all the threatened dangers of Indians, tropic suns, rattlesnakes, mustang horses, jerked beef, terrific mountain passes, fording rivers, and all the concomitants which envy, pedantry, and ignorance had predicted for all passengers by the overland mail route over which I have just passed, here I am in San Francisco, having made the passage from the St. Louis post office to the San Francisco post office in twenty-three days, twenty-three hours and a half, just one day and a half an hour less than the time required by the Overland Mail Company’s contract with the Post Office Department.”
(It is only the fact that he was a 23 year old New Yorker that inclines me to believe him, a little, when he claims, “I feel almost fresh enough to undertake it again.”)
Arriving at the Pecos River, which had “no trees or any unusual luxuriance of foliage on the banks,” the driver who takes charge of the stagecoach is:
“Captain Skillman, an old frontier man who was the first to run the San Antonio and Santa Fé mail at a time when a fight with the Indians, every trip, was considered in the contract. He is a man about forty-five years of age, in appearance much resembling the portraits of the Wandering Jew, with the exception that he carries several revolvers and bowie knives, dresses in buckskin, and has a sandy head of hair and beard. He loved hard work and adventures, and hates ‘injuns,’ and knows the country here pretty well.” (p.68)
But it wasn’t all Kumbaya and PETA for the mules:
“We started with four mules to the wagon and eighteen in the cavellado; but the latter dwindled down in number as one by one the animals gave out.” (p.69)
The stagecoach jolted up alongside the north shore of the Pecos for sixteen miles, then:
“met a train of wagons belonging to Mr. McHenry, who was going from San Francisco to San Antonio, carrying a load of grain for the company on the way. By his invitation, we stopped and breakfasted with him, giving our mules a chance to eat, drink and rest—all of which they much needed.”
Miles later, after Emigrant Crossing, and another slogging day:
“We continued our weary and dusty road up the Pecos…inhaling constant clouds of dust and jolting along almost at snail’s pace. Our animals kept giving out so that we had to leave them on the road; and by the time we reached Pope’s Camp at least half a dozen had been disposed of in this way. ” (p.71)
But, O, Nature!
“As we neared Pope’s Camp, in the bright moonlight, we could see the Guadalupe Mountains, sixty miles distant on the other side of the river, stranding out in bold relief against the clear sky, like the walls of some ancient fortress covered with towers and embattlements. I am told that on a clear day this peak has been seen across the plains for the distance of over one hundred miles, so tall is it and so low the country about it.” (p.71)
At Pope’s Camp, they got their fresh team—and “some supper of shortcake, coffee, dried beef and raw onions” (p.72) that beef being cooked over a fire of buffalo chips (yes, that is what you think it is).
Ormsby continues:
“The Guadalupe Peak loomed up before us all day in the most aggravating manner. It fairly seemed to be further off the more we traveled, so that I almost gave up in despair all hopes of reaching it. Our last eight or ten miles were among the foothills of the range, and I now confidently believed we were within a mile or two, at the outside. But the road wound and crooked over the interminable hills for miles yet and we seemed to be no nearer than before. I could see the outlines of the mountain plainly, and as I eagerly asked how far it was, the captain laughingly told me it was just five miles yet, and we had better stop to give the animals a little rest or they could never finish it. ” (p.73)
So stop they did, by the cool, bubbling water of Independence Spring. Then:
“We were obliged to actually beat our mules with rocks to make them go the remaining five miles to the station” (p.73)
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For a complete and splendidly illustrated history of the Overland Mail, nothing to date beats Glen Sample Ely’s The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail 1858-1861 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). I am fortunate to have a copy of this magnificent tome in my working library.
About those stagecoaches and their teams, writes Ely:
“The stagecoaches used by the Overland Mail Company in West Texas were not the heavy wooden Concord coaches seen in such popular Western movies as Stagecoach. Along the arid frontier, it was too taxing on livestock to pull a cumbersome Concord through deep sand roads in dry weather or through boggy stretches after heavy rains and flooding. In Texas, the typical passenger vehicle was the lighter, canvas-topped Celerity wagon, also known as a mud wagon.” (p.15)
As for the mules:
“Much of the time, four-mule teams were hitched to Butterfield’s mud wagons, although horses were used on some sections of the route. The livestock varied in cost: the lead mules at the front of the team ran $35 to $40 each, whereas higher-grade mules (known as “wheelers”) costing $70 to $80 each were used at the back of the team, closer to the coach. The Overland Mail Company kept ten to twenty mules on hand at each station. Butterfield’s larger regional depots kept fifty to sixty animals in reserve for needed adjustments along the line.” (pp.15-16)
To keep them in feed was a challenge:
The Overland Mail Company kept a large supply of corn and hay on hand for the livestock, as the local terrain was usually too sparse to support a station’s requirements year-round. Local grasses were most prevalent from spring to early fall, during the so-called rainy season. Leaving the stage stop to go out and cut hay was often a deadly task. Raiding Comanches and Apaches targeted employees out on forage detail.” (p.17)
It was reported that, even for 50 dollars an hour—a stupendous sum at the time—there were occasions when no man would cut hay. Speaking of which, on next month’s first Monday I’ll be showcasing some of the captivity memoirs in my working library.
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Look for my next Texas Books post on the first Monday of next month. You can find the archive of the Texas Books posts here.
You can also listen in any time to the 21 podcasts posted so far in my 24 podcast “Marfa Mondays” series exploring Far West Texas here.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
Texas is giant in so many ways, including its literature. However, the literature on its Guadalupe Mountains is relatively sparse. This isn’t surprising when you consider how remote these mountains are—by car from El Paso, only after an hour and half do they rise up to their full splendor from the floor of the Texas desert. They make for a “sky island,” watered woodlands surrounded by the salty desert of what used to be a vast sea. There were never any towns in the Guadalupes’ wooded valleys; into the 19th century these valleys were inhabited by the Mescalero Apaches for seasonal hunting camps, until they were driven out by the U.S. Army, and the railroad tracks laid down across the desert, alongside the telegraph lines. Suffice to say, without the aid of fossil fuels, first coal, then oil, it was brutally difficult to travel over this region. Even today most travelers blow on by the Guadalupes at 80 miles an hour towards points west or east. As one who has served as an artist-in-residence in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I well know what glories (and not a few rattlesnakes) these mountains hold. I am at work on my memoir / portrait of Far West Texas but of course, others have written about the Guadalupes, and their works inform mine. Herewith, a few favorites from my working library:
“The Guadalupe Mountains stand nearly 9,000 feet tall, spanning the far western fringe of Texas, the border of New Mexico, and the meeting point of the Southern Plains and Chihuahuan Desert. Long an iconic landmark of the Trans-Pecos region, the Guadalupe Mountains have played a critical role for the people in this beautiful corner of the Southwest borderlands. In the late 1960s, the area was finally designated a national park.
“Drawing upon published sources, oral histories, and previously unused archival documents, Jeffrey P. Shepherd situates the Guadalupe Mountains and the national park in the context of epic tales of Spanish exploration, westward expansion, Native survival, immigrant settlement, the conservation movement, early tourism, and regional economic development. As Americans cope with climate change, polarized political rhetoric, and suburban sprawl, public spaces such as Guadalupe Mountains National Park remind us about our ties to nature and our historical relationships with the environment.”
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W.C. Jameson’s Legend and Lore of the Guadalupe Mountains (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and The Guadalupe Mountains: Island in the Desert (Texas Western Press, 1994), with tales of Indians, wildest nature, secret gold mines and ghosts, are essential reading for any would-be Hollywood screenwriter.
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A Brush with Passion: The Work of Clark Cox, edited by Wendy Parish and Jeannie Sillis (Carlsbad Caverns-Guadalupe Mountains Association, 2003) is my personal favorite. Clark Cox (1861-1936) was a professional scene painter for opera and theater. For some time he worked out of New Orleans, then moved to Dallas, at which point he began to make annual pilgrimages to paint landscapes in the Guadalupe Mountains. His strike me as the kind of watercolors Beatrix Potter would have painted, had she ventured so far afield. And having hiked these landscapes myself, these many decades later, I so admire how Cox captured their subtle beauty.
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Paul Cool’s Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande (Texas A & M University Press, 2008) is a major scholarly history of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, a bloody conflict between newly-arrived Anglo businessmen and local Mexican salt harvesters. I had the honor of interviewing the author for this blog back in 2016.
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Mark Santiago’s A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) is a superbly researched history of a war that had been, essentially, entirely forgotten. From the catalog copy:
“This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava’s coordinated campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the Spanish military’s efforts to contain Apache aggression, constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting.
“This conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace, annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to which Mescaleros residing in “peace establishments” outside Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal efficiency as a result of Spain’s imperial entanglements. He examines Nava’s yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier, preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin.
“Santiago concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war’s legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority. In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spaniards had technically won a ‘good war’ against the Mescaleros and went on to manage a ‘bad peace.'”
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Last but not least of the favorites to mention, is Donald P. McGookey’sGeologic Wonders of West Texas (self-published, second printing, 2007). This is uber-nerdy geology, but essential reading for anything to do with the Guadalupe Mountains, for these are geologic wonders indeed. To quote McGookey, page 70:
“The Guadalupe Mountain rocks are of a very large and long barrier reef, the Capitan Reef. This type of barrier reef is very similar to the present day Great Australian and Belize Barrier Reefs. The continuity of sediments down the slope into the basin facies are the best found anywhere in the world. In places like McKitrick Canyon it is an easy hike from rocks of the top part of the reef to those deposited in the basin. Total relief between the reef and deeper parts of the basin is over 5,000 feet.”
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Finally, two extra-crunchy videos:
Eleanor King’s video “Conflict Archaeology: The Untold History of the Buffalo Soldiers and the Apache in Texas”
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This recent Zoom by archeologist Dr Bryon Schroder is not about the Guadalupe Mountains per se, but about cutting-edge research on paleolithic hunters in the larger Big Bend Region of Far West Texas. I include it here because it gives an overview of peoples who would have also hunted in the Guadalupe Mountains.
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
I find it startling in the extreme, here in the present rhinocerosness, to reencounter Neil Postman’s lecture on “The Surrender of Culture to Technology” from 1997. Actually, I read Postman’s Technolopy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology a few years ago, but just this week I revisited his lecture apropos of that, archived on YouTube. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find it as eerie as I did.
P.S. So 2021: Wingwoman Géraldine Fasnacht jumps off the Eiger.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
Here we are in the Present Rhinocerosness otherwise known as 2021, in which in the United States we are beginning to see some political realignments of epic proportion; thus, already, Edward H. Miller’s 2015 tome about the Republicans’ Southern Strategy of yore seems like it might have been penned on papyrus. All the same, some knowledge of history, with all its repetitions, rhymes and echos, can be most instructive for those who would speculate about what is to come. Although I object to the title (as I explain in the review), Nut Country is a worthy book I continue to recommend.
NUT COUNTRY: RIGHT-WING DALLAS AND THE BIRTH OF THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY by Edward H. Miller University of Chicago Press 2015 256 pp. Reviewed by C.M. Mayo
Whither Texas in the Republican Party’s rise?
In the early 1950s, for most Texas voters, the party of Abraham Lincoln had about as much appeal as Rhode Island barbecue. In the Civil War, Texas, a slave state, had fought for the Confederacy. Reconstruction brought Republican Party-rule, with its emphasis on establishing and protecting rights for freedmen. The backlash from largely ex-Confederate “redeemers” took only a few years to flush the Republicans from power.
Attacking them as “the black man’s party,” these Democrats called for racial solidarity among whites and for rolling back the rights of African-Americans. For decades to come, Jim Crow Texas, like the rest of the South, was controlled by the so-called “yellow dog Democrats,” Democrats who would vote for their party’s candidate, even if he were a yellow dog. Yet by the 1960s, the Republican Party, now espousing conservatism, came roaring back in the Lone Star State.
What happened?
In the South of the 1960s, so the story goes, fiscal conservatives and segregationists were ill-at-ease and even outraged by the policies of liberal Democrats such as President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” was to coax those demoralized voters into its fold with an appeal to “states’ rights, lower taxes and less government regulation.”
