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During these times we have arrived at a point where folks have been misled and ill informed to the point where it is difficult, at times, to carry on a coherent verbal exchange with over half the population. One example is the leftist proclivity to refer to an illegal alien as a "migrant". The fact is, an illegal alien is an illegal alien. He/she is not a "migrant".
A legal alien, who has sought permission to enter the United States of America and obtained such permission, can be called a tourist, business investor, student, or even resident if he / she can demonstrate self-sufficiency, and above all else, is a legal alien.
It is not my fault that someone might have decided to cross the international boundary illegally, with children…who may or might not be related to the adult who is conducting them into the illegal alien morass. Further, I have had more personal contact with "illegal aliens" than almost anyone who happens to be standing there at the bar at the Sunset Bar and Grill. I am a son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers in southernmost Texas. We never had a problem them any of them. Loyal, clean, honest, quick to learn, kind, literate, are words that come to mind during my time of contact with literally hundreds of "illegals". But that was in the mid-1950s and before. Like the Confederacy, that day is gone.
One of the things that infuriates me is for some person who ignorantly, and almost gleefully, informs the listener that "We are all immigrants". Such is not the case. Neither my wife not your humble servant is an immigrant. We are not descended from immigrants on this American and Texian soil, nor are we anti-immigrant. We celebrate people who come to our shores, legally, and with pure intent and purpose. Tourists, students, business operators, and folks seeking their path to naturalisation and American citizenship.
My wife's people came into Spanish territory in the 1580s, only sixty years after the arrival of Cortez at the Halls of Montezuma, Tenochtitlan. They established farming, ranching, mining, and other commerce where once there had been nothing. Great cities and industries were finally established in the area of what was known as Coahuila, an area encompassing much, including the centre and eastern parts of what would become Texas. That was her mother's side. And all her people were subjects of the Crown.
The father's side was a little later to the game, but they did arrive, also during the Colonial Epoch of Spain in Mexico during the 1750s, settling a similar group of people, all Spaniards. Some of these arrivals had already been in Mexico, settling around Queretaro, to the northwest of Mexico City, for two to four generations. These people were all competent players, and were looking for land to call their own. There were some Portugese, but most all were either Spanish and Azorean background, and all were subjects of the Crown.
Neither side was immigrant, migrant, or anything beyond a colonial, subject of the Crown.
In my case, the surname and peoples who would compose "the lineage" were very similar to those above, except English…very English. My father's people came from Northumbria, near York, but more especially from the area near and about Nottingham, and then over to the east, in Anglia, at the precincts of Bury St. Mary - Kelsale, pictured below.
The church pictured to the left here is the Parish chapel for Bury St. Mary - Kelsale (Anglican). Only the good Lord and Father Mckenzie know how many Newtons are buried there. But from these non-London precincts came the people who would pour into the North American continent.
In 1642, a ship off-loaded various people with my surname at Boston Harbour. Among them were people who could be found guilty of founding the city of Newton, Massachusetts and who continued their spread to the north (to Maine) and west, along the Hudson River from the Catskills up to Duchess County in New York (how appropriate), and then into northeastern Pennsylvania.
Then in 1660, a group of lower level aristocrats from Saxony and Prussia, along with some English (of some sort) relatives with the surname of Bonesteel settled on that same River Hudson in New Amsterdam (or New York as it was becoming).
Finally, another batch of English, the Christians, who were from northwestern England and also the Isle of Man (Manxmen), went to the "New World" and established their businesses to which they were accustomed, jewellery, brewing, and distilling, grains and milling. The last one from that family came over in the 1800 - 1801 period, to join the family in those businesses. And therein we find the base of the paternal side of the family. They generally folded into the Manhattan scene, and then dispersed, especially to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Thus was composed the stew that made the writer's "pure, non-immigrant paternal side". In their great, great majority they were colonials. Even the Germans travelled with a passport from the British Crown.
The last addition as a cornerstone family starter to the mass of humanity in America came in the 1740s, a George Frederick Limbaugh…another Saxon - Prussian, travelling as British subject arrived in the "colonies" and joined similar people in eastern Pennsylvania. He served under Washington during the Revolution, fighting against the Brits and the Hessians, interestingly enough, and then his family turned their faces South and homesteaded in North Carolina.
In the meantime, Neals came into Virginia in the 1660s and after a generation moved on to the higher elevations of North Carolina. In fairly short order the entire Clan of Neals went over the mountain (The Smokies), and homesteaded around a place that would grow to be Winchester, Tennessee.
