Not precise renditions, but essentially correct statements from History

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    Your humble observer of the American Experience recognises that there is really no point to "winning" the point of this matter.   But, it is true that the quotations posted above are, while not precisely accurate in all respects, are true restatements of each man's expressed…both written and spoken…viewpoints concerning the slavery and Negro "situation".

Thanks for your attention, as usual!

El Gringo Viejo

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Several Rapid-fire points of a public and private nature

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     Perhaps first we should show a bit of the mystic by revealing the mystique of the adjacent properties of the Quinta Tesoro de la Sierra Madre and the adjacent Hacienda de La Vega.  These are places that have seen great upheaval, wars, civil unrest, massive investment and profits, the establishment of a rural "middle-class" (very rare in those times - 1870 / 1990), and a history of European contact since the year 1606.

    The setting is not the most impressive, perhaps, in terms of all geographical backdrops on Planet Earth, but it is way on up there in the major leagues of such phenomena.  One reason for this is the complexity of the adjacency of five or six different climate and geological zones within sight of each other, and because it is grouped into an area of only 100,000 square miles.

     The setting for the Quinta is almost like a dream, in many ways.   The picture to the left shows the brooding and understated El Cautivo section of the Sierra Madre Oriental, giving face to the East, towards the Gulf of Mexico, some 105 miles away.   The most distant ridge measures right at 10,000 feet above sea level.

     Adjacent, and at the very foot of the mountains, is the dense oak and bramble forest that extends out from the higher elevations.   Pine and tropical red oak dominates from 2,000 fasl up to about 5,000 fasl.  Due to the "diversity" of vegetation and the benevolent AND at times violent climate and weather conditions, we are treated to one of the greatest "diversity" concentrations of wilderness birds, reptiles, mammals, and butterflies on the planet.

     At the foot of the scene to the left is the magnificent planting of the famous Italian Limes which have become the rage, overnight, from Paris to New York City to Mexico City and a million other places.  They have become mandatory for the fancy saloons and for the use in first-class and deluxe kitchens everywhere.  The Persian lime had been dominating, but before we lament the passing of any of the Lime races, fear not, they all have great numbers of followers…including Ernest Hemingway's favourite, the Key Lime.   El Gringo Viejo is a non-racist in Lime terms, using any and all that come within reach.  BUT!!…the Italian lime is definitely the "aristocratic lime" in my opinion.

     Most recently our neighbour, the owner of the Hacienda de La Vega, had a couple of well-placed friends along with a very pleasant and intelligent fellow from Naples, Italy (homeland of the Italian lime).  One should be comforted when he is producing something that important personalities from the place of origin of the item being produced has come to buy that same product.  That is especially true when the important personality is deeply involved in the business personally as an investor, producer, and purchaser.

     The Santa Engracia area has been the region where Coca-cola de Mexico SAdeCV and Coca-cola of Atlanta, Inc, contended for the limes produced in there…dating back to the 1970s.  It is, as I intone, a mystical place.

     The blossoms on the left are, in the vernacular of the locale, blooms of the garlic vine.  The reason?  It is because when the blossoms open, the have an overpowering scent of garlic.  The flower does, in fact, have a similar presentation as a regular garlic flower, but it is much larger, and…of course…this garlic is different because it comes from a vine, and not a single stem from a single plant.   This particular plant happens to be nearly adjacent to our little adobe hut, about 9 feet away from the vine.   We would have had much more, possibly, had not our previous Winter been so insistent, persistent, and just darned cold.   But, I did notice that there were several late-sprouting vines, so perhaps during the last days of Autumn, we might have a whole bunch of garlic and garlic blossoms.

     El Gringo Viejo, at his age and grumpy disposition, usually sleeps little during the night and wanders the property, watching the sky for UFOs or the blinking lights of passenger jets plying the routes twixt Mexico City and Dallas or Houston.   There are various "Highways in the Sky" that have frequent commercial flights, and it is pleasant to see them fly over at 38,000 feet.  There are other puddle-jumpers, mainly Embraers, that serve shorter hauls and rarely go over 25,000 feet (they are really good aircraft - mules of the fleet, so to speak - very comfortable).