In Nut Country, Edward H. Miller argues that this process began sooner, in the mid-1950s; not in the South, but the Southwest; that “it was in fact explicitly racial in motivation and application”; that the role of Dallas, a wealthy and growing city at the crossroads between South, West, and North, with “a powerful local conservative movement,” was particularly significant; and that Dallas’ ultraconservatives played a more essential role in the Republican Party’s rise than has been previously recognized.
The book’s title is taken from President Kennedy’s remark to his wife on the morning of his assassination in Dallas: “We’re heading into nut country today.” It is a tactless choice of title, as is its grab-‘em-by-the-collar opening line:
“President Kennedy’s exploded head was a mark of the beast, some said, even during Kennedy’s televised state funeral throughout the long, gray weekend of November 23 to 25, 1963.”
That some Americans entertain ideas bizarre and horrible to others— shall we say, to those of us who would write or read a book of political history published by the University of Chicago Press— is hardly news.
For the record, I was at the University of Chicago, in the cafeteria in Reynold’s Club, on the day President Ronald Reagan was shot, and several of the workers there, otherwise unremarkable denizens of the South Side, were watching the TV with glee, openly wishing he would die. What I mean to say is, however repugnant others’ ideas may seem, to so flippantly label them “nuts” makes their power and origins more, rather than less, opaque. This is my one quibble with this solidly researched, well-argued, and illuminating work.
Among a parade of others, Miller introduces H.L. Hunt, the richest man in the world, whose Facts Forum conflated liberalism with Communism and relished ferreting out Communist conspiracies; Ted Dealey, owner of the Dallas Morning News; John Bircher Gen. Edwin Walker; W.A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas; and Bruce Alger, who was in 1954 elected the first Republican congressman from Dallas since Reconstruction, and who famously protested in the Adolphus Hotel against Lyndon Johnson — then JFK’s running mate — by pumping a placard that read, “LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS.”
Despite its title, Nut Country is not only about Dallas’ ultraconservatives: Miller also considers the moderate conservatives in the Republican Party and delineates, episode by episode, how their positions on various issues were molded by their reactions against or alliances with ultraconservatives, on the whole, tilting further right.
By the 1950s, Dallas had a white-collar economy based on oil, aerospace, and financial industries. Its moderate conservatives, already members of (or ripe for the picking by) the Republican Party, included bankers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, and, as elsewhere in the United States, a vocal activist contingent influenced by philosopher Ayn Rand and economists such as Friedrich Hayek, championing small government, personal freedom (though not necessarily civil rights), and laissez-faire economics.
The city’s Southern traditionalist conservatism and Protestant evangelical heritage combined — sometimes easily, other times awkwardly — with the more pragmatic conservatism of immigrants from the Midwest. Many of the latter had “grand expectations for the future and good reason for optimism.”
Ultraconservatives, however, braced for cataclysm. Like their Maecenas, H.L. Hunt, many were premillennial dispensationalists; that is, they believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. They felt they were living in the end times, that the Antichrist would soon appear, or had already (some said he was Kennedy, others the Soviet Union or United Nations; certainly, there was no dearth of candidates), and this would signal the return of Jesus and the rapture, when He would raise the faithful to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to suffer the tribulation and the Apocalypse — the complete, final destruction of the world.
For the premillennial dispensationalists, you either believed or you didn’t; you were either saved or lost; you were either with Jesus or with Satan. This binary thinking, coupled with the thrilling conviction that, as Miller puts it, “Satan’s war against Christianity was history’s biggest and most long-standing conspiracy,” translated directly into secular matters — and a preoccupation with conspiracy theories about everything from Communist agents in the White House to the nefarious purposes behind adding fluoride to the water supply.
Whether in disgust or with a chuckle, it would be easy for most academics and the reasonably well-educated to dismiss the ultraconservatives’ ideas. In recent times, these include the Birthers’ claim that President Barack Obama was born in Africa. For scholars, the difficult but fascinating task is to dig down to the roots of such ideas and movements, evaluate their size and form, and identify what, precisely, nourishes them. Toward this end, Nut Country is a Texas-sized achievement.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
This week I’m away from the blog; herewith, from the archives, my review of a book that just might pop off the top of your head and expaaaand your mind. You can be sure, Texas history didn’t start with the Spanish, nor, for that matter, Davy Crockett growling, “You all can go to Hell and I will go to Texas.” Nothing in the conglomeration of regions we now call Texas makes a lick of sense without the broader historical context in the decades previous to its emergence as a republic in 1836, and that context would be a broad indeed: It includes the whole of the continent west of the Appalachians, innumerable intertribal conflicts and tribal migrations, European power games, as well as the impact of trends in international trade as far afield as Europe, Siberia, and China. Although it is only indirectly about Texas, I count Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution among the finest and most crucial works for approaching an understanding of Texas history.
WEST OF THE REVOLUTION: AN UNCOMMON HISTORY OF 1776 by Claudio Saunt W.W. Norton, 2014 pp. 283 ISBN: 978-0-393-24020-7 Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal Magazine, July 14, 2018
Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history.
In West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt, a noted scholar of early American and Native American history, spotlights nine places and formative events of 1776 that rarely raise a blip on the radar of even the most well-educated Americans. As Saunt writes in his introduction, “The American Revolution so dominates our understanding of the continent’s early history that only four digits—1776—are enough to evoke images of periwigs, quill pens, and yellowing copies of the Declaration of Independence.”
As for knowledge of what was going on west of the Appalachians in 1776, I can speak for myself, lo, many a decade ago, when I was a recent graduate of the University of Chicago. History out there west of the Appachalians had seemed to me then… like, totally vague. I’d heard of some of the tribes, those ones with interesting headgear, mainly from watching TV. Since I grew up in California, I had seen some of the Spanish missions. These had had struck me as absurdly drab and morbid. I was not Catholic, and the Spanish were well and gone, as were those Indians, I assumed. In elementary school, when we got our dose of state history, I must have been told the name of the local indigenous people—the Ohlone—but by the time I graduated from college, for 64,000 dollars, I could not have come up with it. Had I known the term terra nullius, I might have used it.
In the intervening years I had the opportunity to remedy my ignorance of California’s indigenous and mission history; perhaps the more for that, I found Saunt’s masterful historical narrative so rich and riveting.
Writes Saunt in his prologue:
“Between the continent’s far edge and the Appalachians stood thousands of towns and villages, whose millions of residents spoke diverse languages and belonged to a multitude of nations. On the eve of the War of Independence, even the most fervid of American speculators could not imagine the extraordinary events unfolding in the West.”
The events Saunt describes were indeed, extraordinary, and “in surprising ways,” he writes, “as pertinent to the twenty-first century as the better-known history of the American Revolution.”
To begin with, in 1776, the Russians, having pushed across Siberia—their Peru, their Mexico—were several years already in the Aleutian Islands, their main modus operandi, when attempts to trade beads and such failed, to seize Aleut hostages in exchange for payment in furs. The Russians were voracious for furs to sell, above all, to Beijing—fox, seal, and what was so abundant in the Aleutians, otter, what they called “soft gold.” Saunt tells us of seven Aleuts who, the better to comprehend this catastrophe that befallen them by the arrival of these strange men from the west, and having been promised the chance to see “the great Russian cities” and an audience with the Empress Catherine II, set out, along with a hold packed with pelts, on a fur trader’s ship across the Bering Sea. None of the seven Aleuts ever set eyes on a great Russian city, never mind that empress: four survived as far as grubby Irkutsk. We do not learn what they saw in Irkutsk, but Saunt tells us:
“Each year, thousands of pelts from the Aleutian Islands and millions from Siberia funneled into Irkutsk. The scale of the vast warehousing operation was out of proportion to anything the Aleuts could have imagined. In Irkutsk, the furs were sorted by quality and the best sent on to European Russia. The others [for the Chinese market] were floated across Lake Baikal to the mouth of the Selenga and then upriver to Kyakhta.”
Kyakhta, a tiny settlement on the Mongolian border, was the red-hot nexus of the global fur trade. Kyahkta not only received the furs from the west coast of North America, but, via London-St Petersburg-Arkhangelsk, from the Canadian Artic, from the Hudson Bay Company. Explains Saunt:
“Sea otter and beaver pelts, orginating in North America, had traveled in opposite directions around the world-nine thousand miles east or forty-five hundred west-only to converge at a remote outpost … From there, they were carried away on the backs of camels or in two-wheeled carts drawn by oxen, destined for Chinese royality in Beijing.”
Did those Aleuts see Kyahkta? Did they see a camel? Could they picture a Chinese princess in her fur-trimmed silk robe? Given the limits of their language’s vocabulary, not to mention what must have been the bizarrerie of crude translation from the Russian, could the Aleuts have begun to fathom the scale, the scope, the money, the power—could they have but begun to grok but an inkling of the tremendous systemic implications in all of this? (Can we?) We only know that the Aleuts were not far from Kyahkta, presumably on their way there, when they died in Irkutsk, presumably in 1776, of smallpox.
The Spanish, in 1776, were worried. Already the Russians were calling the northwest coast of North America “New Russia.” How far south would they venture? From previous exploratory expeditions the Spanish knew of the three excellent natural habors that lay north of Baja California: San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco. If the Russians took those, they could dominate the Pacific, and so imperil the Spanish lifeline of trade with China (the famed Manila Galleons out of Acapulco, trading Mexican silver for silks, spices, and more). Meanwhile, the Franciscans, zealous to save souls for Paradise, lobbied to push north from the deserts of Baja California, to establish missions in more populated and better-watered lands along the Pacific coast. And so as the King in Madrid and his Viceroy in Mexico City commanded, in 1769, Franciscan missionaries under Father Junípero Serra, with soldiers, started moving into what they called Alta California (today the state of California).
In San Diego, the winter of 1776 was the aftermath of a bloody rebellion of the Kumeyaays. They had burned the mission, shot several soldiers full of arrows, and disemboweled one of the friars. As Saunt details, before the rebellion, and to punish and to staunch further rebellion, the Spanish beat, flogged and whipped many of their neophytes, including a Kumeyaay named Sajuil, whom they baptized as Diego, and who would die at the age of twenty-five, imprisoned and too sick to walk, two years later.
Further north, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in March of 1776, what is now Silicon Valley was the scene of first contact, in all its shock and confusion. It was also the year that Mission Dolores, now nestled in the shadows of San Francisco’s skyscrapers, was founded.
As archaeologists have discovered, in the pre-contact San Francisco Bay Area the indigenous peoples were already pushing hard against their resource limits. Saunt cites evidence of overhunted game and fish, increasing dependence on the labor-intensive acorn as a nutritional staple, widespread childhood malnutrition, and violence. After the arrival of the Spanish, with their disruptive mission system, animals and diseases, writes Saunt, “the demographic collapse that followed was swift and terrible.”
In California the missionaries’ modus operandi was to bring the Indians into the mission and punish any who tried to leave. Yet producing enough food was a challenge greater than the missionaries could manage. Bringing provisions by ship proved too expensive and risky. To support the California missions, therefore, the Spanish determined to establish an overland supply route from Santa Fe, New Mexico (which in turn, was already linked to the cities of the Mexican heartland by the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro). On July 4, 1776, a scouting expedition— known as the Domínguez-Escalante, after the two Franciscans who led it—set out from Santa Fe.
Madrid and Mexico City may have had their cathedrals and palaces, but in 1776, Santa Fe was little more than a huddle of abobes. It was also fragile, still, nearly a century later, recovering from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and beleaguered by the Apache and the Comanche. From Santa Fe, the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition zigzagged northwest over the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, a terra incognita that we know today as the Four Corners region, where the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona meet. The men crossed the Great Basin. They encountered Paiutes and Utes. It was a brutal march, beset with confusions, arguments, starvation and thirst. Their last guide had abandoned them when, on the edge of the snow-blanketed Great Basin, out of food, and with only the murkiest (and mistaken) notion of what still lay between them and the California coast, they turned around. They arrived back in Santa Fe on January 2, 1777—the day General George Washington withdrew, after his breakthrough victory, from Trenton, New Jersey.