Both sides of the family were very much pre-Revolutionary, and all were pro-Continental. Consider, for instance, that Winchester is the county seat of Franklin County…named for the famous kite-flyer. Other like families, all English save for the Limbaugh family, had birthed and buried many generations in Franklin County. Neals, Donaldson, Chisums, Grants, composed the maternal side of this non-immigrant citizen.
These four legs of one couple, a couple that is not immigrant does not make us any better than anyone…or worse. But we both resent the notion that someone can actually believe that he / she has the right to come into this nation without first asking and receiving permission. We further take exception to the idea that anyone who does come in and demands free accommodation and services is entitled to such things has a right to such.
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We now move on to the real meat on the bone. The peculiar and ever-so-interesting background of my wife's people who helped colonise one of the wildest parts of the North American Continent is the actual reason for this submission.
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The Count of the Sierra
Gorda and later Governor
of the Province of Nuevo
Santander |
There is a bit of confusion among people who have ancestry that dates into the colonial period of Spain's populating and governing what is now Mexico for 300 years. Most of those people who wound up being absorbed into the Texas and United States, after the Mexican - American War, frequently thought they were derived from the nearby Mexican State of Tamaulipas (a Chichimec - Nahuatl term meaning 'great extension of grasslands) and from the colonial peoples who settled there in the mid-1700s. And that is that.
It is well, good, and advisable then, to point out that there might some value in exploring a little more deeply into their winding up on this part of the globe. It was known, for instance, that one of the forbearers of my wife's family was a well-placed fellow by the name of Joaquin Galán. This fellow was ordered by the Spanish Royal Court to travel to the new Province of Nuevo Santander and render aid to the Governor of said province. He had a charge from His Majesty to "inhabit and socialise" the community of Santander (actually the capital of the Province, situated in the very centre of said entity) and assist Don Jose de Escandon in the administration of necessary duties.
Santander was the capital where Jose de Escandon was the original overall founder and first governor of a region that had been scrupulously avoided for 250 years as a place for colonisation. The Crown had honoured Escandon with an array of titles; Governor of the Yucatan, Count of the Sierra Gorda (Queretaro), Count of Nuevo Santander (which became Tamaulipas and southernmost Texas) but not Conquistador or Viceroy.
The Province of Nuevo Santander included almost all of the present State of Tamaulipas (northeastern Mexico), and about one-fourth of what is now Texas. Escandon was a meticulous administrator and before ten years had passed, he had established and caused to thrive seventeen distinct and functioning cities.
Finally, some years back, due to a contention about who was and who was not entitled to what began to take place. It was an issue not easily untangled for the reader, but it was a minor and significant fuzziness in the Garza - Garza family's combined history and genealogy.
The problem is this. None of the above pertains directly to my wife's mother's side of the Garza - Garza union. It pertains to Colonial Spain to be sure, and Jose de Escandon was one of the very finest colonial regional governors of the entire Colonial period. But, his colonists were drawn out of Portugal, southernmost Spain, and the Azore Island. There were also a few hundred families that had been in New Spain (Mexico) for a generation or two, and wanted to live with their own land and away from the central part of "New Spain". The core of my wife's father's people came from that background.
Commonality between my mother-in-law's and my father-in-law's lines is that both lines were / are white folks of yeomen's and lesser aristocratic ancestry, just like El Gringo Viejo's English lineage. Both of these Iberian Peninsula sides had considerable Sephardic (Hebrew) blood, along with Arabo-Pheonician, Gothic (Germanic), Celtic, and Italian ancestry, like most Spaniards. My wife's mother's lineage is the one that has the greater amount of Sephardic (Spanish Hebraic) ancestry.
That particular side came into what is now Mexico, but it was a different place in the 1580s. They were settled into what had to have appeared to them, upon arriving, as something akin to a Moonscape. Stoney, mountains as dry as bleached buffalo bones, and entirely dependent on mining and a very few springs and barely running creeks for limited and risky farming. Grazing significant herds of cattle was a laughable alternative for them in almost all cases. For that reason, they began to incorporate the grazing of sheep and goats (especially sheep) into their economic fabric.
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Conquistador Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva
begins the Royal colonisation of the Coahuilteca,
an area that would also include what would be
involved in the extension of the Spanish presence
into a place to be known as Texas |
They were settled into this place with only one recourse to support themselves; work all the time or starve. The Conquistador Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva chose these new colonists carefully. These folks, who came over in three waves during the last quarter of the 1500s (the 16th Century), established very significant communities in what became Coahuila…later, Coahuila y Texas. This province finally extended from Cerralvo in what is now in Nuevo Leon State, and into what is now central and eastern parts of Texas, and to the west, to the famous community of Parras de la Fuente (Grapevines of the Springs), Coahuila, the site of the first winery in northern Mexico…four hundred years ago. Parras also became among the largest Levi's factories in the Levi Strauss industry. The central core of the area includes to-day the large and famous cities of Saltillo, Monclova, Cuatro Cienegas (four swamps), Cerralvo, and Lampazos (Elephant ears), among others.
