Okay, show of hands. How many of you knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (better known as the Mormons) played a prominent role in the settlement of the Texas Hill Country?

Don’t feel bad; I had no idea, either, until I was assigned to write the entries on Gillespie County for the New Handbook of Texas almost thirty years ago. In fact, for more than a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, a breakaway group of Mormons founded and then abandoned an astonishing number of settlements in Central Texas.

The Mormons are now well established in Utah, but that wasn’t always the case; their early history was, to put it mildly, peripatetic. Joseph Smith founded the movement in New York State in the 1820s, but he and his followers attracted violent opposition almost immediately. They moved to Ohio in 1831, intending eventually to settle in Independence, Missouri, but after bloody clashes with locals in both states, they moved again, to Illinois, where they founded the town of Nauvoo in 1840. A year later, Smith and the Nauvoo city council angered non-Mormons by destroying a printing press that had been used to print an exposé critical of Smith and the practice of polygamy; Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois, and died in a riot when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

Before his death, having concluded that Illinois was no more hospitable to the embryonic faith than New York, Ohio, or Missouri, Smith sent an envoy to negotiate with Sam Houston for the establishment of a Mormon settlement in the Republic of Texas. Lyman Wight, one of Smith’s favorites—he was ordained the first high priest of the church in 1831—had received Smith’s permission to lead a group to Texas, but Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided that Utah would be a more propitious site. While most of the Mormons followed Young to the Great Salt Lake Valley, about 150 to 200 dissenters (accounts vary) followed the renegade Wight, who felt compelled to honor Smith’s wishes, to Texas.

Wight seems to have had an incorrigible case of happy feet, even by Mormon standards, and a profound stubborn streak—hence the colorful nickname, “the Wild Ram of the Mountains,” bestowed on him by the New York Sun. (That’s John James Audubon’s ca. 1845 lithograph of Rocky Mountain sheep at the top of the page, by the way.) Wight was born in upstate New York in 1796 and subsequently lived in Canada, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin; he also refused to acknowledge Young as Smith’s legitimate successor.

Wight and his followers spent the winter of 1845–46 at an abandoned fort near Preston, in Grayson County, and arrived in Austin in June 1846. They settled in what is now Webberville, where they met the pioneer blacksmith and memoirist Noah Smithwick, in September 1846, and built a gristmill on the Colorado River which was destroyed by a flood.

By this time the Mormons must have been wondering if they would ever find a place to call home. In 1847, Wight asked John O. Meusebach for permission to found a colony on the Pedernales River; no doubt he hoped that the Germans, with their tradition of religious tolerance, would look more kindly on Mormon polygamy than had their Anglo neighbors. (Apparently the Germans considered the Mormons “lawless of religious practices,” but pragmatically figured the newcomers could teach them American agricultural and milling techniques.)

Wight and his followers founded the settlement of Zodiac, four miles southeast of Fredericksburg, in 1847. There they built a sawmill (the first in Gillespie County), a gristmill, a store, a school, and the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi River; they became the principal suppliers of seed, flour, and lumber to their German fellow settlers, and also helped build Fort Martin Scott, established in 1848 on what was then the western frontier of settlement in Texas.

Wight himself refused several invitations from Young to come to Utah and was excommunicated by the Mormon church in 1849. In 1850 he lost the election for chief justice of Gillespie County to the German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer, but was awarded the office after pointing out that Klingelhoefer was not an American citizen. By the following summer, however, Wight could apparently no longer be bothered to show up for court, so the county commissioners declared the office vacant and awarded it to Klingelhoefer, who had since become a citizen. (One historian has suggested that Wight was addicted to alcohol and opium, which may have contributed to his erratic behavior.)

Perhaps Wight had already sensed another move in the offing. In September 1851, after more devastating floods, he and his followers left Zodiac and moved to Burnet County, where they established a colony called Mormon Mill on Hamilton Creek—those Mormons were serious millers, weren’t they?—but in December 1853 Wight and his followers sold the property to their old friend Smithwick and moved on to Bandera, where they built a furniture factory. In the fall of 1856, however, they moved again, this time to a site on the Medina River below Bandera which came to be known as Mountain Valley or Mormon Camp. (The site is now covered by Medina Lake.)

If folks thought that Wight would settle down at last, they were sadly mistaken. In 1858, he had a premonition of the Civil War and decided to lead his followers—one can only imagine what they thought when he told them to pack up yet again—back to Missouri.