The fruit of this otherwise failed Domínguez-Escalante Expedition was the map completed two years later by one of its members, the artist and cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco—a name that tinkles few bells outside the precincts of Southwestern history aficionados. But Miera’s map of wonders was a wonder in itself. If much of it was wishful guesswork and interpretations, many of them faulty, of what indigenous guides had told him, the man himself, as expert a mapmaker as might have been found in the Americas of his day, had trekked through hundreds of miles of these lands, he had seen strange peoples, strange animals and birds, and he had seen mountains, canyons, rivers, lakes, basins, and fantastic geological formations, all previously unknown to anyone other than the indigenous people.
Of the Miera map Saunt writes:
“Nearly three feet wide and more than two feet high, it charts over 175,000 square miles… Like other cartographers of the time, Miera inherited the medieval tradition of creating ‘visual encyclopedias of the world,’ and his map is bursting with illustrations, symbols, and narrative legends.”
Illustrations, for instance, of bare-breasted Paiute women, and the Pope of Rome in a carriage pulled by black lions…
The Spanish jealously guarded such intelligence; nonetheless, Miera’s map was copied and that copy consulted by Thomas Jefferson and Zebulon Pike, the early 19th century explorer. As Saunt argues, Miera’s map was “one of the most influential maps in American history,” for it “helped shape the geographic imagination” of the United States—a country born in Philadelphia in the same year of that expedition.
And that new nation was, already, in 1776, “intent on extending its sovereignty to the shores of the Pacific.”
The contest for the continent west of Santa Fe was on. There would be ferocious resistance from the peoples already there—many of them, too, fighting one another, as they had for generations, over grievances old and new, and especially for hunting and fishing grounds. Some tribes were as cousins, speaking the same language, or a related dialect; others spoke tongues and had customs as different from one another as Sardinians and Swedes, or, say, Belgians and Bulgarians.
Then, as now, North American trade with China played an indirect yet magnetic role.
And the future would be strange beyond imagining.
Having introduced the English colonists’ hunger to press past the Appalachians, Russia, Spain, the newborn United States, Aleuts, indigenous Californians, the roaring engine of the international fur trade, and a map, Saunt’s tour of 1776 then whirls us back to 1763 and across the Atlantic to the Continental Divide—the opening for the second half of his book.
Saunt refers not to the geological divide of North America, but “this enormous North American land transaction,” as if the continent were a Brobdingnagian buttercream, divvied up by so many knives and spatulas of solemn words and seals, by the European ambassadors congregated in Paris, after the Seven Years War.
France had lost to Britain what had been, in essence, a world war, involving, at various points, Austria, Saxony, Spain, Sweden and Russia for France, and for Britain, Prussia and Hanover. The Seven Years War was fought in Europe and, in proxy wars, from America to Africa, Asia, and India. The war in North America is remembered as the French and Indian War.
With spare but charmingly novelistic description, Saunt evokes 1763 in Paris: Aristocrats gambling, a ball in the Spanish ambassador’s palace, and then the meeting in the Duke of Bedford’s residence where, “under crimson draperies and a portrait of Britain’s King George III,” the treaty was signed. As for North America, in broad strokes, with the noted exception of New Orleans, Louis XV was out. His cousin, Carlos III of Spain, took the continent west of the Mississippi River; and from the east of the Mississippi to the Atlantic, dominion was now all George III’s.
Writes Saunt, “On the face of it, the claims of European monarchs to vast North American domains were absurd… Yet for local residents, the massive land transaction had very real consquences with complex and varying ramifications that took decades to unfold.”
Returning to his rhetorical device of funneling the narrative through the year 1776, Saunt proceeds to spotlight four of these “very real consequences.”
Firstly: In central Canada, with the oceanic prairielands newly claimed by the British, their Hudson Bay Company has moved inland to establish Cumberland House, a stunningly remote trading post, in winter, beset by jaw-locking cold. The Hudson Bay Company aims to defend its monopoly on beaver pelts—that monopoly quickly eroding with the influx of independent traders, many French but now with British backing.
Over the previous century, Europeans had adopted various styles of beaver-fur and beaver-felt hats, from the high-crowned and broad-brimmed Elizabethan courtier’s, to the French-style cavalier’s slouch hat with plume, then, by 1776, tricorn hats, and (this the style Benjamin Franklin favored) rustic fur caps. On the supplying side, Cree and Assiniboine trappers demanded rum, textiles, tobacco, and guns, gunpowder, and shot.
To give an idea of the dimension of the beaver trade, writes Saunt:
“Before the arrival of Europeans, it is estimated that there were between sixty million and four hundred million beaver industriously damming rivers and constructing lodges in North America. By 1900, the animals were nearly extinct.”
This near-extermination of the beaver may have had ecological consequences so huge and systemic that they may prove impossible for us, for all our modern science, to fully grasp. In building dams, Saunt explains, this large rodent becomes a “geomorphic agent.”
“The dams, made of alder, aspen, thicket, leaves, mud, stones, and other debris, can be enormous, regularly stretching 225 feet across with a thickness of six feet. One dam in Montana measured an astounding 2,300 feet. Another rose 16 feet high. In favorable environments, there may be as many as thirty dams per mile of stream, and up to 40 percent of all streams may be modified by the obstructions.”
One of many effects that “cascaded through Canada’s boreal forests in the eighteenth century” was the plaguing blackflies—for, as beaver dams collapsed, wetlands drained and water began to run swiftly. Blackflies prefer that.
Secondly: Some 800 miles south, in what is now western South Dakota, in 1776, Standing Bull arrived in the Black Hills—a sacred place and a founding event in the history of the people known as the Lakota Sioux. Standing Bull had led his people west from their homelands in what is now Minnesota. One reason they had pushed over the Missouri River and the plains was to hunt the bison; another, less understood, was that Pontiac’s War had cut off vital trade goods from the east.
By that 1763 Treaty of Paris, the British had taken the French territories around the Great Lakes and in Ohio country. The French had not governed there with absolute authority; they had long given the indigenous peoples generous scheduled gifts. In other words, they paid tribute to the Indians. Writes Saunt, “European armies were no match for native peoples in this part of the world.” The new British governor, Jeffrey Amherst, refused to give the customary gifts; this enraged the Delawares, the Miamis, Mississaugas, Ojibwas, Senecas, Shawnees, and Ottawas, and soon the British found themseves embroiled in that war named for a chief of the Ottawa.
Writes Saunt:
“Looking east from the Minnesota River, Pontiac’s War appeared a lot different than it did looking west from Manhattan Island. Where Amherst saw an unjustifiable challenge to British power launched by treacherous savages, Standing Bull’s people identified a grave threat to their access to Atlantic trade.”
Specifically, for the Lakota Sioux, what was imperiled was their annual trade fair, a fair attracting thousands of people, on occasion more than ten thousand, on the banks of the Minnesota River. With the war, who would trade with them? Without cloth, kettles, guns, powder, and shot, how would they eat, and continue to hunt? And defend themselves?
In a fascinating section, Saunt details the indigenous trade networks west of the Mississippi, “a hub-and-spoke system, formed not by airlines but by footpaths, horse trails, and river routes.” In 1776 there were three main centers: Taos in New Mexico; the Dalles, a series of cascades on the Columbia River in present-day Oregon; and on the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota. The latter, which became of increasing importance to the Sioux, was situated “at both the eastern edge of the Plains Indian horse market and the western edge of the European gun trade.”
A third consquence: In Spanish territory west of the Mississippi, in what is now central and western Missouri, “the heart of the continent,” 1776 found an empire expanding—that of the Osages, who had arrived “perhaps migrating from the Ohio River,” and with guns. By this time the Osages dominated the fur trade with St. Louis, and they were “stealing Indian women, kidnapping children, and rustling horses and mules.” European law held little sway in this frontier zone, the wild west of its day, filled with, writes Saunt, “deserters, robbers, rapists, and murderers. By trading with any and everyone, they freed native residents from Spanish dependence and underwrote Osage expansion toward the Red River.” The French, then the Spanish, could not control smuggling up, down, or across the Mississippi River any more than could the English. And the Osages, suddenly by that Treaty of Paris surrounded by new trading partners, played the one against the others, to their own advantage. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in distant Philadelphia, the Osages were about to “double the size of their empire, adding one hundred thousand square miles to their domain—a rate of expansion equal to that of the thirteen colonies and United States over the same period.”
In the nineteenth century, the Osages suffered many tribulations. Nonetheless, they retained what turned into an important asset: mineral rights on Oklahoma oil fields that to this day generate tens of millions of dollars in annual royalties. Writes Saunt, “The Osages had not forgotten the lessons of the eighteenth century.”
Fourthly, and finally, Saunt takes us to 1776 in the Deep South, and the saga of the Creeks, a people who, by that Treaty of 1763, suffered a very different fate. They had held large swaths of present-day Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. The coastal plains and pine forests were rich lands for hunting, gathering, fishing, and for growing corn. Creeks had some thirty villages each with “a central square, a council house, and numerous dwellings made of posts, wattle, and mud.” But instead of gaining trading partners, the Creeks lost their Spanish and French partners; the treaty left them surrounded by the British. Creek lands were not for the Spanish to give to the British, they said, as to the wind; British settlers began to move in, making it increasingly difficult for Creeks to hunt deer, the skins of which they traded for cloth, beads, and guns. And here, too, while the French and Spanish had given them gifts, the British refused. Worse, the British began trading guns to the Creeks’ enemies, the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Then British Georgia and Florida embargoed the Creeks. In desperation the Creeks attempted to turn to the Spanish: From the Florida coast, a group of Creeks sailed on a fishing boat to Havana, Cuba.
By 1776 Creek embassies had appeared in Havana at least nineteen times. What the Creeks could offer the Spanish was dried meat; what they wanted from the Spanish were, urgently, guns, powder, and shot. But the Spanish gave them only “stacks of hats, mirrors, and thread and professions of ‘paternal affection.'” Then the war between the British and their American colonies caused Creek trade opportunities to further shrink.
Things might have been different. As Saunt explains, Cuba was then a burgeoning slave economy producing sugarcane and aguardiente; it needed more food, and the Creeks could have helped provide that. In 1776 in a drunken fight over a woman, a Cuban boatman stabbed three of his Creek passengers. In fear of revenge, Cuban boatmen steered clear of the Creeks on the Florida coast. Marooned economically and politically, the Creeks continued losing ground. Their territories were swiftly encroached upon by slave-worked plantations of rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton. In the next century, along wth several other tribes, the Creeks would be forcibly removed, walking the Trail of Tears to a reservation in Oklahoma.
Intriguingly, Saunt asks:
“What if the Creeks had become purveyors to the fastest-growing slave colony in the New World? Would they have had the economic clout to avoid removal in the 1830s and retain their homelands? Would their nation have become a part of the Confederacy in some form, perhaps as a member state that shared the Old South’s deep investment in slavery? How might the South and American history have been transformed?”
In the United States, for the most part, our pre-Revolutionary history west of the Appalachians has been a matter left to academic specialists and local and Indian history enthusiasts. Saunt’s West of the Revolution is an at-once engaging and compelling corrective, and more: these nine places and formative events suggest fresh ways of looking at our own times, and at the power by which trade, migration, technological change, ecological change, epidemics, and the gusts of fashion and sheer, crazy luck may impel us, or, beneath our full awareness, subtly nudge us, in strange directions. Above all, West of Revolution allows us to begin to perceive how these peoples of our own past were, to quote Saunt, “entangled in a web of environmental, political, and economic relationships that they could neither fully control nor completely understand”—as are we. Writes Saunt, “we are unavoidably and always interdependent.”
And to suggest that near-translucent but entangling mega-web, I conclude this review with one web of a question. Do we know, precisely, what has been harvested from the earth, and from where, and by whom, and in what way, and on what terms, for our smartphones?
