Tag: Texas Books

Texas Books / From the Archives: Claudio Saunt’s “West of the Revolution”

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

This week I’m away from the blog; herewith, from the archives, my review of a book that just might pop off the top of your head and expaaaand your mind. You can be sure, Texas history didn’t start with the Spanish, nor, for that matter, Davy Crockett growling, “You all can go to Hell and I will go to Texas.” Nothing in the conglomeration of regions we now call Texas makes a lick of sense without the broader historical context in the decades previous to its emergence as a republic in 1836, and that context would be a broad indeed: It includes the whole of the continent west of the Appalachians, innumerable intertribal conflicts and tribal migrations, European power games, as well as the impact of trends in international trade as far afield as Europe, Siberia, and China. Although it is only indirectly about Texas, I count Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution among the finest and most crucial works for approaching an understanding of Texas history.

WEST OF THE REVOLUTION:
AN UNCOMMON HISTORY OF 1776
by Claudio Saunt
W.W. Norton, 2014
pp. 283
ISBN: 978-0-393-24020-7 
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal Magazine, July 14, 2018

Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history.

In West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt, a noted scholar of early American and Native American history, spotlights nine places and formative events of 1776 that rarely raise a blip on the radar of even the most well-educated Americans. As Saunt writes in his introduction, “The American Revolution so dominates our understanding of the continent’s early history that only four digits—1776—are enough to evoke images of periwigs, quill pens, and yellowing copies of the Declaration of Independence.”

As for knowledge of what was going on west of the Appalachians in 1776, I can speak for myself, lo, many a decade ago, when I was a recent graduate of the University of Chicago. History out there west of the Appachalians had seemed to me then… like, totally vague. I’d heard of some of the tribes, those ones with interesting headgear, mainly from watching TV. Since I grew up in California, I had seen some of the Spanish missions. These had had struck me as absurdly drab and morbid. I was not Catholic, and the Spanish were well and gone, as were those Indians, I assumed. In elementary school, when we got our dose of state history, I must have been told the name of the local indigenous people—the Ohlone—but by the time I graduated from college, for 64,000 dollars, I could not have come up with it. Had I known the term terra nullius, I might have used it. 

In the intervening years I had the opportunity to remedy my ignorance of California’s indigenous and mission history; perhaps the more for that, I found Saunt’s masterful historical narrative so rich and riveting.

Writes Saunt in his prologue:

“Between the continent’s far edge and the Appalachians stood thousands of towns and villages, whose millions of residents spoke diverse languages and belonged to a multitude of nations. On the eve of the War of Independence, even the most fervid of American speculators could not imagine the extraordinary events unfolding in the West.”

The events Saunt describes were indeed, extraordinary, and “in surprising ways,” he writes, “as pertinent to the twenty-first century as the better-known history of the American Revolution.”

To begin with, in 1776, the Russians, having pushed across Siberia—their Peru, their Mexico—were several years already in the Aleutian Islands, their main modus operandi, when attempts to trade beads and such failed, to seize Aleut hostages in exchange for payment in furs. The Russians were voracious for furs to sell, above all, to Beijing—fox, seal, and what was so abundant in the Aleutians, otter, what they called “soft gold.” Saunt tells us of seven Aleuts who, the better to comprehend this catastrophe that befallen them by the arrival of these strange men from the west, and having been promised the chance to see “the great Russian cities” and an audience with the Empress Catherine II, set out, along with a hold packed with pelts, on a fur trader’s ship across the Bering Sea. None of the seven Aleuts ever set eyes on a great Russian city, never mind that empress: four survived as far as grubby Irkutsk. We do not learn what they saw in Irkutsk, but Saunt tells us:

“Each year, thousands of pelts from the Aleutian Islands and millions from Siberia funneled into Irkutsk. The scale of the vast warehousing operation was out of proportion to anything the Aleuts could have imagined. In Irkutsk, the furs were sorted by quality and the best sent on to European Russia. The others [for the Chinese market] were floated across Lake Baikal to the mouth of the Selenga and then upriver to Kyakhta.”

Kyakhta, a tiny settlement on the Mongolian border, was the red-hot nexus of the global fur trade. Kyahkta not only received the furs from the west coast of North America, but, via London-St Petersburg-Arkhangelsk, from the Canadian Artic, from the Hudson Bay Company. Explains Saunt:

“Sea otter and beaver pelts, orginating in North America, had traveled in opposite directions around the world-nine thousand miles east or forty-five hundred west-only to converge at a remote outpost … From there, they were carried away on the backs of camels or in two-wheeled carts drawn by oxen, destined for Chinese royality in Beijing.”

Did those Aleuts see Kyahkta? Did they see a camel? Could they picture a Chinese princess in her fur-trimmed silk robe? Given the limits of their language’s vocabulary, not to mention what must have been the bizarrerie of crude translation from the Russian, could the Aleuts have begun to fathom the scale, the scope, the money, the power—could they have but begun to grok but an inkling of the tremendous systemic implications in all of this? (Can we?) We only know that the Aleuts were not far from Kyahkta, presumably on their way there, when they died in Irkutsk, presumably in 1776, of smallpox.

The Spanish, in 1776, were worried. Already the Russians were calling the northwest coast of North America “New Russia.” How far south would they venture? From previous exploratory expeditions the Spanish knew of the three excellent natural habors that lay north of Baja California: San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco. If the Russians took those, they could dominate the Pacific, and so imperil the Spanish lifeline of trade with China (the famed Manila Galleons out of Acapulco, trading Mexican silver for silks, spices, and more). Meanwhile, the Franciscans, zealous to save souls for Paradise, lobbied to push north from the deserts of Baja California, to establish missions in more populated and better-watered lands along the Pacific coast. And so as the King in Madrid and his Viceroy in Mexico City commanded, in 1769, Franciscan missionaries under Father Junípero Serra, with soldiers, started moving into what they called Alta California (today the state of California). 

In San Diego, the winter of 1776 was the aftermath of a bloody rebellion of the Kumeyaays. They had burned the mission, shot several soldiers full of arrows, and disemboweled one of the friars. As Saunt details, before the rebellion, and to punish and to staunch further rebellion, the Spanish beat, flogged and whipped many of their neophytes, including a Kumeyaay named Sajuil, whom they baptized as Diego, and who would die at the age of twenty-five, imprisoned and too sick to walk, two years later.

Further north, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in March of 1776, what is now Silicon Valley was the scene of first contact, in all its shock and confusion. It was also the year that Mission Dolores, now nestled in the shadows of San Francisco’s skyscrapers, was founded. 

As archaeologists have discovered, in the pre-contact San Francisco Bay Area the indigenous peoples were already pushing hard against their resource limits. Saunt cites evidence of overhunted game and fish, increasing dependence on the labor-intensive acorn as a nutritional staple, widespread childhood malnutrition, and violence. After the arrival of the Spanish, with their disruptive mission system, animals and diseases, writes Saunt, “the demographic collapse that followed was swift and terrible.”

In California the missionaries’ modus operandi was to bring the Indians into the mission and punish any who tried to leave. Yet producing enough food was a challenge greater than the missionaries could manage. Bringing provisions by ship proved too expensive and risky. To support the California missions, therefore, the Spanish determined to establish an overland supply route from Santa Fe, New Mexico (which in turn, was already linked to the cities of the Mexican heartland by the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro). On July 4, 1776, a scouting expedition— known as the Domínguez-Escalante, after the two Franciscans who led it—set out from Santa Fe.

Madrid and Mexico City may have had their cathedrals and palaces, but in 1776, Santa Fe was little more than a huddle of abobes. It was also fragile, still, nearly a century later, recovering from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and beleaguered by the Apache and the Comanche. From Santa Fe, the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition zigzagged northwest over the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, a terra incognita that we know today as the Four Corners region, where the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona meet. The men crossed the Great Basin. They encountered Paiutes and Utes. It was a brutal march, beset with confusions, arguments, starvation and thirst. Their last guide had abandoned them when, on the edge of the snow-blanketed Great Basin, out of food, and with only the murkiest (and mistaken) notion of what still lay between them and the California coast, they turned around. They arrived back in Santa Fe on January 2, 1777—the day General George Washington withdrew, after his breakthrough victory, from Trenton, New Jersey.

The fruit of this otherwise failed Domínguez-Escalante Expedition was the map completed two years later by one of its members, the artist and cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco—a name that tinkles few bells outside the precincts of Southwestern history aficionados. But Miera’s map of wonders was a wonder in itself. If much of it was wishful guesswork and interpretations, many of them faulty, of what indigenous guides had told him, the man himself, as expert a mapmaker as might have been found in the Americas of his day, had trekked through hundreds of miles of these lands, he had seen strange peoples, strange animals and birds, and he had seen mountains, canyons, rivers, lakes, basins, and fantastic geological formations, all previously unknown to anyone other than the indigenous people.

Of the Miera map Saunt writes:

“Nearly three feet wide and more than two feet high, it charts over 175,000 square miles… Like other cartographers of the time, Miera inherited the medieval tradition of creating ‘visual encyclopedias of the world,’ and his map is bursting with illustrations, symbols, and narrative legends.”

Illustrations, for instance, of bare-breasted Paiute women, and the Pope of Rome in a carriage pulled by black lions…

The Spanish jealously guarded such intelligence; nonetheless, Miera’s map was copied and that copy consulted by Thomas Jefferson and Zebulon Pike, the early 19th century explorer. As Saunt argues, Miera’s map was “one of the most influential maps in American history,” for it “helped shape the geographic imagination” of the United States—a country born in Philadelphia in the same year of that expedition. 

And that new nation was, already, in 1776, “intent on extending its sovereignty to the shores of the Pacific.”

The contest for the continent west of Santa Fe was on. There would be ferocious resistance from the peoples already there—many of them, too, fighting one another, as they had for generations, over grievances old and new, and especially for hunting and fishing grounds. Some tribes were as cousins, speaking the same language, or a related dialect; others spoke tongues and had customs as different from one another as Sardinians and Swedes, or, say, Belgians and Bulgarians. 

Then, as now, North American trade with China played an indirect yet magnetic role.

And the future would be strange beyond imagining.