Apparently this was one move too many even for the indefatigable Wild Ram of the Mountains; he died on the second day of the journey, when the group was about eight miles from San Antonio, and was buried in his ceremonial temple robes in the Mormon cemetery at Zodiac, which no longer exists.

And what of his followers? Some remained in Texas, while others moved on to Iowa, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), or Utah. As of 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claimed 315,895 members in Texas, or about 5 percent of the national total of 6,321,416. Only four states—Utah (of course), California, Idaho, and Arizona—had more. I wonder how many of today’s Mormon Texans are descendants of Wight’s followers, followers who were secretly relieved not to have to uproot themselves yet again at the whim of the Wild Ram of the Mountains?

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

Let’s face it: we are not culturally conditioned to look kindly upon constraints. Every day bombards us with messages urging us to maximize our enjoyments, super-size our servings, and prolong our erections. Limitations, we’re told, are for losers.

I, on the other hand, believe firmly that sometimes, under certain circumstances, constraints can actually foster, rather than curtail, creativity; ingenuity can flourish in unexpected ways, in all sorts of compromised settings. I absorbed this lesson during my time as a “county writer” for the Texas State Historical Association’s New Handbook of Texas, beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I suspect I learned at least as much about the craft of writing as I did as an undergraduate English major or in grad school.

As a county writer, my job entailed researching and writing all the entries associated with a given county for a massive revision of the original Handbook of Texas, a historical encyclopedia/biographical dictionary originally published in two volumes in 1952 under the aegis of Walter Prescott Webb, with a supplemental third volume appearing in 1976. The greatly expanded New Handbook, published in six volumes in 1996, required a veritable army of contributors—more than 3,000 in all—some volunteers and some, like me, paid staff, to crank out the roughly 24,000 entries. (Since going online in 1999, the Handbook has grown to more than 25,000 entries.)

On the face of it, few jobs could have less to do with creative writing. Yet trying to shape an occasionally jumbled pile of historical data, hearsay, and legend into a coherent, even compelling, and above all brief (sometimes just two or three sentences) narrative was an irresistible and, I believe, inherently creative challenge, even if I didn’t always succeed; many of the entries I had to write, such as those on small watercourses or hills or towns that had dried up and blown away, were simply too short and/or uninteresting. Here, for example, in its entirety, is my entry on a stream called Town Creek:

Town Creek rises a mile north of Fredericksburg in central Gillespie County (at 30°19′ N, 98°52′ W). Intermittent in its upper reaches, the stream follows a southerly course for 3½ miles to its mouth on Barons Creek in Fredericksburg (at 30°16′ N, 98°52′ W). Rising in the hills of the Edwards Plateau, Town Creek crosses flat to rolling terrain surfaced by shallow loamy and clayey soils; vegetation consists primarily of open stands of live oak, Ashe juniper, and mesquite, and grasses.

Doesn’t exactly set the heart racing, does it? Yet every so often I would find some nugget of information that could add a little color to a highly compressed and otherwise drab recitation of facts, and I took an inordinate pride in trying to craft the most apparently unpromising entry into something that would reward the careful reader with a graceful turn of phrase or an unexpectedly poignant or amusing incident. Here are just a few, drawn from various biographical entries I wrote: After the jazz pianist Peck Kelley quit the music business due to deteriorating eyesight, “he reportedly spent hours practicing at home on a stringless, silent piano so as not to disturb his neighbors.” German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer “was elected chief justice of Gillespie County in 1850 but had to give up the office when his opponent, Mormon leader Lyman Wight, pointed out that Klingelhoefer was not yet an American citizen.” The West Texas rancher and congressman Claude Hudspeth, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, once referred to the president of our neighbor to the south as “that spineless cactus of Mexico.”

If I had to pick one favorite among the hundreds of entries I wrote, though, it might be the one on actor Tom Mix. Mix probably didn’t belong in the Handbook of Texas at all; despite his claims to have been born on a ranch on the Rio Grande and to have served as a Texas Ranger and with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the battle of San Juan Hill, he was in fact an army deserter from Pennsylvania. He was the most celebrated Western silent-movie star in early Hollywood, but he was virtually forgotten with the advent of talkies. After almost a thousand words, my entry on him ends as follows:

Mix died on October 12, 1940, when his Cord automobile overturned on a highway near Florence, Arizona; he was driving to California to discuss a return to the movies. His principal baggage reportedly consisted of three snow-white Stetson hats.

