Idea Garage Sale: The Ultimate History Series

I've been feeling a bit uncommunicative this week and I still have to recreate a character sheet before this afternoon's game, so back I go to the "Notes and Experiments" file folder, where all the random stuff I scribbled down on wastepaper while bored at various soul-sucking day jobs wound up.

Man, the pressure of frustrated ambition used to build up back when I didn't have any control over my own time!

Consider this plan for a Texas history series.

I'd start with the Indians, maybe one book about an Indian living before European contact; then, one each for her descendants living in the various phases of Spanish/Mexican rule - shorthanded in the notes as "Mission/Military/Civil." In other words, Texas was administered by the Spanish first through the church, then through the military, and finally through the civil authority. The change of power from Spanish to Mexican was not a significant one from the point of view of the far northern territory of Texas - both Spain and Mexico relied on a centralized authority that never really controlled the fringes of the claimed territory or understood the needs of the people, native or colonial, who lived there.

From there, the stories would get closer together in time and include more overlapping characters as I proceeded to a book covering the Revolution and the Runaway Scrape, then the Republic, then some portion of the Antebellum period, then the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age/Cattle Age/Wild West (which are all the same historical period), World War I and the flu epidemic, Jazz Age, Depression, and World War II.

The notes end with a bunch of doodles and the following thoughts:

Books should be as ethnic as possible - tribes, Mexican, slave, German, various first generation immigrants. Emphasis on the more neglected crises - economic, climactic, medical. Old-fashioned domestic novels, or the traditional juvenile/historical romance? Room for both.

This cries out for pseudonymity. Susannah Long. Jane Dickens. Magnolia Strasse. Antonia Balcones. Kelly Randolph. Sandy Fernando.

At which point either the day ended, I got some work to do, or I realized I was getting silly. Though I really need to name some sims Magnolia Strasse, Sandy Fernando, and Kelly Randolph...

Anyway, had I been willing to devote my life to this and nothing else, I could have been the Rosemary Sutcliff of Texas. And I contend that every single one of these periods merits further fictional exploration; yes, even the Wild West, which is overdue to have its cliches shaken up with some different viewpoints, hard facts, and maverick interpretations of events.

Regular readers of the Garage Sale will have noted that the Impractically Thorough Historic Series is a recurring theme in my imagination. You'll see it again, I'm sure. There's just so much potential - especially in Texas history, but I bet any arbitrarily designated patch of ground would reward the researcher almost as much. Texas wears its history on its sleeve. Just because Iowa is shyer, doesn't mean it's less interesting.

For those of you without my mental network of references, the sources of the pseudonyms are:

Jane Long, the Mother of Texas.
Susanna Dickenson, Alamo survivor.
And of course Charles Dickens, who would have written awesome westerns had he been born a Texan.

Magnolia Avenue, where I live; Strasse of course is German for Street. (Adele Verein would be another good name, since the Adelsverein was the name of the organization that financed the most famous influx of German settlers.)
Balcones Heights, the name of the area where I live, and the Balcones Escarpment, the geological feature dividing Texas in two and on which San Antonio is built.

San Fernando Cathedral.

And Kelly and Randolph Air Force bases. Damon was working at Kelly when I met him, and we were stationed at Randolph when my little sister was born.

We all have these networks in our heads. Exploring them can be fruitful, or merely dizzying.

Two Frustrations

I was going to turn my blog black for American Censorship Day, but the html Blogger gives me to work with is so mind-bogglingly in need of a good proofreader I chickened out of figuring out where to put the necessary code string. So that's one.

The second is, yesterday I figured out what the problem is with fixing the pacing in the lesbian Western.

It's already paced the way I like it!

The thing is, I wrote this book so I could go back in time, in company with Len, and have a good long visit in Central Texas in Spring 1865. I like all the looking around at the landscape and observation of her surroundings and savoring of food she does. Len is a person who enjoys everything there is to enjoy as much as she can while she can, and she and I are happy for it to be so.

So a lot of what I need to take out is stuff she and I, the people telling the story, care about; but can't expect the audience to.

Yeah, I'll get rid of it. Len and I are both realists and we'll be in the minority on this issue. But the more concentrated, action-oriented story I'm aiming for is one I personally will enjoy less than the one I've got. So that takes a lot of the fun out of revising.

Texas Archeology Month!

It's almost upon us - the state's very own Idea Garage Sale, when museums, archeologists, historical sites, and chambers of commerce open history up and shake it out for public amusement. I don't care how uncreative you think you are - the more you learn about Texas history, the more inspired you'll get.

Here's a smattering of upcoming events, with an emphasis of course on the things that interest me most.
Oct. 1 - Tour of Archeological Ruins of Rancho de las Cabras, Wilson County but within the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
Oct. 8 - Archeological Information and Civil War Symposium, Gainesville - Topics at the symposium include "forts, funeral practices during the Civil War, fashions, cotton, and plantations." Also child-centric activities.
Oct. 12 - Face to Face with the Son of America, Huntsville - Forensic artist presents her facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skull found in a cave on the Brazos River.
Oct. 14-16 Rock Art Foundation Annual Rendezvous, Val Verde County - A tent campout with tours of remote prehistoric art sites; only one of several events centered on the hard-to-see Pecos Valley art; plus nature walk, of course. Action! Adventure! Romance! (Well, you'll have to bring your own romance, but tell me you don't see an opening trailer in your head right now, based on knowing such an event exists.)
Oct. 17 - "How Texas Won the Civil War," Lecture by Dr. Donald. S. Frazier of McMurry University, Abilene; Houston - hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, laying out the ways Texas benefited by the late unpleasantness.
Oct. 22 - Gault Site Tour, Bell County. Preregistration required, openings limited, but they also do it on the third Saturday of every month so if you miss October, don't despair.
Oct. 29 - Murder Mayhem and Misadventure Walking Tour at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin - to "highlight the lives and dramatic deaths of local early citizens."

Nov. 18-20 - 2011 Hot Rocks Cook-Off in College Station, "demonstrations and scientific experiments using Native American earth-oven cookery and stone boiling." (Are you smelling a cookbook? I sure am.)

Yeah, I think that's a pretty representative sample. Go look at the calendar - there's something that intrigues you. I need to start planning my month - October's not that far away and I know I can't do more than a fraction of what I'd like to, but that's no reason to miss what I can do.

Extended Comment on Yesterday's Newslink

This is the same watershed as the Gault site, which I've mentioned here before, and it's a sign of the state of science reporting that it is not mentioned and the team there was not asked anything, probably because the reporter didn't know to do so. And yet, it's the totality of evidence from a number of related sights that's going to get us as close as we're going to get to the truth.

It drives me batty that popular sources are still talking about "Clovis First" as the default model and single sites as if they are going to be the revolutionary discovery that changes everybody's mind. That's already happened - Dillehay's Monte Verde site in Chile. The number and quality of Preclovis sites grows steadily and they are all important.

The Clovis First model is not true. The people who believe it's true are the people who are simply too old to change their minds. We'll stop getting articles presenting the underdog Preclovis vs. the Clovis First folks when we get enough information about the people who preceded Clovis to create a coherent picture of a culture and give that culture a proper name. The term Preclovis defines a people by what they're not, which makes them hard to hold onto.

If, as seems likely, the "Preclovis" were not a single cohesive culture (why should they be, with sites as far apart as Chile, Alaska, and Pennsylvania?) but a number of wildly disparate ones, many of the traces of which were drowned at the end of the Ice Age, we could be at this a long time. It may be that the Central Texas Preclovis documented at Gault and Friedekind were cultural outliers who will in time become entrenched in textbooks as The Definitive First Culture, a view which will be pitched by future reporters as the Orthodox one against which the revolutionary information being discovered via new offshore digging technology is pitched in an underdog battle.