Having introduced the English colonists’ hunger to press past the Appalachians, Russia, Spain, the newborn United States, Aleuts, indigenous Californians, the roaring engine of the international fur trade, and a map, Saunt’s tour of 1776 then whirls us back to 1763 and across the Atlantic to the Continental Divide—the opening for the second half of his book.

Saunt refers not to the geological divide of North America, but “this enormous North American land transaction,” as if the continent were a Brobdingnagian buttercream, divvied up by so many knives and spatulas of solemn words and seals, by the European ambassadors congregated in Paris, after the Seven Years War. 

France had lost to Britain what had been, in essence, a world war, involving, at various points, Austria, Saxony, Spain, Sweden and Russia for France, and for Britain, Prussia and Hanover. The Seven Years War was fought in Europe and, in proxy wars, from America to Africa, Asia, and India. The war in North America is remembered as the French and Indian War.

With spare but charmingly novelistic description, Saunt evokes 1763 in Paris: Aristocrats gambling, a ball in the Spanish ambassador’s palace, and then the meeting in the Duke of Bedford’s residence where, “under crimson draperies and a portrait of Britain’s King George III,” the treaty was signed. As for North America, in broad strokes, with the noted exception of New Orleans, Louis XV was out. His cousin, Carlos III of Spain, took the continent west of the Mississippi River; and from the east of the Mississippi to the Atlantic, dominion was now all George III’s.

Writes Saunt, “On the face of it, the claims of European monarchs to vast North American domains were absurd… Yet for local residents, the massive land transaction had very real consquences with complex and varying ramifications that took decades to unfold.” 

Returning to his rhetorical device of funneling the narrative through the year 1776, Saunt proceeds to spotlight four of these “very real consequences.” 

Firstly: In central Canada, with the oceanic prairielands newly claimed by the British, their Hudson Bay Company has moved inland to establish Cumberland House, a stunningly remote trading post, in winter, beset by jaw-locking cold. The Hudson Bay Company aims to defend its monopoly on beaver pelts—that monopoly quickly eroding with the influx of independent traders, many French but now with British backing. 

Over the previous century, Europeans had adopted various styles of beaver-fur and beaver-felt hats, from the high-crowned and broad-brimmed Elizabethan courtier’s, to the French-style cavalier’s slouch hat with plume, then, by 1776, tricorn hats, and (this the style Benjamin Franklin favored) rustic fur caps. On the supplying side, Cree and Assiniboine trappers demanded rum, textiles, tobacco, and guns, gunpowder, and shot.

To give an idea of the dimension of the beaver trade, writes Saunt:

“Before the arrival of Europeans, it is estimated that there were between sixty million and four hundred million beaver industriously damming rivers and constructing lodges in North America. By 1900, the animals were nearly extinct.”

This near-extermination of the beaver may have had ecological consequences so huge and systemic that they may prove impossible for us, for all our modern science, to fully grasp. In building dams, Saunt explains, this large rodent becomes a “geomorphic agent.”

“The dams, made of alder, aspen, thicket, leaves, mud, stones, and other debris, can be enormous, regularly stretching 225 feet across with a thickness of six feet. One dam in Montana measured an astounding 2,300 feet. Another rose 16 feet high. In favorable environments, there may be as many as thirty dams per mile of stream, and up to 40 percent of all streams may be modified by the obstructions.”

One of many effects that “cascaded through Canada’s boreal forests in the eighteenth century” was the plaguing blackflies—for, as beaver dams collapsed, wetlands drained and water began to run swiftly. Blackflies prefer that.

Secondly: Some 800 miles south, in what is now western South Dakota, in 1776, Standing Bull arrived in the Black Hills—a sacred place and a founding event in the history of the people known as the Lakota Sioux. Standing Bull had led his people west from their homelands in what is now Minnesota. One reason they had pushed over the Missouri River and the plains was to hunt the bison; another, less understood, was that Pontiac’s War had cut off vital trade goods from the east. 

By that 1763 Treaty of Paris, the British had taken the French territories around the Great Lakes and in Ohio country. The French had not governed there with absolute authority; they had long given the indigenous peoples generous scheduled gifts. In other words, they paid tribute to the Indians. Writes Saunt, “European armies were no match for native peoples in this part of the world.” The new British governor, Jeffrey Amherst, refused to give the customary gifts; this enraged the Delawares, the Miamis, Mississaugas, Ojibwas, Senecas, Shawnees, and Ottawas, and soon the British found themseves embroiled in that war named for a chief of the Ottawa.

Writes Saunt:

“Looking east from the Minnesota River, Pontiac’s War appeared a lot different than it did looking west from Manhattan Island. Where Amherst saw an unjustifiable challenge to British power launched by treacherous savages, Standing Bull’s people identified a grave threat to their access to Atlantic trade.”

Specifically, for the Lakota Sioux, what was imperiled was their annual trade fair, a fair attracting thousands of people, on occasion more than ten thousand, on the banks of the Minnesota River. With the war, who would trade with them? Without cloth, kettles, guns, powder, and shot, how would they eat, and continue to hunt? And defend themselves?

In a fascinating section, Saunt details the indigenous trade networks west of the Mississippi, “a hub-and-spoke system, formed not by airlines but by footpaths, horse trails, and river routes.” In 1776 there were three main centers: Taos in New Mexico; the Dalles, a series of cascades on the Columbia River in present-day Oregon; and on the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota. The latter, which became of increasing importance to the Sioux, was situated “at both the eastern edge of the Plains Indian horse market and the western edge of the European gun trade.”

A third consquence: In Spanish territory west of the Mississippi, in what is now central and western Missouri, “the heart of the continent,” 1776 found an empire expanding—that of the Osages, who had arrived “perhaps migrating from the Ohio River,” and with guns. By this time the Osages dominated the fur trade with St. Louis, and they were “stealing Indian women, kidnapping children, and rustling horses and mules.” European law held little sway in this frontier zone, the wild west of its day, filled with, writes Saunt, “deserters, robbers, rapists, and murderers. By trading with any and everyone, they freed native residents from Spanish dependence and underwrote Osage expansion toward the Red River.” The French, then the Spanish, could not control smuggling up, down, or across the Mississippi River any more than could the English. And the Osages, suddenly by that Treaty of Paris surrounded by new trading partners, played the one against the others, to their own advantage. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in distant Philadelphia, the Osages were about to “double the size of their empire, adding one hundred thousand square miles to their domain—a rate of expansion equal to that of the thirteen colonies and United States over the same period.”

In the nineteenth century, the Osages suffered many tribulations. Nonetheless, they retained what turned into an important asset: mineral rights on Oklahoma oil fields that to this day generate tens of millions of dollars in annual royalties. Writes Saunt, “The Osages had not forgotten the lessons of the eighteenth century.”

Fourthly, and finally, Saunt takes us to 1776 in the Deep South, and the saga of the Creeks, a people who, by that Treaty of 1763, suffered a very different fate. They had held large swaths of present-day Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. The coastal plains and pine forests were rich lands for hunting, gathering, fishing, and for growing corn. Creeks had some thirty villages each with “a central square, a council house, and numerous dwellings made of posts, wattle, and mud.” But instead of gaining trading partners, the Creeks lost their Spanish and French partners; the treaty left them surrounded by the British. Creek lands were not for the Spanish to give to the British, they said, as to the wind; British settlers began to move in, making it increasingly difficult for Creeks to hunt deer, the skins of which they traded for cloth, beads, and guns. And here, too, while the French and Spanish had given them gifts, the British refused. Worse, the British began trading guns to the Creeks’ enemies, the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Then British Georgia and Florida embargoed the Creeks. In desperation the Creeks attempted to turn to the Spanish: From the Florida coast, a group of Creeks sailed on a fishing boat to Havana, Cuba.

By 1776 Creek embassies had appeared in Havana at least nineteen times. What the Creeks could offer the Spanish was dried meat; what they wanted from the Spanish were, urgently, guns, powder, and shot. But the Spanish gave them only “stacks of hats, mirrors, and thread and professions of ‘paternal affection.'” Then the war between the British and their American colonies caused Creek trade opportunities to further shrink.

Things might have been different. As Saunt explains, Cuba was then a burgeoning slave economy producing sugarcane and aguardiente; it needed more food, and the Creeks could have helped provide that. In 1776 in a drunken fight over a woman, a Cuban boatman stabbed three of his Creek passengers. In fear of revenge, Cuban boatmen steered clear of the Creeks on the Florida coast. Marooned economically and politically, the Creeks continued losing ground. Their territories were swiftly encroached upon by slave-worked plantations of rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton. In the next century, along wth several other tribes, the Creeks would be forcibly removed, walking the Trail of Tears to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Intriguingly, Saunt asks:

“What if the Creeks had become purveyors to the fastest-growing slave colony in the New World? Would they have had the economic clout to avoid removal in the 1830s and retain their homelands? Would their nation have become a part of the Confederacy in some form, perhaps as a member state that shared the Old South’s deep investment in slavery? How might the South and American history have been transformed?”

In the United States, for the most part, our pre-Revolutionary history west of the Appalachians has been a matter left to academic specialists and local and Indian history enthusiasts. Saunt’s West of the Revolution is an at-once engaging and compelling corrective, and more: these nine places and formative events suggest fresh ways of looking at our own times, and at the power by which trade, migration, technological change, ecological change, epidemics, and the gusts of fashion and sheer, crazy luck may impel us, or, beneath our full awareness, subtly nudge us, in strange directions. Above all, West of Revolution allows us to begin to perceive how these peoples of our own past were, to quote Saunt, “entangled in a web of environmental, political, and economic relationships that they could neither fully control nor completely understand”—as are we. Writes Saunt, “we are unavoidably and always interdependent.”

And to suggest that near-translucent but entangling mega-web, I conclude this review with one web of a question. Do we know, precisely, what has been harvested from the earth, and from where, and by whom, and in what way, and on what terms, for our smartphones?

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

In Memorium: William C. Gruben and his “Animals in the Arts in Texas”

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Using Imagery (The “Metaphor Stuff”) 

From the Archives: A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s “The Comanche Empire”

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

The plan for this first Monday of the month was to post Part III of my series on Cabeza de Vaca books (for Parts I and II click here and here). Force majeure! Look for it later. In lieu of that, herewith, from the archives, my review of a mind-bending masterpiece, Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire.

