Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the Medina Children’s Home. Every time I pass the sign for Turtle Creek, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: the battle of the Nueces, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the Dallas Morning News almost seventy years later.

Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late Terry Jordan, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”

Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as Ferdinand Lindheimer, defended slavery, and others, like August Buchel, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual Staats-Sängerfest (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, as I noted in an earlier post, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.

To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with Fritz Tegener, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general Hamilton P. Bee, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. James Duff, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.

Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; one historian, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though others say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”

At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day Amistad Reservoir) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit.

The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the Nueces River in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.

The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them.

And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—awkward! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.

The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian Stanley S. McGowen called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The Handbook of Texas notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at Comfort, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The Treue der Union (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Martin: C. J. Chivers, The Gun

Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words “environmental writer” and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they’re, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)

We recently spent a few days in the Big Apple, and the fact that the only souvenir we brought back was a bag of Nicola potatoes probably tells you all you need to know about us and our priorities.

Basically, I find New York completely overwhelming. We stayed mostly in midtown and downtown Manhattan, and my reaction upon venturing forth onto the chaotic streets and teeming sidewalks was always the same: Great googly moogly! Get a load of all them tall buildings, Maw!

You have to understand that I don’t know the city at all. The last time I spent any time there was during college, when we used to make occasional forays down from rural western Massachusetts in search of live jazz, cocktails, and the illusion of sophistication. Back then—I’m talking thirty years ago or more—New York seemed a really menacing place, which of course was part of the attraction; taking the subway in the middle of the night made us feel, well, dangerous. Even though we were actually just, you know, stupid.

On this trip, though, I discovered another Manhattan, one that exists behind or along with the gray concrete canyons and jostling hordes and schools of predatory taxis. The principal element of this greener, gentler Manhattan is, of course, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park, the true heart (or perhaps I should say lungs) of the city.

Even when it’s jammed with pedestrians, as I imagine is usually the case in the spring, Central Park, with its forsythia and cherry trees blooming and its undulating serpentine walkways, is a true oasis from the frantic sensory overload that surrounds it. Even the constant din of car horns—the true soundtrack of any New York experience—seems muted and distant. I love Zilker Park in Austin, and Golden Gate Park in my native San Francisco, but neither of them seems as necessary as Central Park.

The hidden Manhattan also includes the High Line, an extremely cool elevated park on the West Side. Talk about creative use of space! On an island such as Manhattan, all the empty spaces in the grid have long since been filled in. But Rob Hammond (the son of our San Antonio friends Hall and Pat Hammond) had the bright idea of turning a disused elevated railroad track into a park. Walking above the streets of Chelsea opens up unexpected vistas; you look down into the surrounding neighborhoods, over the Hudson, and into New Jersey from above, and see them as if for the first time.

Another component of this city-within-the-city is the Union Square Greenmarket, an enormous (140 vendors) farmers market that’s open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays and brings all manner of stuff—meat, vegetables, fruit, flowers, bread, wine, cider—from the surrounding countryside into the heart of the city. (That’s where we bought the potatoes.) According to one of the vendors we talked to, Sarah Shapiro of Hawthorne Valley Farm, the Union Square market is one of about forty in the city. By my extremely rough calculations, given an estimated New York City population of circa 20 million, that works out to about one market for every 500,000 people in New York.

Speaking of food, we had lunch on Saturday at the Green Table, a tiny sustainable eatery tucked inside Chelsea Market, in the old Nabisco plant on Ninth Avenue. And we had a wonderful Easter dinner with friends at Savoy, a charming little Soho bistro specializing in fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It was all delicious.

I guess you really can find anything in New York, from a cast-iron Chrysler Building lantern to overhead parkland, if you just know where and how to look. Funny how a city that, to me at least, has always symbolized traditional, even obsolescent, urban culture—the subway! Radio City! the Brooklyn Bridge! Broadway! Grand Central!—can turn out to be so full of innovation. Those potatoes we brought back were darn tasty, too. Maybe in another five years or so, when we’ve recovered from this visit, we’ll be ready for another!

What we’re reading
Heather: Alexander McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
Martin: Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Frederick Law Olmsted has been on my mind recently, in part because while we’re spending a few days in New York, we’re staying on Fifth Avenue, opposite the southeastern corner of Central Park, unquestionably Olmsted’s best-known creation.

Olmsted (1822–1903) was for all intents and purposes the father of American landscape architecture. Before he gained fame for reshaping much of the nation’s urban and suburban landscape, however, he was an adventurous journalist whose 1857 book A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier is a classic of Texas travel literature. In the book, originally published in serial form in the New York Times, Olmsted recounts a trip he took with his brother John in 1853–54, traversing the Lone Star State from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.

In A Journey Through Texas, as in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856) and A Journey in the Back Country (1861), Olmsted, a deeply committed abolitionist, attempted “to explain how slavery prolongs, in a young community [such as antebellum Texas], the evils which properly belong only to a frontier,” including “bad temper, recklessness, and lawlessness.” (And this was before Interstate 35 even existed!)