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
Delighted to note that earlier this month Jeffrey Mishlove’s interview (in three parts) with me about Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book Spiritist Manual made his “classic reboot” list and for some days it was at the top of his YouTube channel—an honor indeed. For decades, first with his TV show “Thinking Allowed” and now with his YouTube channel “New Thinking Allowed,” Mishlove has been broadcasting his interviews with some of the most innovative and accomplished researchers and authors of works exploring consciousness.
Apropos of the subject of this interview and a just-before-taping conversation with Mishlove about his own research, I went home and directly wrote a review of the then recently published Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal. What could this possibly have to do with Mishlove and Madero? Read on.
SUPER NATURAL: A NEW VISION OF THE UNEXPLAINED by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal Penguin Tarcher, 2015 ISBN 9781101982327 Review originally published in Literal Magazine, June 5, 2015
This book is a flying ax of apocalypse. But whoa, let’s first bring this identified flying thoughtform to Planet Earth: to Texas; Houston; Rice University; Department of Religion; and finally, the office of the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Professor Kripal, who describes his work as comparing “fantastic states of mind and energy and their symbolic expressions in human history, literature, religion, and art,” is one of two authors, alternating chapters, who have launched this catch-it-if-you-can metaphysical ax. The other is Whitley Strieber, a Texan internationally famous for his horror fiction and series of memoirs beginning with Communion: A True Story, the 1987 best-seller about his encounters with UFOs and entities he calls “the visitors.” Whether you indulge in Strieber’s shiver-worthy writings or not, you’ve no doubt seen the image of a “visitor” from the cover of Communion everywhere from the movies to cartoons: a bulbous rubber-like head with darkly liquid almond-shaped eyes.
If you’ve read this far and are tempted to stop, I urge you to take a breath—a bold breath. Should you still feel bristling hostility, as many educated readers do at the mere mention of such subjects as UFOs and “the visitors,” that’s normal. Soldier through the discomfort, however, and you may be able to open a door from the comfy cell of mechanistic materialism onto vast, if vertiginous vistas of reality itself—and not to the supernatural but, as Kripal and Strieber would have it, the super natural.
That door does not open with a key but with what Kripal terms a cut—as provided by Immanuel Kant, that most emminent of bewigged German philosophers. More about the “Kantian cut” in a moment.
Never mind the remarkable contents of The Super Natural, the fact that two such authors would write a book together is remarkable in the extreme. Strieber, while building a passionate following for Communion, his many other works and esoteric podcast, “Dreamland,” has also attracted widespread ridicule for his memoirs which go beyond retailing his perceptions of his abductions by “the visitors” to adventures, both in and out of body, with orbs, hair-raising magnetic fields, blue frog-faced trolls, and the dead. Nonetheless, Kripal, as one steeped in the literature of the world’s religions, identifies Strieber’s Communion as “a piece of modern erotic mystical literature,” and indeed, nothing less than a litmus test for his own academic field:
“[i]f we, as scholars of religion, cannot take this text seriously, if we cannot interpret it in some satisfying fashion, if we cannot make some sense of this man’s honest descriptions of his traumatic, transcendent experiences, then we have no business trying to understand his spiritual ancestors in the historical record. We either put up here, or we shut up there. I decided to put up.”
Now to the Kantian cut. It is to distinguish between the appearances of things and what may actually lie behind them. In making that cut, we recognize that while our physical senses provide us with essential survival-oriented information, in no way do they even begin to convey to our consciousness awareness the totality of reality. As Kripal writes, this cut “is a very reasonable and appropriate response to our actual situation in the cosmos.” Furthermore, “Once one makes such a cut, one can, in principle, take any religious experience or mythical world seriously and sympathetically without adopting any particular interpretation of it, much as one suspends disbelief to enjoy a good novel or watch a science-fiction movie.”
In other words, we don’t need to accept nor reject Strieber’s reports of UFOs and “the visitors”— yes, we can keep the lids on our coconuts while adopting the stance of radical empiricism in considering large-scale quantum phenomena!
Put yet another way: if we can simply look at such experiences as Strieber’s, sit with them, consider them “seriously and sympathetically, without adopting any particular interpretation,” we can then, to quote Kripal again, “begin to study their patterns, histories, narrative structures, sexual dimensions, and philosophical implications.” The Kantian cut thus gives us the power to then spiral up to a broader, richer view. It is an astonishing power.
I know precisely what Kripal means— not that I have any stories about “the visitors”; my encounter was with a mystical text. Nearly a decade ago, in the Francisco I. Madero archive in Mexico’s National Palace, I happened upon his secret book, Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual).
Given that Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution— the first major Revolution of the 20th century and a crucible of modern Mexico— and that he served as President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, it struck me like thunder that, after two decades of living in and writing about Mexico, I had not known that Madero was a Spiritist medium. I was entirely unfamiliar with his Manual espírita, which, as I soon learned, Madero began writing in 1909, finished the following year—the same year he launched the Revolution—then, in 1911, the year he assumed the presidency, he printed 5,000 copies under his pseudonym “Bhima.”
Manual espírita, or Spiritist Manual, is an evangelical work proclaiming that, in my words summarizing Madero’s:
“We are not our physical body; we are spirits, and as such we are immortal and we are destined, lifetime by lifetime, not by any ritual intermediated by clerics, but by freely chosen good works, to evolve into ever higher levels of consciousness and so return to God.”
An offshoot of American Spiritualism, Spiritism was codified by French educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, aka Allan Kardec, and his disciples in the second half of the nineteenth century. Madero, scion of a wealthy family from Coahuila in northern Mexico, was a student in France in 1891 when he encountered Kardec’s magazine and books.
According to Spiritism, because we are spirits it follows that we can communicate with other spirits, embodied or not. Spiritism is a religion but also the most modern of modern science, Kardec argued; as a scientist might peer through a microscope to perceive the detail in a leaf, so a scientist could employ a medium to learn from the spirit world.
Both in France and on his return to Mexico, Madero met with a circle of fellow Spiritists to develop his psychic abilities, in particular, for receiving communications from the dead by means of automatic writing. In 1907, a militant spirit named “José” began to advise Madero on writing the book that would serve as his political platform: La sucessión presidencial en 1910 (The Presidential Succesion of 1910), a work well-known to scholars of the 1910 Revolution. Then, so we learn from Madero’s mediumnistic notebook, José informed Madero that he would write Manual espírita, a work “which will cause an even greater impression.”
By the time I began to leaf through Manual espírita in Madero’s archive nearly a century later, quite the opposite seemed to have been its destiny.
It turns out that there are, albeit astonishingly few, Mexican historians who have written in some depth and seriousness about Madero’s Spiritism: Manuel Guerra de Luna, Enrique Krauze, Alejandro Rosas Robles, and Yolia Tortolero Cervantes. Although, at the time I happened upon Manual espírita in the archive, it was nigh impossible to buy a copy, Alejandro Rosas Robles had included it in his 10 volume compilation, Obras completas de Francisco Ignacio Madero, published in 2000. I should also note the esteemed Mexican novelist, Ignacio Solares, whose Madero, el otro delved, and knowingly, into his esoteric philosophies.
All that said, in Mexico, where Madero has the stature of an Abraham Lincoln, celebrated in every textbook of national history, and the Revolution he proclaimed in his Plan de San Luis Potosí commemorated every November 20th, Bhima’s Manual espírita lay murky leagues below the cultural radar, and the nature and historical and philosophical context of its contents were terra incognita to most historians of the Mexican Revolution. It had never been translated.
I was a translator—and one keenly aware of how little Mexican writing sees publication in English. And I knew enough to know that, whatever its contents, the fact that Francisco I. Madero had written this book gave it importance, for it would illuminate the character and personal and political philosophies of the leader of the 1910 Revolution. It bears repeating that Madero took the trouble to write it in the same year he declared and led that Revolution, and he published it in 1911, the year of his nation-wide campaign that resulted in his election to the presidency of the Republic. Whatever this book contained, it must have been exceedingly important to him.
From the first page of my self-appointed task, however, my instinct was to wince. Nervous laughter, eye-rolling… It was obvious to me that most educated readers, including most historians of Mexico, would regard Madero’s Spiritist Manual with puckerlips of disgust.
What had I taken on?
Madero was murdered in the coup d’etat of 1913. As I read deeper into that terrible episode, I was flummoxed to learn from U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson’s memoir that, after arresting President Madero, General Victoriano Huerta sent his first communication to the U.S. Legation, asking the ambassador, should he lock Madero in the lunatic asylum?
I soon realized that to merely translate this century-old book would be a disservice not only to its author, but to myself and to the reader—the latter, as were those archvillians of 1913, General Huerta and Ambassador Wilson, presumably as unlettered as I was on the history of metaphysical religion and subjects as various as the afterlife, angels, astral planes, automatic writing, bilocation, and the teachings of Lord Krishna in the Hindu wisdom book, the Bhagavad-Gita.
What Spiritist Manual needed was a book-length introduction, a framing context for English language readers who know little or nothing of Madero, and/or of Mexican history, and, most crucially, of the metaphysical philosophies Madero had embraced and espoused.
And so, beginning with Kardec, I began a marathon of reading. There was much to glean from the works of the aforementioned handful of Mexican historians; also, to my happy surprise, from recent scholarly works about nineteenth and twentieth century metaphysical religion, parapsychology, and occult traditions— serious considerations of what many historians still dismiss, as Dame Frances Yates, leading scholar of the esoteric traditions of the Renaissance, archly dismissed nineteenth and twentieth century Rosicrucians as “below the notice of the serious historian.” These works include Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind & Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (Yale University Press); Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment (State University of New York Press); John Warne Monroe’s Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism and Occultism in Modern France(Cornell University Press); Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge University Press), and, neither last nor least, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press).
In addition, I combed through Madero’s personal library, which is preserved in the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México in Mexico City. As I could now appreciate, Madero had assembled a large and sophisticated collection of turn-of-the-last century European and Anglo-American esoterica, including two English translations and J. Roviralta Borrell’s Spanish translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, the latter heavily annotated in Madero’s own handwriting.
Thus: Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. The odyssey I recount is not only Madero’s, but my own into that vast and vertiginous view made possible by my having made, and inviting the reader to make, the Kantian cut— although I did not use that term. I cracked open the door to greater understanding, not by embracing, nor by rejecting Madero’s philosophies and assertions, but by accepting—simply accepting— that what I understand to be reality and what it actually is are not necessarily the same thing because I, like any human being, with wondrous yet rangebound senses and brain, cannot comprehend the fullness and every last quarky detail of the cosmos. What we know is a nano-slice, if that.
In other words, we don’t have to accept nor reject Madero’s ideas—yes, we can keep the lid on our coconuts while seriously considering a whole lot of super freaky stuff!
Although Madero’s Spiritist Manual is radically different in its content and tone from Strieber’s Communion, like that mystical text, if encountered with historical and philosophical context and with the power of the “Kantian cut,” considering it “seriously and sympathetically, without adopting any particular interpretation” can open up vistas. For one thing, Madero’s Spiritist Manual makes Mexico’s 1910 Revolution look glitteringly uncanny, like a prism ferried from the back of a closet to a window. Or, shall we say, to an open door.
To return to Strieber and Kripal’s The Super Natural, writes Kripal: “History is not what we think it is.”
Writes Strieber: “[T]his world is not what it seems, and we do not know what it is, only that we are in it… I am reporting perceptions, and what that means.”
Was Madero really communicating with spirits of the dead? Well, that’s one hypothesis.
Many people know Strieber as “that guy who wrote about being abducted by extraterrestrials.” In fact, Strieber reports his perceptions of his experiences, but as to what they actually are, he says, “I am a wanderer, lost in a forest of hypotheses.” Strieber also echoes Kripal in arguing that, “it is not necessary to believe in such things as flying saucers, aliens, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena in order to study them.”
But to study such things without puckerlips, and all brain cells firing, one must make that Kantian cut—and one needs courage to persist, for that Kantian cut must be made again and again in the face of our inclination towards easy polarities, to either believe or, more commonly, reject, bristling with hostility or scornful laughter.