THE COMANCHE EMPIRE
by Pekka Hämäläinen
Yale University, 2008
ISBN 978-0-300-15117-6
Review originally published in Marfa Mondays Blog, August 1, 2016

The cover of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, of a ghost-white warrior with a trio of blood-red slashes down his cheek, is as arresting as the argument that, as it opens, the Comanches’ was “an American empire that, according to conventional histories, did not exist.”

In the United States public discourse conflates wildly heterogenous groups into easy categories— Native American, white, black, and so on and so forth— and then, with school board-approved narratives as mortar, we construct colossal political edifices. In their shadows, alas, many of us are blind to the complexities in our society and history. The complexities are riotous. And when we shine a light on but one of them— as Finnish historian Hämäläinen has in this brilliant study of Comanche hegemony— suddenly our easy categories and well-worn narratives may look strange, deeply wrong.

As those of you who follow this blog well know, I am at work on a book about Far West Texas, that is, Texas west of the Pecos River. Anyone who heads out there, especially to the remote Big Bend, hears about Comanches, e.g., they crossed the Río Grande here, they watered their horses there. But the Comanches, an equestrian Plains people who hunted the buffalo, were latecomers to the Trans-Pecos. They did not settle there; they trekked through it on the Comanche Trail (more aptly, network of trails) on their way to raid in northern Mexico. They returned driving immense herds of horses and kidnapped Apache and Mexican women and children in tow, for markets up north around Taos, New Mexico, and Big Timbers on the Arkansas, which garnered them metal tools, cooking pots, corn and other carbohydrates, textiles, and above all, guns and ammunition.

The Comanche were raiding south of the Río Grande as early as the 1770s, but their large-scale raiding in northern Mexico commenced in the 1820s, plunging deep into Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Durango, Zacatecas and, in the 1840s, as far as Jalisco and the major central market and manufacturing city of Querétaro. This systematic “mass violence” which left the northern realm of the Mexican economy crippled and its people demoralized, turned it into what Hämäläinen terms “an extension of Greater Comanchería.” Hence, by the late 1840s, when the U.S. Army invaded Mexico, what they were really invading was, to quote Hämäläinen, “the shatterbelt of Native American power.” But this is to get ahead of the story.

CIRCA 1750-1850: THE COMANCHE CENTURY

The imperialists of the 19th century: wouldn’t that be Yankees, the English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans and Belgians and Dutch— “white” people, so-called? Hämäläinen’s is an audacious argument: “In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance; it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.”

Specifically, from about 1750 to 1850, the Comanches aggressively expanded their territory to eventually dominate what we now call the Southwest. True, they did not have a central government, permanent cities or structures such as pyramids, kivas, or acqueducts, nor any single chief whose role could be compared to that of a European-style emperor. Moreover, as nomads for much of the year, their aim may not have been to conquer and colonize, but they were an identifiable group whose aim was to “control and exploit.” As given by the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of the definitions of “empire” is “an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination of control,” hence, unnerving as it may strike some readers, Hämäläinen’s use of the word is apt. He argues:

“[Comanches] manipulated and exploited the colonial outposts in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and northern Mexico to increase their safety, prosperity, and power. They extracted resources and labor from their Euro-American and Indian neighbors through thievery and tribute, and incorporated foreign ethnicities into their ranks as adopted kinspeople, slaves, workers, dependents, and vassals. The Comanche empire was powered by violence, but, like most viable empires, it was first and foremost an economic construction.”

The Spanish, French, Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, as they contested the heart of the North American continent, were “restrained and overshadowed” by Comanches. In fact, argues Hämäläinen, “the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.” Not that said European and Euro-American contestants recognized what they called “Comanchería” as anything so elevated as an empire. They considered the Comanches savages, indios bárbaros, requiring extermination or, failing acceptance of their invitation, a frog-march into “Christian civilization,” Catholic or Protestant, end of story.

But here, in Hämäläinen, unfolds the many-chaptered story. 

ARRIVAL AT THE EDGE OF THE KINGDOM OF NEW MEXICO

A Spanish report of 1706 is the first written mention of the Comanches, who called themselves the Numunu. With their then-allies, the Utes, they were preparing to attack Taos, at the mountainous edge of the Kingdom of New Mexico.

Sometime before, this nomadic Uto-Aztecan speaking people had broken away from the Shoshones, then in the central plains in present-day Wyoming, to head south, skirting the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, in search of game and horses.

Horses had arrived in Mexico in 1519 with the conquistadors and, along with the Spanish colonists, spread north. In New Mexico the Spanish prohibited indigenous Puebloan peoples’ access to horses, but the corrals blew open, as it were, with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and horses and equestrian know-how quickly spread north across the plains.

For the Comanches, the horse changed everything, economically, militarily, and down to the marrow of their culture. With the horse, writes Hämäläinen, “In almost an instant, the world became smaller and its resources more accessible.” On the one hand, the horse allowed the Comanches to more efficiently harvest the buffalo, which roamed in herds of tens of thousands on the shortgrass plains. On the other hand, the horse enabled them to fight and raid more effectively. And more: for the Comanches, horses served as a store of value, a signal of status, and a trade commodity.

Within a few decades, Comanches were specializing in hunting buffalo and stealing horses and taking captives, and trading these to provide for their other needs. While this allowed them to thrive— in 1740 Athanase de Mézières wrote, “They are a people so numerous and so haughty that when asked their number, they make no difficulty comparing it to the stars”— in reality, with an unsustainable resource base plus severe external shocks to come, they were on the rise of a Seneca Cliff.


THE COMANCHES AND SLAVERY

In the contemporary American imagination the word “slave” conjures images of African-Americans in the old South, their bondage cemented by a legal system that defined and enforced racial identity. Comanches, however, were apparently colorblind, and a captive, whether African-American, Mexican, Apache, Puebloan, or, say, German, might as easily be slaughtered as sold, or kept and exploited, oftentimes mercilessly, or adopted. One child captive, Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped from her family’s Texas frontier farm, ended up the wife of a leading Comanche chief, and mother of the incandescently famous chief, Quanah. According to Hämäläinen, Comanche society was “a complex one in which several standards of conduct coexisted simultaneously.” Nonetheless, Comanches “built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest.” Numbers are guess-work, however, based on multiple and diverse anecdotes.

Initially, in and around New Mexico, Comanches took captives as they warred on Apaches, Pueblo Indians, other indigenous peoples, and Spanish and mestizo colonists. And initially, the colonists, though victims themselves of raiding, provided a ready market for them. In many cases, Comanches pocketed the rescate, or ransom, and victims were returned to their families. Although since the mid-16th century Spanish law prohibited slavery, for the colonists of New Mexico, trading in Indian slaves was too lucrative to resist. Writes Hämäläinen, “In theory, these ransomed Indians were to be placed in Spanish households for religious education, but in practice many of them became common slaves who could be sold, bought, and exploited with impunity.” By the late 18th century, large numbers of Apache and other Indian captives purchased from Comanches had been sent to the silver mines in Mexico and Caribbean tobacco plantations.

Comanche slaving began to change in the early 19th century when, smallpox having devastated Comanche and other Indian populations, Euro-American fur traders and other traders moved onto the plains. In response to richer trading opportunities, Comanches began to make greater use of captives to tend their larger horse herds and to scrape and prepare buffalo robes.

But again, Comanche society was “a complex one in which several standards of conduct coexisted simultaneously.” There were several notorious cases of gang rape and torture-murder of captives, including of children, as well as several cases when captives, assimilated into the Comanche way of life and kinship networks, refused the opportunity to return to their original families. 

EXPANSION IN THE 18th AND EARLY 19th CENTURIES

Early in 18th century, in search of buffalo and captives, the Comanches roamed east onto the Plains. Empowered by the horse, and enriched by the bounty of the buffalo and both tribute from New Mexico and stolen horses and captives, throughout the century Comanches continued pushing east, north, west, and south on the Great Plains with what Hämäläinen calls “a vigorous diplomatic and commercial expansion, forging a far-reaching trade and alliance network that in time dwarfed Spain’s imperial arrangements in North America.”

By the 1750s, having displaced the Apaches, the Comanches controlled the western Great Plains below the Arkansas River. In 1762, when by the Treaty of Fountainbleau Carlos III took Louisiana off of Louis XV’s map, writes Hämäläinen, “the transfer was, in effect, imaginary.” The following year, the Treaty of Paris confirmed Spain’s North American expansion, refining its border against what was now British territory to the east— again, ignoring the mammoth and dangerous reality of an expanding Comanchería.

But the Comanches did not settle permanently in any one place; they moved with the buffalo and, with lightning speed, towards raiding opportunities, primarily in New Mexico and other Spanish colonies. For the Spanish, already stretched thin in the north, then weakened by the wars for Independence that began in 1810, Comanche raids proved devastating. Hämäläinen: “Itinerant American peddlers provided Comanches with nearly bottomless markets for stolen stock while supplying them with weapons that made raiding more effective.” The result: “Rather than New Spain’s absorbing the southern plains into its imperial body, Comanches had reduced the Spanish borderlands to a hinterland for an imperial system of their own.”


TEXAS

Spanish Texas, which lay north of the Nueces River and hugged the Gulf Coast into Lousiana, was subject to so many Apache, Comanche, Tawakoni, and other indigenous depredations of its missions, presidios, and ranches that it seemed it might not survive, never mind prosper. When he visited San Antonio in 1821, Stephen F. Austin described the whole country from the Sabine River west a “wild, howling, interminable solitude.” To make a convoluted story short, by invitation of the Mexican government, Austin, now a Mexican citizen, would sign a contract as an empresario, receiving land in exchange for the commitment to colonize it. Mexico City’s aim was to both counter Anglo-American colonization by effectively absorbing it qua Mexican, and, crucially, to establish a buffer between Apache and Comanche raiders and its other northern ranching and population centers. To give an idea of how urgent that latter project was, in 1825 over 300 Comanches arrived in San Antonio to settle in for six days looting the town.

By the 1830s, for fear of Indian depredations, the “Anglo” settlers or Texians, as they came to be known, had still refused to settle east of the Colorado River. South and east Texas, largely under Comanche vassalage, remained Tejano, and was so poor and terrorized that, writes Hämäläinen, “basic economic functions began to shut down.” Farmers did not dare venture into their own fields or onto the roads.

