Tag: The Texian Prisoners

October Sale!

October Sale!

Because October was the month that the prisoners from the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition marched down New Mexico to El Paso, it seems appropriate to put the novel I wrote about that march on sale. So, this month only, the paperback of The Texian Prisoners is 50% off ($8.99) and the ebook is $.99. You can find the Kindle version here and other ebook formats here.

To refresh your memory of what this book is about, here’s the description.

They called themselves “Texians.”

In Fall 1841, a band of roughly 300 men straggled out of the Staked Plains into New Mexico. They had intended to claim everything east of the Rio Grande for Texas. Instead, they were captured and sent south to El Paso del Norte, then on to Mexico City. The largest group of prisoners, which included journalist George Wilkins Kendall, was escorted to El Paso by Captain Damasio Salazar. Five prisoners died on that trek. Kendall would later write a book describing the experience, a book which accused Salazar of food deprivation, mutilation, and murder, and fed the glowing coals that would become the Mexican American War.

But what really happened on the way to El Paso? The Texian Prisoners tells the story through the eyes of Kendall’s friend George Van Ness, a lawyer burdened with the ability to see his enemy’s point of view, and asks us to consider the possibility that Kendall’s report was not unbiased.

A historically accurate retelling of Larry McMurtry’s Dead Man’s Walk, this fictional memoir will make you question everything you thought you knew about Texas, New Mexico, and the boundary between them.

The Priest at El Paso del Norte

The Priest at El Paso del Norte

When the men in my recent novel The Texian Prisoners reach El Paso del Norte (today’s Ciudad Juárez in November 1841, one of the kindest people they meet is local priest, Padre Ramón Ortiz. Prisoner George Wilkins Kendall, who later wrote a book about their trek, says Ortiz had a “benevolent countenance … that at once endeared him to every one.” The priest was also generous, “continually seeking opportunities to do some delicate act of kindness, which, by the manner of its bestowal, showed that he possessed all the more refined feelings of our nature.”


The padre housed, clothed, and gave money to Kendall and other men of the Texas Santa Fe Expedition while they were in El Paso. And his generosity didn’t stop there. When the prisoners headed out on the next leg of their journey, he sent along two or three ox-carts filled with “excellent bread.”


“Seldom have I parted from a friend with more real regret,” Kendall said later. “If ever a noble heart beat in man it was in the breast of this young, generous, and liberal priest. Professing a different religion from mine, and one, too, that I had been taught to believe, at least in Mexico, inculcated a jealous intolerance towards those of any other faith, I [thought I] could expect from him neither favour nor regard. How surprised was I, then, to find him liberal to a fault, constant in his attentions, and striving to make my situation as agreeable as the circumstances would admit.”


One would be tempted to conclude from Kendall’s description that Ramon Ortiz was sympathetic toward the Texians and, by extension, Americans. After all, most of the prisoners had been born in the United States. And the padre may well have felt that way in 1841. But he seems to have changed his mind by the end of the decade.


Padre Ortiz opposed America’s 1846 invasion of Mexico so vociferously that U.S. soldiers arrested him when they reached El Paso. Incarceration doesn’t seem to have curbed his spirit. He continued to voice his opposition and, as a deputy to Mexico’s Congress, fought ratification of its 1848 treaty with the U.S.


Ortiz was concerned about the amount of land the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo proposed to give away, which included today’s California, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. But he didn’t give up when he lost that cause. After the treaty was signed, he took on another role: helping New Mexico families who wished to move south across the new border, and thus remain Mexican citizens.


In late 1848, Mexico sent Padre Ortiz north into New Mexico to identify these people and assist them in the transition. His mission was so successful that the new regime in Santa Fe shut it down.


Ortiz arrived in the Santa Fe area in April 1849 and soon had approximately 1,000 families signed up for the trek south. And those were just the ones from San Miguel del Bado. When he then headed north toward Taos, the American administration panicked and started actively discouraging people from leaving while also throwing up bureaucratic obstacles related to signatures, funding, deadlines, and so forth.

Church at Mesilla, courtesy https://www.mesillanm.gov/history/


Even with these roadblocks, by mid-1850, the padre had successfully assisted 1,552 people to leave their homes in the new American possessions and move across the border to the Mesilla area. He then took on a new role and served as the commissioner responsible for issuing land grants to the new settlers.


If you’re familiar with New Mexico, you’ll know Mesilla is a town in the southern part of the state, on the U.S. side of the border. No, it didn’t move. The land on which the padre settled the newcomers was sold to the Americans in late December 1853. While the emigrants were adjusting to their new location, the U.S. had arranged to pay Mexico another $10 million for a strip of land that would enable a railroad route from Texas to California. Land that included Mesilla.


I haven’t found a record of Padre Ortiz’s response to that exchange of real estate. I doubt he was pleased. But he had plenty of time to adjust to what had happened. He was priest at El Paso del Norte for another forty-two years.


If Kendall’s portrayal of him is accurate, it’s possible that Padre Ortiz, unlike so many of us, was able to distinguish between individuals and the country they came from and continued to be as full of “exceeding liberality” as he’d been in 1841. I don’t think I could have done so.

If you want to learn more about Mesilla’s fascinating history, see https://www.mesillanm.gov/history/ or Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel’s, The Contested Homeland, A Chicano History of New Mexico. You can find a short review of this book in this month’s newsletter. Sign up here!

Source List: Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel, The Contested Homeland, A Chicano History of New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 2000; George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, Harper and Brothers, 1847; W.H. Timmons, El Paso, A Borderlands History, Texas Western Press, 2004

The Call of the Cranes

The Call of the Cranes

I haven’t seen any sandhill cranes in the Santa Fe area yet this year, but recently I ran across a section of Lt. James W Abert’s 1846-47 New Mexico travel diary which definitely evoked them:

Tuesday, October 13: [outside Bernalillo] “… we are now surrounded by cranes that keep up a great whooping all night. Their cry bears some resemblance to that of the red[headed] woodpecker.” The following day, the roadside ponds near Alameda “were covered with cranes, geese, and ducks. All these birds are quite tame and suffered us to approach very close (Abert, 44).”

Not close enough to be killed, though. In fact, whenever Abert or one of his companions appeared with a gun, the birds slipped out of range.

If you’ve had a chance to read The Texian Prisoners, you’ll notice that the men under Damasio Salazar also encounter sandhill cranes, first at Pecos Pueblo and then later along the Rio Grande. The birds, grazing in the stubble of harvested corn and wheat, stay well out of reach. When a horseman canters across the fields, they and the snow geese with them rise in great waves, their cries filling the air.

I have responded viscerally to the call of the cranes since I first heard it here in New Mexico. Abert’s observation that the sound resembled that of the redheaded woodpecker prompted more research. While the woodpecker’s actual call doesn’t seem to have much similarity to the sandhill’s, the sound of its drumming actually does.

Listen for yourself: Here’s the woodpecker drumming (at :31) and here’s the sandhill crane (choose the Garrett McDonald one). Isn’t the similarity amazing?

There’s an important difference to my ear though. The woodpecker is boring a hole in something. The cranes are talking, calling across the sky as they fly overhead through the long shadows of a New Mexico sunset.

How the Texian prisoners must have envied their freedom.

Note: the attached crane images were taken by me at two of my favorite birding places in New Mexico, the Bernardo Waterfowl Area of the Ladd S. Gordon complex south of Belen and the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.