A Gringo in Rural Mexico: More detail and filling in as the Siege of the Alamo begins more than in earnest

Saturday 28 February 2015

More detail and filling in as the Siege of the Alamo begins more than in earnest

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The events pertaining to the Battle of the Alamo, and the six months prior up to the year after, have absorbed analysts, historians, demagogues, archaeologists, run-of-the-mill Texians (if there be such a thing), and all manner of person starting around 1880, especially. The popular perception is not all that bad, but it is also, frequently, not all that good.

For instance in the posting two back from this one, we have a sign off song by Marty Robbins, the "Ballad of the Alamo" that is very good and inspiring. Marty did not make much, if any, crummy work. But, the song and its back up graphics have a few weak spots.

For instance, it speaks to the fact that 185 men were going to face down 5,000 soldiers from the Mexican Centralist government. Well....close, but no cigar. The 185 might have been a few more, because there has been talk about a number of extra of the Tejanos coming in from the Yorktown area of Texas (south of San Antonio by a 100 miles) who were not tabulated into the roster of effectives due to their late arrival. There were a few other of the Latin group who literally crawled into the Alamo through a window at night during the last days before the final assaults. Still, and true enough, although it is probably true, there would have been only another 20 or so to have joined the ranks in defence of the noble old chapel. So let us say that there were 200 or so, plus two Negroes, and a large number of mainly Latin women (wives of Anglo and Latin Texians) and a fairly significant gaggle of children, possibly totally as many as forty.

The entire Mexican Centralist combined armies under Lopez de Santa Anna, along with the Messrs. Gen. Pedro Urrea coming from the Matamoros to San Felipe along the coast, the Italian Filisola coming up on Lopez de Santa Anna's right along what would become closely related to what is now Texas Highway 16 (an excellent wildflower highway with very little traffic....a delight in March and April), along with Reserves and special action battalions associated with General Pefecto de Cos (Lopez de Santa Anna's brother-in-law), Colonel Juan Almonte who had many friends among the Anglo-Texians, and the likes of Gen. Pedro Ampudia, a Cuban who was afraid of nothing and a cunningly brilliant tactician.....did not total 10,000 effectives. Those arriving at the outskirts of San Antonio de Bexar did not exceed 1,800 combatants.

So, when Marty sings about the Texians holding back 5,000, that could be construed as factual if one interpolates the value of distant troops lending doubly indirect assistance to the main body travelling with the Generalissimo Presidente Santa Anna. That group directly involved however with the siege and final solution of the problems presented by the Alamo were never more than 1,800 effectives.

And while it is not my wish to diverge widely, it must be pointed out that under reasonable conditions, any investigating body would have been correct in convening a courts martial action against both William Barret Travis, Colonel Commanding, the Alamo and Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, General Commanding, for defending and attacking the Alamo. It was folly for both. Neither could win, and in the final analysis both lost, but the Ghosts of the Alamo had the last laugh.

Another of the problems presented by the graphics and lyrics of the song is that there is one scene that shows the Alamo with a Texas Lone Star Flag. No such flag existed at that time. Further, the flag as it is depicted is unfurled up-side-down. The white field must be atop the red.

We have that continuing issue with the flags. Still, as last year, we must admit that there are several researchers who adamantly deny the existence of a Mexican tri-colour with the gold numbers 1824 on the middle white field. While I give them deference, it is necessary that they should be disposed of their useless pretences by the following:

Phillip Dimmit's Flag

During the first few months of the Revolution, many of the Texian leaders were simply trying to lend their part in the larger Federalist Revolution that was being waged against the Centralist Regime of Santa Anna in other parts of Mexico. The first reference to a banner resembling the 1824 Flag is one which appears in a letter from Philip Dimmit, commanding the garrison at Goliad, to General Stephen F. Austin, Commander in Chief of the Army of the People, dated October 27th 1835. Dimmit writes:

"I have had a flag made - the colours, and their arrangement the same as the old one - with the words and figures, 'Constitution of 1824,' displayed on the white, in the centre."

