It's actually pretty good here. Not like Iraq when I was there in 2008. I'm at a NATO base which means I can practice my German and Spanish all the time. I have not updated my blog because it's just too hard when you consider OPSEC issues. Yes, there's stuff I could post, but I just haven't done it.
My book that I'm working on is very specifically on the Gutierrez-Magee filibuster, so the other stuff, while interesting, isn't where I'm going. I've got a paper in the hopper at the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, but it will be months before that gets published. For my book, I've got a ton of research, but I still need to do more, so it will take time. I'd rather get it right than quick. I do think that the perspective that I'm bringing to it should cause people to rethink their whole worldview on Texas history.
It's becoming increasingly obvious to me how much of a farce it is to say Texas history began in 1836. Even if you consider Anglo Texas history, that's silly. Anglos were in Texas, technically, before any "Mexicans" were. Because Mexico didn't exist until 30 years after the Anglos arrived. A couple of points:
There is this belief that there just weren't any Anglos in Texas until Austin arrived. So we have stories like Jane Long as the "mother of Texas" because she gave birth to the first Anglo child in Texas. Setting aside the implicit racism, that's horse ***** There were Anglos in Texas as early as the 1790s. Most were men, to be sure, and their children were more likely to be born through Hispanic mothers. But not all. The Nacogdoches census of 1801 shows about 20 Anglos in that area at the time. Some of these were actually living in the Neutral Ground between Texas and Louisiana. It's a patch of land now within Louisiana, but which was claimed by both. However, it was Texas, whether the U.S. accepted it or not. It includes Los Adaes, the original capital of Texas. It was only with the Adams Onis Treaty of 1819 that this area was severed from Texas permanently.
Going through the Bexar archives, these Anglos are hiding in plain sight, under Hispanicized names. There are "Enrique Kuerke" and "Reimundo Kuerke" who most historians simply gloss over. But their real names are Henry and Edmund Quirk. They are from North Carolina and they came to Texas in the 1790s. Henry Quirk had a son, also named Henry, born in Texas (the Neutral Ground) who later signed the 1835 Goliad Declaration of Independence. There's a "Juan Mafalen" who I've proven is actually a guy named John McFarland, who was a trader with the Indians. There's a "Carlos Beltran" (same name as the baseball player), who looks like a Hispanic, but he's really Charles Beltran, also from North Carolina. There's a Daniel Boone (sometimes mentioned with the American spelling or a variety of Hispanicized butcherings of it (who may be a nephew of the famous Daniel Boone), who was living in San Antonio, working as a blacksmith and weapons repairman, fixing Spanish soldiers' muskets. Other than Boone, who I can't confirm, all of these men joined the expedition as it entered into Texas. In fact, there are about 7 Anglos who were found by the expedition languishing in a prison inside the Alamo when they arrived. These men were freed and joined the army.
From about 1790 to 1808, a good number of non-Spanish people settled in Texas. This population came mostly from Louisiana. Some predated the La Purchase and included Anglos and French alike. After the Purchase, a lot of these were Frenchmen who wanted to stay Spanish (which they had been since 1757). It is often forgotten in American history that most creoles were hostile to the Louisiana Purchase. Some hated Republicanism (while some, wanting Napoleon to save them, loved it). Most hated Protestantism. Others hated the fact that the U.S. didn't automatically recognize their land titles (The Spanish, when exiting, took all their land documents with them instead of giving them to the Americans). On the Anglo side, there were a lot of deserters from the U.S. Army who entered Texas. Then there were people who just wanted to settle.
The problem from the Spanish perspective was that a whole lot of these people, Anglo and French alike (and their own Spanish subjects) were quickly engaged in contraband trade. Having connections on both sides of the border made this trade very effective. This sounds criminal, and by Spanish law it was, but in fact, contraband trade was the lifeblood of East Texas. Spanish law, even when Louisiana was part of the empire, required all goods for Nacogdoches to come through Veracruz. The shortest legal route for goods was over a thousand miles overland. But Natchitoches, La. was only 40 miles. This Mercantilist oppression of their own subjects caused rampant smuggling and disobedience of the law, and the new settlers from Louisiana made it worse.
Here's how bad it was: the Spanish commander of Nacogdoches who was sent to stop all trade with Natchitoches had to get special dispensation to do some trading himself so that his soldiers could have anything but rags to wear. He also wrote that fully stopping the contraband trade would cause starvation in his town.
When the filibuster came into Texas, it gained recruits from these populations. Almost the entire garrison of the Spanish army in Nacogdoches (all but 10) came over to the rebels. The Irish-American, now turned Spanish businessman who was the official Spanish Indian agent, came over to them and became their quartermaster. The French came into the invasion, including Bernardo Despallier, who fought in the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition and then later had two sons who fought in the 1836 rebellion, including Carlos (Charles) who died at the Alamo.
One of the things I found in my thesis work was that one half of the known Gutierrez-Magee filibusters later settled in Texas as colonists. Quite literally, some of the settlers who Stephen F. Austin (according to the common narrative) guided through the wilderness, knew 10 times as much about Texas as Austin did. People like Aylett Buckner, who had fought in Texas in 1813 and knew every cow path in Texas when Austin didn't know the Colorado River from the Trinity. Possibly as many as a dozen or more of Austin's colonists were experts. Some of them had owned farms in Texas, although most of these had been near Nacogdoches so they squatted or waited until a grant came that encompassed their old lands, not wanting to move so far inland as Austin's lands.
Anyway, what I want to do is retell the story of the expedition as it's never been told. There are 4 books on the Gutierrez-Magee expedition:
1. Green Flag over Texas, 1939
2. The Sword Was their Passport, 1942
3. Forgotten Battlefield of the First Texas Revolution, 1985
4. We Never Retreat, 2015
All of these books, including the last one, which is not bad, ignore the human element. They simply narrate the battles and never get into who these people were. When I was reading one book (not on the expedition, but on filibusters in general), it said these people were "nameless frontiersmen who were really just pawns of the Madison Administration." This is simply a historian making a determination without examining the facts. Because no one has actually tried to look at these people biographically, no one has ever understood this war. My thesis was the first attempt to do that, and my professor, who's an expert in the field, told me as much. The reason this has never been done before is because previous historians have found these "nameless frontiersmen" to be inscrutable, even when they did know their names. But they did not have the Internet and all the wealth of digitized sources that they've ignored have allowed for new research that could not be done in the past.
So that's what I'm working on.