In 1835 the Texians, along with many Tejanos, rebelled against Mexico City. The Texas Revolution is a foundational story told and retold in an overwhelmingly triumphalist literature, both academic and popular, emphasizing the manliness of the “Anglo” heroes of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, and the weakness of the Mexicans under the cruel and corrupt Antonio López de Santa Anna. Hämäläinen’s bucket-of-cold water revisionism:

“Texas independence may have been predetermined by geography— Texas was simply too far from Mexico City and too close to the United States— but the event can be fully understood only in a larger context that takes into account the overwhelming power and presence of the Comanches in the province in the years leading to the revolt.”

MEANWHILE, IN NEW MEXICO

The distance between what was then Texas and New Mexico was almost inconceivably vast and extremely perilous to cross. Even today at full speed on a major highway it takes eleven hours to travel from San Antonio, Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unsurprisingly, developments in 19th century Texas and New Mexico differed. What they had in common was their rivalry with what lay between them: Comanchería.

Texians, their ranks growing rapidly with ambitious and color-conscious immigrants from slave states such as Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennesssee, Virginia, and elsewhere, took a largely belligerent stance against the Comanches, while New Mexicans, increasingly isolated and impoverished, “looked to Comanchería for the necessities that kept them alive.”

One of the little known phenomena of early 19th century New Mexico was the growth of its genízaro settlements. The word genízaro is the Spanish translation of Janissary, the early 16th century term for a kidnapped Christian boy trained to become a Turkish elite soldier. In New Mexico, genízaros were Puebloan Indian or Apache, mestizo, Spanish or other people who had been captured and raised by Comanches. Many retained close friendship and family ties to Comanches. Notes Hämäläinen, “The rise of genízaro settlements did not signify New Mexico’s expansion into the Comanche realm but rather the colony’s persisting gravitation toward the economic and cultural power of Comanchería.”

This was when and where the “comanchero” commerce began to develop, and the “ciboleros,” New Mexican bison hunters, emerged on the plains. Comancheros specialized in trading with the Comanches—and so meeting “the needs of two societies across a narrowing cultural gulf,” one narrowing so quickly that, writes Hämäläinen, “[m]any nineteenth century observers found it impossible to differentiate ciboleros, comancheros, and Comanches from one another.”

Comanchería’s frontier with New Mexico then was a trading and tribute zone, while other frontiers were assigned to the collection of tribute, other types of trade, and raiding. Raiding depended in part on whether tribute was paid and that, in turn, depended in part on resources forthcoming— and often they were not— from Mexico City. By the 1830s, as Comanche raiding in Mexico stepped up, “New Mexicans had resigned themselves to purchasing peace from the Comanches, even if it meant inflicting death and suffering for the rest of northern Mexico.” Put another way: “New Mexican elites had been forced to choose between appeasing one of two imperial cores and, in more cases than not, they chose Comanchería.”

COMANCHERIA’S “TRADE PUMP” AND THE EXPLOSION INTO NORTHERN MEXICO

Having pushed the Apaches out of the southern Plains, in the 1830s, using Texas as a byway, Comanches now pushed the Apaches west and south out of some of the richest raiding zones of northern Mexico. The door had been left open, so to speak, for in the wake of two decades of war for its independence from Spain, then the bloody contests among monarchists, federalists, and republicans, Mexico did not have the material nor political resources to protect its northern frontier. But as Hämäläinen explains, the Comanches were drawn into northern Mexico not only by their own vitality, the clamor of young warriors seeking status in action and booty, but because of the “vulnerability of their power complex.”

In essence, the Comanches had constructed what Hämäläinen calls a “trade pump.” By thievery, they suctioned into the southern plains massive herds of horses and then, via trade with comancheros and others in New Mexico and around Big Timbers on the Arkansas, released them into the maw of what seemed an insatiable demand.

The vulnerability was that their “productive foundation”—Hämäläinen’s euphemism for the territory they had been raiding— was becoming exhausted. Texas had been scoured of easy-pickings, and impoverished New Mexico was now locked into a tribute relationship.

Demand for horses had three wellsprings. First, northern Plains Indians such as the Arapahoe, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Pawnee, and Sioux, among others, needed horses for hunting, and to replenish the stock that could not survive or reproduce in the harsh winters north of the Arkansas River. Secondly, demand came from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) that had been forced out of the southeast United States and into Indian Territory by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Thirdly, demand came from pioneers, those heading from all points east into the fringes of the Plains and overland to California, Oregon, and Colorado. If a dollar was to be made, there were traders, such as the Bent Brothers and Holland Coffee, who would eagerly deal in horses stolen from Mexico. Texas officials even supplied Comanches with provisions, the better to speed them through on their way to and from Mexico.

From the 1830s Comanche raiding in Mexico became an annual late-summer migration, “a veritable industry”; “carefully planned and organized”; and “extraordinarily profitable.” South of the Río Grande, in the rainy season when the grasses grew, the Comanches often camped in the plateau spanning parts of Coahuila, Chihuahua and Durango known as the Bolsón de Mapimí. Generations later, Mexicans have not forgotten the terror of the Comanches’ “avalanche-like expansion.” As Hämäläinen describes it:

“Sometimes in small parties, sometimes in big war bands, they moved from one target to another, living off the land while sacking ranches, haciendas, villages, towns, and mining communities. They drove off entire horse and mule herds; captured women and children; and butchered cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats for food. To suppress resistance, they killed Mexican men, burned houses, destroyed food storages, and slaughtered animals they could not take and did not need.”

Shocking expanses of northern Mexican soon lay in waste, its farms and ranches abandoned. “The all-important Chihuahua road had become an Indian plunder trail, commerce was paralyzed, and mines languished unused.”

By the end of the 1840s, the U.S. Army marched down through northern Mexico, encountering surprisingly little resistance, and in some cases, assistance, and occupied Mexico City itself. By the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the United States territories that are today the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. And here again, asserts Hämäläinen, it was “Native American expansion that paved the way for the Anglo-American one.” The US-Mexican War was in fact, “a display of both United States and Comanche power.”

CHILDREN OF THE SUN

The sixth chapter, sandwiched in between that on “Greater Comanchería” and “Hunger,” the beginning of the collapse, is “Children of the Sun,” wherein Hämäläinen offers a monograph-like examination of Comanche every day and seasonal life, family, social, military, political, and religious structure, including slavery and polygyny, and how these changed as trade expanded and the Comanches increasingly specialized in buffalo hunting and horse raiding. If somewhat lumpily placed in the middle of the book, “Children of the Sun” is a fascinating and illuminating chapter.

As the Comanches specialized in moving stolen horses and processing buffalo robes for trade, they also moved toward a more “highly structured and competitive warrior cult” and, for the extra household labor it could provide, polygyny. The latter reinforced the former, as young warriors, obstructed by older chiefs, found it difficult to accumulate horse herds and obtain wives. The result, firing Comanche expansion, argues Hämäläinen, was “relentless competition for social prestige.”

This chapter also includes an intriguing albeit brief look at the Comanches’ political councils, “massive, ordered, hierarchical and democratic all at once,” which met at the high elevation points of Medicine Mounds, the Wichita Mountains, and the Caprock Escarpment, in the general vicinity of present-day Amarillo and Wichita Falls, Texas.

COMANCHE COLLAPSE

The United States en route to its Manifest Destiny, and the fall of the Comanches: it would seem that the one was the Juggernaut that rolled over the other. Hämäläinen is careful to underline, however, that “the American expansion did not trigger their decline”; by the end of the 1840s the Comanches’ decline was already underway, and the cause was ecological.

The buffalo were being overhunted by Comanches and other indigenous peoples, many of whom had been granted hunting priviledges in Comanchería as part of trading agreements. Rising demand for buffalo robes—a new fashion— came from urban centers in the northeast; to satisfy it, many of the Indians newly arrived in Indian Territory took to mounted buffalo hunting. In addition to the Comanches, others, including ciboleros, and Arapahoe and Cheyenne hunters, brought into Bent’s Fort— the main trading post near Big Timbers on the Arkansas—”tens of thousands” of robes. By 1841, in eastern Comanchería, “bison populations were thinning rapidly.”

Yes, the “white” buffalo hunters came in with their buffalo guns to wipe out what was left of the herds—leaving a horrific photographic record of stupendous mountains of bones and hides—but that was later, primarily in the 1870s and early 1880s. In the 1850s, it was indigenous overhunting, combined with the destruction of the buffalos’ prime winter riverine habitat by horses, and a sudden and severe onslaught of drought that had begun in 1845, that left the Comanches starving.

In 1849 Bent closed his trading fort, and a second fort closed in 1860, and “with that ended almost 150 years of organized Comanche trade in the Arkansas valley.” With ever fewer buffalo to hunt, Comanches warred over hunting rights with ciboleros, the indigenous newcomers to Indian territory, and with Osages and Kiowas. From the east, immigrants to Texas, many from Germany, were settling in Comanchería, and from the west, in New Mexico, new settlers were establishing sheep and cattle ranches. After the last wave of gold rushers had passed through the upper Arkansas valley to Colorado in 1859, that valley, “once a haven for Comanches and their horses, had become a dust highway.” In short, “the great Comanche trading empire had collapsed.” And when it collapsed, the Comanches had lost their easy access to corn and other vegetables, guns and ammunition. When they tried to raid, the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army went after them. And then, suffering from malnutrition, they were decimated by smallpox and cholera. Trading, raiding, and their own numbers collapsed. By 1860, it seemed the sun was setting on Comanchería.

> See also Andrew C. Isenberg’s landmark The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

But then, in the mid-1860s, there came a “dramatic revival.” The rains returned to the Great Plains and the buffalo herds rebounded, and in the chaotic aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the Comanches renewed their lucrative practice of stealing horses, and now also cattle, and kidnapping women and children. Post-bellum Texas began to disintegrate.