Idea Garage Sale: The Holly and the Ivy

I think we all go through phases of being in love with certain songs and wanting to dig out a story that makes sense of them. When I was in high school, I became haunted by the carol "The Holly and the Ivy," and the fact that though the ivy is part of the title, the holly got all the lines; in fact, it seems to be deliberately dissed in the opening verse:

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

So what is the ivy - chopped liver? Why'd you even bring it up if you were just going to rant on about how cool the holly is?

So I started blocking out a story, in which Holly and Ivy were fraternal twins, born on Christmas Eve. Holly was the dominant twin - the bright, pretty, popular one. Ivy was the one who trailed along after her cleaning up her messes. So Holly is the one who experiments with the grimoire and turns herself into a deer; and Ivy is the one who has to figure out how to break the spell, without making things worse.

And there's a lot of worse to get. To begin with, magic is a tricky thing, and they live in West Texas, where they're surrounded by people who believe in magic and that it is all of the devil. Ivy has no friendly neighborhood Wiccan to turn to, but can find plenty of people who think that by even asking questions about magic she's inviting the devil into her soul. I never solved the question of where the grimoire came from, but I did have a vague idea of a trickster figure who appeared in various guises - including attractive young man (hey, I was 15 or 16, and I wasn't Twilight fan material but I was human) - and who could steer her in the right direction if she could learn the delicate art of handling him for maximum benefit.

Another thing about the West Texas setting - it's getting on for Christmas, and that's hunting season. Holly is running around the ranch looking like a deer. Normally hunters prefer bucks, of course, but Holly makes a particularly clueless deer. She's too human to interpret what her animal senses tell her and make good decisions for her situation, but too animal to use her human knowledge base properly. And she's being destructive. If a doe is breaking into your barn and eating up your feed, knocking down your fences, and trampling the garden, and it's hunting season, yes, you're going to shoot her and eat her. If the city guys on the deer lease don't kill her, her own father and brothers will.

This strikes me now as the most interesting portion of the story, allowing me to deal realistically, through fantasy, with both interfamily politics and hunting culture. Nobody in my family hunts, but I've lived among too many hunters to buy into either the pro- or anti-hunting extremist rhetoric that is all one generally sees in media. Back when I originally conceived the story, though, this was a side thought, a way of generating time pressure for solving the main problem of how to turn Holly back. The spell reversal would involved the rising of the sun, the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ, and sweet singing in the choir, but I never quite worked out how.

Nor - and this is why I never got far with it - could I figure out the ending. All right, Ivy turns Holly back into herself. How does this change their relationship? How did being a deer change Holly; how did rescuing her sister change Ivy? How much does Holly remember? What about that young handsome trickster? I have to know the end of a story before I start it, or I'll never finish it.

It also partook of that "November" feeling I mentioned last month; that cold and vaguely mystical feeling I had in West Texas winter. I think I lost my capacity to experience that sensation fully when my temporal lobes finished growing in; at least, I can't seem to recapture it now. So the time, if there ever was one, when I could have written this story would seem to be past.

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Idea Garage Sale: November Story

I used to get a certain mood in November in West Texas. For those of you who have never lived there - i.e. most people in the world - West Texas is what is known as a "semi-arid" landscape. This means that it's not the Mojave, Sahara, or Saudi Peninsula, we have vegetation year-round most places, and that our droughts are about 7 years long. San Angelo, where I lived from the time I was ten till I left for college, bills itself as "the wool capitol of the world," but if anybody of my generation recognizes the name, it will be from receiving Laugh-In's Fickle Finger of Fate Award when its reservoir caught fire.

If rain falls, it will probably be in May or October, causing floods. But all the same, most of the Novembers I spent there were misty, humidity hovering in the chilly air that came down from the Arctic (there being nothing between San Angelo and the North Pole but a bobwire fence, and I hear that fence is down) without ever precipitating. The hard, bright sun of summer hides behind solid cloud banks that never, ever rain. The leaves are off the scrubby trees, except for the dull green cedar and live oak. Looking out from - well, from anywhere - you can see the curvature of the earth, dun grass fading into blue-gray sky spattered with restless flocks of black birds, grackles mostly. The perpetual West Texas wind doesn't fail, but when its not dragging clouds of dust down from the Panhandle and Oklahoma, it creeps along at a melancholy pace, and it smells wrong. Hunting season starts, and you're likely to encounter a quiescent lump of deer on your way to the icehouse for a candy bar. (Also, I get really awful sinus problems, so I'm drugged to the gills to begin with.)

I made endless attempts during my eight-year tenure there to write something that would convey the emotional state of November to somebody else. But I haven't much use for mood writing, and emotional states are awkward to plot. Here's one I started writing and couldn't finish, though I knew exactly how it should read.

Marion Jabot lives in what my Mom called a "crackerbox" house next door to the local cat lady's bungalow. She was an unspecified school age, probably junior high or high school (I think I tried to write this when I was twelve), she has an Airedale named Bobo, and she hates cats. She teaches Bobo to chase them, because she thinks they're sly and evil and up to something. Even after the cat lady (Annie Wise; I don't know why these names stay with me so well) dies and the cats are all hauled away, the bungalow standing empty, she sees cats gathering there in huge numbers, night after night. Bobo sees them, too. Bobo is afraid of them. But no one else notices anything unusual.

I no longer remember - perhaps this is a plot point I never solved - how she and Bobo were to get trapped, alone, overnight in the bungalow. It would be a November night, and the cats would corner her, led by a huge tortoiseshell with glowing eyes, who she identifies with Annie Wise; perhaps as her reincarnation, perhaps as her witch's familiar, for Annie Wise is patently a witch figure. They would be everywhere, all glowing eyes and silent movement and savage claws and teeth. She and Bobo would try to attack, but they melt away in one part only to surround them more closely in another, until they give up and huddle together in a circle of cats, all night. The tortoiseshell would walk all over them, make eye contact. And when the sun rose, they would all go away, leaving Marian and her dog exhausted, bewildered, and unharmed; beyond the knowledge that the cats she hated, who certainly could have killed her if they'd cared to, didn't care to and weren't malevolent at all. Her idea of cats had nothing to do with the reality of cats, and everything to do with who she was, herself.

And that would be what November feels like in West Texas.

Naw, I didn't think you'd get it. Maybe you could if Ray Bradbury wrote it, or August Derleth, on a good day, like when he wrote "The Lonesome Place." But it was way more than I could do when I was twelve, and I've gone in entirely different directions since then.

And November in San Antonio doesn't feel that way at all.

Idea Garage Sale: The Skeletons in the Cave

Friday and Saturday I took more research trips, but Sunday is reserved for the Garage Sale, so let it suffice to say that taking my speed two days in a row has proven to be well worth the inevitable caffeine hangover today, not to mention the six-hour round trip to Del Rio. The Val Verde County Archeology Fair had relatively little archeology alongside quite a lot of history - did you know they have Rip Ford's own flag on display there? Wow!

Anyway, I picked up a rumor; and it will seem to you also to be a no-brainer, an idea anybody, even a non-writer, would recognize as a potential story. A person I wouldn't know again if he bit me told me that a friend of his he didn't name, at a time he didn't specify, was working as a cowboy for a man with a ranch not far (on a scale not defined) from the site of the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces. In a cave on this ranch, he found skeletons. He was intensely curious about them, but as the cave is on private property belonging to his then employer, he did nothing about them.

As Texas readers probably know, the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces is a notorious and fraught incident in 1862 in which a party of "German" military-age men, with a variety of reasons to get out of Texas, were hunted down by a party of Confederate troops. The Germans fought (hence, Battle) and were defeated. Some escaped, some were killed, and of those captured, many were, ahem, summarily executed. (Hence, Massacre. Oddly, I think I am now the first to suggest that "lynched" is a better term. See "fraught" in the first sentence.) "German" did not necessarily mean to a nineteenth-century Texan what it means to a modern American, hence the quotes; but the term is good enough for now.

