On Organizing (and Twice Moving) a Working Library: Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek

The Texas Bibliothek, Ready to Ship. Yes, it is big. Yes, I devour books like a ravenous owl. Yes, this is my process. I accumulated similar-sized working libraries in writing some of my other books, e.g., Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California (2002); The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (2009); and Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (2014).

File this post under Future Reminder to Take My Own Advice, and if some or all of these ideas also work for you, gentle reader, verily I say unto you: Wunderbar!

Late last September, having finally rearranged and set up my working library in my new office in Mexico City– the work in question being a book on Far West Texas— I had to pack it all back up again and ship it across the Atlantic. (Why? Well, that’s a novel I’m not going to write, both literally and figuratively).

Now that I’ve got my Texas books resettled on their second set of new shelves in less than six months, I’m ready to take on 2018! But whew, I’ve got biceps after this job for a Hercules. The thirty-eight boxes of books comprising what I now call the Texas Bibliothek– I have landed in German-speaking Switzerland– arrived in mid-January. And a couple weeks later, every tome and paperback and pamphlet and back-issue of Cenizo Journal is in place, and I can carry my bike over head! I could scoop up and toss dessicated Christmas trees, small donkeys and their Schmutzlis out windows, too, should I take a notion!

ON ORGANIZING (AND TWICE MOVING) A WORKING LIBRARY:
Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek

1. Organize the books by topic– not as a librarian would recommend, but as your working writer’s mind finds most apt. 

Ideas About Texas (Some, Anyway…)

After all, you’re the one who will be using these books, not the general public. And even in a fairly substantial working library, such as this one, there are not enough books to justify the bothernation of cataloging and labeling each and every title.

If you have more than 50 books and if you do not organize them in some reasonably reasonable way, why don’t you just open your front door and let your dogs wander out and then you can go looking for them on the freeway at four a.m., that might be more fun!

2. If any category has more than 30-40 books, create a new subcategory.

Because trying to keep books in alphabetic order, whether by author or by title, makes me feel dehydrated, RRRRRR.

3. Label categories of books with large, easy-to-read lettering. 

Because if you’re a working writer, like me you’re probably near-sighted…

Funny how book designers always have such unique ideas about colors and font sizes and typefaces…. In other words, I don’t want to have to look at the visual clutter of those spines to try to figure out what this bunch is about; I let that BIG FAT LABEL tell me.

If you do not want to make labels, why don’t you peel the labels off all the jars and cans in your pantry, mix ’em up, and then try to find which one is the dog food and which one the canned pumpkin? That would be a mile more hilarious.

4. When moving, before touching anything, take photos of the whole shebang.

I do not have early onset dementia, but boy howdy, moving house sometimes makes me feel as if I do. (Did I used to have a working library? Was I working on a book? What day is it? Is Ikea still open?)

5. Then, before even touching those books, take a tape measure and write down the inches of shelf space required for each and every category.

I suspect that these things are in cahoots with pens and umbrellas.

A tape measure!

I realize this may sound very OCD.

But three moves ago, it did not occur to me to do this with my working collection on Mexico’s Second Empire / French Intervention, for my then recently-published book, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. In the rush of moving I allowed the moving company crew to pack the books, willynilly-fefifo-rama-chillydilly, and then, on arrival, lacking space, never mind bookshelf space, and so having to leave that particular library in a half-unpacked, unsorted chaos, for the next few years more correspondence and related research was bottlenecked than I want to think about. (That library now has its home in Mexico City– that would be another blog post.)

The main thing is, you want to be certain you actually have the bookshelf space you need plus ample wiggle room for each  category before you start packing– and then double check the available bookshelf space again before you start unpacking.

And never, ever let anyone else pack them.

Sounds obvious. Alas, for me, three moves ago, it was not.

Yeah, “Literary Nuns!” Note upper right-hand corner.

6. Save those neatly made shelf labels to reattach to the new shelves, and also label– with mammoth, easy-to-read fonts– each and every box.

Geology, Energy, Box 1 corresponded to category 40,
requiring 17 inches of shelf space.

7. Number each box, e.g., 1 of 32; 2 of 32, etc.

These can be cross-referenced with the master list of categories, which has the measurements.

8. Don’t be stingy with boxes!!

For moving books I prefer the so-called banker’s boxes with punch-out holes for handles. Banker’s boxes are large enough to take a heaping helping of books, and the handles make them easy to carry, however the weight of a book-filled banker’s box remains within the range of what I, a 50-something female whose daily mainly workout consists of walking two pugs, and, la-de-da, whatever biking and yoga, can easily haul up or down a staircase.

Yes, you could snag a batch of free boxes at the grocery store, and yes, you probably could, as I certainly could, lift bigger boxes with double the number of books in them– and most men can haul a stack of two or even three bigger boxes at a time. However, whatever the upper-body strength you have and shape you are in, when you are moving house, unless you for some reason enjoy showering hundreds of dollars on, say, your chiropractor’s vacation home, lifting huge, ultra-heavy, and unwieldy boxes is penny wise and dollar dumb. Ox dumb.

Goodie for me, I learned this lesson three moves ago, and I had an excellent chiropractor.

9. Take photos of the boxes, labels included.

Because you never know! Seems I have good moving juju. Knock on wood for next time!

  1. On reshelving day, gather together before commencing:
  • Papertowels
  • Cleaning spray for the shelves (they will be dusty)
  • Garbage bag
  • Tape
  • Scissors (to trim off old bits of tape, etc.)
  • Measuring tape!!!!!!!!!!
  • Step stool or small ladder
  • Water and snack
  • iPad with audiobooks and/or podcasts and/or dance music
    P.S. History nerds podcast alert! Check out Liz Covart’s Ben Franklin’s World.

If you are missing any one of these items, you will probably have to interrupt whatever you are doing to go get it, and then in, say, the kitchen, because you have Moving on the Brain, you will be distracted by some zombie command from the dusty ethers such as, I must now go to Ikea to buy garbage bags and whatnotsy whatnots…

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Meanwhile, dagnabbit, people just won’t stop writing books on Texas!! Two more, post-move, essential additions to the Texas Bibliothek:

Regular Army O! Soldiering on the Western Frontier, 1861-1891
By Douglas C. McChristian

The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
by Peter Cozzens

Wish me luck, gentle reader. I aim to finish my book on Far West Texas this year. By the way, I host an associated 24 podcast series, “Marfa Mondays,” which is woefully behind schedule because of these moves, but soon to resume. I invite you to listen in anytime to the 20 podcasts posted so far.

P.S. Using the free blogger platform, I also maintain an online working library of out-of-copyright (now in the public domain, mainly linked to archive.org) Texas books— books which I could not or did not want to attempt to purchase but would like to be able to consult at my leisure. It includes a number of titles that might appear bizarrely out of place (one is on Massachusetts, for example)– but after all, this is not for the general public, but a working library in service of my book in-progress. I mention this because perhaps you might find it of use to create such an online library for your own purposes.

P.P.S. For those wondering, what is my take on ebooks? First of all, I delightedly sell them!  And yes, I have bought some, and as far as the Texas book research goes, when I need a book urgently and/or the paper edition is unavailable or expensive, I have been known to download a Kindle or four– or, as above-mentioned, download out-of-copyright books for free from www.archive.org and similar sites. I appreciate that convenience, and also the ease with which I can search within a text for a word or phrase. Nonetheless, on balance, I find ebooks decidedly inferior to paper. Morever, I doubt that my electronic libraries will outlive me in any meaningful way, while I expect that my working libraries of hardcovers and paperbacks, including some rare editions, may serve other researchers well beyond the horizon of my lifetime.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

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As anounced in the last post of 2017, in 2018 I will be posting on Mondays on the following schedule:

First and third Mondays of the month: New writing / news / podcasts;
Second Monday: For the writing workshop;
Fourth Monday: Cyberflanerie and/or Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or translator; 
Fifth Monday, when applicable: Whatever strikes my gong. 

Working with a Working Library: Kuddelmuddel

Book Review by C.M. Mayo:
Pekka Hamäläinan’s Comanche Empire

Book Review by C.M. Mayo:
Patrick Dearen’s Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas, and a Note on El Paso’s Elroy Bode

My amiga Cecilia Autrique at the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas, November 2017. Her paper is “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930”

Earlier this month I traveled the loooooooong way out from Mexico City via Houston and then via El Paso to Alpine, TX– (that latter stretch through the Far West Texas desert, spectacular though it be, not for the caffeine-deprived)– to participate in the annual Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS) conference at Sul Ross State University.

I’ve been working on this book about Far West Texas, which includes the Big Bend, for an age & an eon, so last year, when I was invited to present at the 2016 CBBS conference, I was honored but flummoxed. My book hadn’t– and still hasn’t– been published and, anyway, it’s not a scholarly work but, as I have begun describing it, a lyrical and personal portrait of place. No, no, what they wanted was for me to talk about my book published in 2014, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I was flummoxed again, for that book about the book by the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution has zip to do with the Big Bend!

Well, it turned out that anything and everything about the Mexican Revolution is game for the CBBS conference, which is multidisciplinary and covers subjects relevant not only to the Big Bend but the surrounding regions, which include the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and northern Mexico’s states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.

So last year at CBBS I presented Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, andI came away mightily impressed– so much so that I decided to present again this year and I recruited my amiga, Mexican historian Cecilia Autrique, to present her outstanding paper, “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930.” (This paper stems from her PhD thesis at the UNAM in Mexico City, which I hope will be published as a book in both Spanish and English, for it provides vital historical context for any discussion of the current US-Mexico border and narcotrafficking issues.)

Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., U.S. Tenth Cavalry

This year I presented my paper on “John Bigelow, Jr: Officer in the Tenth Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between West and East”– much of which material will appear in my book in-progress, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas.

Look for the paper on my website shortly; in the meantime, for those interested, my blog posts about Bigelow are here and here, and the post about his brother, author, world-traveler, life-long friend to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and pioneer magazine publisher Poultney Bigelow, is here. And the selected bibliography on John Bigelow, Jr. and the Bigelow family, and related subjects, which I handed out at the conference, is here.

Bigelow’s relevance to the Big Bend is direct: he was stationed there more than once, scouted all around the region, and indeed, he is an officer already well known to any and all who would study the Indian Wars and the Buffalo Soldiers. I trust I have been able to add new dimensions and insights to his importance for this region, and the West as a whole.

HIGHLIGHTS

One of the downsides of a bustling conference (indeed, a downside to just about everything nifty in the human experience) is that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time! It can also be a challenge to fit fascinating and vital conversations, such as they pop up, into the precise times allotted for coffee breaks and lunch. Alas, there were talks I am tremendously sorry to have missed or to have had to slink into half way through.

Just a few– a very few– of the highlights for me:

Felix Almaraz channeling a Franciscan missionary (and in costume!)

Lonn Taylor’s talk about J.J. Kilpatrick of Candelaria, Texas (right on the Rio Grande) during the Mexican Revolution
This is a movie! (Or has it been made already? If not, por dios, ¿porqué no?)
> Check out Lonn Taylor’s always fascinating “Rambling Boy” column for the Big Bend Sentinel, and my podcast interview with him, “Under Sleeping Lion: Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis”

Once again, Al González of Chiricuahua Books busted my shoe budget for the year. I took home a biography of Jack Hays and two very rare books by cowboys about Marfa, Texas.

Ayyy, and gigazoodles of postcards!

Steve Black, who gave a super crunchy keynote
about Eagle Nest Canyon

A keynote speech by lead archaeologist Steve Black about Eagle Nest Canyon at Langtry, Texas
> One of the most jaw-dropping canyons in Texas. Check out my mini-video of the entrance of Eagle Nest Canyon from a visit a couple of years ago here.

(Perchance you wonder, did we see the Marfa Lights? Not this time. But I have indeed seen them and on four different occasions.)

AND A NOTE ON EL PASO’S ELROY BODE

As you might imagine, flying from Mexico City to El Paso via Houston, and back, apart from being a sardine-y experience, was the perfect opportunity to get some reading done.

I have belatedly discovered Elroy Bode! (pronounced Bo-dee). Doubly belatedly, for Bode passed away only months ago. (See his obituary in the El Paso Times.)

I devoured Bode’s El Paso Days and got started on In a Special LightAs the blurbs on his books attest, Bode is much-admired and even beloved by many Texan writers and readers of a literary bent, but he remains obscure, not only outside the region but, as my visit to El Paso’s Barnes & Noble attests, even in his home town. (Nope, the Barnes & Noble did not have in-store even one copy of Elroy Bode’s — “who? Brady?”– several books. But for, like, totally sure, they did have, for the man in front of me in the customer service line, Exploding Kittens.)

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says:
“Elroy Bode is one of the most essential writers the state of Texas has ever been lucky enough to call its own. In a voice that is at once deeply descriptive and eloquently minimalist, he illuminates our corners, dim memories, streets, fields, prairies, hills, hours, and the hardest of days. His no-frills frankness and steady attentiveness have always had a radiant, carifying power.”

As I read I tagged so many of Bode’s lines but perhaps the best, most representative of all is this one, from “Earth-Life” in the collection of his poetic essays, In a Special Light:

“I need the El Paso countryside. I need to hear the call of redwing blackbirds from salt cedars along an Upper Valley canal. I need to stand in a pecan grove and feel the breeze that moves through it– a breeze that reminds me of other breezes in other trees in other, almost forgotten times. I need to see stretched of plowed land where, in the distance, humans are reduced in scale and become of no greater importance to the eye than a rooster in a yard, a tractor in a field.”
— Elmer Bode, In a Special Light

After the CBBS conference I spent an afternoon in the El Paso Public Library’s Border Heritage archive where I looked up Elroy Bode and Amado Duro. More about those two caballeros literarios anon.