     The skies give all nature of opportunity for "night vision", including satellites, meteors, and things that are hard to describe without appearing to be an escapee from a manicomio (mental hospital) from Ciudad Victoria.  At night, one can almost feel the eyes of a hundred large and small mammals and perhaps a hundred spirits who decided that they would just as soon stay in Santa Engracia (Holy Grace…the name of our area) as to go to Heaven…or some other place.
     The above picture with the moon, the palm, and the silhouette of the Sierra Madre Oriental's section known as La Sierra del Cautivo (captive), centre'd at the living compound of the hacendado (owner of) de La Vega is a happy haunting, reserved for the old fools who like to stumble around at 03:50 in the morning looking for things of interest.   El Gringo Viejo has learned how to use his camera with a little better proficiency.
     One or two last images is the wooliness of the grounds of the home compound of the Quinta, located about 200 yards to the East of the "Moon Picture" above.  Finally, after a long Spring, and then a longer Summer, and then a pretty good start into Autumn, we had an episode of one week with 10 to 15 inches of rain over a fortnight.   The remaining "Summer's heat" cast down from the Sun during those last warm days provoked a very positive response to our gardens and surrounding trees and other vegetation.
     Once again, we can show one and all a bit of a tropical - Alpine - desertine - riverine wonderland, all rolled into one humble picture of one humble, mud home (but with electricity, natural gas, flush toilets, hot showers, cable television, world connected telephone, and even a bit of air conditioning that works!!!).   It's almost like a real place!

butterfly weed

    We shall leave one and all for a bit, in order to attend to chores for a day or so.  The picture of the butterfly weed is left to your pleasure…the butterflies like it too, because the "baby butterflies" eat the plant (apparently to death) when they are "pre-butterfly worms" (caterpillars).   Some folks try to kill the "worms", not realising the "worms" are baby butterflies.   So, this photo is given in memory of those babies.

El Gringo Viejo

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Lamentation concerning the entire nature of public discourse and process...

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Holton-Arms Head of School Susanna A. Jones Praised Blasey Ford 'Using Her Voice’

It was reported that this is the statement of Holton-Arms Head of School Susanna A. Jones:

“In a recent article The Washington Post described an alleged assault of one of our alumnae by Supreme Court nominee Brent M Kavanagh that occurred in the early 1980s, while she was a student at Holton-Arms. In these cases, it is imperative that all voices are heard. As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers.”

    Little matter, of course, whether the voice makes sense or not… Ah! the comfort of modernity and relativity.

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     The children locked in animal care cages during the Obama Administration?  Solution?   The Obsolete Press and the Democrat Party apparatchiks blame Trump and the Deplorables who are killing everybody all the time with their guns and Bibles.   And…all the while…imprisoning children in dog cages, three years before having been elected to the Presidency.

    The Obsolete Press and Democrat Ghouls join hands and walk into the sunset, pleased that they have saved the Nation again from the extremist and racist hordes of Fascists who actually think water runs downhill (natural law) and there is such a thing as a difference between Right  and Wrong…that there is a Divine Force and a Satanic Force…

    Since the end of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan and a few other exceptions…perhaps James Earl Carter…we have witnessed the steady denigration among Democrats of the concept of English / American Common Law and the concept of local control and fiscal sanity…organisation of culture and society based upon the common impulses programmed by the Creator unto His children and all such creatures who reproduce and care for their young.

     We witness now the improbable scene of a woman who is a Doctor of Psychology, a professor…who suddenly…during therapy, arrives at the realisation that all of her tensions and troubled jumble in her mind was the result of an assault against her person at some time in the past.  She is unclear about the precise time…even within the parameters of two years before or two years after.

       Nor can she remember with precision the place where the assault against her person took place.   She thinks that it might have here…or perhaps it was there, or it might have been somewhere else.

        She declares that there were six boys who tormented her and threw her into a dark bedroom.   Or it might have been four…or may two…but she cannot remember, clearly.   She does remember being clumsily handled and accosted by a boy.