As I said - the discovery of skeletons in a cave near the site of such an event is a story idea so obvious anyone could recognize it as such; but this obviousness is deceptive. The person passing on the rumor himself brought up the mystery of the identity of the skeletons: Germans or Indians? Other possibilities include settlers, travelers, crime victims, and modern lost hikers. The cowboy witness could probably provide details that would narrow the classification, but since this is a rumor we have endless freedom to speculate.

But we also have another mystery here. The cowboy could not satisfy his curiosity about the skeletons because they were on private land; but if he's going around talking about them, he must have reported them to the property owner. Who wouldn't? And if such a discovery was reported to the owner, why did he not himself follow up? The first thing most of us would do, after such a report, would be to pick up the phone and call the relevant criminal authority; a sizable majority of those who did not do so would ride out to take a look for themselves, and then do so.

And this is where the writer starts earning her pay, because this is where you start making characters and determining what the story is. What reasons might there be not to call the authorities? Is the property owner a murderer who thought his crime was safe from discovery in that cave? Does he have something else out there he doesn't want authorities to see? Does he - like many rural property owners in Texas - have a prejudice against the intellectual investigation of historical and archeological sites and fear loss of control of his land? An archeological dig can in fact be pretty disruptive. Though in Texas, at least, a land owner's least valid objection will trump anyone else's most legitimate interest, you wouldn't know it to hear many people talk; and eminent domain can do some pretty-high-handed things, even here. Perhaps he's paranoid, or perhaps there are local conditions that make not reporting skeletons which appear to him old enough (or thinks he can identify by context well enough) not to be relevant to any modern crime. Perhaps he's protecting an ancestor's part in a shameful incident from public knowledge; or perhaps he fears what would be discovered about his ancestors if the remains are subject to forensic analysis.

The vagueness of the initial stimulus to the imagination leaves plenty of room for the imagination to function. The difference between a wannabe writer and a writer is, that the wannabe either lacks the imagination to think of possibilities beyond the first suggested to him and runs with a story full of assumptions, cliches, and bad history; or falters, bewildered, unable to choose among a bewildering variety of possibilities.

A non-fiction writer, of course, tries to solve the mystery using the academic and journalistic toolset - interviews, document searches, lead-following. A fiction writer decides what kind of story she wants to make, weeds out the possibilities that don't suit that story, and does the research that will support the endeavor to write that story. I write for young people, so I might go right back to the cowboy discoverer and transform him into a party of exploring children, or into the property owner's oldest son out riding with his girlfriend, or maybe -- ooh, this is an exciting thought, a teen-age illegal immigrant hiding from murderous coyotes, or merely from immigration officials. There's a person with a motive not to report them for you! But where does that lead? An immigrant wouldn't know about the Battle/Massacre, but will interpret them in his own fashion, and where is the story that stems from that interpretation?

Tony Hillerman could have done a lot with this core idea, dealing as he did with the confluence of living culture, academia, history, archeology, and crime. I am attracted to the idea of the ranch family, proud of their history and perhaps feeling embattled in the face of modern economic, ecologic, and political developments, fearing to learn too much about the history of their legendary founding father, and yet desperately needing to know what the skeletons could tell them about him and his circumstances. A Disney exec might see a handy framework for a save-the-family-ranch plot. A mystery? A thriller? A fantastic magical realist exploration of the psychogeography of the West? A straightforward Western with an ethnic German twist? A journalistic investigation?

We all start at the same trailhead, but the trail we follow will be different for each of us.

And this is why no real working author is afraid that her ideas will be stolen! It's not only unnecessary; it's not possible. Every idea that enters our heads changes and becomes ours. It doesn't matter who else's head it lives in, too.

So How Fussy Am I?

The best place to locate a cliff, it appears, is the Hill Country State Nature Area. I camped here once, years ago, with a friend of mine and I'm here to tell you, those trails are rugged. W and I barely made a .75-mile trail in an afternoon (though we did boldly take the hardest route). I could probably write something tolerable based on that experience, but I feel the need for a refresher.

Now, ideally, I would camp in May, with a horse - though even I don't think improving the story is worth jumping the horse off a cliff. If I rode a horse and my companion rode a camel, that would be even better. Think of the realistic detail I could gather; the sights, sounds, smells, animal behavior, aches, pains, sunburn, wildflower assemblages, detailed maps!

But I've never ridden a horse - not really ridden one, as opposed to a half hour tooling around a barnlot on one when I was a kid. And there's this balance thing. And this story is going too well (self-doubt and all) to break if off and wait till May; though since I'm not likely to sell it before then I could always go back next May and make some revision based on that.

When I write a book, I do not want anybody (and 11-year-olds will do this!) with more experience than me writing and telling me "You've got that wrong." I hate it when I read a book or watch a movie set in San Antonio and they've got the geography or the accent or the bus system wrong. I love it when I recognize a place, though, and we all get a thrill when the author gets it right, whatever "it" is.

I won't write about a lot of things I'm interested in - no homo floresiensis novels for me; I'll never do that Populating the Americas Saga (remind me to put those in the garage sale) because there's no prospect of my getting the settings right. I can't afford the money, the time, or the health to visit Indonesia or kayak along the route I believe the first settlers of America followed. There's not even any realistic prospect of looking at northwestern American sites like On Your Knees Cave.

But one of the reasons I read and write so much is that I want to do so much more than I will ever be physically able to do. Vicarious experience is better than none. If I restrict myself to Texas as a setting, I have a much better shot at producing work that meets my own standards, at researching the specific things I need to research. Access to locations, artifacts, and primary sources is easier the closer to home you look. It doesn't help with the balance issues, though.

So I'll have to feel my way here. I regret the not riding most of all, given how important Bean is turning out to be. Maybe I'll be able to ride a little; but no way will that approximate Len's experience riding the horse she hand-raised. Maybe I'll load and shoot a muzzle-loader at a target, but I'll have to take testimony about shooting supper with it and reconstruct killing in self-defense imaginatively.

Which is what imagination and beta readers are for. If I can get W and B to vet the parts of the manuscript dealing with horses and guns, respectively, they should protect me from receiving correction letters from 11-year-olds or gravely offending older people who will never contact me, but will give me bad word of mouth. I expect to get plenty enough bad word of mouth from a large part of this book's natural readership - the people who live in Bexar, Medina, and Bandera counties - just because it's a lesbian western. It would be nice to win a few people over in spite of their disapproval of Len's sexual identity on the basis of my authentic portrayal of the western experience. "Yeah, she's going to hell but she knows her stuff."

I could live with ambivalent praise like that. But first I'll have to earn it. If I earn it and don't get it - well, that's the breaks.

Research Walk

Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.

See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.

Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as

running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.

As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.

Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.

So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!

I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.

I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.

And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.

I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.

But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.

And again.

And again.

Filling in the Blanks: An Idea Garage Sale Interlude

It is a truth not at all universally acknowledged that scientists and historians, when interpreting data, are making stories every bit as much as novelists are.

The big difference between a theory or hypothesis and a story is that a story is entitled to bridge gaps and fill in story holes with invention; whereas the most a theory or hypothesis is allowed to do is to point out a hole and offer suggestions for where to look and what to do in order to fill it. If these suggestions are investigated and pan out, this is called "successful prediction" and the hypothesis is strengthened; if investigation contradicts the hypothesis, the hypothesis is discarded or changed, as appropriate.

A fiction writer can, up to a certain point, change her story to accommodate new information, too, but once she's published she's locked in for the duration. Jean Auel, for example, is now stuck with inarticulate Neanderthals even though evidence uncovered since the first publication of Clan of the Cave Bear indicates that they would have had a full range of phonics available to them.

