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Showing posts with label Center for Big Bend Studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Center for Big Bend Studies. Show all posts
Monday, October 21, 2019
Monday, June 17, 2019
Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”
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| Nope, that is not Francisco I. Madero, pictured right, but J.J. Kilpatrick, subject of Lonn Taylor’s fascinating article in this same issue of the Journal of Big Bend Studies, vol. 29, 2017. |
A belated but delighted announcement: my article, “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero, Leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution” which is an edited transcript of my talk about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (which is about and includes my translation of Manual espírita), came out in the Journal of Big Bend Studies in 2017.
Because I am a literary writer, not an academic historian, it is a special an honor to have my work published in an outstanding scholarly journal of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.
For those rusty on their borderlands and Mexican history, Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 revolution– the first major revolution of the 20th century– and President of Mexico from 1911-1913. This was not only a transformative episode for Mexico, but also for Texas.
My book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, came out in 2014 (also in Spanish, translated by Agustín Cadena as Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto, Manual espírita, from Literal Publishing.) So far so good: it has been cited already in a number of scholarly works about Madero and the Revolution.
Yes, Metaphysical Odyssey, is a peculiar title. In the article, I explain why I chose it and why, much as readers groan about it, I would not change it.
> Read the article here. (I had posted an earlier only partially edited PDF at this link; in case you’ve already seen it, as of June 17, 2019, it has been updated.) And you can order a copy of the actual printed article with all photos, and of the complete issue from the Center for Big Bend Studies here.
Yes, Metaphysical Odyssey, is a peculiar title. In the article, I explain why I chose it and why, much as readers groan about it, I would not change it.
> Read the article here. (I had posted an earlier only partially edited PDF at this link; in case you’ve already seen it, as of June 17, 2019, it has been updated.) And you can order a copy of the actual printed article with all photos, and of the complete issue from the Center for Big Bend Studies here.
A few of the photos, not in the PDF:
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Sunday, December 03, 2017
Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas, and a Note on El Paso's Elroy Bode
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| [ Dr. Cecilia Autrique at the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas, November 2017 Her paper is "American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930" ] |
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I've been working on this book about Far West Texas, which includes the Big Bend, for an age & an eon, so last year, when I was invited to present at the 2016 CBBS conference, I was honored but flummoxed. My book hadn't-- and still hasn't-- been published and, anyway, it's not a scholarly work but, as I have begun describing it, a lyrical and personal portrait of place. No, no, what they wanted was for me to talk about my book published in 2014, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I was flummoxed again, for that book about the book by the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution has zip to do with the Big Bend!
Well, it turned out that anything and everything about the Mexican Revolution is game for the CBBS conference, which is multidisciplinary and covers subjects relevant not only to the Big Bend but the surrounding regions, which include the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and northern Mexico's states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.
So last year at CBBS I presented Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, and I came away mightily impressed-- so much so that I decided to present again this year and I recruited my amiga, Mexican historian Cecilia Autrique, to present her outstanding paper, "American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930." (This paper stems from her PhD thesis at the UNAM in Mexico City, which I hope will be published as a book in both Spanish and English, for it provides vital historical context for any discussion of the current US-Mexico border and narcotrafficking issues.)
Look for the paper on my website shortly; in the meantime, for those interested, my blog posts about Bigelow are here and here, and the post about his brother, author, world-traveler, life-long friend to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and pioneer magazine publisher Poultney Bigelow, is here. And the selected bibliography on John Bigelow, Jr. and the Bigelow family, and related subjects, which I handed out at the conference, is here.
Bigelow's relevance to the Big Bend is direct: he was stationed there more than once, scouted all around the region, and indeed, he is an officer already well known to any and all who would study the Indian Wars and the Buffalo Soldiers. I trust I have been able to add new dimensions and insights to his importance for this region, and the West as a whole.
HIGHLIGHTS
One of the downsides of a bustling conference (indeed, a downside to just about everything nifty in the human experience) is that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time! It can also be a challenge to fit fascinating and vital conversations, such as they pop up, into the precise times allotted for coffee breaks and lunch. Alas, there were talks I am tremendously sorry to have missed or to have had to slink into half way through.