I couldn’t say with certainty that the story of the white Stetsons was true, but it was simply too good to pass up, and it provided a perfect way to punctuate the downward trajectory of Mix’s life. In this entry, and in many others, I was merely following the advice of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”), though I tried always to leave myself a little wiggle room—hence the use of “reportedly” in the excerpt above. (I was also a big fan of “apparently,” “presumably,” “allegedly,” and similar conditional constructions.)

This is all a pretty high-falutin’ way of talking about what was on some level hackwork, but I think that even the humblest piece of writing can benefit from, and manifest, a careful devotion to craft. As George Orwell, a particular literary hero for the simplicity and clarity of his writing, once said, “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” (That would have made a pretty good motto for us county writers, right down to the emphasis on the surface of the earth; we probably had to write more entries on physical features—creeks and mountains and such—than any other type.)

We’re never more creative or more fully human than when we acknowledge and work within our limitations, be they imposed externally or internally. Our aspirations can be infinite, but actual achievement usually requires a pragmatic acceptance of the finite. And, of course, a judicious use of conditionals.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Vincent Virga, Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations

For all of my whingeing about the difficulties of adjusting to life in Texas, even after thirty years here, I know I’ve had it pretty easy, especially compared to the nineteenth-century settlers who endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to claw a tenuous living out of the deceptively thin Hill Country topsoil. For one thing, I speak the same language (more or less) as the natives. For another thing, those natives aren’t actively trying to kill me—well, with the exception of the occasional jackass in a pickup speeding down MoPac. Finally, and arguably most important of all, I live here after the invention of air conditioning.

Many of those Hill Country settlers were German immigrants, and they and their descendants have played a prominent role in the region’s history over the last century and a half. I learned something about them when I started working at the Texas State Historical Association back in the mid-1980s, as my initial assignment was writing entries on Gillespie County for the Handbook of Texas.

I knew little to nothing of Texas history at the time, but I had always enjoyed our occasional day trips to the charming little town of Fredericksburg—people actually spoke German in the shops and restaurants!—and leaped at the opportunity to learn more about it. Perhaps inevitably, the more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Here’s the one-paragraph version: In the mid-1840s, the Adelsverein, an organization founded by a group of German nobles to promote colonization in Texas, shipped over more than 7,000 settlers, most of them peasants. The first Europeans in what is now Gillespie County arrived in 1846, when a group of 120 German settlers led by John O. Meusebach established Fredericksburg on Barons Creek and Town Creek, near the Pedernales River. The little community thrived and became the county seat when the legislature created Gillespie County in 1848. Two years later, the population of the town had grown to almost a thousand; in that same year, three-quarters of the 1,235 whites in Gillespie County were of foreign extraction, almost all of them German.

Though little remembered today, surely one of the most remarkable was Christian Althaus, one of the first doctors in Fredericksburg. (The first was Wilhelm Keidel.) While I myself didn’t write the Handbook entry on Althaus—that honor fell to the Barbara Donalson Althaus, who obviously had a more personal connection with her subject—I’m cribbing from it shamelessly in this post.

Johann Christian Althaus was born in Erndtebrück, Westphalia, and served as a medic in the Prussian army before emigrating to Texas. He sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the York, arriving in Indianola in 1846 and making his way to Fredericksburg by the time town lots were distributed the following year. Also in 1847, he married a fellow immigrant, Anna Maria Elisabetha (Elizabeth) Behrens; they eventually had seven children. Initially, doctoring seems to have been at best a part-time occupation for Althaus; he also worked as a saddle-maker and as an Indian agent at Fort Martin Scott, two miles east of town, though in the 1850 census he was listed as a carpenter.

Althaus seems, like many of his fellow German settlers, to have cultivated a friendly relationship with the local Indians. He was one of the signers of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which virtually eliminated fears of Indian attacks, and he eventually learned several Indian dialects. He treated Indians as well as whites in his medical practice, following the advice of an Indian friend who advised him to “be friendly and never pull a gun.” (This still strikes me as good advice in most circumstances.)