     

 Wanted Dead or Alive
for the crimes of being
a probable Republican,
 Extreme Normalcy,
 uncontrollable groping
impulses, and kicking cats

     Of course, she managed to escape, because males are terribly stupid and even though they outnumbered the hapless girl she slipped their attention and managed to flee from the place that she cannot remember and ran with abandon to the home of her parents where she would find safety and the comfort of protection from a mother and a father.   Or maybe it was to a friend's house…or was it the the Log Cabin Burger and Pancake Ranch - "Always Open 25 hours per day - 8 days a week!!.

      Well, maybe not so much.   For some reason or another, the girl does not inform anyone…unless it is her somewhat distant female "friends" in whom she confides things she cannot remember now with any clarity.

     What should obviously warrant a police report and the initiation of a standard felony sexual assault investigation by the appropriate constabulary and prosecuting office…apparently was not an option.  It might have been because her fingernails hadn't dried enough, or because her false eyelashes (made to make her look "older"?) weren't sticking on,  "just so".   Or perhaps it was whatever…

     Fast forward to the present.  Something torments her.  She goes to counselling, apparently along with her husband or significant other.  She learns from the analyst that all of her torment is brought forward by long repressed horrors and fright suffered at the hands of somebody who has been put forward as a possible member of the United States Supreme Court.

    She knows that individual from her past because… uh, he went to the private boys' school that was associated with her private girls' school.   And uh, all the boys from there were wild drunks.  She knew and still knows that fact, and not only those facts, but she was actually sexually assaulted by that guy that TRUMP named to the Supreme Court.
     And she can identify him, although she hasn't seen him in person for 35 to 40 years.  She knows that he is an anti-abortion type, and that he is against women, and that he is a bad person because he is a Republican and has always been against women's issues, minorities, Eskimos, cute animals, children, a majority of the minorities, and lesbian native american reverse-retransgendered male Greenpeace activists.

    So! Press on! Resist!  Me Too!!!

       She decides to send an innocent letter to a doddering old woman who clings unto her California Senate seat as though it were a life preserver on stormy seas.
  
     That Senator is noteworthy because for the last 20 years, she has had a chauffeur who just happened to be a spy for the Red Chinese Communist government…and now she has a letter from a woman…a Doctor of Psychology…who declares that the new Supreme Court Justice-to-be sexually assaulted her 35 or 40 years ago.

    The letter also demands that the Senator not release this information, and that she not identify the forlorn victim in any way.  She also says that she will not under any circumstance appear in open hearings with the Offender present, and she also wants the FBI to do an investigation concerning this very important offence.

    Little matter that the FBI does not do investigations.  Little matter that the FBI is so horribly compromised now as a co-conspirator in a felonious intrigue pertaining to crimes of process and content against the present President that it would be difficult for that agency to do anything for or against this 15 year old, women' s activist psychologist, whose main claim to fame are two things;   First, wearing "vagina hats" in public, and second , being the most widely despised professor, as rated by her students, on the faculty.  Main complaints by the students? -  the good professor shames the students without cause, shrieks at times about points that she feels the students are not ingesting mentally, being explosive, sarcastic, and caustic towards students who have legitimate questions to ask during class.   It is also felt by the majority of students who have this woman as an instructor that the professor has certain favourites in her class…

     Now comes the 15 year old victim of sexual assault, demanding that she be allowed to set the the parameters of a hearing concerning her complaints that have rested for 35 to 40 years in the bat-belfry of the mind of a woman who has learned well how to practice hubris and demand compliance.   Those parameters in this matter will include:

           (1)   …that the presence of the presumed candidate for elevation to the position of Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America is prohibited in the presence of the aggrieved 15 year old victim of sexual assault that was so serious that the assault could not be reported to her parents or the constabulary.

            (2)    …that the assumed guilty party,  beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, be required to render his version of this matter and mount his defence before the aggrieved 15 year old victim renders her testimony.   This is especially important because it will correct the error of several hundred years of a defendant being required to respond to the charges…not visa-versa.

     The offended 15 year old victim would prefer that the criminal confess to his sins and crimes, and then the procedure would be for the 15 year old victim to  agree to accept the confessions, and she will have a chance to add on several score other  known crimes that the defendant left out of his mea culpa.

     This new procedure will correct centuries of prohibition against the aggrieved parties not being allowed to post an unlimited number of "forgotten crimes and sins" against good people like the Doctor of Psychology has had to suffer.