Just a few-- a very few-- of the highlights for me:
Felix Almaraz channeling a Franciscan missionary (and in costume!)
Lonn Taylor's talk about J.J. Kilpatrick of Candelaria, Texas (right on the Rio Grande) during the Mexican Revolution
This is a movie! (Or has it been made already? If not, por dios, ¿porqué no?)
> Check out Lonn Taylor's always fascinating "Rambling Boy" column for the Big Bend Sentinel, and my podcast interview with him, "Under Sleeping Lion: Lonn Taylor in Fort Davis"
Once again, Al González of Chiricuahua Books busted my shoe budget for the year. I took home a biography of Jack Hays and two very rare books by cowboys about Marfa, Texas.
Ayyy, and gigazoodles of postcards!
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| Steve Black Who gave a super crunchy keynote about Eagle Nest Canyon |
> One of the most jaw-dropping canyons in Texas. Check out my mini-video of the entrance of Eagle Nest Canyon from a visit a couple of years ago here.
(Perchance you wonder, did we see the Marfa Lights? Not this time. But I have indeed seen them and on four different occasions.)
AND A NOTE ON EL PASO'S ELROY BODE
I have belatedly discovered Elroy Bode!* Doubly belatedly, for Bode passed away only months ago. (See his obituary in the El Paso Times.)
*Pronounced Bo-dee.I devoured Bode's El Paso Days and got started on In a Special Light. As the blurbs on his books attest, Bode is much-admired and even beloved by many Texan writers and readers of a literary bent, but he remains obscure, not only outside the region but, as my visit to El Paso's Barnes & Noble attests, even in his home town. (Nope, the Barnes & Noble did not have in-store even one copy of Elroy Bode's -- "who? Brady?"-- several books. But for, like, totally sure, they did have, for the man in front of me in the customer service line, Exploding Kittens.)
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says:
"Elroy Bode is one of the most essential writers the state of Texas has ever been lucky enough to call its own. In a voice that is at once deeply descriptive and eloquently minimalist, he illuminates our corners, dim memories, streets, fields, prairies, hills, hours, and the hardest of days. His no-frills frankness and steady attentiveness have always had a radiant, carifying power."
As I read I tagged so many of Bode's lines but perhaps the best, most representative of all is this one, from "Earth-Life" in the collection of his poetic essays, In a Special Light:
"I need the El Paso countryside. I need to hear the call of redwing blackbirds from salt cedars along an Upper Valley canal. I need to stand in a pecan grove and feel the breeze that moves through it-- a breeze that reminds me of other breezes in other trees in other, almost forgotten times. I need to see stretched of plowed land where, in the distance, humans are reduced in scale and become of no greater importance to the eye than a rooster in a yard, a tractor in a field."
After the CBBS conference I spent an afternoon in the El Paso Public Library's Border Heritage archive where I looked up Elroy Bode and Amado Duro. More about those two caballeros literarios anon.
> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
Monday, October 30, 2017
Notes on John Bigelow, Jr. and "Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth: The Journal of First Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr., Fort Davis, Texas"
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| A portion of the prodigious accumulation |
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As those of you who follow this blog well know, I live in Mexico City and have been at work on a book about the Trans-Pecos (that, is Far West Texas) for more than a spell. Books on the Trans-Pecos are sparse on the ground south of the border, so when I travel to Texas I always try to scour a bookshop or three. Thus have I accumulated a working library, including not a few rare and unusual books. For this sort of project, archival research is also important to do-- and I have done some-- but it can be woefully expensive to travel to and spend time working through archives. So whenever an historian has taken the trouble to transcribe and publish anything relevant from any archive of interest to me, I am triply grateful for such a find.
Why is this excerpt from Lieutenant Bigelow's diary, from 1884-1885 in Fort Davis, Texas, so interesting and important?
The Tenth refers to the Tenth Cavalry, one of the African American regiments -- "Buffalo Soldiers"-- established after the U.S. Civil War, famed for its exploits in the West during the Indian Wars of Bigelow's time (and later, in the Spanish-American War, also of Bigelow's time, but that would be another blog post).
Fort Davis, tucked among the volcanic Davis Mountains, and surrounded by hard desert for hundreds of miles around, was one of a string of US Army forts set up to protect the El Paso Road.