Cartridges and Postcards from the US-Mexico Border of Yore

A Visit to El Paso’s “The Equestrian”

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America by Richard Parker

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Further Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. (1854-1936): “On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo,” the Rare 1958 Westernlore Press Edition

John Bigelow, Jr.

UPDATE: Bibliography has been posted here.

Last Monday’s post was a batch of notes on John Bigelow, Jr. (1854-1936), an undeservedly obscure personality in late 19th century and early 20th century American history. This Friday at the Center for Big Bend Studies conference I’ll be giving a talk about the diverse periods of his life and achievements. The title: John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer with the Tenth Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between West and East. 

I’m not aiming to write Bigelow’s biography, although he certainly merits one,* and I hope my work may encourage and aid some other scholar in that endeavor. Apart from this talk and, fingers crossed, resulting paper for the Journal of Big Bend Studies, my project is a literary travel memoir, World Waiting for Dream: A Turn in Far West Texasin which Bigelow appears, briefly, or at some length, in various chapters, as he was stationed in or traveled through Fort Stockton, Fort Davis, Peña Blanca (now Peña Colorado, a public park south of Marathon), the Guadalupe Mountains, and other sites in the Trans-Pecos, that is to say, Far West Texas at different times in the late 19th century. Hence, it behooves me to do this research– and wagonloads more about the Apaches and Comancheset al— and if you find this subject half as fascinating as I do, gentle reader, you’re in for a fiesta with more than a few firecrackers.

*An excellent partial biography by Marcos Kinevan is Frontier Cavalryman: Lieutenant John Bigelow with the Buffalo Soldiers in Texas (Texas Western Press, 1998).

My copy of the 1958 edition of John Bigelow Jr.’s ON THE BLOODY TRAIL OF GERONIMO (The cover shows an illustration by Frederic Remington).

Apropos of researching John Bigelow, Jr., new in my working library is a handsome hardcover, the 1958 Westernlore Press limited edition of Bigelow’s collected articles for Outing, his brother Poultney Bigelow’s magazineOn the Bloody Trail of Geronimo: A Soldier’s Journal-Account of the Apache Campaign of 1886introduced and annotated by Arthur Woodward. 

Bigelow’s articles in Outing, and as reproduced in this tome, are accompanied by illustrations by a number of artists including Poultney Bigelow’s Yale University classmate, the then-unknown Frederic Remington.

As Woodward writes in his foreward, “It was a fortunate combination. Bigelow the young lieutenant who was breaking into print for the first time, and Remington, who was likewise doing his first important commission as an illustrator.”

In fact, this was not Bigelow’s first publication– although it was his first for a general readership. Two years earlier, in 1884, Bigelow had published his study of two major battles in the Franco-Prussian War, Mars-La-Tour and Gravelotte. And, over the years, he would go on to produce an important oeuvre on military strategy.

Bigelow’s Outing essays comprised his diaries as an officer in the Tenth Cavalry, published as a series of 14 articles under the title “After Geronimo,” beginning in March 1886 and concluding in April 1887. As in Texas, Bigelow remained with the 10th, an African American regiment first established in 1866, but in this action they had been sent further west, to Arizona, to mop up the last of Apache resistance. The Comanche had been defeated in Palo Duro Canyon in 1874, and with Geronimo’s surrender in September 1886, the wars in the southwest ended. (On the northern Plains, the Ghost Dance War, Pine Ridge Campaign, and Massacre at Wounded Knee would be over by 1891.)

Despite the title, Bigelow’s diary says little about the Apaches and less about Geronimo, but it provides a rare and colorful felt sense of what is was like to serve in the West in the last days of the Indian Wars. It is also a window onto Bigelow as a military intellectual, one supremely well-versed on the literature of war and, in particular, battles of the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War– and one who, even while chasing Apaches on horseback, was thinking about the logistics and professionalism required for the industrialized wars of the future.

THE APACHES 

Linguistic evidence suggests that the Apache arrived in the southwest of what is now the United States after having migrated from the northwest centuries ago. The story of the wars against them, first by the Spanish, then the Mexicans, sometimes the Comanches, and then beginning in the 1830s, the Americans, is an ugly one with many chapters. By 1885 the Apache had been decimated, and survivors eked out a meagre life on reservations (another ugly story in itself, with many chapters). On May 17, 1885, a small contingent of Chiricahua Apache led by Geronimo and Nachez bolted the reservation with over 100 other warriors, women and children, heading towards Mexico. Writes Woodward in his introduction of Bigelow and his men:

“[T]heir work guarding the mountain passes leading out of Mexico into Arizona was a most important one. No one knew exactly where Geronimo and his band would strike.”

A graduate of West Point’s class of ’77, Bigelow had no personal animus towards the Apache. He was a patriot from the very core of the Eastern Establishment, a career officer in want of the field experience that could bring him a promotion. Previously, he had served in Texas with the Tenth Cavalry from late 1877 through the end of 1879, participating in the Victorio Campaign, then returning to West Point as an assistant professor of French. He married in Baltimore in 1884, then returned to Texas again, this time with his bride and baby, first stationed at Fort Davis, Texas, then to Fort Grant, Arizona for the Geronimo campaign.

There is much more to say about his varied and outstanding career, but to return to the Geronimo Campaign, Bigelow made no bones about his motives for returning West. As he writes in his diary for May 19, 1885 (Outing, April 1886):

“I had rejoined my regiment with the expectation of gaining in efficiency from experience in the field, and I realized the fact that the opportunities for doing so in our army were becoming fewer and harder to seize every year. I also realized that laurels were scarce along Indian trails, and that they grew in difficult places. It was principally for the practice of looking and reaching for them, with the hope that the skillfulness this acquired might some day serve me under more favorable conditions, that I aspired to getting on the trail of these Chiricahuas.”

But in the same entry, Bigelow also says:

“The American public does not know the meaning of the phrase, Indian atrocity– not its true meaning… There is no public organ to give them utterance. Their revolting indecency often excludes them from every respectable paper…” 

MORE ABOUT THE 1958 EDITION

In the past, for this sort of research I would have made do with online materials or purchased an ex-library or otherwise beat-up “reading copy” from whatever used bookseller. But I have become a rare book nerd! And this fine, mylar-covered and autographed (by the editor, Arthur Woodward), was not so expensive after all (say, half the cost of a pair of not-quite-Ferragamos, or less than the cost of 4 pounds of brisket BBQ). It is a finer edition than I expected, and with a crisp, two-color title page. Check this out:

The two color title page, 1958 edition, in pristine condition
The editor of the volume, Arthur Woodward, was Chief Curator of History and Anthropology of the Los Angeles County Museum, and the author of several books on Western history.

The end papers, front and back, show the same map: OUTLINE MAP OF THE FIELD OF OPERATIONS AGAINST HOSTILE CHIRICAHUA INDIANS.

This first illustration, a portrait of Geronimo, is not by Frederic Remington but by J.R. Chapin, dated 1885.

Portrait of Geronimo by J.R. Chapin

And here are several of the Remington sketches:

“Tenth Cavalry Types” by Frederic Remington
“Arrival of the Doctor” by Frederic Remington
“The Dog of Nogales” by Frederic Remington
“A Six-Mule Government Team and Wagon” by Frederic Remington
“Reading the Orders” by Frederic Remington
“The Race” by Frederic Remington
One of the Pack Mules Turned a Somersault” by Frederic Remington
“Surprised by a Party of Mexicans” by Frederic Remington

LT. BIGELOW AND HIS DIARY

Bigelow was an unusually well-educated officer. His father was a renowned New York newspaper editor and eminence of the Republican Party whose friends included such literary lights as Charles Dickens, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde. (Bigelow, Sr was also the editor of Josiah Gregg’s iconic best-seller Commerce of the Prairies, and when serving as US ambassador to France during the Civil War, had rescued Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. More about Bigelow, Sr. anon.) John Jr.’s diary is wonderfully rich with vivid detail, e.g.:

May 19, 1885… The men and officers have not remained in the fiery furnace in which the command unsaddled. The men are mostly strewn along the railroad track, asleep in the shade of the freight cars; others are in the pump-house, through which water is brought up from an artesian well into the railroad tank; others are lounging on the platform of the station. They officers are in the warehouse. They are an ennuyé-looking set at this hour of 4 P.M.; one of them is sleeping on the hand-truck… About 5 P.M. took place the great excitement of the day– a passenger train came in from the West, and stopped about five minutes. A brisk sale ensured of newspapers and California fruit, in which a crushing railroad monopoly possessed itself of many a last cent. One officer paid 4 bits (50 cents) for four oranges.” (Outing, April 1886)

September 6, 1885… Like most primitive American towns [Harshaw] consists of one street, lined with box-like frame houses, largel eating and drinking places; in front of these we saw an assortment of Harshaw’s men of leisure, whose facial expressions conveyed a seeming determination not to be the first to say good-day.”  (Outing, June 1886)

A LANDSCAPE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION

While Bigelow does describes the saguaro cacti, gila monsters, and other exotica, including Mexican tortillas, pinole, and panocha, he and his men traverse a rapidly industrializing Arizona of railroads and hardscrabble mining towns. When possible, to spare the horses, he would march them along the railroad.

In Clifton:

October 3, 1885… While coming into the town, I had noticed a peculiar intermittent light… which I thought might come from an electric light; now I saw that it came from a smelting work across the river. It was produced by the fresh slag; the pigs– that is, I believe, what they call them– breaking open as they rolled down the side of the dump, exposing the incandescent mass inside. having seen to the feeding and grooming of my horses, I started out with Lietnenant Reade in search of a dinner. We wandered down the street to near the end of the town, and entered the largest and brightest-lighted of the many resorts that we passed– a typical mining-town amusement hall. From a sort of large box I looked over a breast-high, counter-like partition into the main room upon a crowd of men and women of various ages and nationalities. At the middle of the side opposite the entrance was the bar. At the farthest end, from which came the sounds of lively music on the violin and other instruments, I could see figures bobbing and whirling through square and round dances. About the middle of the room was a mixture of Mexicans and Americans, sprinkled with Germans, English, Irish and other nationalities… Some of these people were playing at the billiard-tables, others were seated on the side of the room opposite the bar, or standing about the floor engaged in more or less excited conversation. The women, coming up in their promenades between the dances for a change of scene and air– sometimes for refreshment at the bar– were fewer here than at the farther end of the room. As seated at one of the restaurant tables, I took in the animated scene, I questioned to myself the propriety of my being where I was, especially of my being seen here in uniform. Before I had answered this questioning to my entire satisfaction, a couple of well-dressed gentlemen came into our little room, and as they sat down at the table next to ours, one of them was designated to me as the Governor of the Territory. I had no further concern as to the propriety of my situation. Having eaten a good supper, I repaired, rather tired, to my saddle and blankets for the night.” (Outing, August 1886)

January 21, 1886. My authority for a leave having come yesterday, I… boarded a train and settled down with my Spanish grammar and my papers and periodicals to their enjoyment from a spring-cushioned seat. At Benson, the junction with the Southern Pacific Railroad, I lunched at a Chinaman’s, at the small cost of twenty-five cents, and I think I know what I ate. It brought me back to civilization to find myself, as I did at one o’clock, seated in a sleeping car opposite a young man in a close-fitting checked suit, carrying an extreme height of collar and sporting a varnished cane.”(Outing, November 1886)

WHITHER GERONIMO?

Not a scene Lt. Bigelow saw: Geronimo and his warriors in Mexico, 
prior to their surrender in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.

Bigelow did not see much action nor even get close to Geronimo; the Apache warrior-shaman seems an almost ghost-like presence in the diary.

Sept 8, 1885… Geronimo is thought to be making for the San Mateo Mountains, the Indian strongold in New Mexico. I expect soon to hear of a movement of troops from the border towards the interior” (Outing, July 1886)

October 7, 1885... About an hour after dark I made out a fire among some trees ahead of me. Having proceeded to within a few hundred yards of it, I halted, dismounted the troop, and advanced with my ranking non-commissioned officer to determine what it was. The corporal put his ear to the ground and reported, “They are cowboys, sir; I hear the voices.” So I mounted and pushed on. When about one hundred yards farther, we crossed a railroad and a hard level stretch beyond it, and came upon a stream about twenty feet across, which I took to be the Gila. I worked my way along it toward the fires on the opposite bank, hallooing for some one to come and show me where to cross. I was soon answered by a man standing close to the water’s edge, who told me to do so where I stood, and asked me who I was. Upon telling him, I asked him, with lively curiosity, “Who are you?”

“I am Lieutenant Reade.” 

