Category Archives: History

The TimeWarpVille Saga – Junction, Texas Cemetery

Posted on August 22, 2012 by | 6 comments

A robe that’s so wooly it scratches

Hi readers.  I don’t recall when I first discovered the joys of hanging out in cemeteries.  I don’t remember ever not doing it.  Somewhere back there I discovered that old cemeteries, tombstones and the ways individuals choose to remember their dead tells a lot about the communities, the local histories and priorities.

Vandalism’s a problem in a lot of the older graveyards, has been for a considerable while.   But up-keep of some of the older graves where the families have died or moved away also reveals itself.

A visitor’s left to mull over how those folks standing beside the hull of someone they cared for enough to construct this managed to forget so completely.  A few generations, a few wars, depressions, and something went away.  Every cemetery in the US, probably in the world, has a lot of graves of 1918 flu victims.  Frequently they’re all grouped together, but this one’s not arranged in that way.

The Junction cemetary has 50-100 graves of Confederate Civil War veterans, mostly marked by government-provided stones, each with a Confederate Battle Flag, Confederate flag, or Texas Confederate flag.

A dozen-or-so Texas Rangers are also buried here.  Most were also Confederate veterans.

I’m wondering whether this one mightn’t have been a relative of Sherrod Hunter, commander of the troops that occupied Tucson.  The world was a smaller place back then.

Not necessarily in that order

Sometimes the survivors had the stones marked with the life experiences of the dead they considered most important, sometimes the nicest things they could think of so say about them. 

Sometimes just the way the dead wished to be remembered.

But Junction people have another, more visible way of remembering their dead.  This one’s nearer the center of town.  Almost certainly a lot of those antlers were contributed by people now residing in the cemetery.  Thrilling moments of their lives, or mundane moments in hard times, bringing home meat for the table.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, History, Texas

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The TimeWarpVille Saga – Remembering Isaac Koontz

Posted on August 22, 2012 by | 8 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

TimeWarpVille: “We Will Never Forget!”

Every year in TimeWarpVille on Christmas day a posse of local horsemen armed with modern weaponry meets at this spot, where they display their determination to never forget Isaac Koontz.   

After passing around all the new firearms they got for Christmas they somberly climb these stairs to the now-somewhat-neglected shrine.

We’ve maybe forgotten something?

Surrounding the shrine, they kneel and remove their hats, whispering among themselves what a fine lad Isaac must have been, though none have a distinct recollection of him.

After five carefully timed minutes they descend the staircase, mount up and the elected leader shouts, “Forwarrrrrd, HO!”  Waving a Texas flag, he motions forward.  “Let’s KILL us some INDIANS boys!” 

They ride to the top of the hill behind the monument searching for Comanche spying on the highway and the monument.

Finding no hostiles there they gaze respectfully down at the monument, pass around their hip flasks, swallow solemnly, and descend the hill.  Usually no shots are fired.

As they load their horses into their stock trailers they ask how Aunt Tillie’s doing, order one another to have a merry Christmas and happy new year, gun their engines and return to their families, better men for having remembered something they didn’t experience and someone they never knew.

Their lives more secure in the knowledge the Comanche haven’t killed anyone around TimeWarpVille in recent centuries thanks to their vigilance.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, History, Human Behavior, Texas, The Lone Psychiatrist

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Book Review – Into the Rising Sun – Patrick K. O’Donnell

Posted on August 16, 2012 by | 4 comments

 

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

This book ought to be required reading for all these namby-pamby ‘thank you for your service’ self-hugging smugness goodygoody submerged hypocrites, thinks I. 

These are the WWII experiences told by men who came back from WWII and didn’t talk about it.  Didn’t join the VFW, didn’t wave any flags, and grew old holding it inside their heads because what they saw and experienced as young men didn’t fit inside the picture the US Empire was drawing of itself and its conduct of WWII.

Eventually some decided it was time to tell it and O’Donnell was there to record what they said.  Into The Rising Sun was the result.  They told of being sent into places nobody needed to go, under-equipped with incompetent leadership, under-supplied, half-starved into malaria swamps against an enemy no better off than they were.

They told of the most significant experience of their lives.  A dismal experience perpetrated by negligence, mediocrity, politics, publicity and lies for the folks back home waving flags and beating drums.  Sending their own sons off to join them in jungles where getting captured meant becoming a meal for the enemy.  Where shooting all prisoners was the norm. 

