Monthly Archives: February 2011

That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio – and perhaps all of the rest of Texas – first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour … Continue reading →

Most people, when they have a mental vision of an Army fort on the American frontier, think of a wooden stockade of standing timber – but that was hardly ever the case in Texas. Indians almost never attacked those forts, … Continue reading →

Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James … Continue reading →

No, not that sort of brush – not a narrow escape from a driver on a cellphone running a red light, or a particularly embittered book critic – but a walk through an old cemetery near Fredericksburg, Texas. About a … Continue reading →

Yes, there was a real Philip Nolan, and the writer Edward Everett Hale was apparently remorseful over borrowing his name for the main character in his famous patriotic short story, The Man Without A Country. The real Philip Nolan had … Continue reading →

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be always on the border between the Anglo Texians and the  Mexican Tejanos, during his lifetime and after. He was born in the first decade of … Continue reading →