After ten years in Fredericksburg, Althaus determined to try his hand at ranching. He and the family moved to Cave Creek, several miles northeast of town, where he built a two-room stone house on top of a spring in which he kept his medicines cool. (The house, still standing in modified form on Koennecke-Eckhardt Road, off Ranch Road 1631, is now part of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress.) Althaus, like many of his fellow Germans, opposed the “peculiar institution” of slavery and secession—an unpopular stance with many of their fellow Texans, and contributed to the legendary insularity of the Hill Country Germans—but helped organize the home guard and served as a county commissioner during the Civil War.

And all this time he was practicing medicine, too, as Barbara Donalson Althaus wrote in her Handbook entry:

He served as a community doctor until the 1880s, and his practice of medicine was carried on under many difficulties. Medical instruments were scarce; before Althaus amputated a crushed arm, he had to have the operating instrument (now at Pioneer Museum, Fredericksburg) made by a local blacksmith. He used locally grown herbs, roots, and bark to make his own medicines. When the government sent him to Bandera to treat diphtheria patients, he used medicine he made from honey, almond juice, and the bark of the blackjack tree. Thirty-four out of thirty-five people survived. Elizabeth Althaus not only raised seven children but also ran a makeshift hospital, orphanage, and shelter for wayfarers in their home. In addition she tended the farm during her husband’s trips, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Althaus farmed and ranched and operated a dairy on the Cave Creek property until the 1880s, when he moved a few miles east. In 1883 he was among the founders of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, which calls itself “the oldest rural church in Gillespie County,” and volunteered to help haul the lumber used to build the church from Austin, seventy-five miles away. (At this time he was in his sixties, remember.) He died in 1915, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried beside the church he helped establish.

All in all, a life worthy of remembrance and even celebration, I’m sure you’ll agree. And a life that puts my own in useful perspective. The high in Austin today will be in the mid-90s, but I’m typing this while sitting in a comfortable chair in our well-cooled house; when I sweat, it’s usually because I choose to, either by walking Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound up and down the surrounding hills in the morning, or by going to a nearby gym. The food we eat is plentiful and healthful, almost exclusively grown by local farmers; Heather is fixing a breakfast of home-made polenta (made with cornmeal from Boggy Creek Farm) topped by a poached egg from our happy Madroño Ranch hens. I’m getting over a summer cold, after several days of pounding decongestants and expectorants.

Do I wish I were living in nineteenth-century Texas? No and hell no. But I do wish that I had had the opportunity to meet people like Christian (and Elizabeth) Althaus in person. I know I could learn much from their courage and perseverance and goodness.

What we’re reading
Heather: Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
Martin: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still!)

Last Monday was Memorial Day, which Heather and I acknowledged by visiting the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg on our way out for a quick visit to Madroño Ranch.

If you haven’t been there yet, I can tell you that the museum is an amazing place, crammed full of artifacts and information; we had no idea! (Those of you wondering why a museum commemorating the Pacific war is in landlocked Fredericksburg should know that it is the home town of Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War II.) We were wandering through, overwhelmed by the number and detail of the exhibits, when we came upon a photograph (above) of Heather’s grandmother, Oveta Culp Hobby, who was the head of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.

Mamaw, as she was known in the family, was a formidable woman. Born in Killeen in 1905, she was a proto-feminist (though I suspect she would be horrified to be described as such), both genteel and steely. Family legend holds that she displayed a strong sense of integrity, not to say stubbornness, at an early age. Her son (and Heather’s uncle), former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby, wrote of her in the Handbook of Texas:

She was only five or six when a temperance campaign swept Killeen, and at Sunday school all the small children were invited to sign the pledge and receive a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union white ribbon to wear. Oveta thought it over and refused. She had no particular desire to drink liquor, she granted, but she might wish to when she grew up and thought it best not to give her word unless she was sure she was prepared to keep it.

She inherited a firm belief in the importance of public service from her father, a state legislator, and evinced an early interest in the law. She attended both Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor) and the South Texas College of Law, though she graduated from neither. At the tender age of twenty, she became the parliamentarian of the Texas House of Representatives, beginning a long career of public service, though her lone stab at electoral politics was a failure, as Uncle Bill notes:

At twenty-five she was persuaded to run for the state legislature from Houston, but was beaten by a candidate who whispered darkly that she was “a parliamentarian and a Unitarian.”

In 1931 she became the second wife of former Texas governor William P. Hobby, the president of the Houston Post and a good friend of her father’s; she was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. For the next decade, her life revolved around the newspaper business (she was successively the book editor, assistant editor, and executive vice president of the Post during the 1930s), community affairs (she was president of the League of Women Voters of Texas and served on the boards of various civic organizations), and her two children.