I do not, at the moment, have all the available data behind the site of the dig just completed at the Old Alsatian Steakhouse site in Castroville, but based on the data I have - consisting of local tradition, US Army reports, and the parts of the dig I witnessed - this is what went down.

In April of 1861, due to the secession of Texas from the Union, all units of the US Army were recalled from the frontier. Ben McCulloch, with dubious authority, corralled General Twiggs of the San Antonio garrison and persuaded him to surrender. His men were variously imprisoned or inducted into the Confederate Army (more or less) and their equipment confiscated. When Robert E. Lee came through town on his way to report to Washington, McCulloch demanded his surrender, too, but Lee declared that, though he had not yet decided where his duty lay, he knew he owned none to "any rebel government of Texas" and refused. His luggage was confiscated, and was still in San Antonio when the war ended.

The garrisons of the distant frontier forts Quitman, Davis, and Bliss were still en route to civilization in early May. When they reached Castroville - which, despite the presence of a castle of the Knights of the Golden Circle, voted overwhelmingly against secession - they were warned of a force being sent out to meet them from San Antonio. The force arrayed against them was variously reported as somewhere between 1500 and 1700 (the offical count was 1370) and included cavalry and artillery to the tune of six field pieces. The full force of the US Army at the time of leaving the frontier was 320, including 12 musicians. The meeting of these two forces at San Lucas Springs 15 miles west of San Antonio on May 9 was not so much a battle as a surrender, since by then the Union force had been reduced to 270 by "sickness, desertion, and stragglers...who remained at Castroville from drunkenness and other causes." (All this is according to the official report.)

At some point in the process of straggling and getting drunk in one of Castroville's 30+ liquor-providing establishments, some contingent of the US forces got into conversation with one of Karle family, Unionists who had recently purchased a property on the corner of Houston Square from the equally Unionist Widow Krust on condition that they build her a little house in the rear of the property and rent it to her at a dollar a year. Ben McCulloch was confiscating all the US Army-owned equipment he could get his hands on for the Confederacy. To prevent this, Mr. Karle offered his property as a dump site for anything the people he was talking to wished to get rid of. The soldiers took him up on this offer, unlimbered their trenching tools, and dug a deep, narrow pit on the east side of his smokehouse.

According to local story, these soldiers wished to take their chances heading north on their own, so they would have counted in the official report as deserters, though they were motivated by a desire to evade capture and report for duty with the nearest Union forces. Based on the number of mule bits found, all jumbled together, and the quantity of black leather, at least one of them was a mule driver. At least four people dumped their sabre belts, and one officer knew about the plan, because the leather holster of his sidearm wound up in the pit; though in the absence of an officer named in the report as a deserter I conclude that he gave the sidearm to one of the deserters, wished him well, and returned to his duty station. Mr. Karle donated some meat from the cookhouse (possibly fearing that the soldiers would break in and help themselves if he didn't), and they ate and drank as they dug, dozens of wine and beer bottles finding their way into the pit. Perhaps Mr. Karle, originally planning to do a kindness to one or two people, grew fearful as more men showed up - so many, and so drunk, and him with children in the house! An infection of fear spread through the soldiers as their alcohol intake increased, so that they dumped armloads of harness and belts willy-nilly till, perhaps, dawn approached. The soldiers covered the hole, but the disturbance of the ground was visible, so the Karles, along with Frau Krust, piled trash on top of it as the men lurched away.

The spot became the household's regular dumping spot for all manner of trash until garbage service was introduced in the 20th century. Once or twice, before the construction of Medina Dam upstream changed the flood zones, it was inundated. The cookhouse deteriorated and underwent repair, fences came and went, tenants came and went.

In the early 21st century, Ken Smith rented a portion of the property from Don Belcher, the current owner, for a restaurant, and undertook extensive renovations to the portion of the sprawling structure (comprised of four different houses) containing the restaurant space. Belcher agreed to the construction of a barbeque pit by the old cookhouse, and his son participated in part of the work. Belcher Jr. knew the trash pit contained interesting junk, as he had once found a US Army belt buckle out there, and worn it for some years. Sure enough, he and his fellow workers pulled out lots of bottles (some of which they smashed for the fun of it), belt buckles, a huge interlocking mass of mule bits, a leather holster, and another belt buckle, before Arlene Smith asked them to stop. As a member of the local historical society, she knew an archeological site when she saw one, but it took her most of a year to find an archeologist who was interested. At last she did, and the TAS field school was the result.

We never found what we most wanted - the insignia of the 8th infantry, which would have confirmed the identity of the people doing the dumping - unless it turned up in the last bucket of the last day, the one I was too dizzy to attend. Everything we found was consistent with the story I told here, but a number of different interpretations are also possible. Maybe the Karles didn't volunteer. Maybe they were intimidated by drunken ruffians intent on escape, or maybe the drunken ruffians dug the pit by night without consulting them, or maybe the drunks broke into the smokehouse and littered the property with their cast-offs, leaving the Karles to dig the pit in order to hide the material and avoid the condemnation of their few, but triumphant, secessionist neighbors. Maybe the material doesn't date from this period at all, though since Castroville was never a military station it's hard to match any other event with the distinctive army gear found. (All those mule bits!) Maybe there was more than one deposition of army gear, or it was moved to this location from another one at some point - with so many artifacts coming out of an unstratified pile of barbeque pit spoil, the available stratigraphy doesn't prove much.

As a novelist, I can pick a story and run with it. As a historian or scientist, I would have to acknowledge lots of alternative scenarios and try to suggest further action that could give us more information. In this case, a painstaking document search (including perusal of private sources from the time, such as letters and diaries) and digging up even more of the yard and or digging deeper are almost the only options.

If you go to the Old Alsatian (and I recommend it - they accommodate dietary restrictions and the food is wonderful) and ask Ken or Arlene or a random server, they will happily tell you their version of the above story, which will differ from mine in many respects because they are not me. They will also, with varying degrees of prompting, tell you another story, one the historians and archeologists won't, about the daughter of the Karle family who died in 1856 at the age of 16, was buried in the yard, and now haunts the dining patio. They might even tell you that the dig turned up part of her gravestone.

This last detail is not true. While moving the rock fence, field school members found a slab of native limestone with a broken edge and the numbers "56" carved into it, but the carving is far too casual for a gravestone and by 1856 the cemetery at Cross Hill was well-established. There would have been no reason for the good Catholic Karles (remember that rosary? And the property is cattycorner from the church) to bury a daughter in the yard.

Unless she was a suicide and the priest refused to bury her in sacred ground; as I thought, but did not say. I would never slander the memory of these people, whose family still live in the vicinity and of whom I have heard nothing negative, by openly positing such a thing. But if I were writing a story, and I weren't using Castroville but an analog small town, and I needed a grave in the yard - well, that would be different.

When telling a story, you do what's good for the story. Facts are useful servants but a bad master to a storyteller, and as long as that's clear in everyone's head, no harm is done. Nor should we blame the Smiths if the stories they tell their patrons polish the rough edges and fill in the holes of the messy, incomplete truth. A historic restaurant without a ghost, especially in an area with a high tourist traffic, is at a commercial disadvantage; and one with a ghost moving bottles or appearing as an apparition without any explanatory tale attached is not much better off.

Stories. We all make them, and we all use approximately the same methods to do so, whether as historians, as novelists, or as contributors to the oral tradition. The difference lies in the use to which we put the stories and the degree to which we lock them into final form. History and the oral tradition are fluid and can be adjusted with the discovery of new facts or (in the case of oral tradition) new motives in telling the tale. Only fiction has a point at which it is locked in; in which case, you'd better tell it well enough that the audience that now has better information is willing to set that information aside and believe in your story for the time it takes to read it.

TAS Field School, Day 6; and Happy Juneteenth!

First of all - if you don't know what Juneteenth is, stop a minute and feel happy anyway. June 19 is the day Federal troops arrived at Galveston and said "Yes, we will enforce the Emancipation Proclamation so let those people go already."