It turned out to be my friend and classmate, Lieutenant Reade, of my regiment, and my corporal’s alleged cowboys were his men.” (Outing, August, 1886)

October 4, 1885... I went to the telegraph office for news. Learned that… General Crook concludes that the Indians have returned to Sonora.” (Outing, August, 1886)  

February 3, 1886... I apprehend that Geronimo is not yet ready to make an unconditional surrender.” (Outing, December 1886) 

March 4, 1886… Camp-life seems drearier and emptier than ever. I try to reconcile myself to it as a wholesome  discipline in preparation for the intervals of inaction in real way, but it is hard to imagine this inanity in real war.” (Outing, January 1887) 

March 18, 1886. It is now three days since General Crook was to have met Geronimo, but we have not yet heard of his doing so.”  (Outing, January 1887) 

March 21, 1886… This time last year I was packing to move from Texas to Arizona and I have been pretty constantly in camp or on the march ever since. When I consider what little professional advantage that this roughing it is affording me, I am satified with the prospect of a return, without honor or distinction, to my garrison home.” (Outing, January 1887)

But the violence, and for Bigelow, the chase, heats up in May. Bigelow and his men are in the field, hearing stories of killings and kidnappings, seeing signs of Indians, visiting abandoned and pillaged ranches– but still, no Geronimo. The last article in the series, published in April 1887, in the main diary entries from June 1886, have Bigelow and his men roughing it out in the field.

June, 1886... we found the body of a man shot through the heart. From papers lying near him and from his appearance, I judged him to be a German. He was evidently camping here, cultivating a small vegetable garden.. I noticed on the top of his head a raw, white circle about the size of a dollar, which showed him to have been scalped.” (Outing, April 1887)

They cross the border into Mexico, passing near American-owned mines:

“San Lazaro, Mexico, June 14, 1886... I am told that the day after I passed through here going east, a party of Indians, numbering thirty-seven, crossed the road some twenty-five miles below, testifyng to their hot pursuit by eating raw meat.” (Outing, April 1887) 

Without ceremony, the diary trails off with the last installment in Outing April 1887, when presumably, readers would have known of Geronimo’s surrender in September 1886 in Arizona’s Skeleton Canyon.

In the diary published in Outing Bigelow says little of the Chiricahua Apache. Most of his descriptions of Indians of are of his own scouts, Tontos and Mojave. However brief and light his focus, Bigelow has an eye for novelistic detail:

December 14, 1885…After issuing them their arms, ammunition, accoutrements and camp equipage, I proceeded to take down the wants of my Indians in the way of clothing. which struck me as rather capricious. Some wanted a hat, and some did not; the same was the case with boots… In order to get at the sizes they needed, I had toi let them try on my own boots and hat and gauntlets…. One Indian amused us very much in his first attempt to utilize a boot-jack.” (Outing, September 1886) 

January 30, 1886… Tonto Jim… did not stay long, as I offered him nothing to smoke. These Indians are greater smokers if cigarettes than the Mexicans. Not smoking myself now, I have discontinued keeping tobacco, and I apprehend that my Indian friends will fall off from me. They used to come in and make long visits on my tobacco-box, and would often ask me for tobacco and cigarette papers, of which I kept an extra supply for them. They never say “thank you,” or anything that seems like it. I do not think there is any such phrase in their language.” (Outing, December, 1886)

GERONIMO THEN, GERONIMO NOW

I cannot help but wonder what Bigelow would have made of the rest of Geronimo’s life, and whether he reflected upon his own influence on Geronimo’s fame. (Perhaps I shall find out, if I can consult his diaries, which are in the Library at West Point.) After a stint as a POW in Florida, then Alabama, Geronimo lived out his life in Fort Sill, Indian Territory. Writes William A. Clements in Imagining Geronimo:

“Geronimo became a celebrity. He attended world’s fairs in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898; Buffalo, New York, in 1901; and Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1904. He participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1905 and was courted by Wild West show entrepreneur Gordon Lillie (Pawnie Bill). He was a tourist attraction and provided good copy for journalists who speclated that he had gone mad, that his much heralded conversion to Christianity was only a sham, and that he was plotting an escape. Newspapers sought his opinions on topics such as the Filipino resistance to the American presence following the Spanish-American War and the education of Apache children. Geronimo died in 1909 from pneumonia that he contracted after lying out all night after one of his protracted drinking bouts.” (p. 10) 

Much more anon.

Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. and Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth

Biographers International Interview with C.M. Mayo:
Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

Working with a Working Library: Kuddelmuddel

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Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. and “Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth: The Journal of First Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr., Fort Davis, Texas”

A portion of the prodigious accumulation.

UPDATE: Bibliography has been posted here.

As those of you who follow this blog well know, I live in Mexico City and have been at work on a book about the Trans-Pecos (that, is Far West Texas) for more than a spell. Books on the Trans-Pecos are sparse on the ground south of the border, so when I travel to Texas I always try to scour a bookshop or three. Thus have I accumulated a working library, including not a few rare and unusual books. For this sort of project, archival research is also important to do– and I have done some– but it can be woefully expensive to travel to and spend time working through archives. So whenever an historian has taken the trouble to transcribe and publish anything relevant from any archive of interest to me, I am triply grateful for such a find.

One example is the work by Douglas C. McChristian, a retired research historian for the National Park Service: “Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth: The Journal of First Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr., Fort Davis, Texas,” published as a chapbook of about 60 pages by J.M. Carroll & Co in 1985. The copy I found is in excellent condition with, halleluja, a mylar cover and autographed by the editor.

Why is this excerpt from Lieutenant Bigelow’s diary, from 1884-1885 in Fort Davis, Texas, so interesting and important?

The Tenth refers to the Tenth Cavalry, one of the African American regiments — “Buffalo Soldiers”– established after the U.S. Civil War, famed for its exploits in the West during the Indian Wars of Bigelow’s time (and later, in the Spanish-American War, also of Bigelow’s time, but that would be another blog post).

Fort Davis, tucked among the volcanic Davis Mountains, and surrounded by hard desert for hundreds of miles around, was one of a string of US Army forts set up to protect the El Paso Road.

To give an idea of the remoteness, Bigelow wryly remarks:

Fort Davis, Texas. Thursday Jan. 15, 1885 … One is apt is a country like this to suspect everybody one meets with some discreditable reason for being here, without thinking that one is subject to the same suspicion oneself.

It was highly unusual for anyone to keep such a detailed, articulate, and thoughtful diary as did Lt. Bigelow. No doubt he was encouraged in this endeavor by his father, John Bigelow, a dedicated diarist himself, and newspaper owner and editor, author, ambassador, and publisher. (For one of my previous books, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, a novel based on the true story during the French Intervention in Mexico, I consulted Bigelow Sr.’s diary in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts Division. More about Bigelow, Sr. anon.)

Back to Lt. Bigelow. Writes McChristian of Lt. Bigelow’s Fort Davis diary:

“A keen observer and a skillful writer, Bigelow left a vivid record of events and relationships at the post as he witnessed them. He included no expeditions or battles, no heroics, no glitter– only the realities of life on the frontier.”

Nuggets in Lt. Bigelow’s diary include:

Fort Davis, Tex. February 12, 1885 Have written to Chicago for 1/2 doz. base balls for the troop. The men have bats and bases. I hope my efforts to afford them recreation will counteract the unpleasant impression they receive from the extra drill that I give them and the increased severity of discipline to which I subject them.

The men were not so isolated as they might have seemed:

Fort Davis, Texas. Sat. Feb. 14, 1885… I read the report in the New York Herald today that Khartoum had fallen. From that paper I gather that the British do not comprehend yet the power of their enemy. They think of turning the tables with five or ten thousand additional troops. They will want five or ten times that many troops to conquer the Mahdi.

And Bigelow mentions meeting Quanah Parker:

Fort Davis, Tex. Tuesday Dec. 9, 1884. Have just returned from a call at Lt. Woodward’s where I met the Chief of the Comanches in the Indian Territory [Oklahoma]. His tribe is not regarded as civilized. It is behind the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles. All communications with his tribe from the Federal Government go to him.  He assembled the heads of families with whom he discusses the matter. Ten years ago, says Woodward, this man wore a blanket and breech clout. Today he is dressed like any white man. He has two other Indians with him. All three are going tomorrow about 60 miles south of here to get a certain herb which they prize as a medicine. Clarke is to escort them with about 1/2 dozen men. Quanah has a determined, and intelligent, though not a bright look. His mother was a white woman captured in Texas when quite a child; who subsequently married an Indian.

[Quanah’s mother was Cynthia Ann Parker and his father a chief, Nocona. The “certain herb” they were heading south to harvest was peyote cactus, then abundant in the Big Bend along the Rio Grande.]

Lt. Bigelow and Quanah are among the personalities I will be including in my book on Far West Texas. Apropos of that, this November I will be presenting a paper about Bigelow at the Center for Big Bend Studies conference at Sul Ross State University– in heart of the Trans-Pecos. Indeed, there are continents more to Bigelow’s life than his brief posting to Fort Davis and these few pages of his diary might suggest. The original diary, which spans many more years, including his earlier postings in the Texas in the 1870s, is in the United States Military Academy (West Point).

There is also a substantial archive of John Bigelow Jr. (and Sr. and family) correspondence during the Texas years (and much more) at Union College in Schenectedy, New York.

Bigelow’s father, John Bigelow, Sr. was an ardent reader of Emanuel Swedenborg, having encountered the Swedish mystic’s books on a journey to Haiti in his work as an Abolitionist (whew, yes, that is all packed into in one sentence! Never a dull moment with John Bigelow, Sr.). So I have been wondering to what degree, if any, his son might have been influenced by those ideas. I have little to go on at this point, but one comment in Lt. Bigelow’s diary is suggestive:

Fort Davis, Tex. Dec 4, 1884… I have begun reading to Mary (a chapter every evening) a book that was given to her in Baltimore: Natural Law in the Spiritual World. I find it original, interesting, and edifying. 

Natural Law in the Spiritual World was a best-seller of its day; the author was Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond (1851-1897). As far as I can ascertain from a search through the digital edition of this book however, Drummond was not retailing Swedenborgiana.

FURTHER NOTES ON JOHN BIGELOW, JR. (1854-1936)

Bigelow’s time at Fort Davis, as well as his earlier stints out west, when he was Fort Duncan, Fort Stockton, scouting around the Big Bend out of Peña Blanco (now Peña Colorado, a public park a few miles south of Marathon), and elsewhere in Texas, are well covered in the excellent biography by Marcos Kinevan, Frontier Cavalryman: Lieutenant John Bigelow with the Buffalo Soldiers in Texas (Texas Western Press, 1998).

Also of note is the masters thesis by Howard K. Hansen, Jr., “The Remarkable John Bigelow, Jr: An Examination of Professionalism in the United States Army, 1877-91,” Old Dominion University, 1986, which provides a splendid introduction to Bigelow’s oeuvre as a military intellectual, including Mars-la-Tour and GravelotteThe Principles of Strategy; and The Campaign of Chancellorsville

Today Bigelow’s best-known publication is his series of 15 articles, “After Geronimo,” based on the diary he kept as a cavalry officer with the Tenth in Arizona, which he published in his brother Poultney Bigelow’s magazine, Outing in 1886-87. Some of these articles included illustrations by Poultney’s Yale University classmate and friend, the soon-to-be-world-famous artist Frederic Remington. John Bigelow, Jr.’s  articles for Outingwere collected and republished in 1958 as On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo, with an introduction and notes by Arthur Woodward.

From his obituary in the New York Times, March 1, 1936:

… Expert strategist and tactician, Spanish War veteran, geographer, author, college professor and descendant of a family distinguished in American history, Colonel Bigelow was well-known in military and social circles both in the United States and abroad.

His father was John Bigelow, United States Ambassador to France under President Lincoln, and his mother, the former Jane Tunis Poultney, a social leader of her day. Poultney Bigelow, the author, is a brother.

The colonel was born in New York on May 12, 1854. After attending private schools in New York, Providence, R.I., and in Europe, he was appointed to West Point, from which he was graduated in 1877. One Jun 15 of that year he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.

Promoted to first lieutenant on Sept. 24, 1883, he was made a captain on April 15, 1893, a major on Dec. 8, 1902, and lieutenant colonel on Sept. 15, 1904, being retired at his own request the same day. From 1887 to 1889 he was adjutant general of the District of Columbia Militia. 

Colonel Bigelow particularly distinguished himself during the Spanish-American War. He was wounded four times at the battle of San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898. For his heroic conduct then he was cited in general orders and received the Silver Star…

And I found him and his wife (née Mary Dallam) listed on p. 57 of the 1918 New York Social Register.  Bigelow was then at Rutgers College in New Jersey.

Much more anon.

Next up on my reading list is McChristian’s latest, Regular Army O! Soldiering on the Western Frontier 1865-1891, published this year by University of Oklahoma Press.

> See the Q & A with McChristian over at the Civil War Books and Authors Blog

Review of John McWilliams’ The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut

Q & A with Mary S. Black on Her New Book, From the Frio to Del Rio

Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project

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Cartridges and Postcards from the US-Mexico Border of Yore

Postcards from the US-Mexico border, 1916.

About a century ago, after the fall of Francisco I. Madero’s government in 1913, with the ensuing struggle between the Huertistas and Carrancistas, and the chaos along the US-Mexico border (in part fomented by German agents, hoping to keep the U.S. Army otherwise occupied during WWI), the U.S. Army set up a number of camps there. On ebay, my sister found these postcards, probably sent by a soldier stationed near El Paso, dated October 26, 1916.

One of the postcards shows an address in Alliance, Ohio, a town noted for its Feline Historical Museum. Thank you, Google.