         (3)     …that the date of appearance of the aggrieved, 15 year old victim is to be left to her convenience while the rest of the world awaits the time the 15 year old victim has had a chance for her nail polish to dry.   Perhaps Thursday…perhaps next month…"my calendar is very full…."

     She will think that she is in charge, but perhaps will learn that she is being used in a very foul game.   That game, ultimately, defines victory as the total destruction of English Common Law and the form of republican democracy that brought the United States of America to the very far edge of prosperity, human advancement, and legal process by tradition and common agreement.

    The objective?  The establishment of a Socialist Democratic State, some thing like the Nationale Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei…the parties that solved all the problems last time, like Stalin, Robespierre, Che, Mao, Ho, Hillary, Peron, Fidel, the Ortegas, Chavez / Maduro, etc. etc. etc. 

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    We remember so clearly how the cast of the Broadway Play "Hamilton" stopped in order to insult the Vice-President elect of the United States of America. Whitetrash, presumptuous snips…classless, ignorant, self-impressed.   Hubris without merit…Arrogance without qualification.

     From whence cometh all nature of putrefaction of Truth and Natural Law?
It comes from social engineers who know better than the common man.  Save me from being saved by reformers.

El Gringo Viejo

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Deeper and Wider and More - repost from 21 July 2010

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    This has been a real time of it.   The area of northeastern Mexico comprised of the States of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila which received the brunt of Hurricane Alex (reference previous blog entry) have since received another dose.   This came in the form of  "almost Hurricane Bonnie", a tropical depression that came ashore on the central Gulf coast of Tamaulipas.    This system actually crossed directly over our little Quinta on the banks of the Rio Corona.   We had 16.5 inches of rain in two days.   The mountains to the west had much, much more.    There were reasonable reports of up to 45 inches over a three day period.     This is to be added to what we had received before.

     Our little sedate mountain stream....the Rio Corona....rose up to within about 20 feet of our adobe house, our second threat inside of the month (the Rio ran at 23 feet above normal flow).   The neighbour's old mequite tree that shades our southeast corner was blown down....there was much damage to the Montezuma Cypress trees which line the Rio Corona...but not fatal.    This meant that the winds were much stronger that those which were supposed to have accompanied the 35 mph estimates.   Everyone scoffed at such official velocities.

      Much of the energy of this second system continued to the northwest and dumped prodigous amounts of rain over the same area previously affected by Hurricane Alex.   The Rio Grande's drainage basin collected copious amounts of runoff.   The Rio San Juan, the Alamo, the Salado, the Sabinal, along with upriver inflows being captured by Amistad Reservoir near Del Rio, Texas all joined in the game.   Falcon Reservoir, built in 1953, rose to its highest retention in history....the Mexican rivers overflowed their dams, their banks, and everything possible.    At this moment the floodway system in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is almost at capacity and the Rio Grande is just barely beginning a fall from cresting.    More rain is on the way, however.

      The highways between the Laredos (Texas and Tamaulipas) and the Monterrey metroplex were inundated....there was much damage.   Laredo is the busiest land port between two countries in the world.   The back up was all but incomprehensible.   Tractor-trailer rigs were backed up two-abreast for forty miles on the Mexican side and 35 miles on the American.   Train convoys were in a similar position.  Everyone was tied up from 4 to 6 days.

       I shall report a bit more on this.   We in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas are in precarity at this time, although the water is no longer rising.   The possible arrival of new systems can change this at any time.    In the previous blog I wrote that the governor of Nuevo Leon had estimated damages to be as high as a billion dollars....this is almost a macabre joke at this point.   All the damage, throughout the affected three State area....is surely more in the neighbourhood of 50 billion dollars, if not more....and much of this damage is upon construction and installation of a generally good to excellent quality.   It is a pity.....but perhaps greater things will be built with and upon the ruins.    For sure this area is going to see a severe labour shortage for the coming three years.

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     This is a repost from over eight years ago, concerning a relatively tame hurricane that came over our little adobe hut in the middle of NoWhere, Mexico.   A veritable Blast from the Past.