In 1942, she was appointed the first head of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which later became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). She became the first woman accorded the rank of colonel in the United States Army and worked tirelessly, in the face of deeply entrenched skepticism and prejudice, to establish the WAC as a legitimate branch of the service. (In 1945, in recognition of her efforts, she became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Service Medal.) Uncle Bill again:

The job she undertook was hard, often exasperating, frequently amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking. The new director had to travel constantly, speaking to large groups of men and women on the radical subject of enlisting volunteer women into the army. She traveled with an electric fan and iron, so that at each overnight stop she could wash, dry, and iron her khaki uniform—the only WAAC uniform in existence at the time.

After the war, she was active in the Democrats for Eisenhower movement, and in 1953 Ike appointed her the first secretary of the brand-new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services); she thus became only the second female Cabinet member in United States history. She resigned in 1955 to spend more time with her ailing husband (he died in 1964), and spent the next four decades overseeing the family communications business, which grew to include radio and television stations, and solidifying her standing as the first lady of Houston society. She died in 1995.

My own memories of her begin in the summer of 1981, when Heather and I, having just graduated from Williams College, embarked on an epic cross-country drive from Massachusetts to California and back to San Antonio.

En route to the West Coast, we passed through New Orleans, where we spent several days, and Houston, where we arranged to visit Mamaw. (Heather had made it clear that Mamaw was most definitely not the sort of grandmother one dropped in on unannounced for milk and cookies, so we called her secretary and made an appointment.)

On the night before our departure from the Crescent City, someone broke into our car and made off with all our worldly possessions (admittedly a modest pile), including Heather’s Williams College diploma and (this really hurt) our cooler full of beer. We were left, quite literally, with the clothes on our backs—in my case, a pair of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt bearing, in large letters across the chest, the slogan of the oyster bar in Boston’s Faneuil Hall (“EAT IT RAW”). We waited several hours, in vain, for the New Orleans police to show up before Heather announced that we had to leave; we simply could not afford to be late for our appointment with Mamaw.

We fairly flew over I-10 to Houston, pulling up at Mamaw’s house just in time. We were shown into a beautifully appointed sitting room and offered tea. The tea arrived, served in lovely bone china; I accepted a cup, and balanced it on my knee while we awaited Mamaw’s entrance.

Just before she entered the room, I looked down at the delicate cup and saucer resting on my bare, hairy knee, and suddenly realized that this meeting was not going to go well.

Sure enough, the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees when Mamaw entered and caught her first glimpse of me in my cut-offs and vulgar T-shirt, with my bushy beard and gold earring. What had I been thinking? Granted, we’d been in a hurry to reach Houston, but why hadn’t we stopped for even five minutes at a Dollar General Store and at least bought me a plain white T-shirt?

I escaped that awkward meeting alive, somehow, but for the next few years, whenever Mamaw called Heather and I happened to pick up the phone, I could feel the chill coming over the long-distance lines and through the receiver. “Hello?” I would say. (This was long before caller ID, of course.) “Is Heather there,” came the icy response—never “Hello, Martin,” or “How are you?”

Finally, after we married, Mamaw began, very gradually, to warm up to me. She became much friendlier on the phone, even asking me questions about myself and my work before asking to speak to Heather. We took our kids to visit her in Houston, having first threatened them with torture and dismemberment if they misbehaved; she seemed to enjoy them, though she never got used to the idea that she had a great-grandson named Tito. (“And how is little, er, Toto?” she would ask.)

She was also a little dubious about my ethnicity. The story goes that when one of Heather’s cousins announced that she was marrying a young man of Greek descent, Mamaw sniffed, “Well, we already have a Kohout in the family. I suppose we might as well have a Papadopoulos.”

I had of course always admired and respected her, and toward the end of her life I grew to love her as well. She was ferociously intelligent, determined, and opinionated, and yet she was also gracious and charming, and extremely funny—all qualities, by the way, she passed on to her daughter and granddaughters (and, so far as we can tell, to her great-granddaughters as well). I was fortunate indeed to know her, despite the somewhat, er, awkward beginning of our relationship.

