Category Archives: history

Texas Heritage Days at Schreiner University – 9/15/2023

Posted on by

Schreiner University is hosting a great event this year for us history enthusiasts.    Their Texas Heritage Days event looks to be a good one for sure.

Here is a list of some of the groups in attendance and what they’ll be demonstrating and discussing:

1. AT&T, The Texas Center, E Pluribus Texas

2. Texas Commission on the Arts, Vickie Hayes, Collaborative Art

3. Riverside Nature Center, Fossils

4. Daughters of the Republic of Texas, History Camp Activities

5. Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Texas Ranger Badges an Selfie Station

6. Aurora and Mariza Betancourt, The Original Way of Making Corn Tortillas

7. Clifton Fifer, Stories and Songs

8. Lenny and Dana Medina, Indian Dancer

9. Company A 9th US Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, Buffalo Soldiers Life on the Frontier

10. Rio San Gabriel Party of the American Mountain Men, Fur Trade in Texas/Plains Indian Sign Language

11. Hill Country Archeological Association, The Archeology of the Prehistoric Texas Hill Country

12. Sons of the American Revolution – Firing demonstrations at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

13. The Alamo, Cannon and Musket – Firing demonstrations at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

14. Frontier History Company, Texas Ranger Camps – Firing demonstrations at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

15. Roy Neal, Moses the Mountain Man

16. Doug Baum, Texas Camel Corps

17. Scott S. Kelly, Chuckwagon Display

18. Russell Tiner, Longhorn Living History

19. Kevin Fitzpatrick, Trick Roper

20. Fort McKavett State Historic Site, The Frontier Army in the Antebellum Era

21. Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, Frontier Army Life at Fort Concho

22. Creative Moondance Treasures, Inc., Harmonica lessons with free harmonicas

I’ll be there with some of my AMM brothers discussing period weapons, and we’ll be doing some plains Indian sign language, displaying period gear, and more.

More details are available on their website – https://schreiner.edu/the-texas-center/texas-heritage-days/

Hope to see you there!

Ethan – Instilling a Passion for History in Future Generations

Posted on by

Our friend Ethan over at I Love Muzzleloading presented at the 2023 Kalamazoo Living History Show with some concrete ideas of how to share our passion for history and muzzleloading with others.

Here’s his full presentation . .  .

I really liked how Ethan grouped together the various aspects of the muzzleloader hobby – target shooters, woodsrunners, living historians, experimental archeologists, etc into a muzzeloading community.

Ethan has some great ideas for things we can all do to make sure our common passion can be passed down to future generations.

What do you think?

What will you do . . .

The Mountain Men – Judged by Skill….

Posted on by

“They were social outcasts – some of them army deserters, some of them men with a legal charge over their heads, some of them bound boys or slaves who had run away – but men were pretty much the same out here.  A black man who could shoot center and eat boudins with you and warn you about a Blackfoot creeping up wasn’t a man you looked out on.  Out here a man wasn’t judged by whether he could read or write, or what his color was, or what kind of family he came from, or how much money he had back there, but by his skill. Social rank here, in rising order was pork-eater, camp-tender, company trapper, clerk, booshway, and top rank – free trapper. The measure of a man was his extent of his skill-his mountain craft.”

– Win Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks

2019 Goliad Christmas Rendezvous

Posted on by


From John Donahoo, President – Texas Association of Buckskinners

Good evening friends & neighbors,

The time is once again upon us for the Christmas Rendezvous at Presidio la Bahia in Goliad, Texas. The dates for this year’s event are December 6th, 7th & 8th, 2019.

After a last minute change of cast, Cuz will be our Booshway. If you are able to assist with running events please give him a call asap. His cell number is: (281) 513-7685

As a reminder, this event IS open to the general public, and we are NOT able to have any firearms competitions at this rendezvous.

We will have knife & hawk, fire starting, archery and cooking contests. If you have ideas for any other non-firearm related events, please contact Cuz to discuss those ideas.