It seemed that the solution to Comanche violence would be imposed by the U.S. Army under such as General William Tecumseh Sherman, famed for his March to the Sea and burning of Atlanta. It would, eventually, but in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant, bowing to his constituents’ anti-war sentiments and lobbying by Protestant missionaries, introduced his “Peace Policy.” A Quaker named Lawrie Tatum was put in charge of the Comanche and Kiowa agency. Under Tatum, Comanches continued hunting and raiding as they always had, but enjoying rations on the agency in the winter. As Hämäläinen so originally puts it:

 “Comanches incorporated the reservation into their traditional yearly cycle as a kind of river valley: like river bottoms, the reservation provided food and shelter during the cold months, and like the river valleys, it never held the appeal of the open grasslands. Essentially a new resource domain, the reservation helped Comanches preserve their nomadic way of life on the plains rather than easing into a sedentary existence.”

Tatum made a practice of ransoming Comanche captives, both American and Mexican, paying out as much as a hundred dollars each, then a staggering sum.

Tender-hearted Tatum could not last. For General Sherman and other veterans of the U.S. Civil War who had fought for the Union and the end of slavery, it was outrageous to permit Comanches to engage in stealing livestock and what amounted to slave trading on U.S. soil. In 1871 General Sherman was authorized to unleash war on the Comanche. But it was not by battles so much as strategic sabotage that the U.S. Army crushed the Comanches. Beginning in 1872, breaking the Medicine Lodge Treaty, the U.S. Army permitted the “white” hunters onto tribal lands. With powerful new long-range guns, they began an industrial butchery of what was left of the buffalo—and, as at the two battles of Adobe Walls, fought off and deeply demoralized the Comanches and their allies. With a string of forts and camps, U.S. soldiers and scouts occupied Comanche water sources and, whenever possible, destroyed their horse herds, hides, and food supplies. Over the course of what came to be known as the Red River War, the Comanches were harried off the plains and into the reservation in Indian Territory. In the autumn of 1874, U.S. Army surprised the last substantial holdout of Comanches in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. Only three Comanche warriors died in that encounter, however the army destroyed over 1,000 of their horses and made a bonfire of their tipis and winter food stores, rendering them unable to survive outside the reservation. By the following June, the last of the free Comanches, including Quanah, surrendered at Fort Sill.

> See also S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. Simon and Schuster, 2010.

DOING AWAY WITH “THE UNANTHROPOCENTRIC BARRIER METAPHOR”

In his concluding chapter Hämäläinen coins the phrase: “The unanthropocentric barrier metaphor.” He means the image served up by earlier historians, among them, Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”) and Walter Prescott Webb (The Great Plains), of the Comanches as blood-thirsty savages, like the cacti and the mountain lions and the eagles, a part of the landscape, altogether representing, to quote Hämäläinen, an “essentially nonhuman impediment to the U.S. empire.” In plain English: monsters in feathers blocking our way.

Beginning with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 19th century, American and world culture have been bombarded with cartoon-like images of Comanches. John Wayne movies, dime novels by the dozen, “Rawhide” and other TV shows, and more recently, novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian continue the tradition of portraying Comanches as, to quote Hämäläinen again, “beastlike… on the other side of humanity.”

To be sure, as far as the victims of their raids were concerned, the Comanches were not Sisters of Charity. Hämäläinen’s point, and an enormously valuable one, is that “the unanthropocentric barrier metaphor” trivializes the Comanches both as a society and as historical actors. It blinds us to the existence of an entire civilization, its multifaceted rise, its decline, and its scorched-earth eradication.

It takes rare curiosity and steady focus to see the Comanches as historical actors when the most visible images of them are so romanticized, confections for another culture’s self-aggrandizement and/or for-profit entertainment. In The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen provides a masterful corrective, and more: he has shown the Comanches to have been “a penetrating cutural power” in the heart of the North American continent, and as such, absolutely fundamental to understanding the historical relationship between the United States and Mexico.

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

From the Texas Bibliothek: The Sanderson Flood of 1965; 
Faded Rimrock Memories; 
Terrell County, Texas: Its Past, Its People

Q & A with Jan Cleere on Military Wives in Arizona Territory: A History of Women Who Shaped the Frontier

Peyote and the Perfect You

Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part II: Notes on Narrative Histories and Biographies

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Last month I posted Part I of Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, spotlighting the 1542 and 1555 editions and the various English translations of Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación. (These translations included the Smith, Bandelier, Covey, and the perhaps unsurpassable Adorno and Pautz.) Herewith, for Part II, I offer some notes, tackled chronologically by their date of publication, on notable biographies and narrative histories of Cabeza de Vaca’s North American odyssey which I happen to have at-hand in my working library— what I have dubbed the Texas Bibliothek.

(By the way, my own longform essay available on Kindle, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla,” discusses Cabeza de Vaca’s odyssey and La Relación within a broader meditation on the Mexican literary landscape—not the usual take for a work in English.)

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MORRIS BISHOP

Morris Bishop’s The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (The Century Company, 1933) isn’t really necessary for my working library because, for all practical purposes, for the work of creative nonfiction I am writing, I can rely on the more recent and excellent scholarship of Adorno and Pautz and Reséndez. But I recognize the cultural / historical importance of Bishop’s work and so, for a relatively reasonable price, I wanted to have a first signed edition in my collection. (So, is what I have a working library or a rare book collection? I ask myself that every other day!)

My copy of the Morris Bishop is a first edition in, thank goodness, a mylar cover. That’s my writing assistant, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl, who gave it the sniff test, and a paws up.
Signed by the author to one “Alexander Campbell who not only reads books but buys them and who not only buys books but reads them.”
Edward Toledano’s cover illustration portrays Cabeza de Vaca leading Estevanico, the slave; his two fellow Spaniards, Dorantes and Castillo; and a retinue of hundreds of Indians.

CLEVE HALLENBECH

Cleve Hallenbech’s Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Journey and Route of the First European to Cross the Continent of North America 1534-1536 (The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1940) is another work I do not absolutely require for my working library but which, in recognition of its cultural and historic importance, and the very reasonable price for a near-fine first edition, I wanted to have in my collection.

That said, the maps are a wonder! I’ll be talking about these in my post, Part III, for the first Monday of next month, when I discuss the routes various scholars have proposed for Cabeza de Vaca.

The Arthur H. Clark Company was known for its high quality books on the West. (By the way, the University of Oklahoma Press has a book for collectors of works published by the Arthur H. Clark Company, which you can have a blink at here.)
One of the several pull-out maps in the Cleve Hallenbech, this one showing his version of Cabeza de Vaca’s route through Far West Texas. Crazy-hard to read, I know. I’ll be talking more about the route through Far West Texas, and showing some more readable maps, in Part III, to be posted on the first Monday of July 2021.

JOHN UPTON TERRELL

John Upton Terrell’s Journey Into Darkness: Cabeza de Vaca’s Expedition Across North America 1528-36 (Jarrolds Publishers, 1964) is well-researched, given the resources the author had access to back in the early 1960s, and aimed at the general reader.

The back of this first edition carries an ad for Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Hidden Heart of Baja, which for me was like coming across an old amigo. I had a bit to say about the ever-roving eccentric Hollywood screenplay writer in my own book on Baja California, Miraculous Air.

DAVID A. HOWARD

David A. Howard’s Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas (University of Alabama Press, 1997) —currently reading. I was tremendously curious to learn more about Cabeza de Vaca’s later adventures in South America, which are rarely considered in-depth, lying as they do in the shadow of his epic journey in North America.

ALEX D. KRIEGER

We Came Naked and Barefoot: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca Across North America (University of Texas Press, 2002)—currently reading.

From the catalog copy:

“Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize ‘La Florida’ in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.

“The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez’s Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.

“This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger’s dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester’s foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger’s plot of the journey. Margery Krieger’s preface explains how she prepared her late husband’s work for publication. Alex Krieger’s original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.”

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ANDRÉS RESÉNDEZ

Ring-a-ling to Dr. Jung! Reséndez and Schneider (below) both published their narrative histories about Cabeza de Vaca’s epic journey in North America in the same year, 2007. Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books, 2007) is an award-winning historian’s beautifully written and extensively footnoted narrative history. No one writing about Cabeza de Vaca, whether creative writer or serious scholar, should overlook Reséndez’s masterwork. I went for the paperback so that I could mark it up with my pencil all whichways.

That is not actually Cabeza de Vaca there on the cover, and it ever & always annoys me to see it. Oh well! I don’t know what he looked like, no one does, and I don’t think he looked like this rather sharp-eyed character who keeps on getting recycled as “Cabeza de Vaca.” HMPH!

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PAUL SCHNEIDER

Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America (Henry Holt, 2007) is a riproaring adventure read, well-researched and elegantly written, and one I would warmly recommend to the general reader.

The catalog copy gives the explosive flavor:

“A gripping survival epic, Brutal Journey tells the story of an army of would-be conquerors, bound for glory, who landed in Florida in 1528. But only four of the four hundred would survive: eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes’s gold-drenched Mexico. The survivors of the Narváez expedition brought nothing back other than their story, but what a tale it was. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive.”

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DONALD E. CHIPMAN

Donald E. Chipman’s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Great Pedestrian of North and South America (The Texas State Historical Association, 2012) offers a short (only 70 pages), albeit authoritative overview by an academic historian for those with an interest also in Cabeza de Vaca’s South American odyssey. From the book’s back cover:

“Between 1528 and 1536, explorer Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca trekked an estimated 2,480 to 2,640 miles of North American terrain from the Texas coast near Galveston Island to San Miguel de Culiacán near the Pacific coast of Mexico. Later he served as the royal governor of Asunción, Paraguay. His mode of transportation, afoot on portions of two continents in the early decades of the sixteenth century, fits one dictionary definition of the word ‘pedestrian.’ By no means, however, should the ancillary meanings of ‘commonplace’ or ‘prosaic’ be applied to the man, or his remarkable adventures. This book examines the two great ‘journeys’ of Cabeza de Vaca—his extraordinary adventures on two continents and his remarkable growth as a humanitarian.”

A 70 page paperback available from the Texas State Historical Association. (Sorry, but I just cannot get over the use of the word “pedestrian” in the subtitle. It always makes me think of the Beattles’ Abbey Road album cover.)

ROBIN VARNUM

Robin Varnum’s Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: American Trailblazer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) is an accomplished and, as best I can ascertain, the latest scholarly biography.

