It's a hazard in rare book nerderie: the ephemera bug bit me! I'm just back from the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference at Sul Ross State University in Alpine (Far West Texas), where I presented on "John Bigelow, Jr.," about which a longer post is forthcoming, but in the meantime, fresh from that book fair with its bodacious selection of ephemera, herewith, thanks to Galvan Creek Postcards, a few additions to my burgeoning collection of Texas postcards from the era of WWI and the Mexican Revolution:
>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM
"ARMY MANEUVERS ON THE MEXICAN BORDER"
Postmark: MARFA, TEX OCT 10 2PM 1916 TEXT: hellow Jack how are you I am fine & dandy. Well I rec your letter OK but I am still in the war Well regards to all Your friend LB [?] Jack Hendrix Medicine Mound Tex
b
"BORDER DUTY ON THE RIO GRANDE"
(REVERSE BLANK)
"MOUNTED SCOUTS; THE WAGON TRAIN"
Postmark: EL PASO, TEX AUG 30 1916 TEXT: Will write a latter lato [? ? ?] El Paso Texas August 29, 1916 Dear Burt: Rec you letter and was glad to hear from you they have everything in the stores down here that they have have in Mass but they have a lot of Mexican things here that they dont have in Mass we had Gov inspection this morning but i passed alright the [?] R F D got excellent love to all Albert Mrs Elmer Loving Palmer Road Halifax Mass
"BOYS IN KAKHI GUARDING THE RIO GRANDE"
"W.H. HORNE CO. EL PASO, TEX. U.S. CAVALRY DRILL"
"FORT BLISS, TEXAS"
POSTMARK: PHARR, TEX SEPT 20 1916 Sept 19 '16 Dear Mother: Am feeling fine and as hard as a rock and brown as an Indian. Just 3 months ago tonight we were called out Remember? How is every thing and every one? L.A.B. Mrs F.G. Ball 11489 N. Main Jamestown, N.Y.
P.S. My favorite rare book dealer blog is Greg Gibson's Bookman's Log. Watch out, these rare book and emphemera guys are dangerous. If he ever scares up a Manhattan clipper ship card...
About a century ago, after the fall of Francisco I. Madero's government in 1913, with the ensuing struggle between the Huertistas and Carrancistas, and the chaos along the US-Mexico border (in part fomented by German agents, hoping to keep the U.S. Army otherwise occupied during WWI), the U.S. Army set up a number of camps there. On ebay, my sister found these postcards, probably sent by a soldier stationed near El Paso, dated October 26, 1916.
One of the postcards shows an address in Alliance, Ohio, a town noted for its Feline Historical Museum. Thank you, Google.
Here is another GIF, this one of some cartridges I picked up-- by invitation, I hasten to emphasize-- on private property right by the Rio Grande about 20 minutes' drive down a dirt road from Presidio, Texas. Seriously, these are cartridges from the time of the Mexican Revolution (probably from target practice); they were just lying on the ground. That is how isolated a place it still is.
Cartridge circa 1916, from near Presidio, TX
One last GIF: An overcast day on the otherwise spectacular Hot Springs Historic Trail in the Big Bend National Park. The river is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico. At sunset the mountains turn the most otherwordly sherbet-pink. Imagine this scene with a wall through it-- your tax dollars down the hole for a perfectly pointless aesthetic and ecological atrocity. (I shall now take a deep breath.)
Hot Springs Historic Trail, Big Bend National Park
Far West Texas
(Don't watch this GIF unless you are part Viking,
it will make you seasick)
Not shown in my video: the guy hiking a few minutes ahead of me on this trail wore a T-shirt that said TEXAS GUN SAFETY TIP #1: GET ONE. Well, it ain't California. Excuse me, I need to go crunch my granola.