Burma, the Solomons, the South Pacific they lived didn’t make its way into any Broadway musicals and the ‘thank you for your service’ expressions represented an irony too confusing to face.  Legions of men betrayed by their government for convenience, whims and indifference.  Betrayed by a failure of the military leadership to commit itself to the reality they were living and fulfill their own responsibilities, the only excuse for their existence.

The 20th Century is loaded with places a person wouldn’t care to have been.  What these men lived wasn’t unique.  Happened so many places to so many men of the 20th Century from all countries a book couldn’t list them all.

But this book probably represents as good a synopsis as anyone’s likely to produce.  It’s good the old men finally told it.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2000's, 2012, Adventure, America, Book Reviews, Books, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, Politics

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Book Review – Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

Posted on August 14, 2012 by | 11 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

If any of you are bored, or maybe a bit ashamed hearing yourselves parrot to one another how much you hate Muslims, or Arabs, or one of the numerous other epithets you apply to people of Semitic ancestry without knowing a damned thing about them, you might find this a cleansing read.  [Long sentence, eh?]

I found it in a ‘free’ box in a thrift store held together by rubber bands, but there’s probably another read left in this copy.  If any of you can’t find a copy and want this one I’ll send it to you, rubber bands and all.

Lawrence was a young Englishman assigned early in WWI to go into the desert and try raising a rebellion among the Beduins against the Turkish Empire.  The allies were having an awful time with those Turks, getting themselves made monkeys of, their cannon-fodder reduced to cannon-fodder without seeing any positive results.  Someone got the idea a revolt in the background might help.

So young Lawrence found himself a camel and headed out to make friends of the tribes, to try arranging dissatisfaction among them.  To offer money, weapons, military advisors, explosives to weaken the back door to pesky Turkey.

Lawrence lived among them several years.  Became trusted by them, successfully stirred them into revolt, led them, came to respect and understand them.  Earned their trust, I should have said, to the extent any representative of a European power could be trusted.  And trusted them in a more-or-less realistic way.

These are his memoirs, his exploits, his observations about the people.  The events that came to be important as an influence on the future running right to the present.  And changed his entire perspective about loyalties, betrayals, patriotism and individual responsibility.

In some ways what happened to Lawrence is reminescent of what the Templars were accused of and slaughtered for by the European powers.  Becoming too familiar, dangerously understanding of the fabled, demonized enemy.

Lawrence could probably offer an Eighth Pillar of Wisdom if he’d survived until today and had a chance to offer his thoughts about what he’d see around him.

A worthy read, worth the rubber bands holding it together.  655 pages with introduction and remarks by his friend, George Bernard Shaw.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Book Reviews, Books, History, Military, Politics

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Experience and Expectations – For Better or Worse

Posted on August 14, 2012 by | 6 comments

Hi Readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Humanity’s had a change of heart, expectation-wise, the past few centuries.  Most of us have gotten into the habit of believing everything’s going to get better, one generation to the next.  Which is contrary to the overall historical human experience.

Fact is, once humans organized themselves a step up from savages or barbarians, things usually stayed pretty much the same for the average person.  Sure, the wash and waves added here, subtracted there, but things just didn’t vary enough to notice over the long haul.

Doesn’t much matter where they lived.  Society arranged itself into aristocrats, living as comfortably as they could manage, and peasants/slaves, struggling to get by and keeping the aristocrats in cannon-fodder, food, affluence.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of generations of peasants in Asia, Europe, some of the Americas, some of Africa, muddling along not expecting anything different to pop up to improve things for them.  Maybe more rain, maybe less, maybe the local lord or baron wouldn’t hatch any schemes involving warfare, higher takes of their crops.  Maybe they’d be as warm and no hungrier next year as this.  Peasants didn’t expect to become aristocrats.

And generally the aristocrats didn’t expect any widespread changes, either.  Maybe they’d pick the right side in a fracas or intrigue, get control of more land or peasants, but no general improvements for aristocrats.  No general decline.  Aristocrats didn’t expect to become peasants.

That’s how human society has functioned throughout history once complex social organization came along.  Wasn’t until technology opened things up a bit, the Americas became accessible with a lot of land to take away from the folks who were there, then Africa and Australia, that a wedge was driven into the potential for peasants to become aristocrats.

For a few lifetimes things got better for the average human all over the world.  Got better even for the aristocrats.  And everyone came to expect things to continue to get better.  Lost the old habit of just hoping they wouldn’t get worse.