They then proceeded to muck things up in various ways, but at least the black population of the south wasn't stuck in neutral anymore. It was seriously argued right up to this day that the Federal government couldn't possibly, really, truly, no way, end slavery; they'd just curtail it or confine it or or or something that keeps our poor delicate white backs out of the cotton patch. A year later it was still being argued that "free" didn't have to mean "full citizen," either, and of course it didn't - "free" white women couldn't vote in most US elections, and though most pre-war feminists were also more or less abolitionist, the decision to extend the franchise to black men and not to women of any description split the cause of civil rights in ways it still hasn't recovered from.

But anyway. For some reason I had my dates out of step all week. I kept thinking that the last day of the field school was the 17th and that was good because my husband Damon needed the car on the 18th, when I should have been thinking the 18th and 19th respectively. It turned out to be just as well, though, because yesterday I had vertigo something awful and would have wrecked Moby on the way to the Castroville. So I can't report yet (I hope to hear) what turned up on the last day. On the next to the last day my balance was already going off, so rather than getting to dig up the unit I'd been sitting on - and which turned up lots of metal, bottles, leather, and a big batch of bone (causing us all to picture the 8th Infantry having a barbeque as they dumped their gear) - I started on a unit up top with Claire. My balance was already going off, so I screened a lot more than I dug. People with inner ear problems shouldn't have their heads lower than their butts.

The Civil War era stuff was all deep, of course. Our surface-level unit was a bit of a formality. Pits have to be wider at the top than at the bottom for safety's sake, and the only directly relevant information we were going to get from the surface would be a sense of just how disturbed this trash pit was, how big it was at different times, and what different uses might have gone into it. If we find Civil War stuff at level 3, for example, when the main bulk is at level 8, we know that either there were two episodes of deposition of Civil War material or somebody before us has disturbed the Civil War strata, either shoving some of the artifacts down or bringing some of them up.

But the question you're asking of a site right now isn't the only question that could be asked of it - that's why "irrelevant" material is still curated, waiting for someone to come along asking other questions. And one of the satisfactions of archeology is to dig up artifacts that make you feel close to the inhabitants. Clair uncovered a button, a barrel hoop, hundreds of nails both round (modern) and square (19th-century), and a curling iron.

The curling iron illustrated one of the great truths of archeology - one person's mystery is another person's familiar household implement. Jesi, the crew chief who dug with Claire while I was screening, turned up what he at first thought was a burst metal pipe, but it had something riveted to it and, on examination, the apparent bursting was two pieces that fit together, a round pipe fitting into a half-pipe and rusted together. Claire knew it immediately for a curling iron, and when I saw it end-on I recognized it, too - as did every other woman on the site that day. The men didn't even know what a curling iron is.

This, as well as the need for man-hours of labor, is why archeology is done in teams. Nobody can know everything (though an experienced person can know a hell of a lot within his area of expertise). I knew enough to recognize herbivore molars attached to a jaw when they turned up in the screen, but Jesi, whose folks are from cow country, recognized them as calf. One person can identify spent .22 cartridges, another knows the difference between a steelie marble and round shot, somebody knows blackletter German or the proper terms for buttons or the difference between a horseshoe and a muleshoe or the dates of local flood events and how far they extended. Yes, you can look things up, but that takes awhile. Lynn had a lot of hard copy data on US Army equipment and insignia, but at the time I left the dig no one had identified the wing brooch, which looked like insignia to us.

I'm still tired, so tune in tomorrow (or Monday if I crash again) to find out what this dig was all about and get the lowdown on the ghost.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the crew that was still here when the picture was taken on - Thursday? Friday? It all runs together in my head. Some faces are missing because the participants fluctuated from day to day. By missing Friday I probably got left out of a picture and missed the lunch the owners of the Old Alsatian were talking about hosting for us (and it would have been wonderful, too).


Lynn Yakubik, primary investigator, is center front. I'm at the right at the end with my water bottle, and Claire Younkin is standing behind me. I hope I'm still doing this stuff when I'm 84 like her! Jesi is the young guy behind her on the end of the last row, and I'm already beginning to forget the names of everybody else.

TAS Field School, Day 5

It wasn't Level 4, it was Level 5. I suck at tracking numbers. And the mass of leather hanging at the edge of the pit disintegrated under even finger-screening, but we have a lot of leather so that's all right. It had done its job. When we shovel-skimmed Unit 5 down to 80 centimeters below surface, you could clearly see where the edge of the original trash pit was - we'd been digging, probably, in the spoil of that pit - on the north end, and the shovel test started turning up leather and rusty metal again.

We now have a terraced pit with enough room to work the floor, which we swept so Lynn could take an overview and decide where to dig. I think she said we'd checkerboard 4 units but I was pretty punchy by the end of the day and might be wrong.

I am so tired I had to rest all afternoon to have the strength to form these sentences. Major caffeination tomorrow morning, or I'll just be in the way.

Tomorrow is the last day. Everybody knows the best stuff comes out on the last day.

TAS Field School, Days 3 & 4

Yesterday was the day the business of rising and setting with the sun and working all morning caught up with me. I was too zonked to think, much less post coherently. So today I took my speed - as my husband calls the morning cup of fully caffeinated tea in which I normally cannot indulge if I hope to sleep - and as a result I'm fit to report.

Not that there's much to report. We have six units open and all have been relatively disappointing after the heady first day's screening. I've been kneeling in the future barbeque pit scraping nearly-sterile (except for ants, hackberry roots, and such) dirt and reflecting that either only a handful of men ditched their military equipment here, or I'm kneeling on a gold mine. And I got some evidence to back me up this morning when I found another couple of those rivets-with-leather and familiar-looking corroded plain buckles that were so abundant in "the pile," right on the edge of the south wall, which is also the north side of the pit. There's a corroded bone (probably a ham or beef shoulder blade) right at level and some color changes in the dirt indicative of rust and leather. When I tried brushing the dirt away from the bone, a piece of it broke away from the wall and some leather-and-rivet jumped out from below it. If anything cool is to be found in Unit 5, Level 4 - opened bright and early tomorrow - is where it will be found. At some point tomorrow or Thursday the bottom of the pit will be shovel tested - i.e. a limited area dug straight down - to check the gold mine hypothesis.

I've also meta woman who gave me the phone number of someone in the Quihi Historical Society and took me to a place where I saw a blackpoll warbler (life bird!), so I personally am ahead for the week even if we've found all there is to find.

TAS Field School, Day 1

I am a little wiped and my feet hurt, and I almost certainly will be too tired to pick a garage sale idea tomorrow, but I thought I'd note down today's highlights.

Under Lynn Yakubik, of the Center for Archeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, we spent the day screening the spoil pile that accumulated between the point that the Smiths, of the Old Alsatian Restaurant, started digging their barbeque pit and the point at which they realized they needed to stop and call in the archeologist. One of the crew chiefs and a volunteer did a preliminary profile of the pit while everybody else screened for "Field Sack #1." By the end of the day we were up to Field Sack 1-32 or thereabouts - somebody may have logged in a sack or two after the last one I saw. Because this was all disturbed dirt there was no point trying to track it too closely. We weren't going to get any information from the position of any object.