To give an idea of the remoteness, Bigelow wryly remarks:
Fort Davis, Texas. Thursday Jan. 15, 1885 ... One is apt is a country like this to suspect everybody one meets with some discreditable reason for being here, without thinking that one is subject to the same suspicion oneself.
Back to Lt. Bigelow. Writes McChristian of Lt. Bigelow's Fort Davis diary:
"A keen observer and a skillful writer, Bigelow left a vivid record of events and relationsips at the post as he witnessed them. He included no expeditions or battles, no heroics, no glitter-- only the realities of life on the frontier."
Nuggets in Lt. Bigelow's diary include:
Fort Davis, Tex. February 12, 1885 Have written to Chicago for 1/2 doz. base balls for the troop. The men have bats and bases. I hope my efforts to afford them recreation will counteract the unpleasant impression they receive from the extra drill that I give them and the increased severity of discipline to which I subject them.
The men were not so isolated as they might have seemed:
Fort Davis, Texas. Sat. Feb. 14, 1885... I read the report in the New York Herald today that Khartoum had fallen. From that paper I gather that the British do not comprehend yet the power of their enemy. They think of turning the tables with five or ten thousand additional troops. They will want five or ten times that many troops to conquer the Mahdi.
And Bigelow mentions meeting Quanah Parker:
Fort Davis, Tex. Tuesday Dec. 9, 1884. Have just returned from a call at Lt. Woodward's where I met the Chief of the Comanches in the Indian Territory [Oklahoma]. His tribe is not regarded as civilized. It is behind the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles. All communications with his tribe from the Federal Government go to him. He assembled the heads of families with whom he discusses the matter. Ten years ago, says Woodward, this man wore a blanket and breech clout. Today he is dressed like any white man. He has two other Indians with him. All three are going tomorrow about 60 miles south of here to get a certain herb which they prize as a medicine. Clarke is to escort them with about 1/2 dozen men. Quanah has a determined, and intelligent, though not a bright look. His mother was a white woman captured in Texas when quite a child; who subsequently married an Indian.
[Quanah's mother was Cynthia Ann Parker and his father a chief, Nocona. The "certain herb" they were heading south to harvest was peyote cactus, then abundant in the Big Bend along the Rio Grande.]
Lt. Bigelow and Quanah are among the personalities I will be including in my book on Far West Texas. Apropos of that, this November I will be presenting a paper about Bigelow at the Center for Big Bend Studies conference at Sul Ross State University-- in heart of the Trans-Pecos. Indeed, there are continents more to Bigelow's life than his brief posting to Fort Davis and these few pages of his diary might suggest. The original diary, which spans many more years, including his earlier postings in the Texas in the 1870s, is in the United States Military Academy (West Point).
There is also a substantial archive of John Bigelow Jr. (and Sr. and family) correspondence during the Texas years (and much more) at Union College in Schenectedy, New York.
Bigelow's father, John Bigelow, Sr. was an ardent reader of Emanuel Swedenborg, having encountered the Swedish mystic's books on a journey to Haiti in his work as an Abolitionist (whew, yes, that is all packed into in one sentence! Never a dull moment with John Bigelow, Sr.). So I have been wondering to what degree, if any, his son might have been influenced by those ideas. I have little to go on at this point, but one comment in Lt. Bigelow's diary is suggestive:
Fort Davis, Tex. Dec 4, 1884... I have begun reading to Mary (a chapter every evening) a book that was given to her in Baltimore: Natural Law in the Spiritual World. I find it original, interesting, and edifying.
Natural Law in the Spiritual World was a best-seller of its day; the author was Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond (1851-1897). As far as I can ascertain from a search through the digital edition of this book however, Drummond was not retailing Swedenborgiana.
FURTHER NOTES ON JOHN BIGELOW, JR. (1854-1936)
Also of note is the masters thesis by Howard K. Hansen, Jr., "The Remarkable John Bigelow, Jr: An Examination of Professionalism in the United States Army, 1877-91," Old Dominion University, 1986, which provides a splendid introduction to Bigelow's oeuvre as a military intellectual, including Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte; The Principles of Strategy; and The Campaign of Chancellorsville.