If stability and general affluence had anything to do with the goals of human beings it might have been possible.  Making sure people everywhere got fed, stayed as warm and healthy as conditions allowed.  Might have been done if it were a priority for anyone, but it never was.

Because human beings have a long history of telling what they expect from life by their actions.  And those actions have nothing at all to do with improving the lives of people beyond the range of whatever they find advantageous to call ‘we’.

Inevitably, this probably means the warp and weave of human expectations will re-stabilize to something more akin to the past.  To things generally staying the same, or getting worse, generation-to-generation.  With the average person just trying to hang on, hoping things won’t get worse.

And the human cadre of aristocrats not much giving a damn whether they get worse for the peasantry, so long as it doesn’t get worse for themselves.

There’s a strong argument to be made it’s how we like it.  How we want it.  How we’ve always wanted it.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Ethnic Supremacy, Government, History

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Texas Romance With Secession and Rope-Dancing

Posted on August 12, 2012 by | 11 comments

Hi readers.

Probably a strong case can be made that the Texan love for the idea of secession is directly related to the long-term love affair so many Texans have with lynchings, beatings, bullyings, and executions.  Especially during the past 50-60 years the Federal Government’s been a terrible thorn in the side of folks who’d like to be able to drag accused offenders out of the jailhouse and hang them, as their ancestors were fond of doing.

The side of the Civil War in Texas a reader has to search deeply to find is the part involving Texas Homeland Security of the time.  Raping, burning, looting, confiscation of property, and indiscriminate lynching of anyone the forces of law decided might oppose secession or the Confederacy.

[Secession! Texas Makes Its Choice – Texas State Library and Archives Commission https://www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/civilwar/secession.html]

According to the Texas Historical Commission, “Texas stands third among the states, after Mississippi and Georgia, in the total number of lynching victims. Of the 468 victims in Texas between 1885 and 1942, 339 were black, 77 white, 53 Hispanic, and 1 Indian. Half of the white victims died between 1885 and 1889, and 53 percent of the Hispanics died in the 1915 troubles. Between 1889 and 1942 charges of murder or attempted murder precipitated at least 40 percent of the mobs; rape or attempted rape accounted for 26 percent. Blacks were more likely to be lynched for rape than were members of other groups, although even among blacks murder-related charges accounted for 40 percent of the lynchings and rape for only 32 percent. All but 15 of the 322 lynching incidents that have a known locality occurred in the eastern half of the state. The heaviest concentration of mob activity was along the Brazos River from Waco to the Gulf of Mexico, where eleven counties accounted for 20 percent of all lynch mobs. Other concentrations were in Harrison and neighboring counties on the Louisiana border, adjacent to Caddo Parish, Louisiana, one of the most lynching-prone areas in the country, and in Lamar and surrounding counties in Northeast Texas.”

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jgl01

A couple of examples of Texas Cultural Lynchmen at work:

“Today in Texas History: Teenage boy lynched in Center

On this date in 1920, the body of Lige Daniels, an African-American teenager, hung in the main square of Center, a small town near the border between Texas and Louisiana.

Daniels was the victim of a lynching. In a 2001 story on Refdiff.com, columnist Dilip D’Souza described the scene: “Wearing a white shirt, torn pants and no shoes, his head tilted back sightlessly, this black teenager hung that day from the limb of a tree.”

D’Souza noted Daniels, imprisoned on allegations that he murdered a white woman, was taken from jail by a mob of nearly a thousand citizens, who carried him to the square where they hanged him.

D’Souza said the Daniels’ lynching garnered much attention but no local protests. Instead, there was so much fascination with the strung-up corpse that photographers turned the event into a postcard that was mailed to families and friends across the country. Daniels’ dead body became an article of trade.”

http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2010/08/today-in-texas-history-teenage-boy-lynched-in-center/

Or Jesse Washington, Waco.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

Texans have a legitimate pride in their history and their heritage.  Their heroes of the Alamo, of San Jacinto, of the wars with the Comanche, the Apache, the Civil War are, to Texans, reflections of what they are, themselves.  Their aspirations, their salutes, their strutting pride in a history they yearn to be a part of.

And being a part of the United States with its obstructive Supreme Court decisions, its attempts to stand between Texans and the act of being themselves, needs mending.

Needs another secession to open the doors to opportunities lost.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, History, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Police, Politics, Texas

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Confederate Capital of Arizona Territory

Posted on August 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

I probably should have added this to the last post, but somehow it seems to me to deserve a place of its own.