If you paid your annual TAB dues in October, you are covered for this event.. If you have not paid annual dues, you may do so at this event, or you may pay the $20 camp fee.

Water and showers are available on site. Please bring firewood. There are a limited number of beds available inside the barracks. These will be on a first come, first served basis.

For the Board of Directors,

John Donahoo
TAB President
2018-2020

A few thoughts on The Way West

Posted on by

A few years back, I read A.B. Guthrie, Jr’s incredible mountain man novel, The Big Sky.  An adequate description of that novel deserves more than a passing mention, but suffice to say, it truly stands as one of the best of the best in mountain man literature.  The language is just fantastic, and having been written in the late 1940s, I can only imagine the author wasn’t too far removed from some folks who may have been kin to the original source material.

After having found out there was a sequel, I hemmed and hawed on it a bit, slightly less interested in the story of a mountain man leading a pioneer train down the Oregon Trail vs. a more period novel.    However, I recently took the plunge and was really glad I did.

As I learned in reading the memoir, Sixty Years on the Plains, though the “age of the mountain man” was short lived (generally recognized as 1800-1840, or thereabouts), the mountain men themselves didn’t just head back into civilization once the fallen price of beaver pelts killed the rendezvous system.

In The Way West, we get a glimpse of mountain man Dick Summers, a character from The Big Sky.    Whereas The Big Sky shows him as a much younger trapper, in The Way West, he’s now the “old hand,” brought out of an agricultural semi-retirement to lead a wagon train of pioneers from Missouri and points east to what’s thought of as the Oregonian Promised Land.

In one scene, the author is contrasting mountain man Dick Summer’s slim equipage vs that of the other members of the wagon train:

Evans was looking at Summers’ little pile of plunder.   There wasn’t much there, not near enough by the rules – a blanket and an old buffalo robe that covered just a teensy keg of whisky, a little bit of meal, about a shirttail full of it, and salt meat and coffee and tobacco and a kettle and a couple of knives and two rifles, his Hawken ad an over-and-under double barrel with one bore big enough for bird shot.   He had a little of Indian goods, too, blue and white beads and fishhooks and tobacco and a roll of scarlet strouding and some vermilion. All of his plunder put together wasn’t’ more than a couple of pack horses could carry easy. Even so, it was more than he needed. He could travel from hell to breakfast with no more than a gun and a horse, and would get there in time for dinner without the horse.

Makes me think that a pretty good challenge would be to approach an event with a similar outfit of gear, minus the trade goods of course.    (Though, it may be good to trade for better vittles instead of camp dogging).

There is a cool scene where the erstwhile mountain man reminisces about his time with his former colleagues, the author noting the change in Summers’ language as he interacts with his fellows:

“How be you?  Fat, I’m thinkin’.”  Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back.   “Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol’ bastard, and if you got a dry, here’s whisky.”

The deeper the wagon train pushes into the flat wilderness of the plains and western deserts, the more we get a sense of Summers’ sense of loss and reminiscing about the shinin’ times gone by.

Though not strictly a “mountain man” novel per se, The Way West presents an interesting look at the trials and travails which faced these travelers – both nature and man – and the hardship of the journey is adequately summed in one of the closing passages of the book:

How much would he like Oregon except for sweat and grief along the way?   Grief bowed the heart, but made it richer, so that joy was rich.

AB Guthrie, Jr’s fantastic writing sure holds up after more than 60 years, and The Way West holds up as does The Big Sky as some of the more fantastic literature of the early days of the American West.

Thoughts on The Revenant – The Book

Posted on by

It’s a cheap cliché to say that the book is always better than the movie.

With few exceptions (notably The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Watchmen), most movies are lackluster adaptions of the books.    Of course this has to do with the way your mind imagines characters and scenarios in the book.   Often you’ll have a different idea for how someone would look or be, and the vision of the director is jarring enough to make it not work.