Mamaw, I salute you. I hope that, wherever you are, you can see that I’ve cut my hair, trimmed the beard, and given up the earring. And that EAT IT RAW T-shirt disappeared years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: W. S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems
Martin: Jerome Charyn, The Seventh Babe

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

There must be a story behind the sign at the front gate of the Stonewall Community Cemetery—I mean, who digs a new grave in a cemetery without permission?—but I don’t know it. Even though I wrote the entry on Stonewall for the New Handbook of Texas almost twenty years ago, I never saw the sign until last fall, because I’d never taken the time to go out there and poke around the town. (Even then, I only did so at the urging of our friend Dennis Fagan, a terrific photographer who’s been documenting the town’s annual Peach JAMboree for thirty years now.)

Stonewall, a town of some 470 people on the Pedernales River in Gillespie County and the self-proclaimed “Peach Capital of Texas,” marks the halfway point of the two-and-a-half-hour drive between Austin and Madroño Ranch. It’s one of the places we usually speed through without stopping on our way to or from the ranch, a wide spot in the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg.

I suspect that is most people’s experience of Stonewall. Some may stop for gas, or to buy peaches at one of the numerous roadside stands, but the average driver who whizzes past on Highway 290 is too intent on reaching Austin or Fredericksburg to think much about Stonewall. If the town registers on his or her consciousness at all, it is as an annoyance, because the speed limit drops from 70 to 55 miles per hour there.

The chamber of commerce, having somewhat arbitrarily selected 1860 as the date of the town’s founding, will celebrate Stonewall’s sesquicentennial this year, but many accounts date the town’s birth to some time around 1870. That’s when Israel Nunez, a Jewish transplant from the state of Georgia, established a stagecoach stop a couple of miles south of the current town. Initially Major Nunez, as he was known, collected mail for the scattered local settlers from passengers traveling between San Marcos, Blanco, and points west, but by 1875 the local population had increased to the point that an actual post office was established there, and Nunez insisted it be called Stonewall, after Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, under whom he’d served during the War of Northern Aggression.

Or so the story went. The reality, it appears, was slightly different. Israel Moses Nunez, born in Florida in 1838, was the third child and oldest surviving son of Raphael J. Moses, Confederate general James Longstreet’s chief supply officer and a pioneer of the commercial peach industry in Georgia—an interesting historical note, that, given the future importance of peaches to Stonewall.

Raphael changed his son’s surname to Nunez to perpetuate the family’s Sephardic heritage; “Major” turns out to have been Israel’s childhood nickname, rather than his military rank. In 1906, his younger brother recalled, “When we moved to Columbus [Georgia] in 1849, Israel had on his first pair of boots and he was so proud of them and strutted so up and down the deck showing them off that all the passengers nicknamed him the ‘Major,’ a name which has curiously held on to him the balance of his life.” (Perhaps coincidentally, major was also the rank his father held in the Confederate army.)

Moreover, Israel never actually served under Jackson. He didn’t enlist as a private in William W. Parker’s Virginia artillery battalion until December 1863—a full seven months after Stonewall was cut down by “friendly fire” at Chancellorsville. Israel did serve in the trenches during the siege of Petersburg, but he was back home in Georgia when the war ended. Sometime thereafter he and his wife Anna Marie, who bore him eleven children between 1860 and 1883, moved from Columbus to what was then considered western Texas.

Of course, whether or not he actually served under Jackson, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have named his new home after the Confederate hero. As for the persistence of the nickname “Major,” well, perhaps he didn’t go out of his way to correct those who assumed he’d attained that rank in the Confederate army, but then the post-Civil War years saw a fair amount of romantic historical revisionism. He and his family moved to Austin in 1890, and he died fifteen years later. Israel and Anna Marie Nunez are buried in one of the Jewish sections of Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

In 1924, when Highway 290 was completed between Austin and Fredericksburg, Stonewall hosted the official celebration. Thirty-three years later, the highway was moved four hundred yards to the south, and several businesses followed it. Most people who know Stonewall from the establishments along Highway 290—peach stands like Burg’s Corner, Gold Orchards, Vogel Orchards; restaurants like Lindig’s Café and the One Stop diner; vineyards like Becker, Grape Creek, and Woodrose—might not even realize that the town also boasts a number of establishments aimed primarily at the town’s inhabitants rather than tourists: the Trinity Lutheran, St. Francis Xavier Catholic, and Stonewall Baptist churches; Nielsen Automotive, Stonewall Body Shop, and Eckert and Son Used Auto Parts; the Stonewall Smokehouse; Weinheimer and Son general merchandise; Stonewall Mutual Farm Insurance; the Stonewall Volunteer Fire Department; Stonewall Head Start; Gordon’s Welding; J. Bolton and Associates wholesale furniture; Vogel Tractors.

