(Taken a year and some months ago, when in California – from the east veranda of my parent’s house)
Sgt. Mom
18 Minutes On a Day in April
Eighteen minutes, by the clock – in that furious eighteen minutes, a strategic battle was won. Eventually it would prove that more than just an errant and rebellious state had been lost to a central governing authority – and worse yet, lost under the personal supervision of a charismatic and able leader. In an open meadow with a slight rise across the middle of it, fringed with tall trees, bounded on two sides by a river and a third by a swampy lake (or a lakey swamp – descriptions are elastic) the dreams of one nation-state died and another was born.
The dreams of one of those nation-states died along with a fair number of its soldiers; ironically, the long-term political career of the man who had led them there was not one of them. He was the prototypical general on a white horse, following a willow-the-wisp of his enemy. He would not die in the swamp around Peggy’s Lake, or in the waters where Vince’s Bridge had been cut down. He would – like his adversary – die of old age, in bed of more or less natural causes, after a lifetime of scheming, treachery and showmanship. This probably came as a great surprise to everyone who had taken part on either side of the 1835-36 Texas War of Independence; that General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna would live a long and erratically prosperous life –and his cause of death did not involve a hangman’s rope, a firing squad or an outraged husband. Which, given his career of double-cross, astounding brutality and corruption, should give confidence and inspiration to prospective caudillos everywhere. That is the end of the story, however – the beginning was in Texas, in the mid 1830s.
Which beginning is more tangled than anyone could imagine, from just knowing of it through the medium of pop-culture. For most people, Americans and foreigners alike, that is pretty well limited to movies about the Alamo, and the Disney version of Davy Crockett. Act One – American settlers take over Texas; Act Two – many of them hole up in the Alamo; Act Three – a lot of swarthy and nattily-dressed Mexican soldiers kill them all; Act Four – somehow, the Americans win Texas after all, and in spite of that. Garnish with any number of fashionable intellectual flourishes, conceits and concepts and salt to taste.
All Things Doggish
It has happened to us again; we came home from morning walkies on Thursday with an extra dog, to the bafflement and apparent disgust of the Lesser Weevil and Connor … who seem to be getting over it, even as I write. The current canine find is small, attractive, and relatively well-behaved and seems to be agreeable to cats. Which a dog in our house had damn-well better be … the cats outnumber the dogs, and are Superior Beings – at least, as the cats see it, and woe betide the canine which doesn’t acknowledge this superiority immediately.
Story-Telling and History
I am almost sure that telling a historical story through a movie is fraught with as many perils for the story-teller as doing so through the medium of historical fiction – it’s just that the movie-maker’s pratfalls are so much more … public, I guess is the word that I’m fishing for. There are big-name, serious historical fiction writers who abuse history almost beyond recognition in their attempt to weave a tale of the past – Philippa Gregory, anyone? – but to my mind, the really, really egregious mainstream offenses are committed in the service of movie-making.
American Heritage
I can blame my intense, not to say passionate interest in 19th century American history – specifically, to the Western frontier to being exposed at a very impressionable age to two things, and both of them the fault of my parents. One of them was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books, which Mom and Dad began giving me as gifts at around the age of eight … by which time I could read confidently and omnivorously. I would get a single volume for Christmas or a birthday present, dated and inscribed – and I very clearly remember sitting down and reading them from cover to cover almost immediately. They gave me a pretty good sense of domestic life in the small-town mid-West, and what work was involved in keeping house, home and family together on the late 19th century frontier.