El Gringo Viejo

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Predictable Surprise? Brief Read on the Special Election - Texas State Senate, District 21

     One of my pursuits, off and on over the years, has been dabbling seriously in doing election probability analysis. I worked with my brother for instance many times, at his request, intermittently, and always accurately within one percentage point.

    My brother was Senator John G. Tower's administrative aide for several years in Washington. He was also the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas for several years, and he also established the famed "Associated Republicans of Texas" whose main goal was to fund and generally assist down-ballot positions such as State representatives and senators, sheriffs, county commissioners, constables, county judges and such offices. It functioned during the late 1970s through to the end of the century. Suffice to say that Texas changed from mainly Donkey to essentially totally Elephant during those times.

     Allow me to strongly suggest that the "multiple-sponsor voter disposition poll" calling the election between Robert Francis "Clifford" O'Rourke and Senator Ted Cruz a 2% lead for Mr. O'Rourke is preposterous. The universe of voters was poorly selected and the geographical concentration was completely out of balance. I shall save everyone the boredom of listening to the specifics, but believe me…I am certain in this matter.

      Although I do not require nor have we sought approval from anyone concerning the election at hand, it should be pointed out that the dependably liberal-oriented Quinnipiac Poll's just recently published a widening lead for Ted Cruz, now extending to an 8% lead and increasing.

      The joke among the analysts might be, "Ted Cruz is so methodical and boring when he speaks, but people listen. O'Rourke was fun at the beginning, but after listening to him for a while, he was boring and people have stopped listening."

       The "Gee Whiz, you know I'm just a regular guy like you" is really not a reasonable platform. The other thing is…and it is pointed up by the special, vacant Senate seat for the Texas Senate…a Democrat seat, vacated because the previous incumbent, Uresti, volunteered to make license plates for the Republic of Texas for the next seven or eight years; something about fraud and other hanky-panky.

The famous church of Saint Louis, Castroville, Texas

       The seat has been a Democrat seat since the end of Reconstruction in 1876…literally. The district is composed of mainly Mexican / Spanish derived people (60%), along with sizeable blocks of Alsatian, Belgian, German, and Angloids, almost evenly spread out between the four.   There is a sprinkling of people of Black African ancestry.     It is a district with many small-towns, west of San Antonio, beautiful country. The district is anchored into San Antonio, but the largest part of the geography and the people is decidedly rural and small town.

       It appears that the Spanish / Mexican cohort split 50 / 50 this time…although the Republican share of that particular group of the Texian population has been increasing during the past four cycles. The other group split 60 / 40, it seems in favour of the Republican…a fellow surnamed Flores, a retired Game Warden. Gallegos, the Democrat, did not know what hit him. He was a nice guy, much better than his predecessor, but the area has been changing towards the GOP like the rest of Texas for quite a while.

       Some say that the turnout was very low…but…once again, it's not true. Some 43,000 people voted…while not long ago, a by-election to fill a United States Congressional seat…a much larger universe of voters. And, guess what?  A voters' universe three times larger managed to  have one-half the number of votes as this smaller, State Senator's replacement race.   It was a 44,000 (State Senate race) against  23,000 voters (United States Congressman's race)…but it doesn't really matter all that much…both winners were Republicans.
   
 

Courthouse  -   Hondo, Texas

   The Democrats know that the Senate is now a 21 - 10 split and that the Democrats are essentially spectators with no parliamentary blocking ability…just relegated to a back bench in the governance of the Republic of Texas. The Lower House has a similar ration, and the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Land Commissioner, Supreme Court, etc. etc. etc. is Republican, and Republicans who are simple, smart, humble, active, knowledgable, and while not perfect…they are very accessible and "simpatico".

       The "First Lady'' of the Republic of Texas is a Mexican-born lady, a professional educator, and the Governor's (President's) number one "assistant", in that he is a wheelchair guy.

And that is at the way is was…and the way it is. Thank you for your patience.

El Gringo Viejo

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Continuing from the previous post….

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The last two paragraphs of our previous posting:

   To make a long story as short as possible, the Galan Grant reverted back to the Galan family, and they extended their efforts there, which was a real chore.  Four brothers from Lampazos had to travel 60 to 100 miles just to arrive at this tract of land that really was huge and somewhat useless without heavy financing and constant investment of attention.   The wool business was the best alternative, and there were already relatives who had flocks on the south side of the Rio Grande in the same area.