It should be pointed out that the formal plan of this endeavour was to carve out a northern centre to co-ordinate the insertion of population and to blunt the waves of very competent, totally brave, Indian warriors. Secondarily, it would serve to keep an observant eye on English and French designs on the sparsely populated territory. The formal name was Nuevo Renato de Leon (the New Kingdom of the Leon), which many years later would be reduced to the present day State name of Nuevo Leon, wherein is found the metroplex of Monterrey, Mexico's industrial powerhouse, and the capital since Independence (1821).
Oddly enough, although Carvajal y de la Cueva founded the entire province by Royal authority…a province about half the size of Texas to-day…the southernmost part of that province received the least of his attention. After the death of Carvajal y de la Cueva in 1591 at age 54, another adventurer came to the fore and went to review the status of the province of the "Coahuilteca".
This new adventurer was equally competent, somewhat less imaginative, equally Sephardic in much of his bloodline, and committed to establishing more permanent structure to the frontier outpost. Along with white people of his own stripe, he also brought several hundred Tlaxclalan Indians, people from the highlands just east of Mexico City.
These Indians, along with the Otomi' allied with the Spanish Army of Hernan Cortez (another Sephardic type) and overthrew the hated Aztecs who had oppressed those two quite noble nations of civilised Indians. Those two tribes viewed Cortez and his forces as liberators, after first contesting with his army, and Cortez was wise enough to offer them an alliance.
In any regard, two efforts to establish a "metropolitan" area at the southern end of the province of the Nuevo Renato de Leon failed…one by an officer name Otono, and the other by our friend Carvajal y de la Cueva, who died not long after that effort. The first one was named Santa Lucia, built around springs with abundant clear water, but too close to the bi-polar Rio Santa Catarina…which was usually nearly dry, but after hurricanes bashed themselves by draining the adjacent Sierra Madre Mountains. The Rio would destroy everyone within a mile's breadth in three minutes with water running at 50 miles per hour.
The second effort, by Carvajal y de la Cueva, had the name of San Luis, King of France. It also failed due to this above mentioned flooding. Diego de Montemayor, therefore, is credited for finally succeeding and establishing the town with people that Carvajal y de la Cueva had brought in and settled to the north and west, almost all racially white, and significantly Jewish by their chromosomes.
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A Mural in the State Palace of Government
of the State of Tlaxcala, depicting the
surrender of the Tlaxcalan forces to
Hernan Cortez.
Between the two leaders is the incredible
Malinche, the Sacajawea of that period.
She learned fluent Spanish in three weeks.
As a true Mayan Princess from the
Guatemalan / Yucatan area.
She intervened without
prejudice in almost all original encounters
of Cortez with the Indigenous of
Central Mexico.
The Tlaxcalans won this encounter either way.
if they won, they won. If they lost, they would
ally with the Spaniards and go with him to
destroy the hated Aztecs. Without the Otomi'
and the Tlaxcala, Cortez would have been
destroyed by the Aztecs.
(Truth in History)
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Race relations were not all that bad after the Tlaxcalans established themselves somewhat near to the southwest edge of the city. They had requested and received significant good farming lands to the south, and in front of the Sierra Madres where the alluvium was extremely rich and excellent for corn, vegetables, and goat / sheep / cattle raising.
The Spaniards also had an understanding that the Tlaxcalans would defend Monterrey against the Huajuco Indians who populated the Valley of Huajuco to the south of Monterrey, living high in the second ridges of the Sierra Madre. The Huajuco were known as "white Indians" to some because of the lighter colour, and at times green eyes. But, they also tended to be bellicose, as were their cousin tribesmen, the Hualahuises further to the South. As was their custom, the Tlaxcalans were true to their word, and spread their culture there and even up to New Mexico in terms of fine crafts and handwork.
Much of what folks think, accurately, is Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, etc. must also recognise that much also was shown to them by the Tlaxcala People who escorted considerable portions of the Spanish settlement and religious penetration into the indigenous lands that became known as Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
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At this point the Familia Galan of this group, who had come into the barrens of 'La Coahuila', and founded their towns and made their way by employing trades, pushing sheep and goats, mining, and a very small bit of farming. This life style went on for two centuries…the XVIIth and the XVIIIth.
They begat and begat (relatively small families), and they slowly prospered. Without being coy or negative in any way, I have reviewed various of the registries and it is clear that they selected their mates by Roman Catholic rite, formula, procedure, and proper order. They also chose from a close area and rank of people who were almost all derived from the Carvajal y de la Cueva entry.