Or the screenwriter/direction misses a favorite scene.

Or leaves out a favorite character.

Or in the case of Michael Punke’s The Revenant – A Novel of Revenge . . . maybe they never actually read the book?

Admittedly, I was so put off by the beautifully filmed but ridiculously plotted movie that I decided to skip the book for a long time.   I recently finished the book and was – without hyperbole – blown away.

In a life dominated by four kids, a burgeoning farmstead, and a demanding job, I managed to read the book in 5 days – no small feat – and one I haven’t been able to accomplish since my hazy pre-kid days.

With no silly half-Indian kid subplot, the book was based purely on the concept of Hugh Glass wanting revenge on the two people in his crew that took his rifle and gear and left him for dead after being mauled by a bear.    The book is filled with ample historical details and musings about the day-to-day activities of keeping yourself alive in the vast western wilderness of early 1800s America.   Which, by the way, didn’t include hiding yourself in an animal carcass Tauntaun-style to avoid freezing to death.

But what really made the book shine was all of the details speculated on and provided about Glass.   For all of the infamy gained by his tussle with a bear, there was really not a lot I knew about him.   He was really a character who suddenly appeared in Ashley and Henry’s famous 1822 expedition, and then sort of dropped out of the narratives.

The book speculates on Glass’s early life, time as a mariner and pirate – and how he gets his famous rifle.    All of this fantastic narrative was sadly omitted from the movie.    Can you imagine a pirate mountain man movie?  That would have been incredible!

As a historical weapons enthusiast, there’s one scene I really dig on, where Hugh Glass is resupplying at a frontier trading post, after his recovering from the famous bear mauling and crawling his way back to the fringes of civilization.

After choosing between the limited arms available, and the only two rifles – a .32 caliber Kentucky rifle, and a beat-up Model 1803 U.S. Harper’s Ferry rifle, Glass:

 . . . picked up the Model 1803, the same gun carried by many of the soldiers in Lewis and Clarks’ Corps of Discovery.

After choosing the “Harper’s Ferry” Rifle in .53 caliber, Glass gets the rest of his kit.    Punke continues:

They returned to the cabin and Glass picked out the rest of his supplies.   He chose a .53 pistol to complement the rifle.    A ball mold, lead, powder, and flints.     A tomahawk and a large skinning knife.   A thick leather belt to hold his weapons.   Two red cotton shirts to wear beneath the doeskin tunic.   A large Hudson’s Bay capote.   A wool cap and mittens.   Five pounds of salt and three pigtails of tobacco.  Needle and thread.   Cordage.   To carry his newfound bounty, he picked a fringed leather possibles bag with intricate quill beading.    He noticed that the voyageurs all wore small sacks at the waist for their pipe and tobacco.   He took one of those too, a handy spot for his new flint and steel.

Sounds like a pretty good load-out for an AMM event, eh?

Is the book 100% historical accurate?   Of course not, and it doesn’t purport to be.  It’s a just a very well-written, exciting story about how things may have gone down.

I definitely recommend any mountain man or history enthusiasts check this one out.

Mountaineers and their children…

Posted on by

 

“The mountaineers in their rude hunting dresses, armed with rifles and roughly mounted, and leading their pack-horses down a hill of the forest, looked like banditti returning with plunder. On the top of some of the packs were perched several half-breed children, perfect little imps, with wild black eyes glaring from among elf locks. These, I was told, were children of the trappers; pledges of love from their squaw spouses in the wilderness.”

 

From: Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville. “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West.”

Update on 13th Annual Pre-1840s Pilgrims’ Camp and Swap Meet

Posted on by

13th Annual Pre-1840s Pilgrims’ Camp and Swap Meet – January 24-25, 2015
 
The folks at the Cowboy Action Shooting Range outside of Columbus have once again graciously volunteered their facility to provide a friendly, safe, informative and fun place for “civilians” and “old hands” to explore their interest in living history. The range is located just Northwest of Columbus, Texas off of US Hwy 71. Plenty of camping space is available.