Olmsted was a great admirer of the German settlers of the Hill Country (who, he pointed out, managed to earn a respectable living without employing slave labor) and of their “private convictions of right, justice, and truth.” He repeatedly held their settlements—New Braunfels, Boerne, Sisterdale, and the like—up as examples of the sort of virtuous, prosperous, cultured communities that were possible where slavery did not exist.

For me, however, the best part of the book is Olmsted’s portrayal of Mr. Brown, the mule he and his brother bought in Natchitoches to carry their supplies. Mr. B., as Olmsted often referred to him, was “a stout, dun-colored, short-legged, cheerful son of a donkey, but himself very much a gentleman…. Though sometimes subjected to real neglect, and sometimes even to contemptuous expressions (for which, I trust, this, should it meet his eye, may be considered a cordial apology), he was never heard to give utterance to a complaint or vent to an oath. He traveled with us some two thousand rough miles, kept well up, in spite of the brevity of his legs, with the rest, never winced at any load we had the heart to put on him, came in fresh and active at the end, and, finally, sold for as much as we gave for him.”

Only once did Mr. Brown mutiny. As the party was preparing to cross Cibolo Creek, he suddenly gave “a snort of fat defiance” and raced off into the nearby scrub, attempting to scrape off the wicker hampers affixed to his sides. Olmsted noted admiringly that “a short-legged mule, when fully under way in a stampede, is ‘some pumpkins’ at going,” but they soon ran him down and brought him back under control, and Olmsted tied him to a tree with no supper as punishment. “When morning came, his ears and spirits were completely wilted, and he always carefully avoided the subject of his private Cibolo stampede—never afterwards offering the least symptom of insurrection.”

In another memorable passage, the party was crossing Chocolate Bayou when they unexpectedly encountered a dangerously muddy bottom. Olmsted and his brother managed, with some difficulty, to free their mounts and lead them to safety, abandoning poor Mr. B. to his own devices. “Looking back, to learn the fate of the mule, we beheld one of the most painfully ludicrous sights I have ever seen. Nothing whatever was visible of Mr. Brown, save the horns of the pack-saddle and his own well-known ears, rising piteously above the treacherous waves. He had exhausted his whole energy in efforts that only served to drag him deeper under, and seeing himself deserted, in the midst of the waters, by all his comrades, he gave up with a loud sigh, and laid upon his side to die, hoisting only his ears as a last signal of distress.”

Fortunately Mr. B. rallied his spirits for one last effort and succeeded in freeing himself and wading to safety, “dripping like a drowned rat.” The wicker baskets he carried were, of course, not waterproof; “the hampers had become two barrels of water, which, added to our ridicule, the mule, his excitement over, found more than he could bear, and, sitting down, he gave us a beseeching look, as if ready to burst into a torrent of tears.” Mr. Brown was clearly a sensitive soul, and I’m a little surprised that Olmsted could bear to part with him at the end of his journey.

While I have had no personal experience with mules, my earliest encounter with a burro left deep psychological scars. When I was just a wee lad, no more than three or four, my parents, my grandmother, and I all crammed into my father’s Fiat 1100 and undertook a family trip from San Francisco to Mexico City. Somewhere in the Sonoran desert, we stopped at a dusty roadside establishment for gas, and my parents bought me a bottle of Coca-Cola—a rare treat indeed. Clutching my precious bottle of Coke, I wandered over to say hello to the poor little burro penned beside the gas station.

I was shocked when the creature came over, stuck his head through the slats of the fence, seized the bottle in his yellow teeth, and yanked it out of my hands. He tilted his head back and drained the contents in one long gulp, whereupon I burst into tears. My parents bought me another bottle of Coke, and the same thing happened! (Apparently I’ve always been a slow learner.)

After the tragic loss of the second bottle of Coke, my parents decided not to continue funding the burro’s drinking habit; perhaps they feared the effects of the rapid accumulation of so much carbonated beverage in his stomach. At any rate, they bundled me into the car—still screaming, no doubt—and headed down the highway.

As I grew older, I was as susceptible to the romantic myth of the cowboy as the next kid, but ever since that trip to Mexico I have generally distrusted all members of the genus Equus. Coke wasn’t introduced until 1886, but I like to think that, faced with the same temptation, the gentlemanly Mr. Brown would have exercised more self-control than his larcenous latter-day Sonoran cousin. But then I’ve always tended to idealize my literary heroes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit
Martin: George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (still!)

Time for the next installment in our much-anticipated series of lists (our first two were on our top ten songs about Texas and our top ten books on the environment)! This time, we thought we’d offer up our ten favorite books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the Lone Star State.

Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist
Sarah Bird, The Mommy Club
H. G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place
Oscar Casares, Brownsville: Stories
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier

All right, all you Lone Star literati, let us have it. What classics have we missed and/or forgotten?

What we’re reading
Heather: Shelley Silbert, M. Gay Chanler, and Gary Paul Nabhan (eds.), Five Ways to Value the Working Landscapes of the West
Martin: West Marin Review: A Literary and Visual Arts Journal