The cover of Varnum’s excellent biography features the sculpture of Cabeza de Vaca by Eladio Gil Zambrana, which is in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. (I’ll say it again: although we see him portrayed on many book covers, we do not actually know what Cabeza de Vaca looked like.)

JAMES J. (PETE) DREXLER

The Route and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca (self-published, 2016)—currently reading.

Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures as passed on to us from his La Relación have spawned a small but enduring cottage industry of books, essays, documentaries, websites, and more, which started picking up serious steam over the 20th century. My own sense is that we will see books about Cabeza de Vaca being published for as long as we have books, and I expect books to go on, at one scale or another, for many hundreds of years more. Movies and videos and websites and electronic whatnots? That, too. How about an opera?

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In “Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part III,” to be posted the first Monday of next month, July 2021, I will be discussing the wackadoodle differences in the various maps of Cabeza de Vaca’s epic journey, with a focus on his route through what we know now as Far West Texas.

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

Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part I:
Notes on the Two Editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación 
(Also Known as Account, Chronicle, Narrative, Castaways, Report & etc.)
and Selected English Translations

Carolyn E. Boyd’s The White Shaman Mural

From the Texas Bibliothek: The Sanderson Flood of 1965; 
Faded Rimrock Memories; 
Terrell County, Texas: Its Past, Its People

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My new book is Meteor

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

Selected Cabeza de Vaca Books, Part I: Notes on the Two Editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s “La Relación” (Also Known as Account, Chronicle, Narrative, Shipwrecks, Castaways, Report & etc.) and Selected English Translations

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Just a small election of the translations of La Relación, as well as paraphrases of the Relación, commentaries, histories, and biographies of Cabeza de Vaca.

Yes, that most memorable of conquistadors’ names, Cabeza de Vaca, means Cow Head. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was, among many things, the author of the first printed book on what is now the American Southwest and the great state of Texas— back when it was terra incognita, the 1500s. I have already written about Cabeza de Vaca and his book, La Relación, in a longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla.”

My longform essay about the Mexican literary landscape is now available as a Kindle.

Now that I’m writing about Far West Texas, Cabeza de Vaca pops in again, but where in Far West Texas was he, exactly? Towards answering that question, for my working library, which I have dubbed the Texas Bibliothek, I’ve accumulated a hefty stack of Cabeza de Vaca biographies, histories, and translations of his La Relación. (I do read Spanish, and in fact I’m a translator myself, however I specialize in contemporary Mexican writing, not 16th century Spanish, large chunks of which can float by me like so much Gabbahuaque.) The consternating thing is, in these various tomes the various routes mapped out for Cabeza de Vaca’s travels differ wildly.

As recounted in La Relación, Cabeza de Vaca’s travels encompass, from southern Spain, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Florida, the Galveston area, his enslavement in the general region we call South Texas and what is now northern Mexico, also his trek through Far West Texas, and thence a jog southwest to the Pacific coast, where he was rescued by Spanish slavers, and on to Mexico City-Tenochtitlan, where he was received by Hernán Cortez, conquistador of the Aztec Empire, the Marqués del Valle, himself. (Subsequently, after writing his Relación, Cabeza de Vaca was sent to Argentina, and from there, for being much too nice to the Indians, returned to Spain in chains.)

There is indeed a library’s-worth to say about the life and times of this most unusual conquistador and his fantastic travels and ghastly travails.

THE TWO EDITIONS, 1542 and 1555

A first edition of La Relación appeared in Zamora, Spain in 1542; a second, slightly different, edition in 1555. The latter is available for viewing online at the Witliff Collections— have a look here. To bamboozle matters, some English translations are of the 1542 edition; others of the 1555; some a medley of both.

Read the 1555 edition online at the Witliff Collections

Of the differences between the two editions, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Bandelier translation (discussed below), Ilan Stavans says:

“Whereas the [edition] of 1542 is an attempt to show his courage and achievements to Charles V, the 1555 edition seeks to present the author in a good light so as to cleanse his reputation from charges against him after his forays in South America. Therein lies the difference: the first is a report, the second is an engaging, persuasive act of restoration.”

In addition there was a testimony known as The Joint Report given by Cabeza de Vaca and the other two Spanish survivors of the Narváez Expediton upon their return. The original of The Joint Report has been lost, however a partial transcription was made by historian Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557), and included in his Historia general y natural de las Indias— a verily massive collection of 19 books not published in its entirety until (not a typo) 1851. There is a good website in English on Oviedo’s Historia general y natural at Vassar which you can view here. The notable biographies of and narrative histories about Cabeza de Vaca also incorporate the Joint Report from Oviedo. (I’ll be doing a post on some of those works next first Monday.)

NOTES ON SELECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF CABEZA DE VACA’S LA RELACIÓN

SAMUEL PURCHAS, 1625

The first English translation, by Samuel Purchas, came out in 1625—nearly a century later— sandwiched into a collection of exploration narratives entitled Purchas His Pilgrimes. You can read about that at the Witliff Collections Cabeza de Vaca website. Purchas’ source was the Italian translation of 1556, which explains his calling the author “Capo di Vaca.” Not in my working library, last I checked. If you ever happen to come upon an original edition of Purchas His Pilgrims on offer, and perchance have the clams to buy it, I would suggest that, forthwith, you donate it to a worthy institutional library.

THOMAS BUCKINGHAM SMITH, 1851 and 1871

Astonishingly, no English translation was made directly from the Spanish original of Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación, until Thomas Buckingham Smith‘s in 1851, of the 1555 edition. That it would take over three centuries for a stand-alone English translation of such a major work in the history of the Americas to appear is, in itself, telling— as was the historical moment: the wake of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the US-Mexican War and considerably expanded the territory of the United States at the expense of its sister Republic.

The New York Historical Society, which has Smith’s papers, offers this brief, albeit most interesting, biographical sketch of the far-traveling translator:

“Thomas Buckingham Smith was a lawyer, diplomat, antiquarian, and author. Smith was born on October 21, 1810 on Cumberland Island, Georgia. The family moved to St. Augustine, Florida in 1820, when Smith’s father was appointed U.S. Consul to Mexico. Smith attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1836. Following graduation, Smith worked in the Maine office of Samuel Fessenden, a politician and abolitionist. He returned to St. Augustine in 1839 and served as a secretary to Robert R. Reid, governor of the Territory of Florida from 1839-1841. Smith served as a member of the Florida Territorial Legislative Council in 1841. He married Julia Gardner of Concord, New Hampshire in 1843.

“Throughout his life, Smith was a devoted student of North American history, specifically Spanish colonialism and Native American cultures and languages. In order to further his studies, Smith lobbied U.S. government officials for diplomatic appointments abroad. He was successful in obtaining positions in the U.S. embassies of Mexico (1850-1852) and Spain (1855-1858).

“While abroad, Smith actively purchased, transcribed and translated manuscripts related to the Spanish colonization of North America. Smith also supplemented his income by selling rare books and manuscripts to collectors in the U.S., including Peter Force, an editor and politician, whose collection was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1867. During the 1850-1860s, Smith translated and edited several publications, including Colección de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y tierras adyacentes (1857),  A grammatical sketch of the Heve language (1861),  Narratives of the career of Hernando de Soto in the conquest of Florida (1866), and  Relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeca de Vaca (1871).

Smith died in New York City in 1871 and was buried in St. Augustine.


Note that the New York Historical Society biography is mistaken: A first edition of Smith’s translation of La Relación appeared in 1851; the second edition, edited by J.G. Shea, was published posthumously in 1871. I am sorry to say that I have not yet seen a copy of this translation; I will have to remedy that. I note that inexpensive reprints are widely available.

MRS. FANNY BANDELIER, 1905

Mr and Mrs Bandelier, she the esteemed translator of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. From the NYPL archive (which notes that this image can be freely used).

This second translation of La Relación– from the 1542 edition– was made by Mrs. Fanny Bandelier, and originally published in 1905 as The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Mrs. Bandelier’s translation held its ground for many decades. According to Cleve Hallenbeck, in his Journey and Route of Cabeza de Vaca, published in 1940:

“Of the two English translations I, in common with nearly all other students, prefer the Bandelier. The Smith translation was admittedly defective, and Smith was engaged in its revision at the time of his death in 1871. It was the need for a more accurate translation that prompted Mrs. Bandelier to undertake the task.” (p.24)

Cyclone Covey, on the other hand, has this to say about the Smith and the Bandelier, in his introduction to his 1961 translation (notes on that below):

“The translation that follows has been checked against both of these and is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith version.”

Go figure.

The Briscoe Center at University of Texas, Austin has a collection of documents transcribed from those in the Archivo General de las Indias in 1914-1917 by Fanny and her husband, Adolphe Francis Alphonse Bandelier. From that website, we have a biographical note for Mr. Bandelier but, alas, not Mrs:

“Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840 – 1914) was an American archaeologist after whom Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is named. Bandelier was born in Bern, Switzerland, and emigrated to the United States in his youth. After 1880 he devoted himself to archaeological and ethnological work among the Indians of the southwestern United States, Mexico and South America. Beginning his studies in Sonora (Mexico), Arizona and New Mexico, he made himself the leading authority on the history of this region, and — with F. H. Cushing and his successors — one of the leading authorities on its prehistoric civilization. In 1892 he abandoned this field for Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, where he continued ethnological, archaeological and historical investigations. In the first field he was in a part of his work connected with the Hemenway Archaeological Expedition and in the second worked for Henry Villard of New York, and for the American Museum of Natural History of the same city.”

Says Hallenbech, p. 24:

“[Mrs. Bandelier] was a recognized Spanish scholar, and Adolphe F. Bandelier, who wrote the introduction and annotated the text, certainly subjected the work to the closest scrutinity; some of his notes lead one to believe that he actively participated in the translating. His qualifications for such work are widely recognized.”

Well, ring-a-ling to Gloria Steinem!!

My much marked-up copy of the Bandelier translation is a Penguin Classics paperback edition of 2002 with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, revised and annotated by Harold Augenbraum, shown here:

An inexpensive paperback reprint of the Bandelier translation.