We did, however, find cool stuff. Numerous bottles, both ceramic and glass, in various states of shatter, some with the features that should make them identifiable with certain time periods or tasks - at least one bottle of blueing, lots of ginger beer and wine bottles, and "J. Hos...tomach" in clear glass. Lots and lots and lots of broken window glass from a known source, so much that we were told to not collect glass fragments smaller than a quarter or a 50-cent piece. (The majority of the volunteers here were old enough to know how big a 50-cent piece was; the younger contingent stayed in Hondo for the prehistoric Indian dig.) Some large ceramics, some more delicate ceramics, one flint scraper, and plenty of rusty metal - chains, nails, mule bits, barrel hoops, and less recognizable rusty lumps. I personally probably curated a bunch of old twigs, because at this level of corrosion it's hard to tell a nail from a clay-clodded twig. Shell, ceramic, and bone buttons; but none of the metal U.S. Army buttons we hoped to find. The screening table I shared with Judy Wayland and Charles Locke produced quite a bit of black leather, much of it in association with metal bits, mostly rivets but some buckles or links. It looked like harness to me, but we don't decide that, the lab people do. We also found part of a broken pipe. And quite a bit of bone - the site was adjacent to a smokehouse, after all.

The big finds for today were two intact US Army belt buckles, with some black leather attached, consistent with sabre belts of the 1851 issue; and a small metal comb for holding the hair in place, with about half the teeth intact and an embossed design. I should remember the names of the people who found those, but I'm blanking. I'll get people more firmly attached to their names tomorrow.

It was different from Gault in some ways (indoor plumbing, dry screening, glass and metal, different priorities in the curation) but alike in the most important ones. Lots of artifacts even in the relatively disappointing buckets, for one. And a lot of nice people working together and geeking out over cool finds, for another.

Natural History Across Time

You can't just research one thing at a time. It's not possible.

I spent yesterday at the Castroville Public Library looking at the local history reference materials in the break room next to the hamster. I started with Medina County History, Vol. I (Vol. II is still in production) and am going through systematically, skimming for certain dates and types of data. In an aside in the article on Freemasonry, Mr. Yancy Russell informed me that the town of Quihi was named after the "white-necked Mexican eagle," by which I presumed he meant the caracara, and wondered who called it a quihi. In the Quihi article by Josie Rothe Finger, she claims that the area supported a large number of distinctive birds. "Popularly known as the Mexican eagle, it was a large brown bird with white feathers on tail and tips of wings." The Indians called it Keechee. The Mexicans spelled this "Quichi." The Germans who founded the town chopped out the c when they came to spell it.

Although I wouldn't have used either description (as far as I'm concerned, the caracara is the bird of prey it's easy to confuse with the black-crowned night heron), when I compare the combined descriptions to the caracara, I find that the field marks are accurate as far as they go. They omit the red face and dark crest, but at any distance, and especially when flying, the white throat, tail, and wingtips ("white at all four corners", per Peterson) are diagnostic. So I have added to my vocabulary of regional bird monikers, and note the reliability of old-timers describing nature without optics or field guides.

Then I ate my lunch outside in the arbor behind the building, and read A Texas Pioneer, by August Santleben. Santleben has only one chapter on the Civil War, but his account of his postwar life hauling freight between Texas and Mexico is intrinsically interesting. Here I read the following description of the fauna of Mesa de Vidaurri in northern Mexico:

Cinnamon and common black bears, tigers, panthers, and Mexican lions were common and dangerous; other animals also were numerous, including the mountain sheep of Mexico that have immense horns that serve to protect them when forced by danger to jump down precipices. On such occasions their bodies and limbs are drawn into a lump and they fall without injury on their enormous curved horns, which throw them a somersault before landing them on their feet.

Oooookay.

Santleben doesn't claim to have witnessed this astonishing feat, and to be fair animals are adapted to their environments in so many surprising ways that this means of descending a hill can be placed in a context so as to look plausible. I can even imagine somebody once seeing a bighorn come a cropper and, by freak accident, somersault on his horns and depart without injury. But I can't help thinking somebody, probably one of the locals, was drawing the longbow for Santleben's benefit.

The cinnamon bear, as you probably know, is a color morph or a subspecies (depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter) of the American black bear. The word "tiger" used by an English speaker in the Southwestern US or in Mexico usually refers to the jaguar, colloquially called "el tigre." The terms "panther" and "Mexican lion" are used interchangeably in America, along with painter, puma, cougar, catamount, sneak cat, mountain devil (screamer, or demon), king cat, and a few dozen other names, for that wonderfully successful American big cat, felis concolor. The difference in nomenclature may, or may not, indicate recognition of two different subspecies with overlapping territory in the region. Another possibility is that the tendency to call melanistic spotted cats "panthers" dates back to the 19th century, and use of the term indicates a population of black jaguars on the mesa.

This sort of confusion is only to be expected, and gets worse the closer the source is to the Old Country. In Castroville, Texas 1844-1899, Illustrated by 3 Pioneer Families, the Pichots, Pingevotes, & Ihnkens, Yvonne Chandler Ludwig remarks on the odd creatures the earliest Castro Colonists, fresh off the boat from Alsace, claim to have seen in the western Texas prairie: tigers (jaguars), lobsters (crawdads, I expect), "golden-necked starlings" (an interesting puzzle, that - yellow-breasted chat? One of the orioles? A yellow-headed blackbird way further east then he is nowadays?), and cobras (don't look at me; I got nothing). People don't like being around things with no names, and if nobody's around to tell them "oh, that's a thrush" they'll take a salient feature and slap a description or a familiar name on it, creating the American "robin" on the basis of a red breast and confusing future generations of Americans reading British-illustrated editions of The Secret Garden.

This is the kind of thing you have to be aware of when you're a researcher. It's part of the interest. A little distracting, sure. But who knows what dramatic uses I might have for a melanistic jaguar in a story someday? When I might need a character with a vast supply of prank stories he can use to bait tourists? Where I might run across the reference that solves the "golden-necked starling" mystery? A little distraction is good for you.

(She says, having not gotten halfway through transcribing her notes. Back to work.)

Location Scout #2: Medina County

Almost as soon as I get past the shadow of the I-35 heading south and west of downtown I begin to feel the sky opening up into the South Texas plain. It's hard to judge how far west the city extended in the days I'm thinking of. It's tempting to cut off the town at the present interstate highways running down either side of it, 10/35 on the west and 37 on the east. Mauermann's map encourages me to do so, extending only as far as Pecan in the east and with Laredo the last named street to the west; but since historically these areas are the "black" and "Mexican" parts of town, respectively, and since numerous important sites are indicated off the edges of the map, I'm disinclined to take it at face value. The area west of San Fernando, per one source, was called "Laredito" during the relevant period; and west of Laredo Mauermann shows two distinct streets (modern Santa Rosa and San Saba, I think), numerous tracks, clusters of buildings, the "Dutch windmill," and the plain where Gen. Sheridan reviewed troops. My 1852 plat map also lays out much of the area inside modern Loop 410, with small townlots not giving way to larger lots till west of Alazan Creek. My impression is that the town became less townlike and more villagelike out this way, and that I should mentally replace the present lively cultural life represented by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the giant votive candle with an equally lively suburban life of market gardens, jacales, and a working class that (if we may believe all the accounts of nightly fandangos from this period) also knew how to party hard.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.

Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.

To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.

The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.

When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)

I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.

I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)

The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.

So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.

Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.

I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.

Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.

Reference photos

Not surprisingly, the pictures from my research trip are mostly crud. I'm not a skilled photographer, and I was using a disposable camera because if I use my husband's 35 mm I always expose the film taking it out. It's one of the many talents I can count on but can't get paid for.

However, here's a picture of Polly's Chapel, with Moby in the foreground as a size reference:


Also, the front view of the old house on Cypress and 11th, from the middle of what would have been the residents's great view, came out reasonably well:



The Civil War rag doll, who doesn't have a thing to do with my story that I know of. I just like dolls.


I took a picture of the millstone mantelpiece, but it has a big black shadow in one corner. It's the only one like that on the roll, which isn't bad for me. I'm not sure why I can't get all obsessively perfectionist about photographs like I do about other things, but it saves time that I don't.