That building sitting on the corner of the plaza in Mesilla, New Mexico, was the self-same structure Col. Baylor of the Texas Baylor Baylors of Texas aristocracy chose as the capital building for the Confederate Territory of Arizona.

Baylor turned out to be a less-than-optimal governor to the Territory, brought himself up for all manner of criticism.  One of which being the source of an order to kill all the male Indians in the fledgling Territory, and make slaves of all the kids and surviving females.

News travelled slowly in those days, and this command reached Richmond, Virginia at a time to dovetail nicely with news of Sibley failures, chaotic retreat after Glorietta, and other matters not calculated to endear Baylor to the general Confederate command structure.

For instance, the retreating Texans left their severely injured in the hospital at Fort Davis as they passed through, hop-skip-and-jump ahead of pursuing Union Forces.  Obviously intending to defer medical treatment to the pursuers.

But Apache arrived at that hospital ahead of the Yankees.  Tortured, disembowelled, roasted those Texans at their leisure, finally killed them in time for the arrival of the rescuers.

Ultimately Baylor was reduced in rank to corporal and sentenced to spend the remainder of the war walking guard in Galveston, where he served honorably.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, History, Military, New Mexico, NM, Texas

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Try, Try Again – Texas Secession, Invasion, Evasion and Forgetfulness

Posted on August 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by  for a read this morning.  I promised a few days ago I wouldn’t tell you any Texas history anecdotes, but I’ve already got Old Sol’s sober promise to come up on schedule, the cats are fed, and I probably ought to write about something just to prove I can.

I mentioned Texas invaded New Mexico twice, once in 1841, then again during the early stages of the US War of Secession.  Both of those episodes were characterized by more human folly on both sides than anyone has a right to be part of, but one man, JS Sutton, was right up front for both of them.  First name on the monument. 

Captain in the 1841 Expedition, Lt. Colonel in the second.  Never got another shot at a third try because he was offed at Valverde.  But he must have been considered an expert on the second because the 1841 group surrendered without firing a shot and got frog-marched barefooted southward across the same route Sutton followed north to his death two decades later.

Sutton was a courageous, interesting man, lived a life I’d call worth living, but couldn’t seem to keep his eye on the dirt where he was standing, and it eventually got him killed.  As far as I’ve ever been able to establish, he was the only man involved in both expeditions.

However, there was a Lockridge [second name on the monument] involved in the 1841 debacle, shot himself while they were camped at Bird’s Battleground near Three Rivers.  Maybe this later Lockridge killed at Valverde was a brother, son, cousin.  Almost certainly kinfolk, in any case.

Some other similarities between the two expeditions involved both commanders spending a lot of their time drunk, generally being logistically ill prepared for the task, and plenty of poor command decisions to help it along.

That second expedition, however, came inches from being a success in the sense of achieving the main objective.  Driving the US Army out of Fort Union.  The secondary objective, Sherrod Hunter driving west, taking and holding Tucson, probably was doomed from the first.  Nobody could have anticipated the California Volunteers marching east with the equipment and numbers they managed.

Hunter’s force of 500 retreated from Tucson early in May, headed back to the Rio Grande with plenty of difficulties with Apache and desertion.  Only twelve of the force, including Hunter, arrived in Mesilla finally in August.

Which left them with one hell-of-a-long trek back to Texas and a long war to fight and lose when they got there.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, History, Human Behavior, Military, New Mexico, NM, Reading, Texas

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Strange Folks, These Texans

Posted on August 8, 2012 by | 22 comments

Yankee sniper roost

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Sometimes I marvel, sometimes grind my teeth in frustration without intending to be so involved inside the heads of others, sometimes just don’t know what to think at all.

Texans carry around an over-weening, unconscious, cultural pride in the history of Texas, but mostly don’t know anything much about Texas history.  Literally don’t take the trouble to know.  Carry it around like kids playing cowboys and Indians, a given, picked up from John Wayne movies and a vague awareness the Alamo happened.  San Jacinto happened.  Sam Houston was somebody-or-other important, and naturally they admire him.

Mostly they don’t have a clue what the hell those guys were doing at the Alamo, why they were there, why they made the decision to die, instead of evacuating.  Don’t know why Houston made no attempt to relieve them.  But they venerate them because what-the-hell, everyone does.  Whoopteedoo.

