This last Saturday was the second day of Christmas on the Square in Goliad, Texas. I had a table there, as a local author, but the cold was so pronounced that the whole event was rather a bust … but it did mean that folding up and coming home early allowed some time for taking pictures on the way back. This is a part of Texas which overlies the Eagle Ford Shale formation, and over the last five years I have noted a good many changes along the route, and in the small towns that we pass through on a semi-regular basis.
Entrepreneurship
History Friday – The Tireless Mr. Colt
(Part the second, first part here.)
The redesigned and improved revolver the Walker Colt turned out to be a nearly five-pound brute of a weapon, and returned Sam to the arms-manufacturing business with renewed zest. He subcontracted production of them first with Eli Whitney Blake (nephew of Eli Whitney) at Blake’s Whitneyville armory. The contract specified that the machinery used would revert back into Colt’s ownership at completion of the contract for Sam had set up shop in a former cotton mill in Hartford, Connecticut. He incorporated the company as Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. He held most of the shares; trusted friends and relatives held the remainder.
History Friday: Where Legends Were Born – The Long Trail Cattle Drives
For no good reason that I have ever been able to figure out the figure of the cowboy remains about the most dominant figure in our mental landscape of the Wild West the version of the 19th century American frontier that the public usually knows best, through novels, movies and television. The version of the Wild West which most people have in mind when they consider that period is post-Civil War as to time frame and available technology, and most often centered on aspects of cattle ranches, cow-towns, and long-trail cattle drives and the hired men who performed the grunt work involved or those various forces arrayed against them; homesteaders, rustlers and assorted other stock baddies. The long-trail drives actually took place over a fairly limited time; about ten or fifteen years, but those few years established an undying legend, especially in the minds of people anywhere else or at any other time. The realities of it all, of course, are a bit more nuanced, a bit more complicated, and perhaps a bit more interesting.
History Friday: Lizzie Johnson Williams – The Anti-Lily Bart
I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in. Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. No place there for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating.
Considerations on the N-Word
The injudicious use of which has led to Paula Deen being booted from the Food Network, never mind that she was speaking under oath, and is a lady of a certain age and of a background where the n-word was … well, I honestly can’t say how current was the use of that word back in Paula Deen’s early days. It’s certainly scattered generously all over 19th century literary works like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn like chocolate sprinkles on a frosted Krispy Kreme donut, and piled on by the handful in the 20th century oeuvre of rap artists and edgy comedians of color…