    Now, remember, we are not speaking of 30 or 40 ewes penned up in an arroyo channel with a small pond of water.   We have reference to various assemblies of flocks of 30,000 to  100,000 sheep in different meadows and constructs, designed to provide "pacas" (bales of approximately 250 pounds) to English ships for delivery to the "spools of Liverpool".  Special milk, meat, hide, and wool goats were also shepherded and prized.

     (As a refresher, allow us to restate that, among the Spanish surnames, most that are names that represent an animal or geographic or geological item tend to have Sephardic, Hebraic roots.  In the case of names that end in an "n", or an "s" or a "z", and have two syllables or at times more, with an accent on the last syllable…those are almost entirely of Hebraic roots.   It is the nature of Spain…whose ethnic make-up is Hebraic, Arabic, Celtic, Visigothic and Gothic (Teutonic), and Latin (Italian / Roman) bloodlines.   Many, many Jews came into the Iberian Peninsula, accompanying the Saracen - Mohammedan Invasion.  The Mohammedans trusted the Jews as quartermasters and accountants over their own people, and employed them in such pursuits.  The last vestiges of the official Islamic presence on said peninsula was shoved into the Mediterranean Sea in 1492, after 700 years of occupation Spain and much of southernmost Europe.) 

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 We now move into the last stages of this aspect of the lore of the family.   In order to rein and tongue the horses to the wagon though, please allow us a bit of backgrounding.     The Galan family of Lampazos, 100 miles to the South, managed to intermittently utilise the massive acreage.  There were border disputes between Texas and Mexico, a war between Mexico and the United States, and border depredations by bandits on both sides, along with a Civil War or War Between the States.  The Galans managed to work through and around such distractions.

    As normally things do progress, younger men grow up and become older men until finally they become old men and then men who used to be.   From the period of Texas as a Republic until after the War Between the States, four Galán brothers and a blood Uncle, a fellow  Galán, all flocked their sheep and goats on that downriver part of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo.   The Uncle had a baby who was baptised at the parish church of Revilla, part of a community that 100 years later would be flooded by the waters of Falcon Reservoir in 1953.  Only rarely now, can visitors to the old Chapel see the bronze marker commemorating the first child baptised in that church, a Galan baby, back in the 1780s.   I had the pleasure of "discovering" that plaque and bringing it to the attention of the caretaker…who, oddly enough…had never seen it during almost forty years of taking care of the essentially abandoned, colonial era building.

     All these Galan men were related by blood, and they were known on both sides of the Rio Bravo / Grande and respected, apparently by Anglo and Latin alike.   By the time Reconstruction had run it course in Texas, 1865 - 1875, the Galan Brothers were dispersed into other activities, involving themselves only infrequently with the extension of land on the north side of the Rio Grande.  The Uncle who had originally flocked sheep around Revilla and Mier, downriver from the Laredos, had gone on to his Reward, and the Galans were re-orienting their business and dealings.

     The matter of the disposition of the land has been a thorn in the side of literally thousands of people in South Texas…a number that mushroomed to that point, chiefly because babies and old people stopped dying so much, and numbers, obviously increased.   What was, in the 1850s, a matter of three or four score potential heirs and interested parties has grown into a universe of the qualified by blood heirs that numbers in the thousands.  To wit:

By:  Marty Toohey
Staff Writer - Austin American Statesman
10:00 a.m. / 06 September 2015


    "Garza, a McDonald’s corporate trainer who lives in Dallas, said she is an eighth-generation descendant of Joaquin Galán. She said the family, after research into what its ancestors had insisted was its rightful claim, began compiling evidence in the 1940s, but ran out of money.
    "The family’s lawsuit, filed in July in Travis County District Court, says the state commission formed in 1850 to sort through land-grant claims recognized the family’s ownership of Palafox. After the necessary research and surveying, Gov. Edmund J. Davis endorsed the family’s ownership in 1870.