CYCLONE COVEY, 1961

Not until 1961, with Cyclone Covey’s, did another complete translation of La Relación appear, this one under the title Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. His translation, Covey writes in his preface, “is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith translation,” and he consulted both the 1542 and the 1555 editions. In the afterword professor William T. Pilkington calls Covey’s “the most accessible” translation for the present-day reader. It is moreover, “thoughtful and balanced, avoiding an archaic tone as well as twentieth-century colloquialisms.”

My copy of the Covey is a 1997 University of New Mexico Press reprint, shown here:

Cyclone Covey, by the way, is also the author of a book about a Roman Jewish colony in Arizona in the time of Charlemagne—you read that right. I’ve yet to read it— the title is Calalus—but it’s extremely rare, although I delightedly note that his son has just this year, 2021, made a print-on-demand facsimile edition available on amazon. Covey had few adherents to his Romans-in-Arizona hypothesis, but I give him major points for the courage to stand by his catapult, as it were, and publish Calalus. (And strange as some things may strike me, I always try to remember that the past is a strange and ever-changing country… ) In any event Covey had a long and otherwise distinguished career as an historian at Wake Forest. You can read Covey’s obituary here.

MORE TRANSLATIONS, 1993

Nearing the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, more translations appeared, including Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández’s The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (Arte Público Press, 1993) and Frances M. López-Morillas’ Castaways (University of California Press, 1993, edited by Enrique Pupo-Walker).

ROLENA ADORNO AND PATRICK CHARLES PAUTZ, 1999

At present it would seem that most English-speaking Cabeza de Vaca scholars look to the Adorno and Pautz translation of 1999. Leading scholar of the Spanish Conquest Andrés Reséndez, in his A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books, 2007), has this to say about the Adorno and Pautz, in his notes (p.251):

“I wish to single out the landmark, three-volume set published in 1999 by Rolena Adorno and Patrick C. Pautz, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. This work constitutes yet another edition and translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative plus—literally—two and a half volumes of “notes.” These volumes have taken our understanding of this survival experience to a new level. The book contains biographical information of the protagonists, a detailed study of Cabeza de Vaca’s genaeology, relevant historical backrgound, and a textual analysis of the different accounts of ghe expedition, among other things. It constitites the single most important source for the present book project. I have also relied on their transcription of Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative, first published in 1542, and often cite their translations.” (p.251)

The three volume boxed set published by the University of Nebraska Press, which you might be able to consult in a library, or hunt down on Abebooks.com, is an heirloom of a doorstopper, and yep, it calls for serious clams. (Ouch.) I did buy the three-volume set, very belatedly, and I only wish I had started with it because it is indeed the most authoritative translation and history and biography; moreover, Volume I contains the original text of the original 1542 La Relación side-by-side with Adorno and Pautz’s English translation, with notes on the same page.

The three volume set ALVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA, University of Nebraska Press. Shown here is the side-by-side 1542 original and Adorno and Pautz’s translation, with notes. Simply splendid!

In addition, I have been working from, and freely penciling in my underlines in Adorno and Pautz’s much less expensive paperback edition of their translation of La Relación, separately published by the University of Nebraska Press. Here’s a photo of my copy of that:


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Dear writerly reader, if you are looking for a rollickingly good armchair read about Cabeza de Vaca’s North American odyssey, there are two narrative histories I would especially warmly recommend: Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange, and Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey. I will be talking about these and other narrative histories and biographies in next month’s first Monday Texas Books post.

Next Monday, look for my monthly post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.

P.S. I welcome you to sign up for an automatic email alert about the next post, should you feel so moved, over on the sidebar.

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

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América 
in Mexico City

What the Muse Sent Me about the Tenth Muse, 
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Reading Mexico: 
Recommendations for a Book Club of Extra-Curious 
& Adventurous English-Language Readers

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My new book is Meteor

Carolyn E. Boyd’s “The White Shaman Mural”

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

On my shelf loaded with books on rock art the most beautiful and, I believe, the most important, is The White Shaman Mural, in which artist and archaeologist Carolyn E. Boyd makes the visionary and revolutionary argument, based on many years of research, that the rock art site in the Lower Pecos known as “White Shaman” is no random assemblage but a creation story. It can be considered North America’s oldest “book.”


From the catalog copy from the University of Texas Press:

The prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created some of the most spectacularly complex, colorful, extensive, and enduring rock art of the ancient world. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate painting that spans some twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height on the wall of a shallow cave overlooking the Pecos River. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd takes us on a journey of discovery as she builds a convincing case that the mural tells a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time—making it possibly the oldest pictorial creation narrative in North America.

Unlike previous scholars who have viewed Pecos rock art as random and indecipherable, Boyd demonstrates that the White Shaman mural was intentionally composed as a visual narrative, using a graphic vocabulary of images to communicate multiple levels of meaning and function.

Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research and analysis, as well as insights from ethnohistory and art history, Boyd identifies patterns in the imagery that equate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples, including the ancient Aztec and the present-day Huichol. This paradigm-shifting identification of core Mesoamerican beliefs in the Pecos rock art reveals that a shared ideological universe was already firmly established among foragers living in the Lower Pecos region as long as four thousand years ago.

A few blurbs:

“The White Shaman Mural not only provides a thorough demonstration of technique, but it also raises provocative issues regarding the history and cosmovision of Native America. Boyd penetrates the cosmological conceptions of the past as she unveils an amazing text painted on a rockshelter wall thousands of years ago in southwest Texas.”
— Alfredo López Austin, author of The Myth of Quetzalcoatl and emeritus researcher, UNAM

“This is a milestone in the study of ancient American visual culture. First, it showcases the fruitful results of the scientific studies that the authors conducted, as well as their modes of analysis and analogical interpretation. Second, this work makes a major contribution to the literature on the expansive interaction spheres and fluid boundaries between the US Southwest, Mesoamerica, and south Texas. Finally, it provides a solid model for the interpretation of visual imagery from societies without alphabetic writing and especially for the study of Mesoamerican and Native American art.”
— Carolyn Tate, Texas Tech University, author of Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture: The Unborn, Women, and Creation

For more about the rock art of the Lower Pecos, see my previous post, which includes some images and a video from my visit to White Shaman, Lewis Canyon, Meyers Spring, Curly Tail Panther, and other rock art sites here.

Here is my video from my visit to White Shaman in 2015:

Recently some major news was announced by the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, which was founded by Dr. Boyd and is based in nearby Comstock, Texas.

From Shumla’s January 2021 newsletter:

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District, is now a National Historic Landmark.

This land has always been sacred. There’s no question about that. For those of us lucky enough to have spent time in this place, it holds an almost magical allure. The decision by Archaic people to record their beliefs in marvelous works of art here suggests that they also felt this place was special. 

Scientifically speaking, the archaeological sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands contain a superlative, unbroken record of human occupation spanning at least 11,000 years, represented by extensive deposits and pictographs. For nearly a century, archeologists and art historians have recognized the outstanding significance of these sites, their cultural deposits, and their art. Combined, the deposits and the art can yield a far more complete and complex picture of the past. Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs, unique to the region, are abundant, well-preserved, complex, and among the most significant body of pictographic images in North America.

For all these reasons, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District has now taken its place next to other National Historic Landmarks that tell the story of America from the earliest inhabitants to our modern history.

What does the designation mean?

A National Historic Landmark designation is national recognition. You might compare it to receiving a recognition award at your job. I doesn’t necessarily “do” anything unless you put it on your resume and take advantage of the recognition as you seek to move ahead in your career. From Shumla’s perspective, designation of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District as a National Historic Landmark will help us immensely as we work to raise awareness and funding for the continued preservation and study of these incredible sites.

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

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

Peyote and the Perfect You

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

The Texas Bibliothek’s Digital Doppelgänger: My Online Working Library of Rare Books

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Texas history aficionados, welcome and bienvenido! I invite you to check out these three fascinating—and free—digitalized rare books:

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader During Eight Expeditions Across the Great Western Prairies and a Residence of Nearly Nine Years in Northern Mexico. Two Vols, J.W. Moore, 1851. Fifth Edition.
A best-seller of its day. The editor was none other than John Bigelow, who later became the US ambassador to France during the US Civil War—the time of Mexico’s French Intervention / Second Empire. Gregg’s memoir is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of the West, the Southwest, and the history of US-Mexico trade.

Domenech, Abbé Emmanuel. Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico: A Personal Narrative of Six Years’ Sojourn in Those Regions. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858.
A few years after its publication, Abbé Dommenech served as Maximilian’s press secretary. Here he recounts his travels in the parts that might more properly be called Apachería and Comanchería. Grim stuff.

Sherman, William T. The Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. D. Appleton and Co., 1886
One of the greatest memoirs of the 19th century. Some mighty strange stories in here.

If this finds you, dear writerly reader, working on a biography, history, or historical fiction, whether Texas-related or not, the rest of this post is also for you. Normally I post for my writing workshop the second Monday of each month, but on occasion I make an exception. (In any event, look for the regular workshop post next Monday.)

Hot Diggety Digital!

Is it practical to go all digital with your working library? Probably not. But partially, yes. It depends on your project and your daily capacity for screentime & scrollin’. As I continue with my book in-progress on Far West Texas which, of all my several books to-date, has required the largest working library, this finds me still a-huffin’ & a-puffin’ up the learning curve for utilizing and managing my working library. But I can say that I’ve achieved some oxygen-tank-worthy altitude! Three things about working with working libraries that I learned the “ouch” way:

(A) buy the book whenever possible (else I may not get my hands on it again);

(B) make space, more space than you will ever think you could possibly need for the working library because… you will need it; and

(C) in some way, ruthlessly, keep the books organized (for this I use categories and bookmarks. See A Working Library: Further Notes and Tips for Writers of Historical Fiction, Biography, History, Travel Memoir / Essay, etc.).

I cannot say it too often, a book I cannot find is a book I might as well not own.

A BOOK I CANNOT FIND
IS
A BOOK I MIGHT AS WELL NOT OWN

Kindles?

Only when I don’t have another option. For this particular book project, I have not found Kindles of much use. In my experience, for the most part, where there is a Kindle, there is also a paperback and I ever and always prefer the paperback.

What About Using (Um, Actually Going to) a Library or Three?

