A Famous Refugee from the American Civil War

War always creates refugees, and civil wars especially so. As North and South fought it out, large numbers of civilians fled the advancing armies and guerrilla raiders. To find safety, civilians often trailed along with the armies.

One such refugee was Roy Bean, the colorful self-appointed judge I mentioned in a previous post. Before he set up his own law practice in Texas, he had been knocking around the West and getting into gunfights, doing a spell in prison, and nearly getting lynched by angry Mexicans after killing one of their number. Basically all the things a Wild West judge was expected to do before starting a career upholding the law.

The start of the war found Roy and his brother running a store and saloon in New Mexico Territory. He had a cannon out front that he used to repel Apache raiders. The Confederate army invaded New Mexico from Texas in late 1861 but suffered a severe defeat at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in March 1862. They were forced to make a long retreat back to San Antonio.

Roy decided to go with them. Perhaps he feared more Apache raids since there wouldn't be an army around to protect the towns. He took the store's savings (which may or may not have included his brother's share) and joined the retreating column. Once he got to he made a good profit shipping cotton from San Antonio to British ships at Matamoros, Mexico, and returning with goods that the Confederacy needed. The Confederacy was under a blockade and the Mexican border was one of the few places where merchants could trade with the outside world.

As usual, this crazy Wild West character saw a good chance and took it.


Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

My book on Tombstone is out now!

I've just received the author's copies for my latest book, Tombstone - Wyatt Earp, the O.K. Corral, and the Vendetta Ride 1881-82. This is published by Osprey Publishing and as usual they did a bang up job on the layout and artwork.

This book looks at the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as well as the lead up to the confrontation between the Earp brothers and the Cowboys and the vendetta that lasted for some months afterwards.

As the back cover blurb states:

The Gunfight at the OK Corral on 26 October 1881 is one of the most enduring stories of the Old West. It led to a series of violent incidents that culminated in the Vendetta Ride, in which Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and several other gunslingers went after their rivals the Cowboys.
Like most tales of the Wild West, the facts are buried under layers of myth, and the line between good guys and bad guys is blurry. Wyatt Earp, leader of the so-called “good guys”, was charged with stealing horses in the Indian Territory in 1870 and jumped bail. Becoming a buffalo hunter and gambler, he got into several scrapes and earned a reputation as a gunfighter.
Several times he helped lawmen arrest outlaws, but usually his assistance came more because of a personal grudge against the criminal than any real respect for law and order. He even got fired from a police job in Wichita for beating up a political rival.

This is my sixth book for Osprey and my fourteenth overall. I'm currently talking with the editors about more projects. Stay tuned!

Guest Post: Researching a Shared World Alternate History

Today we have an interesting guest post from an old writing buddy of mine from my Tucson days. I first met David Lee Summers at Tuscon, a great local f/sf/h con. I was immediately struck by his boundless enthusiasm and dedication to the fan community. He's such a nice guy I even forgave him when he rejected one of my short stories for his magazine!

He's come out with several books over the years and is here to talk about his latest.


Last year, Robert E. Vardeman asked me to write a novella in a steampunk shared world he created called Empires of Steam and Rust.  As a steampunk author who has read and admired Bob's work since before my career began, I leapt at the opportunity.

The concept of the world is that it's an alternate 1915.  Queen Victoria is still on the throne and getting younger.  The Russian Revolution failed and the Czar is still on the throne.  The Meiji Restoration never happened and there are still Samurai in Japan.  Teddy Roosevelt is still president of the United States and has ambitions of creating an American Empire.  In the meantime, holes are opening up in the fabric of reality.  Strange substances leak out of these holes, such as gasses that defy description.  In some cases, the holes serve as portals to another alternate world.  My first challenge was to decide what story to tell in this alternate world.

A few days later, I happened upon a T-shirt my wife brought me from Palomas, Mexico with a photo of Pancho Villa dressed jauntily in a pith helmet and cravat, very similar to the public domain photo shown here.  This was virtually a steampunk vision of Pancho Villa.  I realized I could tell the story of Pancho Villa in this world.

This project essentially required three stages of research.  The first stage of research involved getting to know the Pancho Villa of history.  I watched some documentaries, looked up some history on the web and at my local library.  Villa clearly was a larger-than-life figure.  He was a man who loved beautiful women and liked to overwhelm his opponents with the speed of cavalry charges.  I did my best to understand the motivations of the men who surrounded Pancho Villa such as Álvaro Obregón, Rodolfo Fierro, and John J. Pershing.