Here is another GIF, this one of some cartridges I picked up– by invitation, I hasten to emphasize– on private property right by the Rio Grande about 20 minutes’ drive down a dirt road from Presidio, Texas. Seriously, these are cartridges from the time of the Mexican Revolution (probably from target practice); they were just lying on the ground. That is how isolated a place it still is.

Cartridge circa 1916, from near Presidio, TX

One last GIF: An overcast day on the otherwise spectacular Hot Springs Historic Trail in the Big Bend National Park. The river is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico. At sunset the mountains turn the most otherwordly sherbet-pink. Imagine this scene with a wall through it– your tax dollars down the hole for a perfectly pointless aesthetic and ecological atrocity. (I shall now take a deep breath.)

Hot Springs Historic Trail, Big Bend National Park, Far West Texas. (Don’t watch this GIF unless you are part Viking, it will make you seasick).

Not shown in my video: the guy hiking a few minutes ahead of me on this trail wore a T-shirt that said TEXAS GUN SAFETY TIP #1: GET ONE. Well, it ain’t California. Excuse me, I need to go crunch my granola. 

Much more anon.

“Dear Mother, Am hard as a rock and brown as an Indian…”
More Postcards from the US-Mexico Border Circa 1916

Peyote and the Perfect You

A Spell At Chinati Hot Springs

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A Review of Patrick Dearen’s “Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River”

This review by C.M. Mayo appeared in Literal Magazine, May 2017.

Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River by Patrick Dearen
University of Oklahoma Press, 2016

When I closed the cover of Patrick Dearen’s Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River it was with both gratitude and the unsettling sense of having arrived into new territory— raw, rich, appalling—in my understanding of Far West Texas. This is no minor thing to acknowledge; for some years now I have been at work on a book about that very region.

But first, for those who don’t have a jones for, shall we say, Wild Westerie, why bring Far West Texas into the cross hairs? And why give a hoededo about its skinny river so salty, to quote one of Dearen’s informants, that “a snake wouldn’t drink it”?

Texas is one of the most powerful economic and political entities in not only the United States but the Americas. At the same time, “Texas” is so hammered out into tinfoil-thin clichés of popular culture (and many of those informed by warmed-over 19th century war propaganda and Madison Avenue-concocted boosterism), that we have the illusion we know Texas, when in fact it enfolds concatenations of undeservedly obscure histories, stupendenous beauty, and the lumpiest of paradoxes. If Texas—and I mean the real one, not the confection of Marion Morrison aka John Wayne, et al—is still in many ways terra incognita, its “iconic” far west, profoundly moreso. What delineates Far West Texas from the rest of Texas is precisely that skinny, salty river. And a most peculiar body of water it is.

THE PECOS AND THE TRANS-PECOS

In Texas, to set foot on the western shore of the Pecos is to enter the Other Texas, the fritter-shaped, South Carolina-sized chunk of the Lone Star State also known as the Trans-Pecos. 

No, Far West Texas / Trans-Pecos does not include Lubbock. Nor San Antonio. Nor South Texas, nor the Panhandle. Nor Austin, nor Dallas. Nor Midland, nor Odessa. 

The southwestern border of Far West Texas is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico; to the north, it shares a stretch along the 32nd parallel of salt fields and the Guadalupe Mountains with the state of New Mexico; and at its extreme west, the Trans-Pecos elbows into New Mexico at El Paso.

With the exception of El Paso, and the miniscule cowtown and artist-cum-hipster magnet of Marfa, few if any towns of the Trans-Pecos can raise an eyebrow of recognition outside the region. 

The distances in the Trans-Pecos are stunning, never mind those to get out there from anywhere else in Texas. From the state capital in Austin, a straight shot west on Interstate 10 at the speed limit, no stops, gets you to the Pecos River near Iraan in a shoulder-stiffening four hours and twenty minutes. But the Pecos doesn’t look like much at that point—there’s a tiny sign—the highway sinks down pylons for a moment. Sneeze and you’ll miss it. You won’t catch the Pecos in your rearview mirror, either.

However, if from Austin you are game to drive four hours and thirty minutes southwest into the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, nearing the U.S.-Mexico border past Comstock you could rumble onto the high bridge over a wide and sparkling Pecos, a feat of engineering spanning a bright-walled gorge so spectacular it justifies that marathon of a drive.

And how’s this for an inkling of the scale of the Trans-Pecos itself: To drive from El Paso back to that Pecos River crossing near Iraan, 308 miles, would take at least four hours. El Paso actually lies closer to San Diego, California, on the Pacific Ocean, than to Houston on the Gulf of Mexico. (I Googled that so you don’t have to.)

West of the Pecos Texas becomes less southern, more western and more Hispanic, and drier—although there are notable ciénegas, or oases. In places the landscape rolls on as flat as a tortilla; but in others, especially around the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, the landscape turns so lasciviously volcanic it might belong to another planet.

Even as the Texians and the Mexicans contested the farmlands that became the Republic of Texas (and thereafter the state of Texas), and even as the Confederates drove out the soldiers of the Union, and in turn, a victorious Union imposed Reconstruction, in effect, the remote Trans-Pecos remained part of greater Apachería and Comanchería. (That said, the Comanches did not settle in the Trans-Pecos; they passed through it on the so-called Comanche Trail—more aptly, network of trails—to raid in Mexico.) Spanish mapmakers were not far wrong to label the area the Despoblado, or Empty Quarter. The few Spanish, then Mexican, then other explorers who survived their forays into the Trans-Pecos did not have pleasant stories to tell. And so many straggled up to the bitter waters of the Pecos hoping for refreshment for themselves and their livestock only to find death. (Horse lovers should avoid reading the 1858 report of Waterman Lily Ormsby, the first through-passenger on the Butterfield Overland Mail westbound stage. Suffice to say, Ormsby mentions beating the parched and exhausted animals with rocks.)

The impetus for the U.S. government to remove the indigenous peoples—the brutal Indian Wars—and bring this merciless territory into Texas was simply this: to get to California, it had to be crossed.

A few pioneers saw opportunities in Far West Texas. In this twenty-first century some of their enterprises are still ongoing, but the Trans-Pecos is littered with ghost towns, abandoned farms, ranches, mines, and here and there at lonely cross-roads, and even on the main thoroughfares of surviving towns—Fort Stockton, Marathon, Sierra Blanca, Valentine, Van Horn, among others—there are ruins, some boarded up, most not, of houses, motels, cafés, grocery stores, and gas stations. There are many reasons for these eyesores, but a persistent one is the decline in the quantity and quality of water. All over the Trans-Pecos springs and seeps have been disappearing. As for its rivers, after the Rio Grande, the Pecos is the most important, and of all the rivers in the American West, the Pecos is one of the bitterest, most abused, and most fragile. Writes Dearen, “the Pecos is under seige by problems so vast and varied that resolutions are challenging if not impossible.”

You might assume, as I once did, that given all the movies and novels from Zane Grey’s West of the Pecos to Dearen’s own To Hell or the Pecos, the Pecos would be a well-examined river. More to the point, while there is a library’s worth of nonfiction on the Trans-Pecos—from scholarly tomes on the Paleolithic hunters, to the Spanish conquistadors, to memoirs of cowpokes and modern-day naturalists, and Dearen’s earlier works, including the invaluable history Crossing Rio Pecos— astonishingly, Bitter Waters, published in 2016, is the first book-length environmental history of the whole of this river.

THE PECOS AND THE PERMIAN BASIN

Fed by snow, rain, and freshwater springs, the Pecos gushes down from its headwaters in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains southeast towards Texas, but before it reaches the stateline it runs into the Permian Basin. For the most part a desolation dotted with mesquites and pumpjacks, the Permian Basin is the remains of what was, some 250 to 300 million years ago, an inland sea. Layers upon layers of its ancient salts cover over yet deeper layers of the fossilized remains of marine organisms—petroleum. Only a western swath of the Permian Basin lies within the Trans-Pecos; the great amoeba-shaped body of it spreads north and east into New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and almost as far as central Texas. Oil rigs started popping up in the Permian Basin in the 1920s; today the Permian Basin’s industrial center is the twin cities of Midland and Odessa, about an hour’s drive east of the Pecos River.

It bears underlining that, as Dearen writes, “[s]ince time immemorial, the Pecos and its tributaries have washed across a dead sea bottom and carried away its salts.” Literally, every day, for millions of years, brine springs have been pumping tons upon tons of salts into the Pecos.

But the saltiness varies. Dearen explains that as the Pecos winds though Texas it also drains other watersheds, and freshwater springs feed into it from the Davis Mountains. About two-thirds of its way from the top of the Trans-Pecos to its mouth at the Rio Grande, the Pecos receives yet more infusions of fresh water from creeks and springs originating in the Glass Mountains. It also receives infusions of agricultural run-off and debris, and a litany of other challenges—but this is to get ahead of the story.

“STUPID AND UNINTERESTING”

As a baseline, what was the condition of the Pecos before our time?

In the chapter “The River That Was,” Dearen provides an overview of pre-twentieth-century human encounters with the Pecos, from early peoples (some of whom, close to its source in present-day New Mexico, used its waters for irrigation), to the Spanish explorers who encountered it south of those brine feeder springs and so dubbed it the Salado (Salty River) and later the Puerco (Pig-Like). When mid-nineteenth century U.S. Army personnel encountered the “Puerco,” their reports soon began calling it the snappier-sounding “Pecos,” but they they too disdained it. Dearen quotes Second Lieutenant William F. Smith, echoing others, calling it “muddy, swift and narrow.” U.S.-Mexico boundary commissioner John Russell Bartlett, coming upon it in 1850, called its waters “brackish.” Wherever they drank from the Pecos, men and animals tended to suffer from gastrointestinal upset. In the desert, diarrhea could kill. Bartlett added: “Miserable grass.” One youthful explorer of the 1850s summed it up: “A more stupid and uninteresting river cannot be imagined.”

The first survey and and scientific study of the Pecos in the Trans-Pecos was not made until 1854, under Captain John Pope, whose mission was to find a route for the railroad to California. Pope identified areas for potential for irrigiation in the fertile lands north of the 32nd parallel, above the brine springs, in present-day New Mexico. But little could be done until after the Civil War and the conclusion of the Indian Wars.

In Texas, as early as the 1870s in the relatively less salty stretch below the town of Pecos to present-day Iraan, entrepreneurs began to divert water from the Pecos for irrigation. By the late 1880s farming commenced when the Pioneer Canal Company began to dig extensive ditches, reservoirs and small dams. These early efforts to farm in this northeastern corner of the Trans-Pecos were repeatedly wiped out in flash floods.

In 1907 a visionary rancher named T.A. Ezell decided that what Texas needed was a mega-dam on the Pecos. It would be called Red Bluff, and it would be built nearly three decades later, in the depths of the Great Depression. By that time, the banks of the Pecos River had been utterly transformed, infested by saltcedars.

THE PECOS DAMMED

In the twentieth century the Pecos River underwent a series of dramatic changes that have left it severely compromised and increasingly fragile. Apart from the saltcedars, these largely resulted from three major dams: Red Bluff (near the border with New Mexico, built in 1936); Imperial (between the farm towns of Grandfalls, Imperial and Pecos, 1912); and Amistad (on the U.S.-Mexico border, 1969). Asserts Dearen, “Repeatedly, knowledgable observers point to the damming of the Pecos as transformational.”

Of course, the benefits of dams are substantial: they can provide water for irrigation, municipal needs, hydroelectric power, recreation, and they can help control floods, a vital concern in the Trans-Pecos, where rainfall, however rare, tends to generate devastating flash floods. (Second-order benefits may include higher asset prices, more employment, and, going to the third-order, greater fiscal revenues.)

But dams and reservoirs have ecological impacts, not all of them foreseen at the time of their construction. Above all, they tend to promote salinity. And in the already bitter Pecos, increased salinity quickly became a problem. 

In Red Buff, beginning in the 1980s, blooms of golden alga began to appear. Golden alga is an invasive, possibly from England. As Dearen details in his chapter “A Fiend Unleashed,” golden alga attacks fish in two ways: its toxin affects their gills, and it depresses the levels of dissolved oxygen in the water. The fish kills at Red Bluff were so severe that for a time, Texas Parks and Wildlife closed it to fishing. 

Decreased flow in the Pecos has also contributed to higher salinity. Some of this decrease can be explained by the proliferation of groundwater pumps and other irrigation wells. Farming in New Mexico draws away much of the water that might otherwise flow down into Texas (and Dearen provides lengthy discussion of the disputes). In the Trans-Pecos in the neighborhood of Imperial, twentieth century irrigation works set off a boomlet in cotton, alfalfa, vegetable and fruit farming. By the 1960s, however, with the water table down and the quality of the soil eroded, farming went into decline. (Area farms still grow the famed sweet Pecos cantaloupe, though in ever-smaller quantities).

Then there are the questions of long-term drought and climate change, which Dearen addresses briefly in quotes from residents offering their personal observations, as well as from experts. The outlook appears grim.

RECLAMATION AND ROCK ART

My two quibbles about Bitter Waters both have to with the context for these dams.