Tomorrow I take Old Castroville Road out to Medina County and go looking for the Mormon settlement, presently under Medina Lake. It turns out that the nearest approximation I can manage to the route Len and Di would have taken is complicated - Commerce, to Frio, to Old Castroville Road, which eventually peters out into Highway 90, which as near as I can make out follows the correct route, or anyway close enough for government work. Due to the efficiency with which I overprepared last week, I hardly had to do any overpreparation today; though now I think of it, I still need to print out the list of historical markers. So off I go to do that.

Location Scout #1: Bandera

Mentally stripping away the changes wrought by the passage of time and the activities of humans is something I'm accustomed to doing by now, but there's no denying it's harder to do while driving than at any other time. So I pulled off onto the shoulder a couple of times, to birdwatch and make copious illegible notes (it'll be all right as long as I transcribe them soon enough) on soil characteristics, the succession of wildflowers, the smell of the air, insects and other fauna, and other things that my characters, picking their way down from the hills on horse and possibly camel-back, will have plenty of time to notice. I'll have to take care to remove some features - starlings and dandelions did not overrun the Texas countryside in 1864 - and add in others - the faunal assemblage would have been far more abundant, with butterflies rising at each step, and more diverse, including mustangs, bears, and panthers - but that's easy enough. The climate has also changed, but both 1863/64 and 2009/10 were unusually cold, long winters, and though we haven't had anything like the spring floods that hit the Hill Country and south Texas in late March 1864, I've been through enough floods to extrapolate.

From San Antonio proper to Helotes, the terrain beneath the asphalt and years of brush spread by domestic livestock and fire suppression is all open, rolling hills, at one time covered with rich nutritious mesquite grass and mottes of live oaks. Past Helotes, the Hill Country starts, high sculpted hills with cedar (as we call ash juniper) clinging to thin soil over limestone, cut by frequent creeks. The air, when you get far enough away from the internal combustion engine, has a distinct aroma, partly a generic "country" smell that anyone from Iowa would recognize, but with a spicy undertone that I don't think is the cedar, but might be. The term "spicy" is used by travel writers of the 19th century, too, so whatever generates it, it is native.

A picnic in Bandera's city park on the Medina River rewarded me with several cypresses plenty old enough to have been there when Len would have been. The bridge swallows in Bandera build rough pebbly nests not at all like the firm clay ones under San Antonio bridges, and I didn't see a single heron. Nor did I see any fish in the river, but one of the decaying cypresses had boards nailed on it that could most parsimoniously be explained as a seat for fishermen, and a dead alligator gar was washed up on a sandbank near the bridge, so I expect that was a function of the time of day.

The Frontier Times Museum has the virtues and the defects of the local museum. Founded as it was by J. Marvin Hunter, Bandera County's most dedicated historian and founding editor/publisher of Frontier Times, it is larger and more coherent than a lot of them, with a purpose-built building erected in 1930. History is literally built-in, with the fossil-studded central fireplace sporting a millwheel cemented into its mantelpiece: the very same millwheel that washed out of a mill on the Pedernales, that Mormon leader Lyman Wight saw in a vision and went out to retrieve. Not only that, but an Indian mano or grinding stone is inserted into the axle hole. Everybody in the county who had anything remotely interesting deposited it at the museum when they couldn't keep it anymore, from taxidermied animals to a huge collection of bells, from a comforter spun, dyed (with elderberries; a beautiful blue in a complex check pattern called "Snail Trail and Cat Track"), and woven at home to a shrunken head; from a Civil War era rag doll to a picture of John Wesley Hardin's corpse.

Therein, of course, lies the weakness; despite the general Western theme, a lot of "cabinet of curiosities" stuff (dressed fleas), exotic items, and personal-interest collections with little provenance are included. Not everything is labeled, and some of the labeling is inadequate, with "x number of years ago" and "very old" used instead of dates. The large collection of books is all under glass, which is just as well as most of them are falling apart; but that means if the title isn't clear and there's no label, or you can't tell which book a label refers to, you're out of luck. Still, it was possible to get a fair idea of what sort of books the pioneers of Bandera had available - lots of religious tracts, a tiny Iliad, Burns, McGuffey readers, arithmetic books developed in England and printed in New York, Luther Bibles and King James Bibles, Webster's Dictionary, a French book detailing the names, life stories, and associated flowers of each saint for each day of the year.

I saw first-issue Confederate money (I suspect that second issue money never made it as far as Bandera), shinplasters, and one-cent pieces from the 50s, but no Mexican gold or silver older than 1883. Oh, well, I can find books about that. Amasa Clark's camel-hair pillow is on display; so is the shawl which Annie Schickenden wore when she sang for the King and Queen of Prussia, and brought with her when she came to Texas in 1846. Where else would I see those?

I also brought in my Peterson and compared it to a taxidermy display of the birds of Mason County. (I guess there wasn't a Mason County museum when the person who stuffed these died and his grandchildren had to decide what to do with them; or maybe the taxidermist was a friend of Hunter's. You can't think to ask everything!) Now I know regional names for the lesser goldfinch (Mexican canary or Arkansas goldfinch), Bullock's oriole (Texas oriole), kestrel (blue darter sparrowhawk), and summer tanager (redbird). That Mexican canary answers a long-standing question. Wild-caught "canaries" used to be routinely sold in straw cages San Antonio markets, as pets, and I've always wondered what species this might be. So now I know!

Wonderful opportunities lie in the collection, as the staff will tell you. A diary sits in one case, written by some nameless person in New York in 1835-37. It was bought in an antique store in San Antonio in 1916, where it no doubt landed because it mentions the fall of the Alamo. I asked if it had ever been transcribed, and was told no, but not because they don't want it to be! Transcribing is hard, time-consuming work and volunteers can only do so much. If I ever write a story set in that time period, and no one has gotten to it, I may do it myself; until then, I can't spare the time from the rest of my life. She's hoping to lure a graduate student into the job.

The sole staff member on duty that day, whose name I'm afraid I never asked (she never asked mine either, but I don't think that makes us even because I doubt she's blogging about me), was extremely helpful. She took the rag doll, fragile as it was, out of its case to be photographed, and she knew where "the Slide-off" is - the hill where, do what they would, the shingle-makers who founded the town always lost the top of their load when they took their shingles in to San Antonio to sell. She also gave me directions to the oldest building in town, currently under renovation.

Huffmeyer's Store on Main claims to be the oldest, but it wasn't built until 1874, and a block beyond is 11th street, the actual first street in town. I took a picture of a real estate office which claimed to have been built in 1860 and operated as a home, store, school, and first bank in Bandera (banking was illegal in Texas until Reconstruction; this explains much of our economic history); but the oldest building in town stands at the corner of Cypress and 11th. It's a limestone building with a gallery, once covered with a coat of stucco, and currently in the revealing disarray of restoration. It looks to me as though its two rooms were built at two different times - the limestone blocks are different - and with the stucco mostly worn off and windows glassless you can see, even from the street, how the wooden frames were fitted and the windows arranged to catch the breeze. Across the street is a sharp drop-off into a lot full of trees and cedar waxwings; beyond that lot, I almost immediately came to the tourist cottages on the edge of the park where I picnicked. The builder chose the best spot in town - a view of what would have been the ford of the Medina, but well out of the flood plain. Our Texas summers would have been relieved by the position of the house and gallery relative to the prevailing breeze, while the northers would have been closed out with shutters and the thick stuccoed limestone blocks. Who needs central heat and air?

At the library, a beautiful well-designed building, they told me that the historical marker I'd failed to find as I came into town was Polly's Chapel, and it was well off the main road. I had turned back when I drove for a while on a road that got ever narrower, thinking I'd missed the marker and was heading into somebody's ranch; and they said you did feel that way getting there, and to just keep going. So on the way back I tried again.

