Strange but true – General Lopez de Santa Anna’s invasion of Texas in 1836 was not to be the last time that a Mexican Army crossed the border into Texas in full battle array – artillery, infantry, military band and all. Santa Anna may have been defeated at San Jacinto – but for…
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Added by Celia Hayes on December 21, 2010 at 11:41am —
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Added by Celia Hayes on December 14, 2010 at 2:29pm —
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I’ve done three book club meetings so far with groups who have read one or anther of the Trilogy, and have another two scheduled in the hear future, so I thought I’d get around to answering some of the questions that I have been asked about the setting and the characters – both the real ones, and the ones that I made up.
Question: How could a very intelligent and observant girl like Magda – who grew up on a farm - be so clueless about sex when it comes to her wedding… Continue
Added by Celia Hayes on October 29, 2009 at 3:17pm —
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The practice of medicine in these United (and for the period 1861-1865, somewhat disunited) States was for most of the 19th century a pretty hit or miss proposition, both in practice and by training. That many sensible people possessed pretty extensive kits of medicines – the modern equivalents of which are administered as prescriptions or under the care of a licensed medical professional – might tend to indicate that the qualifications required to hang out a shingle and practice medicine were…
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Added by Celia Hayes on March 18, 2009 at 7:30am —
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He really was a black hat, this particular villain; he was known and recognized throughout the district – around Fredericksburg and the German settlements in Gillespie County – by a fine, black beaver hat. Which was not furry, as people might tend to picture immediately – but made of felt, felt manufactured from the hair scraped from beaver pelts. This had been the fashion early in the 19th century, and made a fortune for those who sent trappers and mountain-men into the far, far west, hunting…
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Added by Celia Hayes on March 15, 2009 at 5:00pm —
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All righty, then - I was on the marquee two weeks ago at the felicitously named Butt Holdsworth Memorial Library, to give a talk about the German settlements in the Hill Country. On Sunday, I will be at the old German Free School in Austin, to do another. Three PM - the address is 507 East 10th Street, in Austin.
Learn more than you ever thought possible about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country - and cookies and lemonade…
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Added by Celia Hayes on March 13, 2009 at 4:54pm —
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The westward movement of Americans rolled west of the Appalachians and hung up for a decade or two on the barrier of the Mississippi-Missouri. It was almost an interior sea-coast, the barrier between the settled lands, and the un-peopled and tree-less desert beyond, populated by wild Indians. To be sure, there were scattered enclaves, as far-distant as the stars in the age of “shanks’ mare” and team animals hitched to wagons, or led in a pack-train: far California, equally distant Oregon, the…
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Added by Celia Hayes on March 8, 2009 at 8:16am —
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That most northern, fractious and rebelliously-inclined of those northern provinces of the nation of Mexico was in ferment in the 1830s, some of which might be chalked up to the presence of settlers who had come to Texas from the various United States looking for land. Texas had plenty of it to go around, and a distinct paucity of residents. Entrepreneurs, such as Stephen Austin's father were allotted a tract of land, based upon how many people they might induce to come and settle on it, to…
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Added by Celia Hayes on February 16, 2009 at 5:30pm —
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That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio - and perhaps all of the rest of Texas - first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour and a half, just before sunrise on a chill spring morning in 1836. People who come to visit today, with an image in their mind from the movies about it - from John Wayne's version, and the more recent 2004 movie, or from sketch-maps in books about the desperate, fourteen-day siege are usually…
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Added by Celia Hayes on February 15, 2009 at 7:37am —
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So, I belong to a number of different chat-groups about books, and historical novels and Westerns and all ... and at one of them, fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns - any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. The thinking is, we can achieve a critical mass of fans, and maybe take the book-selling world - if not by the throat, maybe we can…
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Added by Celia Hayes on February 12, 2009 at 9:22am —
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In the Texas Hill Country, feelings about the draft were especially bitter. Firstly, most of the Germans were Unionists and abhorred slavery. Secondly, a prime motivation for emigrating from Germany in the first place had been the existence of conscription there. To be forced to fight in the defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body whose very existence they had opposed was an insult past bearing. And finally, Gillespie County was very much still a part of the frontier.…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 27, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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More new settlers than just the Germans had been making their way into Texas, in the decades before the Civil War. Once that the coastal lowlands below the Balcones Escarpment could be fairly said to be settled, Texas attracted more than just the land-hungry and restless. It drew ambitious and more prosperous settlers from across the south, settlers and entrepreneurs who brought their slaves with them. These men farmed sugar and rice and built fine plantation houses, gracefully adorned with…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 26, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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When I was first beginning to write about the the bitter days of the Civil War in Gillespie County, for the second volume of "Adeslverein", I was initially stymied. There was actually not much available in print or on line: just barely enough to give tantalizing hints at what happened during those years. It’s a skeleton upon which to drape a story of split loyalties, of bewildering events and sudden hatreds, seemingly sprung fully-armored out of the ground, like dragons-teeth, much to the…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 25, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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The execution of approximately a hundred and twenty men, women, and yes, children also - of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train party stands out particularly among revolting accounts of massacres in the old West, and not just for the number of victims. The most notorious 19th century massacres usually involved Indians and either settlers or soldiers in some combination, overrunning a settlement or encampment, or ambushing a military unit or a wagon-train and slaughtering all in or after a brief and…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 23, 2009 at 10:30pm —
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Considering all those cinematic or literary occasions in which an emigrant wagon train on the California/Oregon trail was pictured being attacked by a war-party of Indians, it actually happened as represented on very few occasions. That is, a defensive circle of wagons, with the pioneers being well-dug in while the Indians ride around on horseback, whooping and shouting to beat the band, and firing volleys of arrows at them. Very likely, more emigrants died in accidents with firearms than were…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 22, 2009 at 4:44pm —
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Among the books in my tall stack to read to provide background for the "Adelsverein Trilogy" was one with the very dry title of “Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture”… which has actually proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together… which is good, especially since I need to write a description of building such a thing as a log building. Little details like how many days it would take…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 21, 2009 at 7:36am —
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I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows, given that the classic "cowboy" functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 20, 2009 at 6:20pm —
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There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture: an upholstered wing chair, a spinning wheel, a very elaborate trunk fitted out with a number of smaller drawers for silverware: the trunk is open, displaying a fine mid-Victorian assembly of knives and silverware. There are a couple…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 11, 2009 at 9:00am —
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The average western movie or television series only very rarely gives a true idea of what it must have been like to take to the emigrant trail in the 1840ies and 50ies. Most westerns are set in a time-period from the end of the Civil war to about 1885, an overwhelming proportion have a cattle-ranch setting, sometimes a setting in the wild and woolly mining camps. The popular culture vision of the "old west" tends to warp our imagining of the 19th century in general, in that it puts in place…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 9, 2009 at 9:00am —
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That was a treat – Saturday at Fredericksburg’s Pioneer Museum. I had a talk and a discussion for an hour, with a group of interested historians and readers, and then sat behind a small table the visitor center, between a shelf of scented candles, cowboy postcards and other souvenirs, and a large rack of maps and information about Fredericksburg and the Hill Country and signed copies of the Adelsverein Trilogy for two hours. All in all, exhausted, happy and talked hoarse. Richard Bristol, the…
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Added by Celia Hayes on January 8, 2009 at 8:06am —
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