The second stage of research involved getting to know the alternate world Bob Vardeman had developed.  Bob, with input from several of the Empires of Steam and Rust authors, including Steve Sullivan assembled a "bible" explaining what was going on in different parts of the world.  The bible mentioned two things of interest to my story.  The United States had invaded Mexico and no one had yet invented airplanes.  Only airships had been developed.  I knew that Pancho Villa would seize any opportunity he could to create a "cavalry of the air" to go after invading American airships.  Of course, I also read Bob Vardmeman's novella Gateway to Rust and Ruin and Stephen D. Sullivan's novella Heart of Steam and Rust, both set in this alternate world to understand the world better.


Finally, I decided to set a large portion of the conflict on the U.S./Mexican border at the towns of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Mexico, a place Pancho Villa was known to have been.  One of the landmarks of Douglas is the Hotel Gadsden.  It was a classic old hotel used by ranchers in the area at the time of Pancho Villa.  I was fortunate enough to be invited down for a book signing in Douglas at the hotel, which allowed me to do the third stage of research, which was a visit to the location of the story.

Inside the lobby of the Hotel Gadsden is a beautiful marble staircase.  There are two chips in the marble halfway up the first flight.  In the photo, you see my daughters posing with the chips in question.  A sign in the lobby claims the chips were made when Pancho Villa rode his horse up the staircase.  Later research has since cast some doubt on whether this really happened, particularly since the Hotel Gadsden suffered a bad fire after Pancho Villa died.  The hotel owners claim the staircase survived the fire.  Whatever the truth, it was too good a story not to use in my novella, especially since I had a scene that would allow Pancho Villa to ride up the staircase, guns blazing!

For me, part of the fun of writing alternate history is to gain new insights into the people and places of history by imagining them in circumstances that weren't the same as the ones we're familiar with.  Even though the events are different than those of history, it still means getting to know the characters involved well enough that you can imagine how they would react in new circumstances.

My novella of Pancho Villa in an alternate 1915 is Revolution of Air and Rust.  I'd love to hear what you think of this alternate Pancho Villa and his comrades.  The novella is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

The Westernmost Battle of the Civil War

As I mentioned in my post on the Civil War in Arizona, the year 1862 saw the westernmost fighting of the war when a group of Texas Confederates made it all the way to the western New Mexico Territory (what's now Arizona) and were pushed out by the Union California Column.

The main "battle" happened on April 15 at Picacho Peak, 50 miles northwest of Tucson at 111° 24' 17'' W longitude, when the advance guard of the column clashed with Confederate pickets. This is often called the westernmost land battle of the Civil War.

Well, it wasn't really a battle but a skirmish with only 23 soldiers involved, and there was a skirmish even further west than that one. On March 30, while the California Column was still headed for Tucson, it came upon a group of ten Confederates at Stanwix Station led by 2nd Lt. Jack Swilling, pictured here in this Wikimedia Commons image. They were burning hay that had been left out on the column's route to supply the horses. Swilling's men were greatly outnumbered and after firing a few shots, one of which wounded Private William Frank Semmelrogge, they wisely withdrew. Semmelrogge later recovered.

But we're not done yet! You see, Stanwix Station was about six miles southwest of Agua Caliente, which is at 113° 19′ 28″ W. Almost a year later on May 20, 1863, there was a shooting at La Paz, Arizona, which is at 114° 25′ 35″ W. Confederate sympathizer William Edwards fired upon a crowd of Union soldiers, killing Privates Ferdinand Behn and Thomas Gainor and wounding a civilian bystander. Edwards fled into the desert, where he later died of thirst. There was no exchange of fire and Edwards wasn't in the Confederate army, so whether you want to call this a skirmish or not is up to you.

In California there was a band of robbers who called themselves Confederate Partisan Rangers. Holding up a stagecoach doesn't count as a skirmish, though. There was also a standoff between Union soldiers and Confederate sympathizers with no shots fired, so let's strike that one out too.

None of these are battles. If you want the westernmost BATTLE of the Civil War, you have to go all the was east to Valverde, New Mexico, where on February 20-21 at longitude 106° 54' 53" W, several thousand men in blue and gray had a real, proper, standup battle.

Civil War in Arizona

While the main focus of Civil War history is on the big battles east of the Mississippi, the war raged in the west too. It even reached as far west as Arizona.

Back then Arizona didn't exist; it was part of the New Mexico Territory. Early in the war the Confederacy suffered from a Union naval blockade and decided to send an expedition to take the territory to gain access to its mines and as a route to ports in Mexico and California. In the spring of 1862 an army of Texans under General Sibley marched into New Mexico.