First, the discussion of issues at-hand and scope for future policy for the Pecos River would have been better grounded by an introduction, however brief, to Reclamation. For the uninitiated, The Reclamation Act of 1902 created the juggernaut first called the Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation. Its mission is to promote development in the Western states with water projects such as dams, powerplants, and canals, and to undertake water management and water conservation. According to its official website, www.usbr.gov, the Bureau of Reclamation has constructed over 600 dams and reservoirs, including Hoover Dam, and is today the largest wholesaler of water and the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States. To quote Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Reclamation “put the national government in the center of the control and development of water, the West’s key resource.” The political and environmental implications have been monumental, as Reclamation’s dams, to quote Limerick again, “have changed Western rivers into giant plumbing systems.” In short, it would be impossible to understate Reclamation’s influence over the economics and environment of the West—including that of the Trans-Pecos.

Second, Bitter Waters makes no mention of the rock art of the Lower Pecos, an unparalleled cultural legacy, some of it many thousands of years old, an important portion of which was inundated by the Amistad Reservoir. The rock art sites that survive are imperiled by the rise in humidity, slight as it may seem in the desert air, from that same reservoir. The most spectacular of these sites is White Shaman, so named for its central headless white anthropomorph, which sprawls across the back wall of a rock shelter—from which one can glimpse the high bridge over the Pecos. I refer interested readers to Harry J. Schafer’s anthology, Painters in Prehistory: Archaeology and Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, and Carolyn E. Boyd’s works, including The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos. The latter, published in late 2016, makes a brilliant argument that White Shaman tells the story of creation, and hence it should be considered the oldest surviving “book” in North America.

INVASION OF THE SALTCEDARS

Among the most fascinating and valuable contributions of Bitter Waters is the history of the arrival of the saltcedars and subsequent attempts to eradicate them. Also known as the tamarisk, this “tree to admire and loathe,” as Dearen calls it, arrived in Far West Texas in 1886 on the wagon of one C.E. Buchholz, his idea being that saltcedars could help protect against floods. Two years later, the Pioneer Canal Company imported a second species of saltcedar from California. Native to the Levant and Central Asia, the scraggly-looking saltcedars quickly infested the Pecos. Thickets of them also cropped up along the Rio Grande, and indeed everywhere else there might be water. The list of environmental impacts includes displaced alamos (the stately native willow trees); degraded habitat for various species of birds, fish, grasses; and—ironically—a reduction of the Pecos’ ability to channel flood waters, leaving large zones in greater danger of flooding.

Bureau of Reclamation experts believed that saltcedars both raised the Pecos River’s salinity and reduced its flow. In the early 1960s the bureau launched a massive eradication campaign that, in the Trans-Pecos alone, covered 21,000 acres. Writes Dearen, “Amid soaring early expectations for a significant increase in the river’s base flow, something strange happened—nothing happened.”

In the following decades, after the construction of Red Bluff and Amistad Reservoirs, both of which increased the Pecos’ salinity, experts still took it on faith that saltcedars were displacing staggering quantities of water. Dearen quotes one expert claiming that a single large saltcedar could take up two hundred gallons a day. Ergo, so it seemed at the time, eradicating the saltcedars “had the potential to improve both the quality and vitalty of the Pecos.”

In several campaigns beginning in 1999 Red Bluff District authorities dispatched helicopters to dump Arsenal, a herbicide, on some 12,766 acres. But again, the river’s flow did not respond. One of numerous theories to account for this was that the destruction of the canopy promoted algae. Certainly algae had become a problem. In any event, the saltcedars returned, and worse: in torrential rain in 2014, the still unburned debris of those thousands of poisoned-to-death trees swept down the upper Texas stretch of the Pecos, causing half a million dollars’ worth of damage to croplands and infrastructure.

The widely quoted assertion that a single saltcedar could suck up two hundred gallons a day? That was pulled out of someone’s Stetson. As for saltcedars contributing to the Pecos’ salinity, Dearen notes a 2008 study that showed that saltcedars were not, after all, significant.

Nonetheless, a more exotic scheme to attack the saltcedar was afoot. In its Old World native habitat, the saltcedars had insect predators… As I read Dearen’s account of a U.S. government entomologist importing leaf beetles in his land-luggage, I could not help but envision this as the opening scene in a tragicomic novel.

To date, a number of different species of saltcedar munching beetles have been released on the Pecos. Jury’s out.

AN ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION

In his preface Dearen expresses the hope that Bitter Waters might “provide an essential foundation for the next generation of endeavors and policies.” Unquestionably it does, and its detailed maps and photographs help bring an amply-documented narrative into especially crisp focus.

But Bitter Waters also represents a stellar contribution to the literature on the Trans-Pecos itself, and as such, to the environmental history of Texas and the Southwest, for the Pecos River is fundamental to understanding the region in all its many facets, not only ecological, but also cultural, economic, geological, historical, and political.

And more: in the microcosm of this environmental history of the Pecos River, we may more clearly perceive the macro-catastrophe of our planet’s degradation, and, in my view, its three powerful motors: First, what economists call “the tragedy of the commons”—in the absence of well-specified and enforced limits, we to tend to overexploit shared resources; second, ye olde Road to Hell, that is, the one paved with good intentions—interventions that did not anticipate systemic consequences; and third, the advent of the oil industry, for without oil to fuel agriculture, construction, and transportation, such rapacious demands upon this bitter river, and projects to manage it, would never have been viable.

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project

More Book Reviews by C.M. Mayo

“Dear Mother, Am feeling hard as a rock and brown as an Indian”:
More Postcards from the US-Mexico Border Circa 1916

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Photo by C.M. Mayo. Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site in Far West Texas. Confession: After I snapped this photo with my iPhone I checked my email, just to see if I could! Alas, I could.

The aim of literary travel writing was– and remains– to bring the reader to deeply notice, that is, get out of her head and into the world of specific sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors, ideas, histories, geographies, geologies… In the words of Kenneth Smith, “You have to open space, and deepen place.” 

Start with escape velocity: from wherever you are, whoever you are in your known world, you rocket out, beyond the orbit of ordinary life. You float around out there– there being your own backyard or, for that matter, the island of Molokai– for a spell. Then, with a story to tell, you splash back to earth.

Next step: craft the narrative, rendering your experience in and understanding of that time and place as vividly, as lyrically, and engagingly as possible. I’ve had plenty to say about the craft of literary travel writing; what I want to touch on here are some of the steps in the process and how they have or have not changed with the lure of digital technologies and the tsunami of the Internet.

HEREWITH SOME NOTES, 
FIRSTLY, ON TAKING NOTES:

THEN: In olden times of yore, I mean in the 1990s, when traveling in Baja California for my travel memoir Miraculous Air, I carried around a pen and bulky notebook, and a camera with so many lenses and dials that if I were to pick it up today I wouldn’t remember how to operate it. To get every raw thing down that I would need for my book, I had to scribble-scribble-scribble, and during interviews and/or at the end of a day’s driving and hiking or whatever, boy howdy, I felt like a squeezed-out sponge and my hand like an arthritic claw. Once home, I spent hours upon hours typing up my field notes. And neither film nor film processing was cheap. Such was the first step of the process.

Charlie Angell, expert guide, in the Solitario, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Far West Texas. Listen in anytime to my podcast interview with Angell here.

NOW:These days, for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I carry a pen and a slim Moleskine to jot down this-and-that, but my main tool is my iPhone. Rather than scribble my field notes and interview notes, I simply turn on my iPhone’s dictation app and press “record” — when finished, I have a digital file. I also take loads of photos and videos. Oh yes, this is infinitely easier on me as I am traveling, and as far as the pictures and video go, the cost is zip. Once home, however, transcribing the audio field notes takes me hours upon hours, and it is exhausting.[*] 

[*]Yep, I have voice recognition software but it doesn’t work well enough– in the time it would take me to correct the gobbledygook I might as well transcribe from scratch. I expect this to change. For some of my podcasts I have used a transcription service, but field notes are another matter– too detailed, too personal. Furthermore, as tedious a job as it may be, transcribing my field notes helps me hyper-focus, recall more details, and gain further insight.

I am the first to admit, were I to do another literary travel memoir, while I would dictate my notes, I would need a better strategy for getting them transcribed. So I’m working on this mid-way. Ayyy.

ON UTILIZING / PROCESSING / PUBLISHING PHOTOS & VIDEO

THEN: Photos stayed in a box. A few ended up in the book. (Several years after the book on Baja California was published I uploaded a few to my website. You can view those here.)

NOW: Photos and videos can be amply shared on this blog, the website, Twitter, etc. A few will end up in the book, I expect.

Is this aspect of the process really that different because of the Internet? A few years ago I would have said so– I got very excited about the multimedia possibilities in ebooks. But I now believe that while our culture is increasingly oriented towards visual media, as far as books go, not much has changed, nor will it because what readers want is text. 

I’ll grant that some literary travel memoirs might offer a few more images and color images than might have been economically feasible before. I’ll grant that ebooks can include video or links to video. And I’ll grant that a few people may find out about and read my book because of a photo or video they Google up on my websites. A few. Most people surfing around the Internet don’t read books, never mind literary travel memoir. And there is nothing new about that.

ON FINDING BOOKS

THEN: To find books on Baja California, I scoured the shelves at John Cole’s in La Jolla, El Tecolote in Todos Santos, and a very few other bookstores and libraries, including the Bancroft at UC Berkeley. I thought the bibliography on Baja California was enormous, and I ended up owning a wall of books.

NOW: Amazon!!!! Although the other day I bought a rare book about the town of Toyah on www.abebooks.com. Over the past few years I have also bought a few books from bricks-and-mortar shops including the Marfa Book Company and Front Street Books in Alpine, and more from the bookstores in various state and national parks. And I go to the always fabulosa Librería Madero in Mexico City for out-of-print Spanish language books. I have consulted a few archives and collections… But I get most of my books from amazon.*

*I hasten to add that for research purposes I am mainly buying paperbacks and used reading-quality books, the kind I’ll take a highlighter to, not rare books. Buying rare books from amazon is not the best idea for many reasons, one of them being that the multitudinous sellers of used books  oftentimes describe a book as “new” when it is actually a stamped review copy, stained, or missing a dust jacket, and so on. For quality rare books from reputable sellers, I can recommend www.abebooks.com , www.abaa.com , and www.biblio.com

(Why am I buying so many books? Because I need to read and consult them and, alas, I do not live anywhere near a good English language library. And I admit, I do have a thing for rare books, especially on the Mexican Revolution, Baja California, Mexico’s Second Empire, or Far West Texana. Uh oh, that’s a lot.)

Bottom line: Not only is it easier to find books now, but the bibliography on Far West Texas and Texas makes that on Baja California look puny. Um, I think I’m going to need a new house.

Is this aspect of the process of writing a literary travel memoir really that different because of the Internet? It would seem so, but I’m contrasting an apple and a Durian, as it were. Baja California is a very different subject than Far West Texas. Many of the books I found useful on Baja California are not easy to find online, even today, while, so it seems to me now, if I sneeze someone hands me a book on the Great State of Lonestarlandia. 

I do miss ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I do not miss being unable to find what I was looking for. 

Anyway, not every travel memoir requires such intensive reading. 

And yet another consideration– and a topic for another blog post– is that it’s always easy to under- or over-research any given book.

ON THE INCONVENIENT LUXURY OF BEING INCOMMUNICADO 

THEN: Traveling in remote places on the peninsula I more often than not found myself incommunicado. (Back then, many small towns in Baja California did not yet have telephones.)

NOW: Few stretches of any highway, anywhere, including the most offbeat corners Far West Texas, are without cell phone reception. Many campgrounds and all hotels, properly so-called, have wifi. Digital distractions are legion. Or, another way to put it: the digital leash stays on– unless one is willing to confront friends, colleagues, and family. That takes energy. Or, another way to put it: that takes training. 

Deep Work by Cal Newport. Highly recommended.

While traveling, no, I do not text, no, I do not email (except when I fall into temptation!), and no, I do not answer my cell phone while I am driving or possibly fending off mountain lions! Sounds easy. Sounds curmudgeony. But for the kind of travel writing I do, trying to immerse my consciousness in an unfamiliar place, and come back with a vivid narrative, very necessary. 

Is it really that different? Not so much as it might appear. It has always taken a strategy plus herculean effort against formidable economic, physical, psychological, and social pressures to protect uninterrupted stretches of time for deep work. 

>> See Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Highly recommended.

ON FINDING (NONBOOK) RESEARCH MATERIALS

THEN: If it wasn’t in a book or a paper file, usually, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.

NOW: Whatever, Google.* And the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas is a fabulously rich– and free- resource. 

*Don’t get me started about the Maoist Muddle, aka Wikipedia. 

Is it really that different? Yes. 

To take but one example, it is radically different to be able to look at all the real estate on the Internet. I can be sitting in Mexico City and with my iPad and surf around, looking at all these places for sale in Far West Texas– whether a luxury ranch or a humble hunt box / trailer— I can see the kitchen, the bedrooms, ayyy, the bathrooms… I hasten to add I am not looking for anything in the Texas real estate market, but those listings, the descriptions and photos, constitute a window onto a people and place– in the not-so-distant past, this sort of at-hand detail was available only to licensed local real estate agents. 

ON ANONYMITY & KARMA

THEN: In the 90s in Baja California I talked to a lot of people who wouldn’t know me from a denizen of the fifth moon of Pluto and who would probably never learn about, never mind pick up and read my book. I found that very freeing.