Their Jewishness was a source of good (and not so good) humour, high intelligence, high skill, and a keen sense of the value of money and instruments of wealth and production of wealth. They had long thought of themselves as Europeans and Spaniards, even knowing that they were a "mongrel" race. But, by now, they were beginning to think (and realise) themselves as Spanish land owners and established agrarians…as "landed people"…and they were right by the sweat and blood of their efforts.
But, the Spanish hold on the land began to weaken due to the incessant depredations by the Kickapoo, Kiowa, and especially the Comanche and Apache and a few smaller Indian Nations. By this time, the settlers in what would become the Texas territory numbered around 2,000. Another 25,000 populated the area (once again, about half the size of Texas) in the "settled" zones of 'La Coahuilteca'.
To close this passage, the Garza family which pertains to my grandchildren and children, from the side of my mother-in-law predate the foundation of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico and Texas as we know it. Many understandings concerning the complexities of Spanish / Mexican / Texian population establishments and movements held by to-day's politicians, commentators, and even educators are erroneous…even if innocently.
Those original colonists who came into 'La Coahuilteca', as well as those later arrivals who came in with Jose de Escandon to 'La Tamaulipeca', were people whose souls and fortitude were made of iron, copper, silver, and gold…in their vast majority. They had almost no imagination to dedicate to useless speculation …but they had, almost to a man / woman, a lightning quick mind and a commitment to commitment…compliance…a steady catechism and sense of responsibility…protection of assets…patriotism to one's flag…all very common qualities generally shared by both of these sides.
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After pushing sheep and goats around for a century and a half, the Galan family, the one associated with the Saltillo, Monclova, Lampazos grouping petitioned for property from the Crown, offering a commitment to ranching and to generally develop whatever grant they could wrangle out of the authorities.
After several years, in the early 1800s, very late in the Spanish Colonial period, the Galan family was awarded a staggering 400,000 acres, all entirely on the northern side of the Rio Grande, located on and fronting on the aforementioned watercourse. The entire southern portion of the grant was fronted upon the Rio Grande del Norte, just downstream from what is now Laredo, Texas / Nvo. Laredo, Tamaulipas.
This property was almost a joke, in the sense that in Spain (in full disarray) the Crown thought nothing about giving away a huge stretch of land that had no value beyond the natural gypsum and gravel it had in the near sub-surface. The Galan people, being en situs, thought it would be an excellent place to extend the grazing of goats and sheep. To wit:
"About 100 settled in the Balconcitos and Palafox area which was also a part of the Galan Grant. Joaquin Galan fell ill and in December 1804 he granted power of attorney to his son Juan Galan. In April 1805 Juan turned the property over to Manuel Garza. Garza resided on the property until April 1810, when Manuel Antonio y Bustamante in accordance with the wishes of the Spanish King, condemned a large tract of land that included Garza's property."
The Spanish government then ordered the establishment of a new town on the margin of the Rio Grande. It was named Palafox, in honor of a Spanish general Fransisco de Palafox Melci, who won distinction opposing Napoleon's forces in Spain. Juan Jose Diaz was to administer justice and distribute land to settlers, mostly families from the older settlements of Saltillo, Monclova, Cuatro Cienegas, and Lampazos, Coahuila, though no money was available to fund the construction of public buildings. The settlers themselves built a church in the center of town. The townspeople prospered by raising livestock, especially sheep and goats, and the town grew to almost 240 inhabitants in 1815 to 277 by the end of 1816."
The townspeople, however, soon faced the possibility of depredations by Indians, usually Comanches, but Kiowas, Kickapoo, and various types of Apaches also. Though the Palafox documents give no indication of fear or panic, they do reveal an awareness of the need to be well armed. In April 1823 Capt. José Manuel García lamented "the attacks of the indians were brutal and the indians burned the entire village in 1808." Remember that this period was closely associated with the War for Independence, the establishment of a Mexican Emperor, Agustin de Iturbide, his expulsion, execution, finally the establishment of the Republic in 1824.
Some families had returned by 1824 (the beginning of the Mexican Republican period), and in 1826 sixty soldiers were ordered to Palafox to build barracks, but the town was finally destroyed in 1829, with the massacre of most of its inhabitants. Attempts were made to restore it under the name of Houston in the 1840s, but by 1850 the name Palafox was again in use."
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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.
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We are going to retire from the field of battle for a moment and prepare for the next chapter in this recounting of the times that brought my wife's family into a form of prominence in South Texas. The explanation is at once extremely complicated and very simple. Within the next 36 hours, barring electrical problems or floods, we shall roll out that part of the story.
El Gringo Viejo
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