As Kripal puts it, one must “learn to live with paradox, to sit with the question.”
But again, this sitting in the gray zone of maybes, this repeated Kantian cutting—it becomes a kind of mowing—takes nerve, both intellectual and social. It can prove hellishly uncomfortable.
Elegantly written and engaging as it is, it takes nerve to read The Super Natural—not to mention Strieber’s Communion. However, in my experience of reading for my book about Madero’s book, it gets easier. So much ectoplasm, so many floating trumpets, fairies and tulpas, psychic surgery… ho hum! It seemed I could tackle anything, whether a purported download from the Akashic records of Jiddu Kirshnamurti’s incarnations wending back to 22,662 B.C. (C.W. Leadbeater’s Lives of Alcyone, inscribed by its Spanish translator to Mrs. Madero), Joan of Arc’s autobiography (as channelled by medium Léon Denis, one of Madero’s favorite authors) or, for instance, a modern parapsychologist’s story about a sociopathic psychic named Ted Owens and his hyperdimensional rain-making confreres “Twitter” and “Tweeter” (Jeffrey Mishlove’s The P.K. Man, which I picked up for late 20th century context).
Speaking of Jeffrey Mishlove’s The P.K. Man, I am not sure I could have appreciated Kripal and Strieber’s The Super Natural so much as I do without having read that first. On its face, like Strieber’s Communion, or Madero’s Spiritist Manual, The P.K. Man would no doubt strike most readers as outrageous, indigestible bizarrerie. Yet having read The P.K. Man twice now, I concur with Harvard University Medical School Professor John W. Mack, who writes in that book’s forward, “Mishlove’s powerful true story may greatly help to clear the way for new creative human visions and achievements.”
Mishlove concludes his story of mind over matter: “We must move toward honest, authentic integration of the depths within us and the facts before us.” He holds the flag high. Yet Mishlove confesses, it took him more than two decades to summon the courage to publish The P.K. Man.
I myself procrastinated mightily in translating and writing about Madero’s Spiritist Manual. And I had assumed that I was at the end of that years’-long road, with my book and the translation edited, formatted, and an index prepared, when in an antiquarian bookstore in Mexico City, I chanced upon Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window onto the Invisible World). Published in 1960, this exceptionally rare book contains the detailed records of séances performed by ex-President Plutarco Elías Calles, other prominent Mexicans, and a medium named Luís Martínez, from 1940 to 1952 for the Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Síquicas (IMIS). Its dust jacket features a “spirit photograph” of “Master Amajur,” a 10th century astronomer who had much to say and many a rose petal to materialize in many a dark night’s séance. After dipping into those spooky accounts, I could not sleep, and my manuscript and galleys, which needed to be modified in light of that book, sat untouched on a shelf for more than a month.
The first sentence Kripal writes in his own first chapter of The Super Natural is, “I am afraid of this book.”
When we make the Kantian cut, we can consider stories that might seem not only ludicrous, but frightening—perchance beyond frightening. Beyond one’s world view by a galaxy.
For instance: As Strieber writes in The Super Natural, after publishing Communion, he started receiving letters from readers, “at first by the hundreds, then the thousands, then a great cataract of letters, easily ten thousand a month, from all over the world.” They too had seen the haunting face on the cover of Communion. Writes Strieber, “I was deeply moved, not to say shocked, to see that I had uncovered a human experience of vast size that was completely hidden.”
And for instance: that Kripal himself, while in Calcutta during the Kali Puja festivities, experienced an explosive out of- and in-body state that he believes resonanted with some of Strieber’s—and thousands of others who gave similar testimony. And: Kripal finds striking correspondences between American UFO abduction literature and—who’dathunk?—Indian Tantric traditions.
And, finally, for instance: As his library and voluminous correspondence attest, Francisco I. Madero did not come up with his ideas by his lonesome; Spiritist Manual is not evidence of schizophrenia, but a unique synthesis of what was in his time in the West the cutting edge of a well-established literature of Spiritist / Spiritualist, Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, and occult philosophies.
But if, as Kripal and Strieber, Mishlove, and Madero all suggest, we seriously consider these stories of anomalous phenomena—communication with disembodied consciousnesses, out-of-body travel, psychokinesis, telepathy, “the visitors,” and so on and so forth, how do we live our lives with dignity while entertaining the notion that, say, someone, anyone, might read our thoughts, game the financial markets, or, say, impel a pilot, of a sudden, to crash his plane? And how do we avoid sinking into primitive credulities, viscious paranoias, and, ultimately, barbarities such as the burning alive of witches?
I think I mentioned, it can get uncomfortable.
Kripal writes, “many of the things that we are constantly told are impossible are in fact not only possible but also the whispered secrets of what we are, where we are, and why we are here.” But neither are Kripal and Strieber saying, believe this or believe that. On the contrary; Kripal says, make that cut. “Do not believe what you believe.”
But whatever you believe, or not, that is a story. And stories are what make us human. And being human— for that matter, being able to read and write books, and so catch and hurl packages of thought from across one axis of time and space to multiple others— is both super and natural. As Kripal and Strieber insist: super natural.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
The plan for this first Monday of the month was to post Part III of my series on Cabeza de Vaca books (for Parts I and II click here and here). Force majeure! Look for it later. In lieu of that, herewith, from the archives, my review of a mind-bending masterpiece, Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire.
THE COMANCHE EMPIRE by Pekka Hämäläinen Yale University, 2008 ISBN 978-0-300-15117-6 Review originally published in Marfa Mondays Blog, August 1, 2016
The cover of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, of a ghost-white warrior with a trio of blood-red slashes down his cheek, is as arresting as the argument that, as it opens, the Comanches’ was “an American empire that, according to conventional histories, did not exist.”
In the United States public discourse conflates wildly heterogenous groups into easy categories— Native American, white, black, and so on and so forth— and then, with school board-approved narratives as mortar, we construct colossal political edifices. In their shadows, alas, many of us are blind to the complexities in our society and history. The complexities are riotous. And when we shine a light on but one of them— as Finnish historian Hämäläinen has in this brilliant study of Comanche hegemony— suddenly our easy categories and well-worn narratives may look strange, deeply wrong.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, I am at work on a book about Far West Texas, that is, Texas west of the Pecos River. Anyone who heads out there, especially to the remote Big Bend, hears about Comanches, e.g., they crossed the Río Grande here, they watered their horses there. But the Comanches, an equestrian Plains people who hunted the buffalo, were latecomers to the Trans-Pecos. They did not settle there; they trekked through it on the Comanche Trail (more aptly, network of trails) on their way to raid in northern Mexico. They returned driving immense herds of horses and kidnapped Apache and Mexican women and children in tow, for markets up north around Taos, New Mexico, and Big Timbers on the Arkansas, which garnered them metal tools, cooking pots, corn and other carbohydrates, textiles, and above all, guns and ammunition.
The Comanche were raiding south of the Río Grande as early as the 1770s, but their large-scale raiding in northern Mexico commenced in the 1820s, plunging deep into Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Durango, Zacatecas and, in the 1840s, as far as Jalisco and the major central market and manufacturing city of Querétaro. This systematic “mass violence” which left the northern realm of the Mexican economy crippled and its people demoralized, turned it into what Hämäläinen terms “an extension of Greater Comanchería.” Hence, by the late 1840s, when the U.S. Army invaded Mexico, what they were really invading was, to quote Hämäläinen, “the shatterbelt of Native American power.” But this is to get ahead of the story.
CIRCA 1750-1850: THE COMANCHE CENTURY
The imperialists of the 19th century: wouldn’t that be Yankees, the English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans and Belgians and Dutch— “white” people, so-called? Hämäläinen’s is an audacious argument: “In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance; it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.”
Specifically, from about 1750 to 1850, the Comanches aggressively expanded their territory to eventually dominate what we now call the Southwest. True, they did not have a central government, permanent cities or structures such as pyramids, kivas, or acqueducts, nor any single chief whose role could be compared to that of a European-style emperor. Moreover, as nomads for much of the year, their aim may not have been to conquer and colonize, but they were an identifiable group whose aim was to “control and exploit.” As given by the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of the definitions of “empire” is “an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination of control,” hence, unnerving as it may strike some readers, Hämäläinen’s use of the word is apt. He argues:
“[Comanches] manipulated and exploited the colonial outposts in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and northern Mexico to increase their safety, prosperity, and power. They extracted resources and labor from their Euro-American and Indian neighbors through thievery and tribute, and incorporated foreign ethnicities into their ranks as adopted kinspeople, slaves, workers, dependents, and vassals. The Comanche empire was powered by violence, but, like most viable empires, it was first and foremost an economic construction.”
The Spanish, French, Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, as they contested the heart of the North American continent, were “restrained and overshadowed” by Comanches. In fact, argues Hämäläinen, “the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.” Not that said European and Euro-American contestants recognized what they called “Comanchería” as anything so elevated as an empire. They considered the Comanches savages, indios bárbaros, requiring extermination or, failing acceptance of their invitation, a frog-march into “Christian civilization,” Catholic or Protestant, end of story.
But here, in Hämäläinen, unfolds the many-chaptered story.
ARRIVAL AT THE EDGE OF THE KINGDOM OF NEW MEXICO
A Spanish report of 1706 is the first written mention of the Comanches, who called themselves the Numunu. With their then-allies, the Utes, they were preparing to attack Taos, at the mountainous edge of the Kingdom of New Mexico.
Sometime before, this nomadic Uto-Aztecan speaking people had broken away from the Shoshones, then in the central plains in present-day Wyoming, to head south, skirting the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, in search of game and horses.
Horses had arrived in Mexico in 1519 with the conquistadors and, along with the Spanish colonists, spread north. In New Mexico the Spanish prohibited indigenous Puebloan peoples’ access to horses, but the corrals blew open, as it were, with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and horses and equestrian know-how quickly spread north across the plains.
For the Comanches, the horse changed everything, economically, militarily, and down to the marrow of their culture. With the horse, writes Hämäläinen, “In almost an instant, the world became smaller and its resources more accessible.” On the one hand, the horse allowed the Comanches to more efficiently harvest the buffalo, which roamed in herds of tens of thousands on the shortgrass plains. On the other hand, the horse enabled them to fight and raid more effectively. And more: for the Comanches, horses served as a store of value, a signal of status, and a trade commodity.
Within a few decades, Comanches were specializing in hunting buffalo and stealing horses and taking captives, and trading these to provide for their other needs. While this allowed them to thrive— in 1740 Athanase de Mézières wrote, “They are a people so numerous and so haughty that when asked their number, they make no difficulty comparing it to the stars”— in reality, with an unsustainable resource base plus severe external shocks to come, they were on the rise of a Seneca Cliff.
THE COMANCHES AND SLAVERY
In the contemporary American imagination the word “slave” conjures images of African-Americans in the old South, their bondage cemented by a legal system that defined and enforced racial identity. Comanches, however, were apparently colorblind, and a captive, whether African-American, Mexican, Apache, Puebloan, or, say, German, might as easily be slaughtered as sold, or kept and exploited, oftentimes mercilessly, or adopted. One child captive, Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped from her family’s Texas frontier farm, ended up the wife of a leading Comanche chief, and mother of the incandescently famous chief, Quanah. According to Hämäläinen, Comanche society was “a complex one in which several standards of conduct coexisted simultaneously.” Nonetheless, Comanches “built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest.” Numbers are guess-work, however, based on multiple and diverse anecdotes.
Initially, in and around New Mexico, Comanches took captives as they warred on Apaches, Pueblo Indians, other indigenous peoples, and Spanish and mestizo colonists. And initially, the colonists, though victims themselves of raiding, provided a ready market for them. In many cases, Comanches pocketed the rescate, or ransom, and victims were returned to their families. Although since the mid-16th century Spanish law prohibited slavery, for the colonists of New Mexico, trading in Indian slaves was too lucrative to resist. Writes Hämäläinen, “In theory, these ransomed Indians were to be placed in Spanish households for religious education, but in practice many of them became common slaves who could be sold, bought, and exploited with impunity.” By the late 18th century, large numbers of Apache and other Indian captives purchased from Comanches had been sent to the silver mines in Mexico and Caribbean tobacco plantations.