Yes, of course, I have used both public and research libraries. That would be another blog post (such as this one). That said, for independent scholars with limited travel options, relying on libraries is not ever and always nor even usually the best option when it comes to consulting a given book. Let me put it this way: I don’t cook spaghetti one noodle at a time, either.

Rare Books Out of Reach?

But what about when a needed book is impossible to find and/or too expensive to buy? A fine copy of certain classic 19th works can go for hundreds, even (I’m talking about you, Josiah Gregg) thousands of dollars. Happily, many such classics are now in the public domain, that is to say, they are out of copyright and some publisher somewhere has brought out an affordable paperback edition. My working library has many such paperbacks purchased for a few bucks each from my go-to online booksellers. I’ve also purchased used and ex-library books of later editions, many of which books, not being in such good shape, are generally inexpensive (sometimes the book is cheaper than the shipping), these mainly from www.abebooks.com. And finally, on a few special occasions, I have shelled out a pile of clams for a rare book (see my posts on rare books here and here, for example). For rare books, stay away from amazon and ebay because many used book sellers on those platforms do not know how to properly describe a rare book (you’ll think you’re getting the elephant, but what shows up is a three-legged alpaca). It is best to buy from a member-in-good-standing of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, or similar association, for those dealers based in other countries.

Free!

Fortunately for this writer’s pocketbook, many out-of-copyright oldies are now available in ***free*** digital editions on the nonprofit Internet Archive archive.org and/or the Gutenberg Project gutenberg.org. Lo and behold, many of the books I need in my working library fall into this category.

For example, the English translation of the French Abbé Emmanuel Domenech’s memoir Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico was one I had been looking for several years (it was relevant to an earlier book of mine, as well.) When a copy finally popped up, alas, its price was well out of my budget. But I can now access Domenech’s memoir for my working purposes, thanks to the free online edition.

And Searchable!

Yep, digital books are also searchable and that can come in handy.

Behold:
The Digital Döppelgänger

So, after some time working on this Far West Texas book, I have accumulated what I think of as the digital Doppelgänger to my physical working library, the Texas Bibliothek.

As I noted in a previous post about how I organize my (physical) working library, I shelve the physical books under categories that work for me— categories that may not necessarily make sense to anyone else. I also include books which inclusion may not make sense to anyone else. And that is OK: Anyone Else is not the name of the person writing my book. Nor is Anyone Else writing your book, I would imagine…

And what about when, as is oftentimes the case, a book falls into two or more categories? Well, la de diddly da, I just pick one category, and go with that. My working library may be large, but I don’t need to put on rollerskates to go in there.

How to keep an online working library
organized for one’s writerly purposes?

For the online library originally I kept a list, by author in alphabetical order, on a blogger blog (treating it as basically a free, oft-updated webpage). But I have since moved to a system that works much better for me: I categorize the links to the online books in the same way as I do my physical working library, using a photo for quick reference, on a private page of my very own self-hosted WordPress blog, Madam Mayo.

Herewith, one example of the approximately 30 categories in my online working library (that is to say, a photo of the physical working library ‘s label and shelf + any online titles):

Davis, Richard Harding. The West from a Car-Window, Harper & Brothers, 1892.

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Q & A with Sergio Troncoso, Author of A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son 

A Review of Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution: 
An Uncommon History of 1776

The Solitario Dome

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My new book is Meteor

From the Texas Bibliothek: The Sanderson Flood of 1965; Faded Rimrock Memories; Terrell County, Texas: Its Past, Its People

This blog posts on Mondays. This year, 2021, I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to Texas Books, in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. Listen in any time to the related podcast series.

Writes Craig Childs in his masterful The Secret Knowledge of Water, “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” It does indeed rain in the desert, not often of course, but when it does, with so little vegetation to catch it, water can rage through canyons with killing power. In Far West Texas a standout tragedy of the 20th century was the June 11, 1965 flash flood that killed 26 people and devastated the little railroad town of Sanderson.

But this post isn’t about the Sanderson flood, rather, the matter of books in a writer’s working library. Back when I was writing Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, my first book of creative nonfiction, I learned the painful way to never, as in, never ever, let pass the chance to snap up a book of local history. These histories, which often offer the richest of detail, unique voices, and personal memories, are vital reading for such a work as mine—as those of you who follow this blog well know, I’m now working on a book about Far West Texas.

Oftentimes local histories are self-published, and in the days before amazon and print-on-demand, only available locally and in limited numbers. Try to find such a book later, and chances are… you won’t. So when I wandered into the Sanderson Visitors Center and saw them, I snapped up Tales of the Flood, a collection of oral histories by C.W. (Bill) Smith, along with Russell Ashton Scogin’s history, The Sanderson Flood of 1965: Crisis in a Rural Texas Community (Sul Ross State University, 1995), and Terrell County, Texas: Its Past Its People (Rangel Printing, Fourth Printing, 2008).

Sanderson is the seat of Terrell County, a county best known for its hunting ranches with fabulous vistas, its cactus, and sheep ranching. One of the more remote towns in Texas, from El Paso Sanderson lies a 4 and a half hours drive east, and from Austin a 5 and a half hours drive west. If you live anywhere in the county outside of Sanderson, you’ll want a rifle. It’s infested with rattlesnakes.

Here’s my map of Far West Texas (that is, Texas west of the Pecos River), showing Sanderson just above the US-Mexico border between Langtry and the Big Bend National Park.

In the Sanderson Visitors Center C.W. (Bill) Smith granted me a fascinating and wide-ranging interview on Sanderson’s history–which of course included much discussion of the 1965 flood. The podcast of this interview has been a long while in production, but I’ll be posting it shortly. (You can listen in to the other 21 podcasts apropos of this book posted to date here.)

From C.W. (Bill) Smith’s Tales of the Flood, from “Genaro’s Story”:

Sometimes a moment of mirth turns to disaster in seconds. Genaro Valles and his wife of Del Rio were just in town visiting. They had found an older wooden house near the Dairy King to stay in while there and spent a restless night from the pounding rain and the roar of the nearby creek. Early that morning Genaro awoke to the sound of water running. He teased his wife for letting the water run in the old toilet. But as he turned over to return to sleep his hand dropped by the side of the bed and fell into cold water…

If memory serves me, I found Joe Brown’s Faded Rimrock Memories in one of the Big Bend National Park ranger station bookstores. A Sanderson, Texas native, Brown grew up “all over West Texas, doing whatever to survive.” His ranch stories and cowboy poetry are lively examples of the genre, and his rattlesnake stories alone are worth the price of the book.

From Faded Rimrock Memories by Joe Brown:

A Texans Version of Jesus Birthplace

Jesus was born in Texas, this I know,
Listen and tell me this is not so.
His mother rode into town on an ass,
His father walked, they had no cash

(end of excerpt)

As for the Terrell County book, a hardcover that clocks in at over 700 pages, that was a bit pricier, and dicier to pack into my luggage. But I’m glad I did, for it is a superb reference on the region, with innumerable family and business histories, and it includes local newspaper clippings from the 1965 flood—and earlier and also devastating floods.

So what is the Texas Bibliothek? That’s what I call my working library for my book-in-progress, tentatively titled World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. Texans are rather more prolific on the literary front than bajacalifornianos, so keeping the Texas Bibliothek in order has been, shall we say, a learning experience. But my bookmark organizing method, which I blogged about here, is keeping me away from the Advil.

Next month for my first-of-the-month post on Texas books I’ll be blogging about using archive.org and assembling an online library for out-of-copyright books, that is, books that are now in the public domain. Reading a book online is never the ideal option, but oftentimes necessary.

A Trio of Texas Biographies in the Texas Bibliothek

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

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

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My new book is Meteor

A Trio of Texas Biographies in the Texas Bibliothek

Happy New Year! This first Monday of 2021 finds me rolling along at 80 MPH with writing my book about Far West Texas and, concurrently, editing the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project episode # 22 about Sanderson (listen in to the other 21 Marfa Mondays podcasts here). Those of you who follow this blog well know that I’ve been at work on this book and the related podcast series for a whale of a while. One of many reasons for that is, to quote J.P. Bryan, a past president of the Texas State Historical Association, “More books have been written about [Texas] than any state in the union. In fact, there are more books about Texas than all the rest of the states combined.” Having been reading intensively about Texas for some years now, I believe it.

Starting this year, 2021, I’ll be dedicating the first Monday of the month to sharing with you some of the more interesting books in my working library. This post features a trio of biographies, two recent, and one I’d call an oldie but yummie.

Michael Vinson’s Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).
Splendidly well-written and deeply researched, this page-turner about criminal rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins is by none other than Michael Vinson, a leading rare book dealer himself, and so a biographer with an insider’s knowledge of the business. Rare books and documents are the DNA of the stories we tell about our history; burning them or presenting forgeries is to mess with something sacred. This is not a simple story, and the subject was an extremely unusual person.

Gene Fowler’s Mavericks: A Gallery of Texas Characters (University of Texas Press, 2008). I cannot recall how I first came upon Fowler’s work, but whenever it was, count me a fan. He writes high faultin’ art criticism and is himself a performance artist (e.g., “Astroturf Ranchette”). Now that I think about it, it may have been his wild-ride of a book, Border Radio… Or maybe it was Mystic Healers and Medicine Shows… or Crazy Water? (P.S. Maverick Bobcat Carter just might decide to pop into my book.)

Brad Rockwell’s The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (Alegría Press, 2020)
I was delighted to give this book a blurb:
“Dr. Alberto G. Garcia was Texas’ pioneer yogi, and so much more… This first biography of this extraordinarily accomplished man opens a new and strange window onto Austin history, Texas history, Mexican-American history, the Mexican Revolution, and the transnational development of esoteric movements and philosophies.”–C.M. Mayo


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What can you find here at ye olde Madam Mayo blog in 2021? As noted above, this year I am dedicating the first Monday of the month to selected treasures in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my personal working library. As in 2020, the second Monday of the month will be for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing; the third Monday for my podcasts and publications, should I happen to have a new one; the fourth Monday Q & A with a fellow writer; and the fifth Monday, when there is one, for my newsletter and cyberflanerie.


A Visit to El Paso’s “The Equestrian”

Q & A: Carolina Castillo Crimm, 
Author of De León: A Tejano Family History

In Memorium: 
William C. Gruben and his “Animals in the Arts in Texas”