    "But for some reason, the state cancelled that endorsement four years later and took possession of the land. Garza said the state later passed pieces of the Palafox land to other owners, some of whom still live there. The state kept the 40,000 acres at the center of the family’s case, she said.The office of General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush, the lead defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment per its policy for ongoing litigation, spokesman Jim Sudyam said.

Garza said the family is only interested in the mineral rights under the state-controlled land, not the property itself. She said dealing with the surface land could draw in other people who received pieces of the Palafox land over the years"

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     As a brief side issue, as it is revealed in the above text, there is a statement that Governor Edmund Davis endorsed the family's ownership in 1870.  One can look up the author of the article from which the above excerpt is extracted and inquire as to why he (1) assumed that the Governor of Texas would "endorse" the family's ownership, and (2) why he did not look up the fact that the Governor of Texas would be powerless in this issue of the Courts, even if the Governor endorsed the matter 1,000 times, and (3) Governor Edmund Davis was a Reconstruction Governor who was hated by the populace by at least a 9 to 1 ratio.   He had been a high-handed, even brutal martial law governor who literally had to be dragged out of the Governor's Mansion by physical force when Reconstruction was finally discontinued in Texas (the last State of the Confederacy to be 'set free').

     We feel remorse for those people who have involved themselves and paid monthly dues, essentially, to people…attorneys…others who have been trying to resuscitate this case.   Lamentably, this case would have to start at the top of the food chain, in an unofficial way…informally, but engaging the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the supreme court, so to speak, for criminal law adjudications).   Judges and clerks would speak very carefully and declare that this matter has been settled law for over 150 years.

     Your humble servant…no attorney he…would declare that there is an apple hanging from the tree that has not fallen in the past 160 years, neither far from nor close by.  It is a fact that the agent of sale of that property did not have full and complete control over the property and the purchaser of the property, a member of a legal firm from New York, knew that fact and yet proceeded with the transaction, hoping and almost knowing the other parties would probably never know about the matter until far too late.   Those parties were the three Galan brothers who did not know what the Oveja Negra of the foursome was up to while counting saloons and excitement in Laredo, Texas.  Three older brothers were gentlemen and industrious types, highly respected.   And their brother was a known rowdy, undisciplined, self-centre'd individual.
     The attorney took advantage of that opening and rode the train back to New York City to flaunt his success, I am sure.   The attorney committed a breach of law by not doing the due diligence to assure all parties that original ownership had been reasonably established.   By the time the youngest Galan boy had spent something like 12,000 American dollars on his fling, the ink was dry, and days, weeks, and months would pass before the three other brothers would learn of this treachery.    Things became worse for the errant Galan, an I must confess some pleasure in that fact.

     For those who might like to review this case, one need only type into the search engine, Google if need be, something like "Galan Spanish Grant - Webb County, Texas".  The searcher will be immediately rewarded with about 10 or 12 choices.   Some are pitiable, self-torture stories about "little people" being trampled, others are more studied, even if strident, because, after all, these people of the present lost their economic heritage in many ways.  Most of them are professional people, proprietors, high-skill blue-collar…absolutely one of the finest slices of the American and Texian Pie that exists.   Their resentment is justified so long as it does not cause ulcers.

    I finish this now, because otherwise it would become something like a Doctor Zhivago interminable commentary…ending in a pointless point.   Suffice to say that a girl by the name Librada Galan would marry a boy by the name of Rufino Rios…and they would forward the population, but in an area much closer to the Escandon people's settlements and cities.   The coming together of people of similar backgrounds but different geographic characteristics and life challenges.
     That girl became the grandmother of my mother-in-law…and the great-great grandmother of my daughter and son.  They lived in Penitas, Texas…forming part of the population of Hidalgo County that would always draw the comment from the Anglos that, "Those people out in Penitas and San Isidro…they are really strange birds.   They're really honest, hard-working people."  And it was true…although there were many of those rural communities where such work ethic and moral self-control were norms…Santa Maria, Granjeno, Salinen~o, …they were the ones who stayed in when the American Army passed them by on the way to the Battle of Monterrey in 1846.  They were primordial Americans and Texians.

More sometime soon…this has been a bit exhausting…but pleasant. Thank you for your kind attention.
El Gringo Viejo…

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