Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

Texas Travelogue:Gonzales

by

The town of Gonzales is about an hour’s drive east and a little way south of San Antonio. In the days when Texas was a Spanish and then a Mexican posession, San Antonio, Goliad and Nacogdoches were the centers of what little population there was. But in the 1820s, the newly-established and independent Mexican nation sought to encourage America and European entrepeneurs to take up generous land grants, and bring in settlers. Stephen F. Austin was the one that everyone knows about: the urban heart – if you could call it that – of his grant was at San Felipe on the Brazos River.

Read more

On Being a Real Arthur

by

That expression became something of a family joke, as I came around, by easy steps, from being a teller of tall tales, an intermittent scribbler, an unrepentant essayist, a fairly dedicated blogger … to being as my daughter put it – a real arthur. Yes, a “real arthur” in that I have a number of books, ranging free in the wilderness of the book-reading public. Not that I am in any danger of buying the castle next-door to J.K. Rowlings’, and my royalty checks and payments for consignments and direct sales dribble in but slowly. Slowly, but steadily, which is gratifying. Readers are buying my books, as they find out about them in various ways; through internet searches, through word of mouth, and the odd book club meeting, casual conversation and interviews on blogs and internet radio stations. It has been my peculiar good fortune to have come about to being “a real arthur” just when the established order of things literary was being shaken to the foundations, so I  did not waste  very much time fighting it and trying to smuggle my books past the toothless old dragons of the literary-industrial complex, defending the crumbling castle of Things That Once Were.

Read more

Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841

by

The westward movement of Americans rolled west of the Appalachians and hung up for a decade or two on the barrier of the Mississippi-Missouri River. It was almost an interior sea-coast, the barrier between the settled lands, and the un-peopled and tree-less desert beyond, populated by wild Indians. To be sure, there were scattered enclaves, as far-distant as the stars, in the age of “shanks’ mare” and team animals hitched to wagons, or led in a pack-train: far California, equally distant Oregon, the pueblos of Santa Fe, and Texas. A handful of men in exploring parties, or on trade had ventured out to the ends of the known continent … and by the winter of 1840 there were reports of what had been found. Letters, rumor, common talk among the newspapers, and meeting-places had put the temptation and the possibility in peoples’ minds, to the point where an emigrating society had been formed over that winter.

Read more

Things That Make You Start to Laugh, Uncontrollably

by

So there we were on Monday, sharpening up our awareness of odd things one might pick up at a yard sale or a thrift store for fifty cents or a dollar and which might later turn out to be worth a small or medium-sized fortune, by watching Antiques Road Show (US version) when this particular item was spotlighted for an appraisal.

Read more