Comanche slaving began to change in the early 19th century when, smallpox having devastated Comanche and other Indian populations, Euro-American fur traders and other traders moved onto the plains. In response to richer trading opportunities, Comanches began to make greater use of captives to tend their larger horse herds and to scrape and prepare buffalo robes.
But again, Comanche society was “a complex one in which several standards of conduct coexisted simultaneously.” There were several notorious cases of gang rape and torture-murder of captives, including of children, as well as several cases when captives, assimilated into the Comanche way of life and kinship networks, refused the opportunity to return to their original families.
EXPANSION IN THE 18th AND EARLY 19th CENTURIES
Early in 18th century, in search of buffalo and captives, the Comanches roamed east onto the Plains. Empowered by the horse, and enriched by the bounty of the buffalo and both tribute from New Mexico and stolen horses and captives, throughout the century Comanches continued pushing east, north, west, and south on the Great Plains with what Hämäläinen calls “a vigorous diplomatic and commercial expansion, forging a far-reaching trade and alliance network that in time dwarfed Spain’s imperial arrangements in North America.”
By the 1750s, having displaced the Apaches, the Comanches controlled the western Great Plains below the Arkansas River. In 1762, when by the Treaty of Fountainbleau Carlos III took Louisiana off of Louis XV’s map, writes Hämäläinen, “the transfer was, in effect, imaginary.” The following year, the Treaty of Paris confirmed Spain’s North American expansion, refining its border against what was now British territory to the east— again, ignoring the mammoth and dangerous reality of an expanding Comanchería.
But the Comanches did not settle permanently in any one place; they moved with the buffalo and, with lightning speed, towards raiding opportunities, primarily in New Mexico and other Spanish colonies. For the Spanish, already stretched thin in the north, then weakened by the wars for Independence that began in 1810, Comanche raids proved devastating. Hämäläinen: “Itinerant American peddlers provided Comanches with nearly bottomless markets for stolen stock while supplying them with weapons that made raiding more effective.” The result: “Rather than New Spain’s absorbing the southern plains into its imperial body, Comanches had reduced the Spanish borderlands to a hinterland for an imperial system of their own.”
TEXAS
Spanish Texas, which lay north of the Nueces River and hugged the Gulf Coast into Lousiana, was subject to so many Apache, Comanche, Tawakoni, and other indigenous depredations of its missions, presidios, and ranches that it seemed it might not survive, never mind prosper. When he visited San Antonio in 1821, Stephen F. Austin described the whole country from the Sabine River west a “wild, howling, interminable solitude.” To make a convoluted story short, by invitation of the Mexican government, Austin, now a Mexican citizen, would sign a contract as an empresario, receiving land in exchange for the commitment to colonize it. Mexico City’s aim was to both counter Anglo-American colonization by effectively absorbing it qua Mexican, and, crucially, to establish a buffer between Apache and Comanche raiders and its other northern ranching and population centers. To give an idea of how urgent that latter project was, in 1825 over 300 Comanches arrived in San Antonio to settle in for six days looting the town.
By the 1830s, for fear of Indian depredations, the “Anglo” settlers or Texians, as they came to be known, had still refused to settle east of the Colorado River. South and east Texas, largely under Comanche vassalage, remained Tejano, and was so poor and terrorized that, writes Hämäläinen, “basic economic functions began to shut down.” Farmers did not dare venture into their own fields or onto the roads.
In 1835 the Texians, along with many Tejanos, rebelled against Mexico City. The Texas Revolution is a foundational story told and retold in an overwhelmingly triumphalist literature, both academic and popular, emphasizing the manliness of the “Anglo” heroes of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, and the weakness of the Mexicans under the cruel and corrupt Antonio López de Santa Anna. Hämäläinen’s bucket-of-cold water revisionism:
“Texas independence may have been predetermined by geography— Texas was simply too far from Mexico City and too close to the United States— but the event can be fully understood only in a larger context that takes into account the overwhelming power and presence of the Comanches in the province in the years leading to the revolt.”
MEANWHILE, IN NEW MEXICO
The distance between what was then Texas and New Mexico was almost inconceivably vast and extremely perilous to cross. Even today at full speed on a major highway it takes eleven hours to travel from San Antonio, Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unsurprisingly, developments in 19th century Texas and New Mexico differed. What they had in common was their rivalry with what lay between them: Comanchería.
Texians, their ranks growing rapidly with ambitious and color-conscious immigrants from slave states such as Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennesssee, Virginia, and elsewhere, took a largely belligerent stance against the Comanches, while New Mexicans, increasingly isolated and impoverished, “looked to Comanchería for the necessities that kept them alive.”
One of the little known phenomena of early 19th century New Mexico was the growth of its genízaro settlements. The word genízaro is the Spanish translation of Janissary, the early 16th century term for a kidnapped Christian boy trained to become a Turkish elite soldier. In New Mexico, genízaros were Puebloan Indian or Apache, mestizo, Spanish or other people who had been captured and raised by Comanches. Many retained close friendship and family ties to Comanches. Notes Hämäläinen, “The rise of genízaro settlements did not signify New Mexico’s expansion into the Comanche realm but rather the colony’s persisting gravitation toward the economic and cultural power of Comanchería.”
This was when and where the “comanchero” commerce began to develop, and the “ciboleros,” New Mexican bison hunters, emerged on the plains. Comancheros specialized in trading with the Comanches—and so meeting “the needs of two societies across a narrowing cultural gulf,” one narrowing so quickly that, writes Hämäläinen, “[m]any nineteenth century observers found it impossible to differentiate ciboleros, comancheros, and Comanches from one another.”
Comanchería’s frontier with New Mexico then was a trading and tribute zone, while other frontiers were assigned to the collection of tribute, other types of trade, and raiding. Raiding depended in part on whether tribute was paid and that, in turn, depended in part on resources forthcoming— and often they were not— from Mexico City. By the 1830s, as Comanche raiding in Mexico stepped up, “New Mexicans had resigned themselves to purchasing peace from the Comanches, even if it meant inflicting death and suffering for the rest of northern Mexico.” Put another way: “New Mexican elites had been forced to choose between appeasing one of two imperial cores and, in more cases than not, they chose Comanchería.”
COMANCHERIA’S “TRADE PUMP” AND THE EXPLOSION INTO NORTHERN MEXICO
Having pushed the Apaches out of the southern Plains, in the 1830s, using Texas as a byway, Comanches now pushed the Apaches west and south out of some of the richest raiding zones of northern Mexico. The door had been left open, so to speak, for in the wake of two decades of war for its independence from Spain, then the bloody contests among monarchists, federalists, and republicans, Mexico did not have the material nor political resources to protect its northern frontier. But as Hämäläinen explains, the Comanches were drawn into northern Mexico not only by their own vitality, the clamor of young warriors seeking status in action and booty, but because of the “vulnerability of their power complex.”
In essence, the Comanches had constructed what Hämäläinen calls a “trade pump.” By thievery, they suctioned into the southern plains massive herds of horses and then, via trade with comancheros and others in New Mexico and around Big Timbers on the Arkansas, released them into the maw of what seemed an insatiable demand.
The vulnerability was that their “productive foundation”—Hämäläinen’s euphemism for the territory they had been raiding— was becoming exhausted. Texas had been scoured of easy-pickings, and impoverished New Mexico was now locked into a tribute relationship.
Demand for horses had three wellsprings. First, northern Plains Indians such as the Arapahoe, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Pawnee, and Sioux, among others, needed horses for hunting, and to replenish the stock that could not survive or reproduce in the harsh winters north of the Arkansas River. Secondly, demand came from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) that had been forced out of the southeast United States and into Indian Territory by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Thirdly, demand came from pioneers, those heading from all points east into the fringes of the Plains and overland to California, Oregon, and Colorado. If a dollar was to be made, there were traders, such as the Bent Brothers and Holland Coffee, who would eagerly deal in horses stolen from Mexico. Texas officials even supplied Comanches with provisions, the better to speed them through on their way to and from Mexico.
From the 1830s Comanche raiding in Mexico became an annual late-summer migration, “a veritable industry”; “carefully planned and organized”; and “extraordinarily profitable.” South of the Río Grande, in the rainy season when the grasses grew, the Comanches often camped in the plateau spanning parts of Coahuila, Chihuahua and Durango known as the Bolsón de Mapimí. Generations later, Mexicans have not forgotten the terror of the Comanches’ “avalanche-like expansion.” As Hämäläinen describes it:
“Sometimes in small parties, sometimes in big war bands, they moved from one target to another, living off the land while sacking ranches, haciendas, villages, towns, and mining communities. They drove off entire horse and mule herds; captured women and children; and butchered cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats for food. To suppress resistance, they killed Mexican men, burned houses, destroyed food storages, and slaughtered animals they could not take and did not need.”
Shocking expanses of northern Mexican soon lay in waste, its farms and ranches abandoned. “The all-important Chihuahua road had become an Indian plunder trail, commerce was paralyzed, and mines languished unused.”
By the end of the 1840s, the U.S. Army marched down through northern Mexico, encountering surprisingly little resistance, and in some cases, assistance, and occupied Mexico City itself. By the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the United States territories that are today the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. And here again, asserts Hämäläinen, it was “Native American expansion that paved the way for the Anglo-American one.” The US-Mexican War was in fact, “a display of both United States and Comanche power.”
CHILDREN OF THE SUN
The sixth chapter, sandwiched in between that on “Greater Comanchería” and “Hunger,” the beginning of the collapse, is “Children of the Sun,” wherein Hämäläinen offers a monograph-like examination of Comanche every day and seasonal life, family, social, military, political, and religious structure, including slavery and polygyny, and how these changed as trade expanded and the Comanches increasingly specialized in buffalo hunting and horse raiding. If somewhat lumpily placed in the middle of the book, “Children of the Sun” is a fascinating and illuminating chapter.
As the Comanches specialized in moving stolen horses and processing buffalo robes for trade, they also moved toward a more “highly structured and competitive warrior cult” and, for the extra household labor it could provide, polygyny. The latter reinforced the former, as young warriors, obstructed by older chiefs, found it difficult to accumulate horse herds and obtain wives. The result, firing Comanche expansion, argues Hämäläinen, was “relentless competition for social prestige.”
This chapter also includes an intriguing albeit brief look at the Comanches’ political councils, “massive, ordered, hierarchical and democratic all at once,” which met at the high elevation points of Medicine Mounds, the Wichita Mountains, and the Caprock Escarpment, in the general vicinity of present-day Amarillo and Wichita Falls, Texas.
COMANCHE COLLAPSE
The United States en route to its Manifest Destiny, and the fall of the Comanches: it would seem that the one was the Juggernaut that rolled over the other. Hämäläinen is careful to underline, however, that “the American expansion did not trigger their decline”; by the end of the 1840s the Comanches’ decline was already underway, and the cause was ecological.
The buffalo were being overhunted by Comanches and other indigenous peoples, many of whom had been granted hunting priviledges in Comanchería as part of trading agreements. Rising demand for buffalo robes—a new fashion— came from urban centers in the northeast; to satisfy it, many of the Indians newly arrived in Indian Territory took to mounted buffalo hunting. In addition to the Comanches, others, including ciboleros, and Arapahoe and Cheyenne hunters, brought into Bent’s Fort— the main trading post near Big Timbers on the Arkansas—”tens of thousands” of robes. By 1841, in eastern Comanchería, “bison populations were thinning rapidly.”
Yes, the “white” buffalo hunters came in with their buffalo guns to wipe out what was left of the herds—leaving a horrific photographic record of stupendous mountains of bones and hides—but that was later, primarily in the 1870s and early 1880s. In the 1850s, it was indigenous overhunting, combined with the destruction of the buffalos’ prime winter riverine habitat by horses, and a sudden and severe onslaught of drought that had begun in 1845, that left the Comanches starving.