The vast stretches of the Texas-Mexico border region enfold some unusual cultural niches. The mediumnistic healer El Niño Fidencio, who died in northern Mexico in 1938, and his followers, the fidencistas, are unquestionably among the most intriguing of subjects for a history and an enthnography, and with El Niño Fidencio and the Fidencistas: Folk Religion in the US-Mexico Borderland, anthropologist Antonio Noé Zavaleta has just published precisely that. Zavaleta's El Niño Fidencio and the Fidencistas crossed my radar because I did a fair amount of reading on this very subject, including Zavaleta's fascinating book with curandero Alberto Salinas Jr., Curandero Conversations, when I was writing my book on the "secret book," Spiritist Manual of 1911, by the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution, Francisco I. Madero. (See my 2013 blog post on Niño Fidencio.) I cannot say for sure, but I doubt that Niño Fidencio and Madero met. Niño Fidencio did not consider himself a Spiritist, and when Madero died in the coup d'etat that ended his presidency in 1913, Fidencio was still a teenaged worker on a remote ranch. But there is an intermediating figure who appears multiple times in Zavaleta's new book: Teodoro von Wernich, a wealthy hacendado of northern Mexico, personality in the San Antonio Texas Spiritist scene, friend and supporter of Francisco I. Madero, and employer, patient of, and mentor to his worker José Fidencio Sintoro Constantino, the boy who became the folk saint revered on both sides of the border as "El Niño Fidencio." (Researchers take note: With Teodoro von Wernich and his circle there may be rich lodes still to mine, and in archives on both sides of the border.) In sum, Zavaleta's latest is a must-read for anyone interested in Niño Fidencio, shamanism, and the cross-border cultures of northern Mexico and South Texas. More anon. 2018 UPDATE: Professor Zavaleta has a new webpage about his research which you can visit here. > Your comments are always and ever most welcome. Write to me here.
EXTRA EXTRA: US-MEXICO BORDER CYBERFLANERIE More about Peyote A few weeks ago I posted an extra-crunchy batch of notes under the title, "Peyote and the Perfect You." * Thanks to Gene Fowler, none other, who very kindly sent me the link, I have added to that blog post this link (embed rather) to "Amada of the Gardens" a fascinating documentary on peyotera Amada Cardenas (1904-2005).
*Marfa Mondays Podcast #22, not yet posted, scoots an hour and forty five minutes east on highway 90 over "The Town Too Mean for Bean," Sanderson, the Cactus Capital of Texas-- so stay tuned for more about peyote.
Remote as they are, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of the US-Mexico border have a strangely magnetic pull. That may sound like a wild assertion, but the evidence comprises over 200 shamanistic rock art sites, many of them thousands of years old, and the fact that dozens of rock art enthusiasts, including myself, find themselves returning again and again.
It was on a meltingly hot August day in 2014 that I made my first foray into the canyonlands for the Rock Art Foundation’s visit to Meyers Spring. A speck of an oasis tucked into the vast desert just west of the Pecos, Meyers Spring’s limestone overhang is vibrant with petrographs, both ancient, but very faded, and of Plains Indians works including a brave on a galloping horse, an eagle, a sun, and what appears to be a missionary and his church.
I took home the realization that with Meyers Spring I had taken one nibble of the richest of banquets. In addition the rock art of the Plains Indians—Apaches and Comanches— of historic times, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are filled with prehistoric art, principally Pecos River, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. Of the three, Pecos River is comparable to the best known Paleolithic rock in the world, the caves of Lascaux in France.
I would have to return to the canyonlands— alas for my book’s time and travel budget!Not that the Rock Art Foundation charges more than a nominal sum for its tours. The individual tour to Meyers Spring, which lasted four hours, cost a mere 30 dollars. Everyone involved, including the guides, works for the foundation for free.
By December of 2014 I was back for another Rock Art Foundation tour, this one down into Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry. Apart from rock shelters with their ancient and badly faded petrographs, cooking debris, tools, and even a mummy of a woman who—scientists have determined— died of chagas, Eagle Nest Canyon is the site of Bonfire Shelter, the earliest and the second biggest bison jump, after Canada’s Head Bashed-In, in North America. Some 10,000 years ago hunters drove hundreds of prehistoric bison—larger than today’s bison—over the cliff. And in 800 BC, hunters drove a herd of modern bison over the same cliff, so many animals that the decaying mass of unbutchered and partially butchered carcasses spontaneously combusted. In deeper layers dated to 14,000 years, archaeologists have found bones of camel, horse, and mammoth, among other megafauna of the Pleistocene.
DESCENT INTO EAGLE NEST CANYON,
DECEMBER 2014
Then in the spring of this year I visited the Lewis Canyon site on the shore of the Pecos, with its mesmerizing petroglyphs of bear claws, atlatls, and stars, and, behind a morass of boulders, an agate mirror of a tinaja encircled by petrographs.