One day when he was still visiting down here the neighbor from up the hill began the favorite Texas assertion, “Texas has the right to secede if it chose to.  Has the right to split up into five different States.”  Evidently the neighbor’d been learning his history from this ignorant twit calls himself Governor of Texas.  [Gov. Rick Perry: Texas Could Secede, Leave Union – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/gov-rick-perry-texas-coul_n_187490.html]  “Sam Houston arranged it before Texas was annexed into the US,” the damned neighbor blandly tells me.

“You happen to recall,” says I, “Texas tried once to secede?  Recall the consequences?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t voted by the State Legislature,” says he.

“What the hell you talking about?” says I.  “Sam Houston spent the last weeks before the vote to secede travelling all over Texas trying to talk them out of seceding.”

“Oh.  You mean THAT secession.”

Evidently he was referring to some later attempt by some Texas geniuses to secede.  Texans who never bothered to read up on how it turned out the last time it was tried for real.

But I’ve digressed.  I wasn’t going to tell you about the mindless drivel echoing around inside the heads of modern Texans.  I was going to tell you about some Texans and events of the 19th Century so truly remarkable they’d be worthy of study by anyone.  Texans and events, I was about to say, the overwhelming majority of Texans never heard of.

I was going to tell you a bit about Mirabeau Buonoparte Lamar, second President of the Republic of Texas.  Ten times the man, the courage, the intellect, Sam Houston ever was.  And a poet, besides.  Somewhere around here I’ve got a couple of books of his poetry. 

I was going to tell you about Jacob Snively.  One of the strangest, most interesting men in Texas, even US history.

I was going to tell you how Texas military forces invaded west, New Mexico twice, New Mexico and Arizona both, once, occupied Tucson.

I toyed with the idea of giving words to the Somerville expedition, the black bean incident Texans have a vague awareness of, but couldn’t tell you when, where, why, on a lottery-sized bet.

But to hell with it.  Texans ain’t interested in Texas history if it wasn’t in a John Wayne movie and I suppose it ain’t worth the effort anyway.  If they wanted to know anything about Texas history they’d learn to read.

Screw it.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, History, Human Behavior, Texas

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Vice President Spiro T. Agnew – A Man Ahead of his Time

Posted on August 5, 2012 by | 13 comments

What can a person say about Spiro Agnew?  Most of you readers are too young to remember the most well-known, most popular Vice President in US history.  He served at a time when the US was torn apart by civil strife, an undeclared, unpopular foreign war, and a level of corruption in the Executive Branch few citizens allowed themselves to suspect.

Agnew.  Forced from office for accepting bribes before, “Everyone does it,” became a defense.

But, of course, that was long before Iran-Contra, Bush 1&2, Billary Clinton, Blackwater, and the current king.  Nowadays Spiro would seem clean, honest and soft-spoken.  A pristine choice for wannabe king for either of the parties:

In April 1973, when revelations about Watergate began to surface, Agnew was the choice of 35 percent of Republican voters to be the next Republican nominee for President, while then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was second on the Gallup Poll. [18]

Spiro Theodore Agnew (pronunciation: /ˈspɪroʊ ˈæɡnjuː/; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th Vice President of the United States (1969–1973), serving under President Richard Nixon, and the 55th Governor of Maryland (1967–1969). He was the first Greek American to hold these offices.

During his fifth year as Vice President, in the late summer of 1973, Agnew was under investigation by the United States Attorney‘s office in Baltimore, Maryland, on charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy. In October, he was formally charged with having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000 while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United States. On October 10, 1973, Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967, with the condition that he resign the office of Vice President. Nixon replaced him by appointing by then House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford to the office of Vice President.

Agnew is the only Vice President in United States history to resign because of criminal charges. Ten years after leaving office, in January 1983, Agnew paid the state of Maryland nearly $270,000 as a result of a civil suit that stemmed from the bribery allegations.

Agnew soon found his role as the voice of the so-called “silent majority“, and by late 1969 he was ranking high on national “Most Admired Men” polls. He also inspired a fashion craze when one entrepreneur introduced Spiro Agnew watches (a take off on the popular Mickey Mouse watch); conservatives wore them to show their support for Agnew, while many liberals wore them to signify their contempt.

Agnew was known for his scathing criticisms of political opponents, especially journalists and anti-war activists. He attacked his adversaries with relish, hurling unusual, often alliterative epithets—some of which were coined by White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan—including “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, “nattering nabobs of negativism” (written by Safire), and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”.[15] He once described a group of opponents as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Agnew

13 Comments

Posted in 1970's, America, History, Liars

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