NOTE: After
deciding I’d cease and desist back in September I was flooded with emails from
people wanting to know why I’d stopped writing this blog. The reasons centered primarily on commitments
to other projects. Many readers suggested
I write when I could and so I’ve decided to post articles as time permits. Look for a new article about every ten days
to two weeks. I’ll write more if
possible. As before, the posts will deal
with topics related to ethnobotany, especially primitive technologies, and with
knife-making, historical themes and issues associated with keeping our lands
clean and free of pollutants. May I
offer a special thanks to all those who took the time to write me and I hope
you enjoy what’s coming down the pike.
The two most popular fellows on the Texas Mexico border in 1875
were named Oliver and Samuel. There
wasn’t a ranch house within a hundred miles of the Río Grande that didn’t have
their namesakes tucked into a holster or hanging from nails hammered into hard-plastered
walls or hand-hewed lumber. Not too many
people knew them by their first names but Winchester and Colt was good
enough. Back when I was a kid there were
still plenty of 44/40s and .45 Colts in cabinets and closets and even riding the
racks of pickups. Backwoods types had
learned long ago that nothing matched the feel and balance of a Winchester
carbine and the hand-hugging warmth of a Colt Peacemaker.
There was good reason to own a gun or two back in 1875. Cattle rustlers, bandits, marauding Apache
and Comanche and other ornery characters scoured the countryside looking for
loot and captives. In 1875 a few
houses were made from uninsulated boards set on concrete blocks but that wasn’t
the norm. Some parts of South Texas had
been so overrun by Indian attacks that they’d become no man’s lands. Of course, that game will never end as one
group comes in and displaces another and people fight over land and
resources. A hundred and fifty years
earlier or around 1725 Catholic missionaries living in what is now San Antonio
noticed the Apache had vanished. Now to
these Christian sorts the Apache constituted a fresh batch of converts. Change their names, erase their cultures,
show them a “better life” and usher in a brand new flock. I guess you’ve heard that story. But when these parishioners-to-be grew sparse
the missionaries became concerned. After
all, how can you spread the Gospel when “there ain’t no one to spread it to?” The priests grew anxious but then someone
finally told them the Apache had been shoved aside by a new bunch of potential
believers. What’re their names the
priests asked? “Them’s the other guys,”
someone told them. But the word came out
sounding like comanche so Comanche it
became.
Now people have affinities for family members and these other
guys—like the other guys before them—enjoyed stealing pilgrims to become
slaves. Shucks, the white folks
should’ve been used to that I heard someone once say. But that’s another story.
Along the borderlands these raids were common and, in fact,
in some places where the King of Spain had given away big chunks of territory
called porciones the new landowners
had no peace at all. You see the
previous landowners (just like the landowners before them) still considered
what we now call South Texas their home.
A never ending story of conflict and bloodshed; by the time 1875 came
along these Celtic Iberians had learned a thing or two about thick walls, gun
ports and family bonds. Nearly every
old-time family in the region has a story or two about some ancestor who was
kidnapped by either Apache or Comanche. In
some cases people who’d been kidnapped were able to escape years later and make
it back to their families. In other
cases those who were kidnapped never returned.
But even when children were abducted and managed to break free they are
said to have never fully acclimated back into the European lifestyle. Some came close but none of them ever forgot
their Indian ways. It seems “the
Christian life” was kind of boring and lacked all those neat adventures of the
Indian way.
In order to make a proper defensive home one needed thick
walls and enough places to return fire should the need arise. Families kept close to each other and maybe
that’s one of the sad parts about modern life because these days families split
away like wood chipped from an axe.
That’s not to suggest that families didn’t go their separate ways in the
old days because when people journeyed to America from homes in England,
France, Spain, Galicia, Asturias and other places they were more often than not
gone forever. Their families back in the
Homeland might get a letter or two in the next forty or fifty years but that
wasn’t common. Come to the New World and
never have any contact with the Old World again. Kind of sad when you think about it but I
imagine I have distant grandfathers and grandmothers who said goodbye to
whatever life they’d known and even if they looked back now and then there was
nothing much to see. It turns out that
the Apache and Comanche had a similar history in that regard. The Comanche were never a tribe in the
traditional sense but instead groups or bands connected only by a common
language and culture. Other than that
they roamed their respective territories and oftentimes a family member joined
another band as a result of marriage or some other circumstance and if that
band drifted far enough away then chances were an individual might never see
his family again.
The old houses pictured go back to about 1875. They’re made of mud and limestone slabs
carefully stacked one atop the other then plastered over to form a uniform
inner and outer skin. The original roofs
were also covered with sticks and mud then overlaid with grass seed to form a
living roof so-to-speak. Later on
someone came along and replaced the original roofs with corrugated metal. The influence is strictly European since
these early settlers arrived from the Celtic kingdoms of Galicia and Asturias though
there were also a few Basque in the mix.
Later on other people showed up from the region that once constituted
the kingdoms of Spain, Castile and Granada.
The priests in San Antonio finally had their way and got to “save” a
bunch of Natives who didn’t really need saving (but that too is another story)
and most of the Natives were assimilated into the greater society having lost
their original Indian names, cultures, myths, songs and even a knowledge of
their glorious past. Oh well, I guess
all I’ve done here is open the door to telling a bunch of other tales about
life in South Texas by common folk who came to homestead and live close to the
land and didn’t’ care much about building "empires" or becoming scripts of cheap
Hollywood movies and, if truth be known, were the ones who really built the
region. Not by destroying it but instead
filling it with romance, adventure and a love of family.