Everyone will be famous for, like, 2 seconds, LOL

NOW: Still true in 2016 in Far West Texas, but almost everyone who feels moved to do so can whip out his or her smartphone and Google up my name for scads of links from my webpage to podcasts to this blog to academia.edu to LinkedIn, Twitter, blah blah blah, and all about my book on Baja California, my novel, my stories, and my book on the Mexican Revolution with the uber-crunchy title! I Google other people, too. I can follow the Twitter feed for the Food Shark in Marfa! I interview Lonn Taylor for my podcast! Lonn Taylor writes about me for the Big Bend Sentinel! Sometimes when I go out to Far West Texas I want to wear a wig and dark glasses a la Andy Warhol! But seriously, human nature hasn’t changed; most people respond very generously when asked sincere questions about their art, their business, their research, and/or their opinion, and I believe this will remain the case whether people know about my works and/or Google me or not. Moreover I expect that it will remain the case long into the future that the majority of Texans, and for that matter, denizens of the planet, will not be avidly reading literary travel memoir and couldn’t care a hula-whoop about the oeuvre of moi. (Oh well!)

Is it really that different because of the Internet? Having published several books, one thing I do appreciate, although my ego does not, is that books go out to a largely opaque response. You can talk about sales numbers, “big data,” reviews, and prizes, and it doesn’t change the fact that an author does not know when any given person is actually reading or talking about or feeling one way or the other about his or her book– and anyway, the readers of some books will be born long after their authors have passed to the Great Beyond. 

Still, I think it best to assume that there is karma with a capital “K” — opaque as it may be. In other words, you might not have to, but be prepared to live with the consequences of what you have written. Translation: truth is beauty but cruelty is stupid.

ON DISTRACTIONS

THEN: The main distractions were the television and the telephone.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. Strange, wonderful, and kinda creepy.

NOW: It’s the magnetic rabbit holes-o-rama of the Internet. In some ways this is more difficult for me as a writer because I use the same machine, the laptop, for writing as for research, for email, and for social media and surfing. (Oh, so that’s the problem! Well, at least I don’t watch television anymore.)

Is it really that different? Yes, because technology really is taking us somewhere very strange, and in some ways, for many people, smartphones are beginning to serve as an actual appendage. But no, because since the dawn of written history we have ample evidence that people have been tempted continually by hyper-palatable distractions of one kind or another and have been taken advantage of by those with the wherewithal to take advantage. Hmmmm…. religion…. slavery…. alcohol… opiates…. cigarettes…. casinos…. spectator sports…. mindless shopping…. television… or even, as they did even back in the days of the atl-atl, lolling around the campfire and indulging in idle & malicious gossip…

>> See also Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle.

ON PUBLISHING EN ROUTE

THEN: As work progresses, I would publish an occasional article in a magazine or newspaper such as, say, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal— and I would actually get paid. I also published a number of longform essays in literary magazines. I got paid, a bit, and I treasure the beautiful copies.

NOW: Although I continue to publish in magazines, mainly I post digital media– articles on this blog, guest-blogs, and text, photos, videos and podcasts on my websites, plus I send out my emailed newsletter a few times a year. Downside: My short works make less money. Upside: publishing articles is quick, easy, and I retain control. Further upside: when people Google certain terms, they get me. For example, try “Sierra Madera Astrobleme.”

Is it really that different? Alas, yes. See Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

I would tell any young writer getting started today that if you want the freedom to write things you will be proud of, first find a reliable alternative income source and from there, always living below your means, build and diversify your sources of income away from the labor market. (Getting an MFA so you can teach in a creative writing program? That might have made a smidge of sense two decades ago. Now you’d be better off starting a dog grooming business, and I am not joking.) Yes, if you are brilliant, hard-working and lucky, you might one day make a good living from your creative writing. But why squander your creative energy for your best work worrying about generating income from, specifically, writing? Quality and market response only occasionally coincide. Jaw-dropping mysteries abound. 

FURTHER NOTES: WHAT ELSE HASN’T CHANGED (MUCH)? 

The Call to Dive Below the Surface

One might imagine that with all the firehoses of information available to the average traveler, literary travel writing now needs to offer something get-out-the-scuba-gear profound. But this has been true for decades– long before the blogosphere and Tripadvisor.com & etc. thundered upon us. 

As V.S. Naipaul writes in A Turn in the South– waaay back in 1989:

“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago… Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, ‘This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys…’ This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer.”

Organizational Challenges

Another thing that has not changed is the need to keep things organized– whether digital or paper. When I sit down to bang out a draft and then polish (and polish & polish & polish) a literary travel narrative, I need to constantly refer to my field notes, books, photos and videos, so it is vital that I have these resources where I can easily find them– and when done for the day, or with that section, that I have a place to easily put them back (and from where I can easily retrieve them as need be). This might sound trivial. It is not. 

Here’s what works for me: 

BOOKS: Shelve by category, e.g., Texas history, geology; regional; rock art, etc, using big, easy-to-read labels on the shelves; 

PAPERS: File in hanging folders in a cabinet, e.g., travels by date, editorial correspondence, other alphabetical correspondence, people (as subjects), places;

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

TRANSCRIBED FIELD NOTES AND INTERVIEWS: Store in three-ring binders; 

DIGITAL FILES: Save in folders on the laptop, e.g., audio by date and place, photos and video by date and place;

WEBSITES, PODCASTS, VIDEOS: For websites and etc, I often use posts on this very searchable blog as a way of filing notes that I can easily retrieve (here’s an example and here’s another and another and another and another);

Notes on Peyote, for example.

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

Sounds like I know what I’m doing! The truth is, no matter how often I declutter, books and papers tend to mushroom into unwieldy piles and ooze over any and all horizontal expanses. Piles make it easier to procrastinate. And procrastination is the Devil. I have been struggling mightily with getting my field notes transcribed. All that said, a book gets written as an elephant gets eaten– bit by bit. It’s happening. Stay tuned.

It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone
(Plus an App Evaluation Flowchart to Tailor-Make Your Own

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber, on
Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the NIneteenth Century

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


The Strangely Beautiful Sierra Madera Astrobleme

The Sierra Madera Astrobleme. Photo: C.M. Mayo

As those of you who have been following this blog know, I am at work on a book about Far West Texas and, apropos of that, hosting the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project. So in addition to reading about Far West Texas and related subjects, and interviewing artists and many other interesting people, I’ve been doing a heap of driving all over the place out there. 

Driving east or west on I-10 or I-20 or 90 is to barrel along with the steady flow of big rigs, pickup trucks, RVs and SUVs; driving north-south, on the other hand, it gets very lonely, very strange, very fast.

Here is a photo* I took with my iPhone through the windshield while heading south on US-385 from Fort Stockton to Marathon. That jumble of hills over to the left is the Sierra Madera, which sits on the vast La Escalera Ranch, one of the largest ranches in Texas. Although I did not know it at the time, the highway was about to blaze me right through the Sierra Madera Astrobleme.

[*Normally I would never fool around with my smartphone while driving, but I had been driving out here for sometime and not seen a single vehicle, in either direction. I daresay I could have taken got out of the car and taken a siesta in the middle of the road.]

The Sierra Madera Astrobleme in Far West Texas
The Sierra Madera Astrobleme, off US-385 between the towns of Fort Stockton and Marathon

The Sierra Madera is indeed on Google maps, but neither of the maps I carried with me that day, the AAA and the Geological Highway Map of Texas, noted it, so I was wholly unprepared for the sight, on the open plains, well before the Glass Mountains, of the strange-looking huddle of the Sierra Madera off to the east–  and all bathed in the golden-orange glow of sunset. Alas, my photo does not do its stunning gorgeousness a shred of justice. 

It turns out that the Sierra Madera is an extremely rare “cryptoexplosion structure,” in this case, a crater with a central mountain range raised not by volcanic or tectonic forces, but by the rebound from the impact of an unknown extraterrestrial object. The mountains and the approximately 6 mile-in-diameter crater, so eroded over some nearly 100 million years that I did not recognize it as I drove through it, are together known as the Sierra Madera Astrobleme. 

An astrobleme is an eroded remnant of a large crater made by the impact of a meteorite or comet. The term, first used in the mid-20th century, is from the Greek astron, star, and blema, wound. 

What was that object that slammed into the earth those nearly 100 million years ago? I searched the literature but could not find any description beyond “approximately spherical.” So I wrote to Dr. Robert Beaufort, who host the United States Meteorite Impact Craters website. He kindly answered:

“Identifying the class of meteorite that caused a particular impact crater is a genuinely difficult task… Because we are talking about gargantuan numbers of nuclear bombs worth of heat and shock energy, the impacting body itself, which is pretty tiny compared to the size of the crater, winds up distributed as parts per million or billion among the melted and/or redistributed target rocks remaining in and around the crater.  Finding traces of the impactor is pretty straightforward if you have a mass spectrometer to play with (which I don’t), but actually telling which specific type of asteroid and associated meteorite you are dealing with is much more difficult.  Scientists have looked at differences in bulk elemental ratios and at differences in isotope ratios in different classes of meteorites, and found cases where the same characteristic ratios could be discerned, even though they were diluted to parts per gazillion in the earth rock at an impact site.  It is tricky work, and depends upon being able to clearly evaluate terrestrial background abundances, and so forth, but we are getting better at it with each passing decade.  I don’t think it has been done for Sierra Madera.  There is a very good chapter on the subject in Osinski and Pierazzo’s book, Impact Cratering: Processes and Products.  Dr. Christian Koberl springs to mind as one of the world’s notable authorities on the subject of projectile identification at impact crater sites.”

What was going on 100 million years ago? This would have been the Late Cretaceous or Early Tertiary, when Tyrannosaurus roamed and Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a pterosaur the size of a small jet airplane, cast his shadow from overhead. (Seems the flora and fauna had a few more million years to go… 66 million years ago came Chicxulub and the great extinction.)

The literature I could Google up on the Sierra Madera Astrobleme has a great deal of detail on shatter cones and various types of rock, as well as gravitational and magnetic anomalies. But as for a description for the layman, or shall we say, the average Tyrannosaurus Rex, of what the impact might have sounded like and how it might have affected the atmosphere, or caused mega-tsunamis, no dice. 

Would the Sierra Madera have appeared as an island? It seems that those many millions of years ago the area was then underneath the so-called Western Interior Seaway. The Davis Mountains— the Texas Alps– lying beyond the horizon to the northwest, would not emerge until the volcanic frenzy of (gosh, only) 35 million years ago.

Dear reader, if you have more information about the Sierra Madera Astrobleme, please do write.

Informative links:

> “When Texas Was at the Bottom of the Sea” by Olivia Judson, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2015.

University of Texas of the Permian Basin webpage on the Sierra Madera Astrobleme

All the crunchy geology. Plus the hypothetical reconstruction of the event.

> “Hydrocone Modeling of the Sierra Madera Impact Structure” by Tamara J. Goldin et al. Meteoritics and Planetary Science, 2006.
Extra-crunchy.

“Geology of the Sierra Madera Cryptoexplosion Structure, Pecos County, Texas” by H.G. Wilshire, et al. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper No. 599, 1972.
Extra-extra-crunchy with shatter cones.

> United States Meteorite Impact Craters: Page on the Sierra Madera Crater
Good variety of photographs and information by Robert Beauford, PhD. He writes: 

“This is one of the largest impact craters in the United States, and even after having worked on 4 to 5 km craters for several years, I found it challenging to take in the scale of the structure.  It defines the shape of the vast, open landscape in every direction.”

Purdue University’s Impact Earth! Famous Craters page. 
Alas, it does not include the Sierra Madera Astrobleme. But fascinating nonetheless.

> Astronaut’s Guide to Terrestrial Impact Cratersby R.A.F. Grieve, et al. LP Technical Report Number 88-03, Lunar and Planetary Institute, NASA, 1988
(See Sierra Madera, p. 13.)

#

P.S. Wiggy synchronicity du jour: Given that the Sierra Madera Astrobleme is near the Glass Mountains, it raised my eyebrows to come upon this webpage with the Ames Astrobleme Museum and the Gloss Mountains of Oklahoma:

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

Q & A: Amy Hale Auker, on Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Blood Over Salt in Borderlands Texas: Q & A with Paul Cool about “Salt Warriors”

I am still turtling along in writing my book about Far West Texas, which has involved not only extensive travel in the Trans-Pecos and some podcasting but reading– towers of books!– and what a joy it was to encounter one so fascinating as Paul Cool’s Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande

A meticulously researched and expertly told history of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, Salt Warriors is essential reading for anyone interested in US-Mexico border and Texas history, and indeed, anyone interested in US history per se.

The El Paso Salt War of 1877 was sparked by “Anglo” businessmen staking claim to the massive salt bed that lies just west of what is now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Local Mexican-Americans, known as Paseños, considered the salt deposits community property, in accord with Spanish Law.

While the salt may have been free to anyone who would shovel it up, that required an arduous journey across the desert with carts pulled by oxen, and under constant threat of Indian attack. For Paseño farmers who eked out a living in this drought-prone region, the salt they could harvest was vital for curing food, pelts, for livestock licks, and above all, as a cash commodity– much of it sold to mines in Mexico, where it was used for refining silver. The Paseños were outraged when Judge Charles H. Howard, a recent arrival from Virginia, informed them that they would have to start paying his father-in-law, a German businessman based in Austin, for the salt.