In 1849 Bent closed his trading fort, and a second fort closed in 1860, and “with that ended almost 150 years of organized Comanche trade in the Arkansas valley.” With ever fewer buffalo to hunt, Comanches warred over hunting rights with ciboleros, the indigenous newcomers to Indian territory, and with Osages and Kiowas. From the east, immigrants to Texas, many from Germany, were settling in Comanchería, and from the west, in New Mexico, new settlers were establishing sheep and cattle ranches. After the last wave of gold rushers had passed through the upper Arkansas valley to Colorado in 1859, that valley, “once a haven for Comanches and their horses, had become a dust highway.” In short, “the great Comanche trading empire had collapsed.” And when it collapsed, the Comanches had lost their easy access to corn and other vegetables, guns and ammunition. When they tried to raid, the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army went after them. And then, suffering from malnutrition, they were decimated by smallpox and cholera. Trading, raiding, and their own numbers collapsed. By 1860, it seemed the sun was setting on Comanchería.
But then, in the mid-1860s, there came a “dramatic revival.” The rains returned to the Great Plains and the buffalo herds rebounded, and in the chaotic aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the Comanches renewed their lucrative practice of stealing horses, and now also cattle, and kidnapping women and children. Post-bellum Texas began to disintegrate.
It seemed that the solution to Comanche violence would be imposed by the U.S. Army under such as General William Tecumseh Sherman, famed for his March to the Sea and burning of Atlanta. It would, eventually, but in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant, bowing to his constituents’ anti-war sentiments and lobbying by Protestant missionaries, introduced his “Peace Policy.” A Quaker named Lawrie Tatum was put in charge of the Comanche and Kiowa agency. Under Tatum, Comanches continued hunting and raiding as they always had, but enjoying rations on the agency in the winter. As Hämäläinen so originally puts it:
“Comanches incorporated the reservation into their traditional yearly cycle as a kind of river valley: like river bottoms, the reservation provided food and shelter during the cold months, and like the river valleys, it never held the appeal of the open grasslands. Essentially a new resource domain, the reservation helped Comanches preserve their nomadic way of life on the plains rather than easing into a sedentary existence.”
Tatum made a practice of ransoming Comanche captives, both American and Mexican, paying out as much as a hundred dollars each, then a staggering sum.
Tender-hearted Tatum could not last. For General Sherman and other veterans of the U.S. Civil War who had fought for the Union and the end of slavery, it was outrageous to permit Comanches to engage in stealing livestock and what amounted to slave trading on U.S. soil. In 1871 General Sherman was authorized to unleash war on the Comanche. But it was not by battles so much as strategic sabotage that the U.S. Army crushed the Comanches. Beginning in 1872, breaking the Medicine Lodge Treaty, the U.S. Army permitted the “white” hunters onto tribal lands. With powerful new long-range guns, they began an industrial butchery of what was left of the buffalo—and, as at the two battles of Adobe Walls, fought off and deeply demoralized the Comanches and their allies. With a string of forts and camps, U.S. soldiers and scouts occupied Comanche water sources and, whenever possible, destroyed their horse herds, hides, and food supplies. Over the course of what came to be known as the Red River War, the Comanches were harried off the plains and into the reservation in Indian Territory. In the autumn of 1874, U.S. Army surprised the last substantial holdout of Comanches in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. Only three Comanche warriors died in that encounter, however the army destroyed over 1,000 of their horses and made a bonfire of their tipis and winter food stores, rendering them unable to survive outside the reservation. By the following June, the last of the free Comanches, including Quanah, surrendered at Fort Sill.
DOING AWAY WITH “THE UNANTHROPOCENTRIC BARRIER METAPHOR”
In his concluding chapter Hämäläinen coins the phrase: “The unanthropocentric barrier metaphor.” He means the image served up by earlier historians, among them, Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”) and Walter Prescott Webb (The Great Plains), of the Comanches as blood-thirsty savages, like the cacti and the mountain lions and the eagles, a part of the landscape, altogether representing, to quote Hämäläinen, an “essentially nonhuman impediment to the U.S. empire.” In plain English: monsters in feathers blocking our way.
Beginning with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 19th century, American and world culture have been bombarded with cartoon-like images of Comanches. John Wayne movies, dime novels by the dozen, “Rawhide” and other TV shows, and more recently, novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian continue the tradition of portraying Comanches as, to quote Hämäläinen again, “beastlike… on the other side of humanity.”
To be sure, as far as the victims of their raids were concerned, the Comanches were not Sisters of Charity. Hämäläinen’s point, and an enormously valuable one, is that “the unanthropocentric barrier metaphor” trivializes the Comanches both as a society and as historical actors. It blinds us to the existence of an entire civilization, its multifaceted rise, its decline, and its scorched-earth eradication.
It takes rare curiosity and steady focus to see the Comanches as historical actors when the most visible images of them are so romanticized, confections for another culture’s self-aggrandizement and/or for-profit entertainment. In The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen provides a masterful corrective, and more: he has shown the Comanches to have been “a penetrating cutural power” in the heart of the North American continent, and as such, absolutely fundamental to understanding the historical relationship between the United States and Mexico.
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This finds me working on my Far West Texas book and, by the by, pondering multitudinous things cross-border & pharmaceutical… ergo, this week’s post is from the archives: my review, originally published in Literal Magazine, of Sam Quinones’ must-read book, Dreamland.
DREAMLAND: THE TRUE TALE OF AMERICA’S OPIATE EPIDEMIC by Sam Quinones Bloomsbury Press, 2015 / ISBN 978-1620402504
This is a grenade of a book. Based on extensive investigative reporting on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland tells the deeply unsettling story of the production, smuggling, and marketing of semi-processed opium base— or “black tar heroin”— originating in and around Xalisco, a farm town in the state of Nayarit, and in tandem, the story of the aggressive marketing of pain pills in the U.S.— in particular, of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin—and the resulting conflagration of addiction and death.
Unlike previous drug epidemics—heroin in the 70s, crack in the 90s— this one involved more deaths and more users, and not so many in urban slums but “in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.”
Mexican black tar heroin trafficking isn’t anything like what you’ve seen on TV or in the movies or, for that matter, most books about narcotrafficking. It’s a small-time and customer-centric business: smugglers carry small high-quality batches over the border, and then drivers, using codes received on their cell phones, deliver tiny balloons filled with heroin directly to individual customers. The smugglers and drivers, “Xalisco Boys,” for the most part— friends, neighbors, brothers, third cousins— are not ready-for-prime-time “narcos” but otherwise ordinary young men from an otherwise ordinary farm town.
Nor are these Mexicans crossing the border because they are drawn by the light of “a better life” in the U.S. Their goal is a short period of hard work—and if that work happens to be delivering balloons filled with some drug to gringo addicts, so be it—and then to return home with the cash to peel off for a house, a wedding banquet with a live band, a stack of Levi’s jeans for the clan.
The number of English language reporters who could have written such a book can be counted on one hand— if that. Quinones draws on two decades of covering remote corners of Mexico and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. His two previous books, both superb, are True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In Dreamland, Quinones writes about the “Xalisco Boys” with unusual insight and compassion; nonetheless, in their numbers and moral blindness, they have an ant-like quality. As one DEA agent told Quinones, “We arrest the drivers all the time and they send new ones up from Mexico… They never go away.”
Neither are their customers, “slaves to an unseen molecule,” what one might expect: oftentimes well-off people living in places like Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Minneapolis or say, Columbus, Ohio. Writes Quinones:
“Via pills, heroin had entered the mainstream.The new addicts were football players and cheerleaders; football was almost a gateway to opiate addiction. Wounded soldiers returned from Afghanistan hooked on pain pills and died in America. Kids got hooked in college and died there. Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia. But many more were from the U.S. middle class… They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners and bankers. And almost every one was white.”
As Quinones explains, the use of opiates is ancient, going back to the Mesopotamians who harvested poppies—“joy plants”— for their pods containing opium. The Egyptians produced opium as drug. In the early 19th century, a German chemist came up with the extract known as morphine; later in that same century, another German chemist brought us heroin, and China lost its two Opium Wars to the British, arriving at the turn of the century with a prodigious number of addicts. In the U.S. in the early twentieth century, a government-led campaign to outlaw addictive drugs may have decreased the number of “dope fiends,” but it resulted in the growth of illegal drug dealing by mafias and gangs, many of them prone to extreme violence.
The game-changer has been the Xalisco Boys’ marketing and distribution model for black tar heroin—Quinones likens it to pizza delivery— coinciding with the aggressive marketing of legal opiates such as OxyContin—which are more expensive than, but in terms of effects, close substitutes for Mexican tar heroin.
As for the marketing of pharmaceuticals, Quinones devotes an illuminating chapter to marketing guru Arthur Sackler and his work for Charles Pfizer and Company back in the 1950s, when he turned Pfizer “into a household name among doctors.” Things took a bum turn in the mid-1980s when two pain specialists, Russell Porteney and Kathy Foley, published a paper in a medical journal, Pain, suggesting that opiates might not be inherently addictive. In a footnote they cited a letter to editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from Jane Porter and Hershel Jick. Soon thereafter, Portenoy assumed a prestigious position: Director of the Pain Medicine and Palliative Care department at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Writes Quinones: “From this vantage point, and with funding from several drug companies, he pressed a campaign to destigmatize opiates.”
Enter Purdue Pharma with its new painkiller, OxyContin, an opium derivative with a molecular structure similar to heroin. Somehow in all the hoopla, Porter and Jick’s letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine— not a report, and certainly not a study, but a mere one-paragraph note that less than one percent of hospitalized patients receiving opiates for pain became addicted— “had become a foundation for a revolution in U.S. medical practice.”
It seems few troubled to read said letter; armies of sales reps marched out citing “Porter and Jick” and—magic gong— the New England Journal of Medicine. As one nurse told Quinones, “Everybody heard it everywhere. It was Porter and Jick. We all used it. We all thought it was gospel.”
Quinones is careful to note that OxyContin “has legitimate medical uses, and has assuaged the pain of many Americans, for whom life would otherwise be torture.” But in fact, like heroin, its close chemical cousin, it is highly addictive. As one addict, a prison guard who had started off with OxyContin for back pain and, in agony from withdrawal, ended up on black tar heroin, told Quinones,
“You think you’re doing stuff the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re trusting the doctor. After a while you realize this isn’t right but there really isn’t anything you can do about it. You’re stuck. You’re addicted.”
Dreamland, a football-field-sized private swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio is the touchstone for Quinones’ narrative. For decades after it opened in 1929, Dreamland served as a center for the community, whose prosperity was based on a steel mill and shoe factories. Anyone who has traveled through the U.S. in recent years will have seen the same decline Quinones describes here and in so many other towns: the Mom and Pop diner replaced by a Subway sandwich shop or an Applebee’s or a Jack in the Box; the family-run hardware store and grocers, overtaken by Walmart and Home Depot; ye olde bookshop shuttered and scribbled with graffiti. (There might be, but probably isn’t a Barnes & Noble.) And the big box stores are not wedged into in the now decrepit downtown but sit on the outskirts where real estate is cheap, zoning whatever, and parking an easy swing.
As jobs went abroad, Portmouth’s businesses began to close, and “pill mills,” that is, pain clinics specializing in dispensing drugs such as OxyContin, began to open. In 1993, Dreamland was razed to make a parking lot. Writes Quinones:
“After Dreamland closed, the town went indoors. Police took the place of the communal adult supervision that the pool had provided. Walmart became the place to socialize. Opiates, the most private and selfish of drugs, moved in and made easy work of a landscape stripped of any communal girding.”
It was the historian of Mexico John Tutino who said, “We need Mexico as an other. We cannot deal with it as an us.” Too many U.S. policymakers and pundits are quick-on-the-trigger to blame the drug trade on Mexican corruption. But supply responds to demand and the corruption that makes the drug trade possible thrives on both sides of the border. Yes, even in the nicely appointed offices of a major pharmaceutical company. In 2005 Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to a felony count of “misbranding” OxyContin as less addictive than other pain medications. None of its executives went to jail, but three paid a USD $34.5 million fine and the company itself paid a US $634.5 million fine.