Saturday afternoon forensic sculptor, Amanda Danning will give a talk on putting a face on the remains of two of La Salle’s settlers. David Martin will give a presentation on indigenous natives of Texas at first European contact and the success of the French and the failures of the Spanish to interact with them. And Charlie Yates will give a talk on the Mexican artillery positions at the 1836 Battle of the Alamo and what they tell us of Santa Anna’s strategy.

There will also be a limited amount of range time for those wishing to shoot. Jerry Tubbs will be in charge of the range and will have rules and procedures for the firing.

The event is open to living historians, reënactors, interested individuals and groups. In conjunction with the “Pilgrim’s” Camp, the “old hands” are encouraged to bring their surplus gear, equipment, clothes and accouterments for an old fash-ioned trading session and swap meet.

There is a $10 general registration fee to help defray expenses and period dress is not required, but it is encouraged. Wood will be provided and if you’d like to help out, bring a chainsaw for a wood cutting party on Friday. For additional information contact Jerry Tubbs at coloneltubbs@yahoo.com (telephone 713-973-1136) or Charlie Yates at cmyates_50@yahoo.com .

Texas Archaeology Month – October 2013

Posted on by
Some recent details from Comrade Michael on some great upcoming Texas history events:

Texas Archaeology Month at the Brazoria County Historical Museum

October 3rd at 6:30pm: Alamo Artillery: Ampudia and a Real Cannon. As part of the Brazoria County Historical Museum’s Archeology Series, Dr. Gregg Dimmick will attempt to convince the audience, through historical data, that the brass cannon currently on loan to the Alamo from San Jacinto Battleground was actually at the Alamo in March of 1836.

October 10th at 6:30 pm: Prehistoric Appetites. Second of four in the museum’s Archeology Series, Jack Johnson will explore the life of prehistoric hunter gathers as it relates to weapons, edible plants, processing and cooking techniques. Artifacts and demonstrations will help bring to life the realities of our prehistoric ancestors.

October 17th at 6:30pm: Hatteras 150: Rediscovering the Naval Battle that Shaped the Civil War in Texas. Three of four in the museum’s Archeology Series, Andrew Hall will present the 1863 battle that sunk USS Hatteras, a Union warship whose mission was to help block the passage of supplies and arms to and from the Confederacy. 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico.

October 24th at 6:30pm: Discovering the Bernardo Plantation. The final program in the museum’s Archeology Series, Charlie Gordy will reveal the latest excavation discoveries made at Bernardo Plantation, former home of Jared E. Groce and site of the Texas Revolution encampment of the Texian Army before the Battle of San Jacinto.

All programs are free and open to the public. The Brazoria County Historical Museum is located at 100 East Cedar Street in Angleton, Texas. For Information call 979-864-1208.

April 19, 1775 – The Battles of Lexington and Concord

Posted on by


The morning of April 19, 1775 saw soldiers of the British Army arriving at the Massachusetts town of Lexington. Their mission was to seize and destroy militia weapons and ammunition, but the local militia, known as Minutemen, stood on Lexington Green, awaiting their arrival. During the stand off, a someone fired a shot, which led the British troops to fire at the colonial militia. The Minutemen dispersed, and the British headed toward nearby Concord.

At the Concord North Bridge, a small group of militia battled a force of British soldiers. At this point, the British commander decided to retreat back toward Lexington, as it became evident that more and more Minutemen were arriving from all of the local villages and farms.

During this retreat, the British kept to the road, while the American farmers fired at them from behind trees, walls and any obstacle they could find. When the British force returned to Lexington, they were met by a relief column. The combined British units then headed for Boston. The Minutemen continued to harass them the whole way.

By the end of the day, British casualties numbered 273, while the colonials suffered only 94, 18 of whom fell during the initial clash at Lexington. The American Revolutionary War had begun.

More info from The History Guy.