LEWIS CANYON PETROGLYPHS,
MAY 2015
LEWIS CANYON TINAJA SITE WITH PETROGRAPHS,
BY THE PECOS RIVER,
MAY 2015
Not all but most of the Lower Pecos Canyonland rock art sites— and this includes Meyers Spring, Eagle Nest Canyon and Lewis Canyon— are on private property. Furthermore, visits to Meyers Spring, Lewis Canyon, and many other sites require a high clearance vehicle for a tire-whumping, paint-scraping, bone-jarring drive in. So I was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the privilege it is to visit these sites. At Lewis Canyon, as I stood on the limestone shore of the sparkling Pecos in utter silence but for the crunch of the boots of my fellow tour members, I learned that less than 50 people a year venture to float down its length.
This October I once again traveled to the Lower Pecos, this time for the Rock Art Foundation’s annual three day Rock Art Rendezvous. Offered this year were the three sites I had already visited, plus a delectable menu that included White Shaman, Fate Bell, and—not for those prone to vertigo— Curly Tail Panther.
WHITE SHAMAN,
OCTOBER 2015
Just off Highway 90 near its Pecos River crossing, the White Shaman Preserve serves as the headquarters for Rock Art Rendezvous. After a winding drive on dirt road, I parked near the shade structure. From there, the White Shaman rock art site was a brief but rugged hike down one side of cactus-studded canyon, then up the other. I was glad to have brought a hiking pole and leather gloves. No knee surgery on the horizon, either. When I arrived at White Shaman, named after the central luminous figure, the sun was low in the sky, bathing the shelter’s wall and its reddish drawings in gold and turning the Pecos, far below, where an occasional truck droned by, deep silver.
The next morning, at the Rock Art Foundation’s tour of the Shumla Archaeological and Research Center in nearby Comstock,I heard Dr. Carolyn Boyd’s stunning talk about her book,The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos,which is forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press. Dr. Boyd, whose work is based on 25 years of archaeological research in the Lower Pecos and a meticulous study of Mexican anthropology, argues that White Shaman, which is many thousands of years old, may represent the oldest known creation story in North America.(See Mary S. Black’s interview with Dr. Boyd, “Deciphering the Oldest American ‘Book.’”)
FATE BELL,
OCTOBER 2015
From the White Shaman Preserve, Fate Bell is a few minutes down highway 90 in Seminole Canyon State Park. More than any other site, this shelter in the cake-like layers of the limestone walls of a canyon, reminded me of the cave art I had seen in Baja California’s Sierra de San Francisco. Inhabited on and off for some 9,000 years, Fate Bell is the largest site in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It has various styles of petrograph, including a spectacular group of anthropomorphs with what appear to be antlers and wings.
CURLY TAIL PANTHER,
OCTOBER 2015
Curly Tail Panther is a scoop of a cave about the size of a walk-in closet, but as if for Superman to whoosh in, set dizzyingly high on a cliff-side overlooking the Devils River. The back wall has an array of petrographs: red mountain lion, anthropomorphic figures, and geometric designs. The only access to Curly Tail Panther is by way of a narrow ledge. Drop your hiking pole or your sunglasses from here, and you won’t see them again. You might lose a character, too—in the opening of Mary Black’s novel, Peyote Fire, a shaman stumbles to his death from this very ledge. The Rock Art Foundation’s website made it clear, Curly Tail Panther is not for anyone who has a fear of heights. But who doesn’t? My strategy was to take a deepbreath and, like the running shoes ad says, Just do it.
Just back from the Rock Art Foundation's annual Rock Art Rendezvous at the White Shaman Preserve on the US-Mexico border near Comstock, Texas. Here is a mini-clip of my visit to Curly Tail Panther, one of the several (yes, several) marvels I visited this past weekend (1 minute 49 seconds):
"The Curly Tail Panther site is high on the cliffs with a breathtaking view of the Devils River valley but accessible only by a very narrow ledge. Such settings were conducive to the visionary experiences that are the core of shamanistic belief systems. Two large mountain lions flanking an anthropomorphic shaman, typical of the Pecos River style, dominate the scene but Red Linear, Red Monochrome, and geometric designs testify to the enduring appeal of this shallow overhang with its spectacular vistas."