From behind the windshield, approaching Guadalupe Mountains National Park from US 62, which goes through the salt lake. Photo by C.M. Mayo

In the wake of the El Paso Salt War, several people on both sides of the conflict had been killed, some horribly (Judge Howard was murdered, and his body mutilated and thrown down a well), the town of San Elizario sacked, several reputations ruined– some fairly and others unfairly, as Cool argues– and a wedge of suspicion and resentment driven between communities that is still, more than a century later, not entirely healed.

Paul Cool is a former Army Reserve officer and resident of Arizona with an avid interest in the US-Mexico borderlands. He kindly agreed to answer my questions via email.

C.M. MAYO: When and why did you develop your avid interest in the US-Mexico border?

PAUL COOL: It came late in life, but traces back to growing up in Southern California and marrying a young lady whose paternal grandparents came to El Paso during the Mexican Revolution. Unfortunately, I spent nearly two decades trying to write a book about the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic era, and only recently turned to the borderlands for material.

C.M. MAYO: What prompted your interest in the Salt War?

PAUL COOL: I have always been drawn to historical eras marked by the collapse or relative absence of order, justice, and social restraint, periods when ambitious or unscrupulous individuals are more able to give free rein to their personal desires and vices at the expense of the larger community. The late Roman Republic. Revolutionary France. The frontier West.  

In 1999, I drove from Seattle to Baltimore via El Paso, where I happened to purchase Walter Prescott Webb’s history of the Texas Rangers. His book contains a chapter on the Salt War. It was obvious there was an interesting story here, but it was buried beneath the ethnic bigotry running through Webb’s take. I then read C. L. Sonnichsen’s little book on the Salt War. The writing was vivid, and his account grabbed me in a way Webb’s had not. I felt closer to what happened, but the characters were still archetypes and stereotypes.

C.M. MAYO: Outside the region this conflict is almost unknown. Why do you think this is? 

PAUL COOL: Several reasons. The Spanish-speaking losers in the conflict disappeared into Mexico, and were in no position to write the history. As for the Anglos, many of the protagonists died, and they were soon replaced as by others who came to El Paso with the railroad, lacking any concern for the past. The story was buried because it was about a world that no longer existed, and no one cared about. 

Second, the story did survive as a chapter in Texas Ranger history, but since the Rangers surrendered to an enemy repeatedly characterized as a “howling mob,” Texans generally considered the Ranger performance a thing of shame and no one made any effort to expand our knowledge of the episode for that reason.

Third, from the perspective of Anglo sources, no iconic Anglo figure arose to grab our attention and turn the story into the stuff of legend north of the border. I think the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt illustrates what can happen with a hero. Think of Lawrence of Arabia’s impact on Western understanding of the Arab Revolt. Without Lawrence, no newspaper coverage by Lowell Thomas, no Seven Pillars of Wisdom, no David Lean film, no Omar Sharif as Ali or Zhivago! Lawrence’s story, and all that followed, is a misreading, to be sure, but corrective history is now available. It is possible that Mexican sources will reveal the existence of a hero, possibly Barela, possibly someone who we don’t yet know, and the information needed to provide the foundation of a heroic narrative. The romantic in me hopes that further research uncovers such a figure who can raise awareness of this popular yet tragic rebellion, south of the border first, then migrating up here.

Latino historians are and have long been aware of the Salt War and its place in Mexican American history. When I asked Dr. Arnoldo De Leon, a preeminent authority on Tejano history, why Latino scholars had never tackled the subject, he explained that they are playing catch-up, that there are so many stories still in need of telling, so many that continue to wait their chance.

C.M. MAYO: Of the results of the war, you write (p. 4) “In the long term, the distrust and marginalization of Paseño citizens by Anglos was deepened.” Your book does an excellent job of showing why this was but at the same time, you show that the insurgency was not “a bloody riot by a howling mob but in reality a complex political, social, and military struggle.” After your book came out, did your argument meet any notable resistance?

PAUL COOL: The academic community has generally applauded the appearance of Salt Warriors, although some reservations about my approach have been expressed. For example, one reviewer justly criticized the book for its reliance on north-of-the-border sources, to the exclusion of any archival material inside Mexico. I do not speak or read Spanish, and did not have the resources to hire others to dig through material that might or might not tell the story I wanted to tell. I had a choice: I could leave the story untold because I could not do a so-called “definitive” version (which is always elusive anyway), or I could tell this story to the best of my ability and hope that others would follow up to provide new perspectives. 

One other criticism I will mention is that I gave my opinion of the key participants, of their individual responsibility for the chaos and destruction that took place, and even of their moral failings. Some said that is not the historian’s job. It is best to just state the facts and let the reader decide. That may be true, but in this case, I felt that the story of the Salt War had been so repeatedly twisted over time that a clear statement of who was responsible was in order. One can never really know the hearts and minds of people who died more than a century before, but I feel confident in my opinion of who was most responsible for the tragedy.

C.M. MAYO: What lessons does the Salt War offer us today? I am thinking of some of the dynamics we see played out with other insurgencies and their repression, and the dynamics that ensure. On p. 235 you write “‘Throughout history,’ today’s U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers learn, many defeated insurgent movements ‘have degenerated into criminality.'” My understanding is that this would apply both to some of the defeated Mexican-American and allied Mexican insurgents, as well as to many ex-Confederates who were then coming into the Southwest and taking up careers as rustlers, and bank and train robbers.

PAUL COOL: Any population is always going to include “hustling individualists” who are most interested in getting what they want, whether it is inordinate power or wealth at the expense of the larger population, or the satisfaction of some baser need, including taking something from someone else in a violent or disturbing manner. 

The question is, does the presence of an equally applied law and a just order prevent or at least put a damper on that? 

In the first instance, one group, whether it’s Gilded Age entrepreneurs and their political allies, or their 21st century heirs on Wall Street and in government, uses “law” to corral wealth and power at the expense of the general population. 

In the second, violent criminals trade on the lack of “order” to achieve much the same ends, perhaps more bloodily, but not necessarily on a smaller scale. 

What transpired in post-Salt War El Paso, in terms of increases in criminal activity by gangs and individuals, was probably not much different in nature than what happens any place the authority structure collapses, whether in Iraq, Revolutionary France between Louis XVI and Napoleon, or the Soviet Union after Gorbachev. 

But something additional happened in El Paso, new to the American West but not uncommon in world history. There, the sheriff hired mercenaries to enforce order against perceived enemies, in this case the Mexican American population. Those mercenaries included career criminals led by John Kinney. What happened in El Paso became, for a few years, the way sheriffs did business in the American borderlands, and was repeated during the Lincoln County War (again with Kinney leading a band of criminals) and in Cochise County, Arizona during the final stage of the so-called Earp-Cowboy troubles. 

C.M. MAYO: You were a former Army Reserve officer. How did this inform and color how you saw some of the individuals in this story?

PAUL COOL: The event had largely been treated as an ugly civil disturbance requiring military policing. I decided to approach it as a “war” brought on by clashing cultures, economic drivers, and untrammeled ambition. 

My own military career was slender, but my first thirty years were spent as the son of a decorated combat hero and, as a Reserve officer, in close association with officers and men who also met that definition. The military is made up of people from the general population. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen are, in that sense, much like the rest of us. But in addition to military knowledge, i.e., how to fight and win, the military honestly attempts to inculcate certain ideal qualities, including honor, integrity, reliability. People, whether the population you’re sworn to protect or your buddy in the next foxhole, suffer and die unnecessarily when these qualities are forgotten or ignored. The military I knew does try to adhere to them.  

There is, of course, so much more to the military ethos, but I mention these factors because they influenced the course of the Salt War. There were army officers, such as Lieutenant Rucker and Colonel Hatch, who attempted to use their influence and authority to prevent violence and to quickly, peacefully put a lid on it. But it just so happened that, at the critical point, the officer on the scene, Captain Thomas Blair, possessed probably less integrity than any other officer in the U.S. Army. He was a smooth charmer, and no one realized his lack of character. Had Rucker not been replaced by Blair, or had Blair possessed ordinary integrity, it seems to me likely that some of the violence might have been short-circuited. Who knows? It was only later, through Blair’s bigamy, that the value of his word was revealed to all.

The military also attempts to instill discipline, to convince young soldiers to follow the rules, something that goes against the grain for many, from teenagers to independent-minded middle-age men. Discipline enables a unit to carry out its missions and prevents the naked exercise of power in service to personal wants. The Salt War illustrates the importance of discipline and leadership. We read that the various companies of the Ninth Cavalry occupying the Mexicano towns carried out their pacifying mission without any complaints, whereas soldiers from the company of the Tenth Cavalry engaged in a variety of violent personal and property crimes. The difference was the discipline instilled by the leaders of the Ninth Cavalry, but not the Tenth, both prior to and during the military action. 

C.M. MAYO: A modern recounting of the Salt Wars usually makes Judge Charles H. Howard into a simple character, an arrogant, stubborn and greedy villain, the outsider who swiped the community’s salt and then, even to the point of endangering both himself and others, insisted on pressing his client’s claim. One of the things I appreciated about your book is that you explained in more depth some of Howard’s probable motivations and, in particular, the mid-19th century Virginian concepts of honor to which he would have ascribed. The fact that he was bereaved after the death of his wife and deeply indebted to his father-in-law, the purported owner of the salt lakes, was another crucial factor you point out. 

It seems to me that you have made a powerful effort to objectively present the different points of view in the conflict. Was this something that came easily or did it take a while? 

Were there any individuals whose motivations were particularly obscure to you, or even now remain so?

PAUL COOL: While I don’t subscribe to the “great man” theory of history, I do believe that individuals make a difference, whether it’s Jean-Paul Marat steering the French Revolution along a more violent course or young Charlotte Corday who feels bound to save France from Marat. I believe that the Salt War was filled with such characters, whose personalities and behaviors were instrumental in leading the county into a downward spiral. That was not fully evident from the published record, because Salt War history was for decades largely a matter of historians regurgitating the same tale: largely nameless, faceless, hapless Texas Rangers surrender to a Mexican mob led by the evil Chico Barela. Nothing worth investigating further. But once I dug into sources not previously used, such as the federal government’s records, or personal correspondence that popped up in newspapers or located in the governor’s records, a different story emerged. At some point, for some reason, I decided to investigate the lives of key players before and after the Salt War. And that’s where I found the keys to their actions in 1877, most notably in the cases of Blair and Kerber.

Howard is a figure out of Greek tragedy. He wore his arrogance on his sleeve, but arrogance is a trait, not a motive. What was his motive? What impelled him to send a county over a cliff? It had to be something deep and personal. Howard himself spoke and wrote of his debasement by the Paseños, of his overriding debt to his father in law, of his depression after the loss of his wife. Losing his honor, he wanted only to regain it, and it did not matter who he harmed in the process. He was raised in a society that educated him to believe that personal honor trumped all.  I don’t believe that he saw that he had any choice. He could only act as he did. 

That realization took me some time to reach, and it came by happenstance. I caught an interview with Dr. Joanne Freeman, who wrote a book on the highly ritualized duels in the early Republic. (Think Hamilton and Burr.) She stated that, as the 19th century progressed, the formalities fell away, and those who felt their honor attacked were far more likely to just start shooting and caning one another. I thought she was describing Howard feeling empowered to beat or kill Cardis on sight. That led me to some readings on ante-bellum notions of honor and shame, and to discussions with Dr. Gary L. Roberts, who has written about codes of honor in the South and West.

I am afraid that, despite the best efforts of New Mexico historian, Dr. Rick Hendricks, I never quite got a handle on Father Antonio Severo Borrajo, the man most demonized by contemporary Anglo sources. Toward the end of my work, I did add a paragraph that attempted to make sense of Father Borrajo, based on Dr. Hendrick’s guidance, but then in the final flurry of chopping and editing the manuscript, the passage got deleted from one spot and not replaced in another. I didn’t notice until the book was published. I tell myself that these things happen, but it’s a mistake I’d rather sweep under the rug. I’d love to revise Salt Warriors after Dr. Hendricks publishes his Borrajo biography. I think that would fill a large gap in the story I’ve told.

The Paseños were a tough nut to crack. They did not write the histories, their thoughts are largely absent from the written record, and the victors universally denigrated their motives and characters. I got past that in two ways. First, I decided to make the Paseño community a character.  Who were these people at the Pass of the North? Faced with a century-long relative isolation from Spanish, Mexican, and American authorities and support systems, what kind of community did they establish and build? How did it function? What did that maintenance and development of a community say about its leadership? Guesswork on my part was necessary, but traits did present themselves and a portrait I trust did emerge. 

Second, in the case of the Paseno’s leaders, I was able to draw conclusions about their leadership skills based on their military actions, which were quite elaborate. One thing that the evidence revealed is that the Paseños had a long history of self-defense, whether against Apache raiders or the demoralized Confederates who retreated from New Mexico. It was obvious that the Paseño community had a core of leaders they turned to, men who had previously considered how best to respond to threats, and had put their lives on the line to lead those efforts. I had no direct evidence enabling me to get inside the minds of Chico Barela (or “Varela”), Sisto Salcido, or other leaders, but the reports of what actions they took was very revealing. For example, the traditional Anglo account is that Barela was a man not given to keeping his word. A different reading is that he was a master of using deception to misdirect his enemy’s attentions and actions. He could spot an opponent of weak resolve and then guide his actions by telling that opponent what he wanted to hear. He played his opponents no less than Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, or Rommel. That’s something you do in war, if you can. Ultimately, Barela and his little army bit off more than they could chew, but they conducted a skillful military operation that achieved short-term results no one among the Anglos expected.