If I had known in detail what the route was like, I probably wouldn't have gone; and wouldn't that have been a shame? If you are ever in the Bandera vicinity and want to visit Polly's Chapel, you should turn off at the Historical Marker sign, on Privilege Creek Road. Follow Privilege Creek Road, at 30 MPH or less, through all its many lane-and-a-half windings, being prepared to pull over and creep past any of the people who live back there on their way out. Be polite and wait your turn at the narrow bridge over Privilege Creek - watch for killdeer. Drive right on through the cattle guard at the sign that warns: "Loose livestock" and onto the gravel road. If you don't mind the dust you raise (the slower you go the less dust) this is a beautiful stretch of road, parallelling the creek, which at this point is lined on the opposite bank with steep limestone cliffs. The first fork you come to won't confuse you as it will have a sign saying "Polly's Chapel" pointing straight over the ford.

Yes, you will have to drive through Privilege Creek. Don't do this if the water is at all high! Moby has a low undercarriage, but we got through all right. On the other side you'll soon come to another cattle guard, and right past it there's another sign for the Chapel, pointing you to a two-rut road with a slight grade on one side and cedar and live oak scrub all around. If you meet somebody coming out, one of you will have to back up. That's all there is to it.

But the chapel clearing is beautiful and peaceful (except for the sound of destruction equipment beeping and roaring somewhere - the terrible thing is that the country is so beautiful, everybody wants to live there, but they can't live there without dragging the city after them), and the chapel itself is a tiny gem. Policarpo Rodriguez, one of the most interesting men to ever live in Bandera County, built it himself out of limestone blocks after he got religion of the Protestant kind in 1878. The date on the cornerstone is 1882, too late for me; but that's okay. It's in use today, with electricity, an acoustical tile ceiling, picnic tables, and a garden-shed-sized restroom building out back. Lots of tempting trails lead into the live oak/cedar brush, but I restrained myself and did a single circuit of the clearing. Most of the birds eluded me, as they always do in this sort of terrain; but that's all right. The birds are an excuse to go to places like this. One bird I thought was going to be a mocker showed me a head like a chickadee, then vanished, so that's my big birding mystery for the trip.

I saved one shot in the disposable camera (I'd have a digital one by now if I hadn't driven into that light pole) to take the view from the Slide-Off; but when I got there I didn't think it wise to stop. Another time, perhaps. After all, I might not even use this location.

Next week, if all goes well, I'll scout Medina County.

Overpreparation

It is a fixed principle of mine that a sufficient amount of overpreparation guarantees a smoothly-running trip. That's why my backpack is already loaded with trail mix and apples, a notebook, printed notes, maps, walking shows, socks, binoculars, digital camera, a guidebook, and a bird book; why I baked two loaves of bread to be sure of having one decent low-sodium sandwich; why there's a bottle of water in the freezer this minute; why Moby (an old-fashioned car) has his CD changer filled with road music, mostly the 70s rock/pop that I find most conducive to a relaxed central Texas Drie, but also the essential Melissa Etheridge, who tends to pop up on random play at the very moment she's needed (I swear her cover of "Piece of My Heart" saved both our lives one time) to see me through tricky bits of driving. I'll probably lay my clothes out tonight to make it easier to get up in time to have breakfast and brew a big travel mug of tea, take my husband to work, and get on my way.

I've spent a good bit of the last two days working back and forth between maps, and been unable to determine exactly where people hit town coming in from Bandera. Fredericksburg Road and Castroville Road are indicated on the city maps, but though the mid-19th century county map shows Bandera Road going more or less straight into town, the scale on that one is too small to see where, and the city maps don't show anything. My working assumption is that some approximation of Fredericksburg Road/Culebra Road/Bandera Road defines the historic route, and that San Pedro Springs/Five Points would be the psychological equivalent of hitting Loop 1604 - not there yet, but close enough to count as "coming into town" rather than "going to town." I'm hoping to find something in Bandera that can tweak this for me.

Of course, I may decide Len comes into town via Castroville. I'll have to do this all over again for that trip. And if I decide that I need to camp overnight and ride horseback at Hill Country Natural Area to get a proper sense of how she experienced the terrain - the overpreparation I do for a camping trip is tiring to think about!

Feel free to make fun of me if you want. Overpreparation the day before puts me in a zen state on the day, and when unexpected things happen - when the car breaks down 50 miles from the middle of nowhere (I don't have a cell phone); when the librarian who organized the school visit goes into labor the day before my school visit and no one knows what's going on when I show up; when the players do something completely off-the-wall and the dice perform statistically improbable feats, sending the adventure careening off the map - I'll be able to cope. It never fails. If I haven't covered every possible base beforehand, it's even odds I'll fall apart.

Nobody wants me to fall apart. I'm a dangerous nuisance when shattered across the landscape.

Once more, into the breach

I'm mostly recovered now and trying to get focused on the next big phase of research: the Day Trip(s). (Though I also need to get some queries out again...sending queries is like sweeping; no matter how good a job you do, it'll need doing again.) I could research Civil War Texas for decades and not get done; but it's getting to be time to plot the story in detail and for that, I need to get away from the libraries and the computers and go out to look at things. The plot and the research are leading me inexorably toward Medina and Bandera counties as the necessary setting for certain crucial sequences; possibly, for the bulk of the book. I'd rather have it set in town, but some important things can't happen here.

I know that some people set books in places they've never set foot in, and for the life of me I can't understand how they do it. Maybe the left and right turns and the views from the heights and the particular quality of the light at certain times and seasons won't make it into the published book - but if I'm not anchored in all of that, I can't write the book at all.

I think this has its source in Air Force Bratism. Though, looking back on it, I didn't have as peripatetic a childhood as some people, at the time it felt like we moved a lot: the Rio Grande Valley where I was born, the San Antonio area, two places in Alaska, Iowa while my dad was in 'Nam, Maryland, and finally West Texas, before I came to San Antonio and felt like I was finally in a place I belonged. One of the methods my mom used to ease the transitions was to read up on an area before we moved there, and then to aggressively read the local literature when we arrived. We stopped and read historical markers, went to all the log cabins and pioneer villages and museums, toured the houses of local celebrities, and found out all the cool things there were to know. The better you know people and places, the better chance you have to love them; or at least to rub along with them in comfort.

So now I have to go look at Medina and Bandera counties. I'm trying to reduce the mileage Moby and I have to travel by hunting up local sources of information on the Civil War period beforehand, so I can make arrangements to view them, but it's uphill work. As I believe I've mentioned before, the Civil War was a sufficiently nasty time for community relationships in western Texas that nobody wanted to remember. Consider this quote from a postwar letter to a Northern cousin by a Castroville man:

"I had a store before the war & sold a good deal, but during the war, I stopped selling, for there was nothing but robbing, stealing, hanging, & killing, that no one was secure of his life if he was a Confederate, but now the war is over, & everything quite as before, & I mean to reopen the store again."

(TX 976.442. Castroville, Texas 1844-1899, Illustrated by 3 Pioneer Families, the Pichots, Pingevotes, & Ihnkens. Yvonne Chandler Ludwig, "Bonnie." )

If that doesn't say "interesting times," what does? But as for what specifically happened when, who robbed and murdered whom, and why - nothing to see here. Move along. I need to call Ms. Ludwig and see if she has anything more on the topic, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I suspect if she had more she'd have put it in.

The story occurs between Appommatox and the beginning of Reconstruction, so I need to get moving if I want to view the geography at the proper season. At the moment, I'm planning to drive out to Bandera one day next week, see the Frontier Times Museum and scout the geography, do a little birding and hope for a lucky break. If I get one, good. If I don't - well, I write the story anyway. Maybe I won't happen upon a piece of ground and realize: "Here, right here, she finds the body," or be told the local ghost story that ties in perfectly; but maybe I will. Maybe I'll see the bird that achieves metaphoric significance. Maybe I'll come back feeling that I'm no further ahead, and then next week gain the key piece of folklore that makes it all come together, but wouldn't recognize if I were never on the spot.

It sure won't happen if I don't give it a chance.