Today Bigelow's best-known publication is his series of 15 articles, "After Geronimo," based on the diary he kept as a cavalry officer with the Tenth in Arizona, which he published in his brother Poultney Bigelow's magazine, Outing in 1886-87. Some of these articles included illustrations by Poultney's Yale University classmate and friend, the soon-to-be-world-famous artist Frederic Remington. John Bigelow, Jr.'s articles for Outing were collected and republished in 1958 as On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo, with an introduction and notes by Arthur Woodward.
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| Read this book for free on archive.org |
John Bigelow, Jr. also fought in and wrote about the Spanish-American War of 1898. That book is Reminiscences of the Santiago Campaign, published by Harper & Brothers in New York and London in 1899.
From his obituary in the New York Times, March 1, 1936:
... Expert strategist and tactician, Spanish War veteran, geographer, author, college professor and descendant of a family distinguished in American history, Colonel Bigelow was well-known in military and social circles both in the United States and abroad.
His father was John Bigelow, United States Ambassador to France under President Lincoln, and his mother, the former Jane Tunis Poultney, a social leader of her day. Poultney Bigelow, the author, is a brother.
The colonel was born in New York on May 12, 1854. After attending private schools in New York, Providence, R.I., and in Europe, he was appointed to West Point, from which he was graduated in 1877. One Jun 15 of that year he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Promoted to first lieutenant on Sept. 24, 1883, he was made a captain on April 15, 1893, a major on Dec. 8, 1902, and lieutenant colonel on Sept. 15, 1904, being retired at his own request the same day. From 1887 to 1889 he was adjutant general of the District of Columbia Militia.
Colonel Bigelow particularly distinguished himself during the Spanish-American War. He was wounded four times at the battle of San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898. For his heroic conduct then he was cited in general orders and received the Silver Star...
And I found him and his wife (née Mary Dallam) listed on p. 57 of the 1918 New York Social Register. Bigelow was then at Rutgers College in New Jersey.
Much more anon.
> See the Q & A with McChristian over at the Civil War Books and Authors Blog.
> Your comments are always very welcome. Write to me here.
Monday, November 14, 2016
The Mexican Revolution at the Center for Big Bend Studies Annual Conference at Sul Ross State University
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| [[ WASHI & ULI, stop those suitcases! ]] |
I have been visiting Alpine, Texas for the annual Center for Big Bend Studies conference to talk about Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. Check out the conference, which is rich with archaeology and history and more on the Big Bend but also the wider region of West Texas and encompassing parts of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, here.
UPDATE November 2017: The PDF of my paper, "The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero, Leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution," which is an expanded transcript of my talk about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, can be downloaded here. See also a brief video about four exceedingly rare books. In November 2017 I will be presenting "John Bigelow, Jr.: Officer with the Tenth Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between West and East." The link for that paper will be posted soon.
The keynote speaker was my amiga, M.M. McAllen, author of the extraordinary narrative history Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico. (Listen to our extra-bacon-on-top-crunchy conversation about the whole enchilada of Mexico's Second Empire / French Intervention for my "Conversations with Other Writers" occasional podcast series here.)
Funny, my Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution has zip to do with the Big Bend of Far West Texas. But the Mexican Revolution is a topic of perennial interest in this region; many battles and other incidents of the Mexican Revolution took place along the border in the Big Bend region, especially in the years after President Francisco I. Madero's assassination in 1913.
UPDATE: Biographers International January 2017 Newsletter Q & A with Yours Truly about Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. Read it here.
Moreover, it so happens that I am at work on a book about Far West Texas. It won't be a book of straight history, however, but an interweaving of personal narrative, history and reporting, and maybe the kitchen sink, too, in the style of my book about Mexico's Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air.
Herewith a batch of posts on this blog about the Big Bend:
Plus you will find 20 of a projected 24 "Marfa Mondays" podcasts, mainly interviews, posted to date, including Charles Angell in the Big Bend; Lisa Fernandes at the Pecos Rodeo; Mary Baxter on Painting the Big Bend; Avram Dumitrescu, and Artist in Alpine; and Cowboy Songs by Cowboys and an Interview with Michael Stevens. >>> Listen in anytime.
More anon.
> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.
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