Dreamland should be read—and more than once— by anyone who would make or attempt to influence policy on the drug trade, whether legal or illegal. Moreover, Dreamland should be read by every citizen who would visit a doctor. As Quinones wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, apropos of Dreamland, “we need to question the drugs marketed to us, depend less on pills as solutions and stop demanding that doctors magically fix us. It will then matter less what new product a drug company—or the drug underworld—devises.”
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.
(By the way, my own longform essay available on Kindle, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla,” discusses Cabeza de Vaca’s odyssey and La Relación within a broader meditation on the Mexican literary landscape—not the usual take for a work in English.)
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MORRIS BISHOP
Morris Bishop’s The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (The Century Company, 1933) isn’t really necessary for my working library because, for all practical purposes, for the work of creative nonfiction I am writing, I can rely on the more recent and excellent scholarship of Adorno and Pautz and Reséndez. But I recognize the cultural / historical importance of Bishop’s work and so, for a relatively reasonable price, I wanted to have a first signed edition in my collection. (So, is what I have a working library or a rare book collection? I ask myself that every other day!)
My copy of the Morris Bishop is a first edition in, thank goodness, a mylar cover. That’s my writing assistant, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl, who gave it the sniff test, and a paws up.
Signed by the author to one “Alexander Campbell who not only reads books but buys them and who not only buys books but reads them.”
Edward Toledano’s cover illustration portrays Cabeza de Vaca leading Estevanico, the slave; his two fellow Spaniards, Dorantes and Castillo; and a retinue of hundreds of Indians.
CLEVE HALLENBECH
Cleve Hallenbech’s Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Journey and Route of the First European to Cross the Continent of North America 1534-1536 (The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1940) is another work I do not absolutely require for my working library but which, in recognition of its cultural and historic importance, and the very reasonable price for a near-fine first edition, I wanted to have in my collection.
That said, the maps are a wonder! I’ll be talking about these in my post, Part III, for the first Monday of next month, when I discuss the routes various scholars have proposed for Cabeza de Vaca.
The Arthur H. Clark Company was known for its high quality books on the West. (By the way, the University of Oklahoma Press has a book for collectors of works published by the Arthur H. Clark Company, which you can have a blink at here.)
One of the several pull-out maps in the Cleve Hallenbech, this one showing his version of Cabeza de Vaca’s route through Far West Texas. Crazy-hard to read, I know. I’ll be talking more about the route through Far West Texas, and showing some more readable maps, in Part III, to be posted on the first Monday of July 2021.
JOHN UPTON TERRELL
John Upton Terrell’s Journey Into Darkness: Cabeza de Vaca’s Expedition Across North America 1528-36 (Jarrolds Publishers, 1964) is well-researched, given the resources the author had access to back in the early 1960s, and aimed at the general reader.
The back of this first edition carries an ad for Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Hidden Heart of Baja, which for me was like coming across an old amigo. I had a bit to say about the ever-roving eccentric Hollywood screenplay writer in my own book on Baja California, Miraculous Air.
DAVID A. HOWARD
David A. Howard’s Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas (University of Alabama Press, 1997) —currently reading. I was tremendously curious to learn more about Cabeza de Vaca’s later adventures in South America, which are rarely considered in-depth, lying as they do in the shadow of his epic journey in North America.
“Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize ‘La Florida’ in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.
“The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez’s Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.
“This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger’s dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester’s foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger’s plot of the journey. Margery Krieger’s preface explains how she prepared her late husband’s work for publication. Alex Krieger’s original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.”
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ANDRÉS RESÉNDEZ
Ring-a-ling to Dr. Jung! Reséndez and Schneider (below) both published their narrative histories about Cabeza de Vaca’s epic journey in North America in the same year, 2007. Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books, 2007) is an award-winning historian’s beautifully written and extensively footnoted narrative history. No one writing about Cabeza de Vaca, whether creative writer or serious scholar, should overlook Reséndez’s masterwork. I went for the paperback so that I could mark it up with my pencil all whichways.
That is not actually Cabeza de Vaca there on the cover, and it ever & always annoys me to see it. Oh well! I don’t know what he looked like, no one does, and I don’t think he looked like this rather sharp-eyed character who keeps on getting recycled as “Cabeza de Vaca.” HMPH!
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PAUL SCHNEIDER
Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America (Henry Holt, 2007) is a riproaring adventure read, well-researched and elegantly written, and one I would warmly recommend to the general reader.
The catalog copy gives the explosive flavor:
“A gripping survival epic, Brutal Journey tells the story of an army of would-be conquerors, bound for glory, who landed in Florida in 1528. But only four of the four hundred would survive: eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes’s gold-drenched Mexico. The survivors of the Narváez expedition brought nothing back other than their story, but what a tale it was. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive.”
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DONALD E. CHIPMAN
Donald E. Chipman’s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Great Pedestrian of North and South America (The Texas State Historical Association, 2012) offers a short (only 70 pages), albeit authoritative overview by an academic historian for those with an interest also in Cabeza de Vaca’s South American odyssey. From the book’s back cover:
“Between 1528 and 1536, explorer Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca trekked an estimated 2,480 to 2,640 miles of North American terrain from the Texas coast near Galveston Island to San Miguel de Culiacán near the Pacific coast of Mexico. Later he served as the royal governor of Asunción, Paraguay. His mode of transportation, afoot on portions of two continents in the early decades of the sixteenth century, fits one dictionary definition of the word ‘pedestrian.’ By no means, however, should the ancillary meanings of ‘commonplace’ or ‘prosaic’ be applied to the man, or his remarkable adventures. This book examines the two great ‘journeys’ of Cabeza de Vaca—his extraordinary adventures on two continents and his remarkable growth as a humanitarian.”
A 70 page paperback available from the Texas State Historical Association. (Sorry, but I just cannot get over the use of the word “pedestrian” in the subtitle. It always makes me think of the Beattles’ Abbey Road album cover.)
ROBIN VARNUM
Robin Varnum’s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: American Trailblazer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) is an accomplished and, as best I can ascertain, the latest scholarly biography.
The cover of Varnum’s excellent biography features the sculpture of Cabeza de Vaca by Eladio Gil Zambrana, which is in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. (I’ll say it again: although we see him portrayed on many book covers, we do not actually know what Cabeza de Vaca looked like.)
JAMES J. (PETE) DREXLER
The Route and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca (self-published, 2016)—currently reading.
Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures as passed on to us from his La Relación have spawned a small but enduring cottage industry of books, essays, documentaries, websites, and more, which started picking up serious steam over the 20th century. My own sense is that we will see books about Cabeza de Vaca being published for as long as we have books, and I expect books to go on, at one scale or another, for many hundreds of years more. Movies and videos and websites and electronic whatnots? That, too. How about an opera?
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In “Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part III,” to be posted the first Monday of next month, July 2021, I will be discussing the wackadoodle differences in the various maps of Cabeza de Vaca’s epic journey, with a focus on his route through what we know now as Far West Texas.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me by simply clicking here.
A TRAVELER IN MEXICO: A RENDEZVOUS WITH WRITER ROSEMARY SULLIVAN C.M. MAYO Originally published in Inside Mexico, March 2009
Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood has become inextricably linked with the Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, so what better place to rendezvous with poet, writer, and biographer of Surrealists, Rosemary Sullivan? A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Sullivan had just alighted in Mexico City and would soon be on her way to meet with Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, when we met over cappuccinos at the sun-drenched Café Moheli to talk about her latest book.
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseilleis a page-turner of a deeply researched history about the rescue of artists and intellectuals trapped as the Nazis closed in. The effort, fomented by the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee and led by their agent in Marseilles, Varian Fry, managed to save André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst, among others, and found refuge for them in the United States. But some came to Mexico. These included the Russian novelist Victor Serge, and his son Vlady; and most famously, Surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who (along with Frida Kahlo), are today among Mexico’s most revered artists. For this reason, Villa Air-Bel is a work important to the history of modern art in Mexico.
But the book’s connection to Mexico goes deeper.
“Villa Air-Bel started here,” Sullivan said. She explained that, back in 1995, she had come to Mexico City to write about the intense friendship of three women artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and the Canadian poet P.K. Page (also known as the painter Pat Irwin), which commenced in 1960 when Page, already the author of several books and a winner of Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award, arrived with her husband, Arthur Irwin, then Canada’s ambassador to Mexico.
Sullivan, then two years out of graduate school, met Page in Victoria in 1974. As Sullivan recalls in the essay “Three Travellers in Mexico,” “For me P.K. is one of the searchers, ahead of the rest of us, throwing back clues. She encouraged me to believe I might become a writer.” Varo had died of a heart attack in 1963. But thanks to an introduction from Page, Sullivan met Carrington in Mexico City.
The English-born Leonora Carrington had a harrowing but triumphant story. She was living in France when the Germans invaded. Her lover, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, was arrested, first as an enemy alien and then a second time as an enemy of the Nazis. Leonora fled to Spain, where she had a mental collapse and was put in an insane asylum, a searing experience she wrote about in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below. Her family got her out, but thinking they wanted to put her in another asylum in South Africa, she escaped in Lisbon en route. Ernst, miraculously, reappeared in Lisbon, but the pair parted ways, Ernst going to New York with Peggy Guggenheim, and Leonora, in a marriage of convenience to her rescuer, Mexican diplomat-poet Renato Leduc, to Mexico. Here she remarried, produced two sons, and an extraordinary body of work as a painter, sculptor, poet and writer. (Still active in her 90s, last month [February 2009] Carrington attended an event in her honor at Mexico City’s Museo José Luis Cuevas.)
In 1995, Carrington showed Sullivan some of Varo’s playfully dreamlike and delicately-rendered paintings. Later, while reading Unexpected Journeys, Janet A. Kaplan’s biography of Varo, Sullivan came upon the story of Varian Fry and the Villa Bel-Air, a château outside Marseille where so many of the outstanding figures involved either lived or visited. For a time, though they were in terrible danger and lacked such basics as coal and meat, with André Breton hosting a Sunday open house and leading Surrealist games in the drawing room, Villa Air-Bel had all the joyous spirit of an artists colony.
While in Mexico City that time, Sullivan also wrote the short story that became the nucleus of Labyrinth of Desire, an exploration of the myths women live out when they fall in love, from Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara (“Don Juan / Doña Juana”), to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (“Self-Portrait with Mirrors”). In that short story, Sullivan said, “The man is named Varian, but just because I loved the name. I never imagined I’d write this book! He just sat at the bottom of my mind…”
While reading The Quiet American, Andy Marino’s biography of Varian Fry, Sullivan saw the image that made her decide to write about the refugee artists and intellectuals and their rescuers. In the photo, like a pair of children, Fry and Consuelo de Saint Exupéry perch high in the python-like branches of an plane tree.
“This was war-time France!” Sullivan exclaimed. “What were they doing in the tree?” They were hanging paintings. “That refusal to be cowed by Fascism… “
But how to tell such a huge and sprawling story? In a flash, Sullivan realized that she could organize it around a year in the life of Villa Air-Bel.
Other than Carrington, however, few of those who had been at Villa Air-Bel were still alive.
One of the most important sources had to be Vlady Serge, the painter who, as a young man had been rescued from France along with his father. From Canada, Sullivan made an appointment for an interview in Cuernavaca, where he had his house and studio. She then flew to Mexico. She settled into Las Mañanitas hotel, and when she telephoned that she was on her way, she was informed he was not there. It turned out Serge had been rushed to the hospital with a fatal stroke. Sullivan had missed him by a matter of minutes; nonetheless, he had left her detailed instructions on whom to meet and where to find archives.
Here in Coyoacan’s Café Moheli, the snortle of the cappuccino machine interlaced with birdsong, conversations, and the occasional passing car, I said, what had most struck me about Villa Air-Bel was the way she described the confusion at the time, and how, throughout the 1930s, people had a sense of normalcy, until—I quoted her—”in a moment, the world collapsed like a burnt husk.”
“I meant people to read this book in terms of now,” Sullivan said. “Because it can always happen.”
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me by simply clicking here.