Just posted a batch of what I call "mini travel clips," that is, super brief videos, nothing fancy (taken with my iPhone), but edited and with audio—in these, by that jaw-droppingly prolific clangy-bangy soundmaestro of Bridport, U.K., Ergo Phizmiz. FAR WEST TEXAS MINI CLIPS Casa Piedra Road, Far West Texas (with a view of a fire in Mexico) (1:06)
> Listen in anytime to my podcast. "A Visit to Swan House." Swan House, a unique adobe teaching house inspired by the legacy of Egypt's greatest architect, Hassan Fathy, is on Casa Piedra Road.
> Read my article in Cenizo Journal, "A Visit to Swan House." Over Burro Mesa and Into Apache Canyon (Big Bend National Park) (1:06)
> Listen in anytime to my "Marfa Mondays" podcast, "Over Burro Mesa / The Kickapoo Ambassadors"
> Read the essay, "Over Burro Mesa."
Pecos River Crossing (Highway 90, near the US-Mexico border) (:41) West of the Pecos is Far West Texas. The end of the video is a gaze south into Mexico.
And I did some slight edits on a video I had posted a few weeks ago, Descent into Eagle Canyon(:53), near Langrty, Texas— Eagle Canyon flows into the Rio Grande on the US-Mexico border.
> Listen in anytime to "Gifts of the Ancient Ones: Greg Williams on the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands." AND AWAYS YONDER WEST
Finally, almost the border (well, a two hour drive) is Joshua Tree National Park in California (2:24). Herewith my mini travel clip of that:
> More mini travel clips here and > Mini clips of Far West Texas (apropos of my book-in-progress) here.
> Watch Ergo Phizmiz starring in "I Am the Music Man," a video by Martha Moopette.
Back in December I went with the Rock Art Foundation down into Eagle Nest Canyon, which drains into the Rio Grande just past the Pecos near Langtry. There was rock art to see, of course, and the second largest buffalo jump in North America. This mini-travel clip, an edited 50 seconds, shows only the descent into that spectacular canyon.
Happy 2015! Just posted, Marfa Mondays podcast #16 (of a projected 24), an interview with photographer Paul V. Chaplo, author of Marfa Flights: Aerial Views of Big Bend Country (Texas A & M University Press). Recorded at the Texas Book Festival in October, 2014. Marfa Flights was published to coincide with the opening of the exhibition of Chaplo's large format color photographs in the Museum of the Big Bend, in Alpine Texas. That show is open through January 18, 2015. Don't miss it! >Listen in anytime here. >Listen in to the other Marfa Mondays Podcasts here. >Find out more about Chaplo's magnificent Marfa Flightshere.
Lisa G. Sharp, author of the memoir
A Slow Trot Home
It was thanks to Women Writing the West that I first came upon the extraordinary writing of Lisa G. Sharp. Mexicans sit up and take notice when I mention that she's the granddaughter of the owner of the Greene Cattle Company, which had its headquarters in Cananea, a place synonymous with an infamous massacre in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution. But to get beyond that: A Slow Trot Home, Sharp's memoir about growing up, first in her grandmother's house in Cananea, and then for most of her life on San Rafael, a working cattle ranch a scooch north of the border in a remote corner of Arizona, is one of the most beautifully written and moving memoirs I have ever read. The sweep of the land, the peace and violence of the sky, the people, both Mexican and American, and all the animals, come alive with a rare vividness. It's poetic prose that, in places, breaks open into poetry itself, as with this list in the chapter "Winter":
Frozen water troughs.
Short days.
Matches handy by wood stoves.
A dead calf half eaten by coyotes and vultures.
Dogs curled up by fire places.
Down comforters and flannel sheets.
Bare trees, dormant rose bushes, red berries.
Stews, soups, Christmas tamales.
Fires burned all day long.
By the end, as she returns to visit her mother's lonely grave, one understands what this is: an elegy for a world that is no more. Now the SUVs rumbling by might more likely carry birdwatchers or Border Patrol officers than ranchers or ranch hands. 9/11 changed everything on the US-Mexico Border. And in what had been velvet nights, electric lights from Mexico glow on the horizon.
Literati will note that this is self-published. I think that says far more about the state of publishing than it does this splendid book. I recommend it for anyone interested in a fine read, and especially for anyone interested in ranching culture and the US-Mexico border region.