Later, Philip Dimmit left Goliad to take part in the Storming of Bexar in late 1835. I think we can safely assume that he had his "Constitution of 1824" flag with him. Even during the Storming of Bexar, Dimmit was an ardent supporter of Restoration.

The next reference to an 1824 Flag can be found in the proceedings of the General Council of the Provisional Government of Texas. I believe that from the Dimmit design, evolved the design that was adopted by this General Council for the banner which was to be flown by ships bearing "Letters of Marque and Reprisal". These were privately owned and operated ships that were granted permission by the government to attack and seize enemy ships and cargo. In return for this license the government received a percentage of the value of the seized property. On November 29, 1835 the General Council passed an ordinance which reads in part:

"...Sec. 2. Be it further ordained and decreed, That all vessels sailing under Licenses, as Letters of Marque and Reprisal, which have been, or may be hereafter granted by the Governor and Council, or by the Governor, as provided in this supplementary Ordinance, or under any register or license of this Government, shall carry the flag of the Republic of the United States of Mexico, and shall have the figures 1, 8, 2, 4, cyphered in large Arabics on the white ground thereof....Passed at San Felipe de Austin, Nov. 29, 1835."

This flag and another, the Coahuila y Texas Dos Estrellas, celebrated the region of the two States that had been combined into one by statute of the Mexico City central Congress. The two States had a common political understanding and both were anti-centralists, pro-federalist, States' Rights places, and the "Two - Star Flag" flew over the Alamo most of the time during the siege. The following analysis is presented:

DeWitt Colonists lived under the State Flag of Coahuila y Tejas in the 1820’s and 1830’s. The two stars signified the two regions that comprised the State of Coahuila and Texas. Col. Juan Almonte, aid to Santa Anna, states "the enemy, as soon as the march of the division was seen, hoisted the tri-colored flag with two stars, designed to represent Coahuila and Texas" in his journal entry about the Siege and Battle of the Alamo. Mexican officer and engineer Carlos Sanchez-Navarro, who participated in the siege of the Alamo in Mar 1836 in his memoirs, La Guerra de Tejas, Memorias de un Soldado, shows in a illustration the flag of Coahuila y Tejas flying over the Alamo. It has also been speculated that this banner may have been carried by Capt. Juan Seguin's company at the Battle of Bexar and taken with them to the Alamo garrison.

There was another, the banner of the New Orleans Greys, a body of two companies of infantry totalling about 120 men, well-supplied and trained, relatively. They had a banner on grey-blue silk, and a group of those men left La Bahia del Espiritu Santo and entered the Alamo after the Texian victory in December that expulsed the garrison of Pefecto de Cos, and remained until they were killed-in-action on the 6th of March. One last banner may have been the "bonny blue flag's" first appearance on a battlefield. It has been said that there was a "blue field flag with a single five pointed star in the centre" at the Alamo, but it is our opinion that it is confused with the first efforts of establishing an official standard for the new Republic of Texas, and one of the first of those was such a standard.

Another depiction of the three big cheeses, Crockett, Bowie, and Travis, is okay for a glamour shot or a marquis poster, but Bowie, after 12th of February, could barely walk across his tiny cloister room. So, the "crossing of the line in the sand, made by Travis's army sabre" if it occurred would have required Bowie to have been carried across said line. The song's lyrics also indicate that "not a soldier crossed that line"....when supposedly Travis's admonition was to cross the line, if the soldier intended to stay to the death.

The "crossing the line" matter is also disputed by some historians who say that it was fanciful, romanticism at best, and that none of those surviving souls saw the event or testified to it. That is not exactly true, because the women and children and the two Negroes, one a slave the other a runaway "extralegal" from Louisiana, were kept inside the great room so as to be away from any harassing canon fire from Lopez de Santa Anna's ever tightening ring of six-pounders.

These matters can go on and on....they become more interesting and riveting, not less, as the years go by. We shall continue our communion with the Ghosts of the Alamo to-morrow, along with other things. Thank one and all for your kind attention and time.

El Gringo Viejo

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Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

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What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

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Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

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Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

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And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

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“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

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It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

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El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.