C.M. MAYO: About Father Antonio Severo Borrajo, who as you say was “most demonized by contemporary Anglo sources,” would you like to share the lost paragraph?

PAUL COOL: Unfortunately, whatever paragraph I had on Borrajo was in some unknown spot in some unknown draft that never got indexed. However, whatever I put in was influenced by this 2002 corrective view by Dr. Hendricks, who, since 2010, has been New Mexico’s State Historian. I do think Borrajo’s intolerance of the Protestants and the French-based Catholic teachings of the then current parish priest, Father Pierre Bourgade (later archbishop of Tucson), helped to keep the population stirred up, even if he was not the greedy demon falsely portrayed by his enemies. Unfortunately, Borrajo’s appearances during 1877, the climax of the crisis, are few and references to him at that point are probably less reliable than usual. 

C.M. MAYO: Louis Cardis, the Italian-born businessman and stagecoach owner is a most intriguing character. Was it possible to find out more about his origins other than that he was from Piedmont and might have served as a captain in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army? 

PAUL COOL: There was more about his life story and others that just had to come out to get the book down to size. Anything I found that explains his actions did stay in the book. He is another character who, where the written record is concerned, is largely seen through the eyes of others. I detect no bigotry toward his constituents, none, but he did not do all he could to protect them from the power structure that was moving to seize their grandfathered rights in the salt lakes. For example, he signed his name to the 1876 Texas Constitution that enabled private citizens to own saline deposits, but never after, as far as I can tell, spurred his constituents to take legal action to forestall Anglo ownership. 

C.M. MAYO: As you proceeded with your research, what most surprised you?

PAUL COOL: This project started as a planned 2-3 chapters in another book. I was surprised by the complexity and the epic sweep of the story, and by the characters who could leap off the page in the hands of writers much better than me. (If there were a viable market, this story deserves a ten-hour TV miniseries starring Russell Crowe and Edward James Olmos, among others.) If I could have made Salt Warriors twice as long, I would have. Pity the poor reader had I owned my own publishing house. 

C.M. MAYO: You were able to talk to several of the descendants on both sides of the conflict. Were you surprised by how they saw it?

PAUL COOL: The families that remain in San Elizario knew they had reason to be proud of their ancestors, but over the years, exposed only to increasingly vague oral tradition and the Anglo-centric writings of later historians, they had largely lost the details of what really happened. In some cases, I had to reject the tradition, but in other instances, I thought tradition held up and explained what the records obscured. It was the first time I had to make sense of oral tradition, to treat it as evidence that deserved to be weighed rather than ignored.

On an early visit to San Elizario, a leader of the local historical and genealogical society showed me where tradition said certain key events happened. My research often showed otherwise, and a few years later I was happy to return the favor, incorporating the written evidence. We still had doubts about this and that event and had a great time trying to make sense of the surviving evidence, including tradition.

C.M. MAYO: In reading about the organized crime in El Paso in the wake of the Salt War– in particular of cattle rustler John Kinney and his alliance with Sheriff Kerber– it’s tempting to make modern day comparisons with modern day drug trafficking, etc. Would you? Or was it something very different?

PAUL COOL: Well, it was much, much, less organized, and the crimes much more impromptu than we see with modern drug traffickers. My subsequent research has led me to believe that a better analogy would be the Bahamian pirates of the early 18th century, those who established a base of operations on Nassau temporarily free of British authority. (El Paso had a government, but totally ineffective keeping order.) There were criminal leaders (Blackbeard, for example), but individual pirates were more or less free to sign on to this piratical raid or that. They had to strictly follow orders during any voyage—at sea, everyone’s life depends on it—but otherwise were independent contractors who, between “jobs,” had no duty to follow anyone.  Likewise, men might follow Kinney or not. That they raided with Kinney today did not prevent them from riding off to commit their own crimes tomorrow, or just sit around playing cards and drinking rot-gut till they went broke.

C.M. MAYO: One of the most astonishing things to me about the entire episode is that nearing the end of the book (p.280) we learn that the government never granted Zimpleman ownership of the salt lakes! So what happened after that? Who took possession of them? Who owns them now?

PAUL COOL: I too was astonished by that. I did learn that some business did extract salt into the 20th century, but more than that could not tell you. I simply had to move on.

C.M. MAYO: Anyone who drives east out of El Paso en route to Carlsbad NM passes right through the salt lakes. But to really see them, what is the best place to view them? 

PAUL COOL: If one is simply traveling east or west, on the way to or from El Paso, one can get a good view at several points along Highway 62/180.  My book’s cover painting, by artist Bob Boze Bell, is based on a photograph (found inside on the page facing the Introduction) that I took from this highway. A more immersive experience can be gained at the Gypsum Salt Dunes inside Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The lakes stretch for 100 miles, so I imagine there are any number of good sites for viewing.

C.M. MAYO: One of the stops on one of the routes from the Rio Grande out to the salt lakes is Hueco Tanks, an oasis with some important rock art that is now a State Park and Historic Site. For anyone interested in the history of the Salt War, is there any place there that would be especially relevant to see?

PAUL COOL: Among the signatures carved into the rocks of Hueco Tanks is that of Santiago Cooper, one of the Texas Rangers who survived the siege and battle of San Elizario. 

A walking tour of San Elizario is essential. Many of the buildings date from 1877 and before. With the benefit of the bird’s eye view painting in my book, it is possible to follow the course of the actual fighting, as well as place other events that took place in town. A walking tour guide is also available at the museum, giving historic and architectural details on surviving structures.  

In the city of El Paso, a very few buildings survive, most notably the Magoffin House. One should also visit nearby Mesilla, New Mexico, near Las Cruces, where A. J. Fountain published the newspaper that gave the fullest, if one-sided, reporting of the events inside El Paso County. The town square dates from before the salt war.

C.M. MAYO: Anything else you think I should have asked?

PAUL COOL: There was one other sound criticism of my book that deserves comment. In part because I did not use Mexican sources, I did not link the Paseños to Mexican national thinking and traditions regarding liberty, property, justice, and the right to rise in defense of one’s rights. Instead, I quite clearly linked them to traditions of New England’s minute men and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. 

I did that for two reasons. First, I know more about U.S. traditions, and can stand on more solid ground. Second, I intentionally attempted to make a point to an American audience.  The political philosophy driving the Paseños was of a universal nature but could be and was expressed at the time by them (page 141) in terms that New Englanders of 1775, Continental Congress delegates of 1789, and the Anglos who moved to El Paso could understand, had their minds been open. However much the Paseños acted within the traditions of the long Mexican quest for justice within the law, they certainly acted within the U.S. tradition.

> Visit Paul Cool’s website here.

UPDATES: Paul Cool passed away suddenly a few months after this interview was posted. See Mark Boardman’s “The Coolest Guy in the Room, Paul Cool 1950-2016” in True West magazine, October 5, 2016.

For more about the area, see also Joe Holley’s article, which mentions Paul Cool’s work, “Danger Lurks in Salt Flats, As It Did A Century Ago,” Houston Chronicle, August 26, 2016.

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A note about the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts. Twenty podcasts have been posted, most recently, an interview with Raymond Caballero about Mexican revolutionary General Pascual Orozco and Far West Texas.

Notes on Tom Lea and His Epic Masterpiece
of a Western,
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Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

On the Trail of the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos

Remote as they are, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of the US-Mexico border have a strangely magnetic pull. That may sound like a wild assertion, but the evidence comprises over 200 shamanistic rock art sites, many of them thousands of years old, and the fact that dozens of rock art enthusiasts, including myself, find themselves returning again and again. 

It was on a meltingly hot August day in 2014 that I made my first foray into the canyonlands for the Rock Art Foundation’s visit to Meyers Spring. A speck of an oasis tucked into the vast desert just west of the Pecos, Meyers Spring’s limestone overhang is vibrant with petrographs, both ancient, but very faded, and of Plains Indians works including a brave on a galloping horse, an eagle, a sun, and what appears to be a missionary and his church.

MEYERS SPRING, AUGUST 2014

Because I am writing a book about Far West Texas and I must travel all the way from Mexico City via San Antonio, I had figured that this visit, plus an interview with the foundation’s executive director, Greg Williams, would suffice for such a little-known corner of my subject. 

I took home the realization that with Meyers Spring I had taken one nibble of the richest of banquets. In addition the rock art of the Plains Indians—Apaches and Comanches— of historic times, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are filled with prehistoric art, principally Pecos River, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. Of the three, Pecos River is comparable to the best known Paleolithic rock in the world, the caves of Lascaux in France.

I would have to return to the canyonlands— alas for my book’s time and travel budget!  Not that the Rock Art Foundation charges more than a nominal sum for its tours. The individual tour to Meyers Spring, which lasted four hours, cost a mere 30 dollars. Everyone involved, including the guides, works for the foundation for free.

By December of 2014 I was back for another Rock Art Foundation tour, this one down into Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry. Apart from rock shelters with their ancient and badly faded petrographs, cooking debris, tools, and even a mummy of a woman who—scientists have determined— died of chagas, Eagle Nest Canyon is the site of Bonfire Shelter, the earliest and the second biggest bison jump, after Canada’s Head Bashed-In, in North America. Some 10,000 years ago hunters drove hundreds of prehistoric bison—larger than today’s bison—over the cliff. And in 800 BC, hunters drove a herd of modern bison over the same cliff, so many animals that the decaying mass of unbutchered and partially butchered carcasses spontaneously combusted. In deeper layers dated to 14,000 years, archaeologists have found bones of camel, horse, and mammoth, among other megafauna of the Pleistocene. 

DESCENT INTO EAGLE NEST CANYON, DECEMBER 2014

Then in the spring of this year I visited the Lewis Canyon site on the shore of the Pecos, with its mesmerizing petroglyphs of bear claws, atlatls, and stars, and, behind a morass of boulders, an agate mirror of a tinaja encircled by petrographs. 

LEWIS CANYON PETROGLYPHS, MAY 2015

LEWIS CANYON TINAJA SITE WITH PETROGRAPHS, 
BY THE PECOS RIVER, MAY 2015

Not all but most of the Lower Pecos Canyonland rock art sites— and this includes Meyers Spring, Eagle Nest Canyon and Lewis Canyon— are on private property. Furthermore, visits to Meyers Spring, Lewis Canyon, and many other sites require a high clearance vehicle for a tire-whumping, paint-scraping, bone-jarring drive in. So I was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the privilege it is to visit these sites. At Lewis Canyon, as I stood on the limestone shore of the sparkling Pecos in utter silence but for the crunch of the boots of my fellow tour members, I learned that less than 50 people a year venture to float down its length.

This October I once again traveled to the Lower Pecos, this time for the Rock Art Foundation’s annual three day Rock Art Rendezvous. Offered this year were the three sites I had already visited, plus a delectable menu that included White Shaman, Fate Bell, and—not for those prone to vertigo— Curly Tail Panther.

WHITE SHAMAN, OCTOBER 2015

Just off Highway 90 near its Pecos River crossing, the White Shaman Preserve serves as the headquarters for Rock Art Rendezvous. After a winding drive on dirt road, I parked near the shade structure. From there, the White Shaman rock art site was a brief but rugged hike down one side of cactus-studded canyon, then up the other. I was glad to have brought a hiking pole and leather gloves. No knee surgery on the horizon, either. When I arrived at White Shaman, named after the central luminous figure, the sun was low in the sky, bathing the shelter’s wall and its reddish drawings in gold and turning the Pecos, far below, where an occasional truck droned by, deep silver.

The next morning, at the Rock Art Foundation’s tour of the Shumla Archaeological and Research Center in nearby Comstock, I heard Dr. Carolyn Boyd’s stunning talk about her book, The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, which is forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press. Dr. Boyd, whose work is based on 25 years of archaeological research in the Lower Pecos and a meticulous study of Mexican anthropology, argues that White Shaman, which is many thousands of years old, may represent the oldest known creation story in North America.  

FATE BELL, OCTOBER 2015

From the White Shaman Preserve, Fate Bell is a few minutes down highway 90 in Seminole Canyon State Park. More than any other site, this shelter in the cake-like layers of the limestone walls of a canyon, reminded me of the cave art I had seen in Baja California’s Sierra de San Francisco. Inhabited on and off for some 9,000 years, Fate Bell is the largest site in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It has various styles of petrograph, including a spectacular group of anthropomorphs with what appear to be antlers and wings. 

CURLY TAIL PANTHER, OCTOBER 2015

Curly Tail Panther is a scoop of a cave about the size of a walk-in closet, but as if for Superman to whoosh in, set dizzyingly high on a cliff-side overlooking the Devils River. The back wall has an array of petrographs: red mountain lion, anthropomorphic figures, and geometric designs. The only access to Curly Tail Panther is by way of a narrow ledge. Drop your hiking pole or your sunglasses from here, and you won’t see them again. You might lose a character, too—in the opening of Mary Black’s novel, Peyote Fire, a shaman stumbles to his death from this very ledge. The Rock Art Foundation’s website made it clear, Curly Tail Panther is not for anyone who has a fear of heights. But who doesn’t? My strategy was to take a deep  breath and, like the running shoes ad says, Just do it. 

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What Is Writing (Really)? Plus a New Video of Yours Truly Talking About Four Exceedingly Rare Books Essential for Scholars of the Mexican Revolution

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