At first all went well, but the army suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Glorieta pass on March 26-28. The rebels were soon fleeing back to Texas. But not all of them. A detachment of 54 Texans had ridden further west, all the way to Tucson, and had claimed it for the Confederacy. As part of the reorganization of Confederate territories they renamed it the Territory of Arizona. They may even have issued an Arizona Confederate currency, a mystery that I'm still trying to clear up with the help of some other researchers.

The Confederate occupation of Arizona was to be short-lived. A column of 2,350 Union cavalry from California headed into the territory and clashed with the Texans at Pichacho Pass about 50 miles northwest of town. After a short firefight that left several men dead on both sides, the rebels retreated. The Battle of Picacho Pass is often called the westernmost battle of the Civil War. I'll be takinng up the question of whether this is true or not later this month.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Book Review: Vampires of the Scarlet Order

Vampires of the Scarlet Order by David Lee Summers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the vampire genre, but I picked this up when I heard the author speak at Tuscon Fantasy and Science Fiction Convention a few years back and I'm glad I did.

Vampires of the Scarlet Order is the best of what the small press has to offer. What major publishing house is going to accept a book by a then-unknown author that has vampires as something other than angsty teens? The vampires in this book are most certainly not. Summers takes the implausible (the existence of vampires) and puts them in a plausible context (being used and discarded by secret government agencies). We're treated to a sweeping ride through history before settling down into modern day Las Cruces, New Mexico.

This is where it got really fun for me. I lived for many years in the desert Southwest and Summers captures the sights and smells of the desert perfectly. There's even a few inside references to one of my favorite local Tucson bands. If Summers writes more horror novels, especially if they're set in the West, I'll definitely pick them up.



View all my reviews

A Russian hussar in the Wild West

Wait, what's a picture of a Russian hussar doing on a Civil War/Wild West blog? Well, there is a Wild West connection.

I've been researching a book on Tombstone for Osprey Publishing and have come across lots of little stories that can't make it into the text. One of them is about Russian Bill, who passed through Tombstone claiming to be an aristocratic lieutenant of the Imperial White Hussars of the czar. He had asked for leave in 1880 to go explore the American frontier. Another story has him coming to the Arizona Territory earlier after having been court marshaled for punching a superior officer.

Russian Bill strutted around town dressed in Western gear and claiming to be a hardened outlaw. He certainly kept company with them. In 1881 he and Sandy King, another Tombstone hoodlum, were caught in the little town of Shakespeare, New Mexico, with some stolen cattle. Vigilantes hanged the both of them.

There is no record of this lynching causing an international incident. Was Russian Bill really one of the czar's elite cavalry? It's hard to say. There were lots of Europeans wandering around the Old West claiming to be what they weren't. If all of them had been telling the truth, every castle, manorial estate, and general's headquarters in Europe would have been depopulated!

Without doing some serious research in Moscow, I guess we'll never know.

There's another Old West connection to this painting. It was done by none other than Frederic Remington.

Lancers in the American Civil War

I recently did a guest post over at Genre Author about Medieval Weapons in the American Civil War. Space limitations didn't allow me to include all examples of "primitive" weapons used in the war, so here are some more.

Some Texas cavalry units had lances. These weren't the huge lances of the medieval jousting era, rather the slim lances used in the Napoleonic era. The Texans' lance blades were 3 inches wide and 12 long, mounted on a 9 foot shaft. Each sported a red guidon with a white star to "drink the blood" of the Yankees.

At the Battle of Valverde, New Mexico Territory,  on 21 February 1862, Texas lancers under Capt. W.L. Lang, Fifth Texas Regiment, formed three columns and charged the Union left flank. Facing them were the Second Colorado Volunteer Infantry. The infantry waited until the horsemen were only 20 yards away and then gave them a volley. At that range it was hard to miss. At least 20 fell and the Coloradans quickly reloaded and gave them some more of the same.

Some Texans managed to close with the infantry. The Colorado troops didn't break, instead fighting back effectively with their bayonets. At this point the Texans should have been able to destroy the infantry. They had longer reach, after all. That a lancer should be beaten by a bayonet hints that the Texans hadn't trained with their weapons much. A fellow history buff over at the RenWars Yahoo group told me the Texans, disgusted at their performance in battle, ended up using their lances as firewood!

Another RenWars user pointed out an interesting article on pikes used by soldiers in Georgia. None actually saw combat, which was probably a good thing as far as the Georgians were concerned.

I couldn't find a public domain image of the Texan lancers. There's a good modern painting of them here.