Similarly, my Handbook of Texas entry on Stonewall, while more or less accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t come close to giving the flavor of the place. Nowhere in it do you learn that the locals are trying desperately to keep the peach industry going in the face of terrible and persistent drought; that they’re facing pressure to quit growing peaches in favor of grapes, that pernicious totem of yuppie agritourism; that as the memory of local boy LBJ fades further into the past, the number of visitors to the nearby Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park keeps dwindling. What’s missing from that entry, in other words, is the real human drama you can find in Stonewall right now, every day, if you just know where and how to dig.

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Martin: Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats

Bandera County, and the field of Texas history, lost a good one when Dorothy “Dot” Ferguson Hatfield passed away in late September at her home in Medina.

Probably not many of you know who she was, but over the last two decades she produced a shelf-full of indispensable books—eighteen in all—on the history and people of Bandera County. I had never heard of her or her books until our ranch manager Robert Selement generously loaned me his personal copies, signed by the author, when he learned I was researching the history of Madroño Ranch and the surrounding area.

Hatfield’s books, which bear titles such as Medina Memories; Medina: Mecca of the Hills; Magical Medina; and Medina, Glory Land, are compilations of interviews with old-timers, recountings of local legends, and other such ephemera, jumbled together in somewhat random order. They are far from scholarly, lacking an index and, often, any attribution by which to gauge their veracity, but full of lively and otherwise unavailable information—such as the tale of Medina’s last cattle drive, in 1941; or of the impromptu local celebration on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice ending World War I was signed in France; or Ida Hatfield’s account of the 1870 raid in which Indians killed her parents, kidnapped her two brothers, and left eight-year-old Ida for dead after piercing her seven times with lances.

I am sorry to say there was a time, while I was a graduate student at UT Austin, when I looked down my nose at such works. I was working toward a master’s degree in American studies, and while that field seemed somewhat less strictly “academic” than, say, English lit or history, I still believed that no work without footnotes and an index was really worth much. Then, in 1986, the Texas State Historical Association, then headquartered on the UT campus, hired me as a part-time writer and researcher on the New Handbook of Texas project.

The NHOT, as we called it, is a six-volume, 6,000-page reference work published in 1996. (It is now available online as well.) It is a sort of combination historical encyclopedia and biographical dictionary, comprising some 25,000 entries on every county, city, town, river, creek, mountain, battle, personality, and profession in or associated with Texas. The NHOT was the culmination of a 14-year project to revise, expand, and update the original two-volume Handbook of Texas, co-edited by the legendary Walter Prescott Webb and published in 1952. (A single supplementary volume appeared in 1976.)

Over the years I wrote several hundred entries for the NHOT on a dizzying variety of topics, including rock and roller Buddy Holly, football star Bobby Layne, Fredericksburg’s Nimitz Hotel, Western swing pioneer Adolph Hofner, the Dallas Stars hockey team, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Big Bend Ranch State Park, silent movie star Tom Mix, singing cowgirl Dale Evans, and many others. And while I eventually spent about fifteen years on the TSHA staff in a variety of full-time positions, initially I was just one foot soldier in a veritable army of grad students, independent researchers, and freelance writers working on the NHOT.

Most of us relied primarily on the collection of what was then known as the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, now part of UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Among the most valuable resources in that collection were works, many of them much like Hatfield’s, by amateur local historians. I quickly developed a profound appreciation of such folk; they were “on the ground,” so to speak, and knew their communities in a way that no professional academic historian could. While some of the stories were almost certainly exaggerated, if not made up out of whole cloth, and while we often wished the books had a more logical organizational structure, much of what they contained was invaluable information that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Once I meandered through Dot Hatfield’s charming and informative books of Medina history, I had been hoping to meet her; Robert, who knew she had been in poor health, kept urging me not to delay. As usual, Robert was right; she died before I had the opportunity to meet her and tell her how much I enjoyed and appreciated her work. There’s no doubt that it will inform and enrich any future blog posts in which we talk about the history of the area.

What we’re reading
Heather: Ian Falconer, Olivia Helps with Christmas
Martin:Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties