Good Turnout for History Reenactment

It was a beautiful, sunny, morning, a perfect day to reenact some of the most important events in Pleasanton's history. March 24, 2012, the Atascosa County Historical Commission and a number of dedicated volunteers, after a great deal of planning did just that.

In 1861 one of the county commissioners, Elijah O'Brion, after riding, unarmed to check his horses on the Laparita, made a daring escape from the Indians, jumping over the Bonita Creek, with three arrows in his back, barely making it back to Pleasanton.

The Indian problems were bad out on the ranches. Jose Antonio Navarro wrote a letter to his son, Angel, and to the San Antonio Express, asking for help out on his ranch on the Atascosa Creek. These letters were read during the reenactment by Jim Coronado.

On March 29, 1862, Cpt. Lewis Maverick rode into Pleasanton and mustered men from Atascosa and surrounding counties into what would become Company E of the 32nd Texas Volunteer Cavalry. This would very soon become the 36th Wood's Regiment. More than 17 volunteer horse riders were on hand Saturday to represent the men who mustered in 1862.

During the war the county bought a large quantity of corn, took it to a San Antonio mission (San Wan in the county records)and had it ground into meal, then distributed it to the families who had men in the war. A horse drawn buggy was used during the reenactment to carry burlap sacks of corn, then it returned with cotton sacks of ground corn. Souvenir, miniature sacks were given to some in the crowd.

These events were recreated for a crowd of 80-100, finished by the men riding home on their horses, and taps played on a real bugle. Old-time music was played by fiddle and guitar throughout.

Additional photos can be found on the Atacosa County Historical Commission facebook page.

Historical Re-enactment in Pleasanton March 24

Atascosa County's Regiment in the Civil War - Part 9

While the 36th Texas Cavalry Prepares for War . . .

Overall between 60,000 and 70,000 Texans, two thirds of the military-age population, reportedly saw Confederate service.1 In the Trans-Mississippi by mid-September 1862, Texas had fielded six cavalry regiments (including the 823 horse of the 36th Texas) amounting to 4,201 men. To these were added regiments from Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Indian Territory, 12,729 men, for a total of 16,930 Confederate mounted soldiers in service west of the Mississippi.

In addition to the formal military organizations, there were some 2,677 men in independent, unattached units (including sixteen cavalry troops) stationed at various points in Texas (among them Captain A. Navarro’s 80 men in Atascosa County) for home guard duties.2

While the troopers of the 36th Texas at Camp Clark were engaged in training and firming up the regiment, military engagements elsewhere continued:

To the east: March through August 1862: Union General George McClellan begins the Peninsula Campaign in the attempt to circumvent the Confederate army in northern Virginia and capture the capital of Richmond. Hood’s Texas Brigade, fighting with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, launches a desperate final charge that breaks the Federal line at Gaines Mill.3 In August, General Earl Van Dorn, commander of Confederate forces east of the Mississippi, makes an unsuccessful attempt to retake Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which had been abandoned when New Orleans fell.4

To the north: in March the Confederate Army of the West, in an attempt to open a pathway to Missouri, fights the Battle of Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas. The thrust north fails and the Confederacy never again seriously threatens the state of Missouri. Within weeks the Army of the West is transferred across the Mississippi River to bolster the Army of Tennessee, leaving Arkansas virtually defenseless and the Texas border vulnerable.

To the west: the Frontier Regiment, described above, is manning a series of “camps” along the Indian line and are having only marginal success against depredations by the aboriginals. The Indians have learned to exploit the weakness of the Regiment’s “passive patrol” system (as opposed to the volunteer minutemen’s pursue-and-punish or the Rangers’ find-and-destroy tactics). After a lull at the beginning of the Civil War, Comanche and Kiowa raiding parties are resuming their tactics and penetrating the line at will.5

Threats to the State and the Home Front

Probably in late July 1862, after two months of the boredom, rigors, and routine of training camp life, orders come down to Colonel Woods. Those soldiers in his command passionate to go to war against the Yankees will not be happy to hear them. He and his men are not going across the Mississippi. There will not be any daring raids behind enemy lines; there will be no riding rings around McClellan’s army as Jeb Stuart has just done in Virginia. They are needed in Texas.

The state has problems of its own. The patriotic fervor of a year and a half ago is beginning to fade somewhat, even among supporters of the Confederacy. The farther west you live in the state, the less likely you are to be concerned with the problems of the slaveocracy and the trials of the Army of Northern Virginia than you are with local dangers and the immediate threats to life and property. Texas still did not have what it always desired: a force of Rangers to protect the frontier, paid and adequately funded by the eastern government, but controlled by Texans.

Two of those threats come from old adversaries: Mexicans and Indians. But now there is menace from some other groups as well.

This year’s Mexicans are not the invaders of 1842; they are roaming bands of banditos – the whole area south of the Nueces is subject to their raids. Some of the raiders are simply rancheros trying to regain the off-spring of the stock that was taken from them after the Mexican War. But there are also bands of lawless riders, who range from legitimately aggrieved men displaced by years of war and revolution who have turned to banditry out of necessity, to despicable gangs of thugs, sometimes augmented by renegade Gringos, from whom no man, woman, horse, or cow is safe.

Plus, there are outlaw mobs of Anglos, most of them Texans; the kind of low dregs of society who will always show up to take advantage of others when they can. There are villainous quasi-military guerilla bands, near-outlaws of two types: Jayhawkers (Union sympathizers) and bushwhackers (Confederate partisans), who raid, rob, and kill for one side or the other. Not too different from these are bands of draft dodgers, those who were against secession and the war from the beginning, plus some who are now permanent deserters from the army, who ride and steal and sometimes kill in order not to be captured and hung for treason.

A number of frontier and Rio Grande towns and ranches are depopulated and run down from fear and the constant strife, and the absence of their mainstay of able-bodied males.

And, As Always, The Native Americans

On Secession Day, March 16, 1861, there had been 2,700 federal troops, one quarter of the U.S. Army, deployed among a string of frontier defense forts. By now all those soldiers were gone and all the forts abandoned, some burned to the ground.

By the end of 1862, there would be 62,000 Texas men absent with the southern armies – lots of fighters on good horses had gone away 6 – as we have seen, at least 47 men of fighting age and ability from Pleasanton alone! And a number surely in excess of 15 from other parts of the county.7 But for the Frontier Regiment, the line of civilization would have been left unguarded.

When the great war between the two Anglo-American tribes began, the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors threw off what had been a growing sense of defeat and demoralization. They realized that the white warriors had moved east to fight amongst themselves – and, even though some realized that their former world had effectively ended, they returned to their old ways of raiding: stealing, killing, and kidnapping. Deep anxiety and fear again descended on the Anglo frontier.

Next time: The 36th Texas Cavalry Goes to Work . . .

Sources:
Purgason, Howard. Calvin Turner, Texas Ranger
1. Fehrenbach, T.R.. Lone Star, 354
2. Oates, Stephen B.. Confederate Cavalry West of the River, 44-45
3. McPherson, James M.. Battle Cry of Freedom, 427, 464-71
4. Gallaway, B.P., ed. Texas: The Dark Corner of the Confederacy, 249
5. Smith, David Paul. Frontier Defense in the Civil War, 46-53
6. Fehrenbach, 448, 452
7. Duaine, Carl L.. The Dead Men Wore Boots, 96-109

The Civil War Comes to Atascosa County - Part 1

Imagine a day in mid-April 1861. You’re walking down Pleasanton’s Main Street on the way to the General Store, or you’ve ridden your horse to San Antonio on business, and you see a newspaper emblazoned with the headline “WAR! FORT SUMTER FIRED ON!” So, it really is going to happen. Now the larger world will invade the lives of ranchers and shopkeepers and mothers of children out on the edge of the Texas frontier and pull them into its turmoil.

Of course, the County’s citizens would have known war was coming. All of the news of the previous year was rife with the politics of slavery, abolition, states’ rights, the seeming threat of Lincoln’s election, the fracturing of political parties. Then when the Republican won the presidency in November, it was only a matter of time until the secessionist tide reached Texas.

On February 23rd a popular referendum was held in Texas; some citizens were strongly opposed, others adamantly in favor. A contested election indicated that about two thirds had voted yes. On March 5th Texas joined the Confederate States of America, and when the Fort Sumter bombardment began on April 12th, there was no longer any avoiding civil war. It was real now.1

Surely, there were young single men eager to go to war, but many men with families were also swept up. There would have been somber talk between husbands and wives at the kitchen table that night after the children had gone to bed; possibly the husband stressing duty, the wife arguing for family. Should he go? How could he not go? How was she to manage? Households would have had livestock and probably a sizeable patch of vegetables growing and hired hands and all the rest. How could a family man with that kind of responsibility go off to war!?

A Home Front Concern

As if domestic and familial constraints weren’t enough, the Indian threat to the region was ongoing.

In the 1850s due to the increased presence of some U.S. Army units along the frontier, but more to the continual punitive expeditions and patrolling of the frontier line by Ranger outfits such as Rip Ford’s and Henry McCulloch’s, the Indians were somewhat held in check. But neither the Army and Ranger operations nor the removal of many tribes to reservations put a stop to Comanche-Kiowa depredations by the eve of the Civil War. To the contrary, the military operations against the Comanches brought sporadic retaliatory “murder raids” by those native warriors whose code required vengeance for fathers or sons or family members killed.2

During the decade of the ‘50s the area around San Antonio was still being raided periodically. “An entire German settlement was destroyed northwest of San Antonio.”3 And it was reported that in 1861 “the Indians made [a] big raid, penetrating the settlements as far as Pleasanton” and that under the command of Big Foot Wallace “men gathered from all over the country to fight them.”4

Company E of the 36th Texas Cavalry is Formed

By very early in 1862, likely everybody in the county knew that the military call-up was coming soon. Lewis Maverick of San Antonio returned from the war in Virginia probably with the intention of raising a company. When he did, about half of it was from the little town on the Atascosa.

Did Maverick ride down to Pleasanton to meet with the men of the town, maybe make a patriotic recruitment speech? Did he explain the possible mission of the company and set out the place and time of muster and the equipment requirements?

Or did the initiative came from Pleasanton? There must have been one or more meetings in town to discuss formation of a cavalry company of the C.S.A., and what it might mean to them. Brave and resolute as most of the would-be volunteers probably were, it would have been good to have old hands, Rangers and Mexican War veterans, around to ask questions of and maybe privately seek a little reassurance from.

Perhaps the Pleasanton men had heard that young Maverick wanted to form a company and so sent a spokesperson to San Antonio to tell him that half a company of men were ready to join up and they would accept his leadership.

To our very great benefit, a South Texas historian, Carl L. Duaine, wrote the only history to be found of the regiment. Here he describes the general nature of the men who made up Maverick’s company. He says they were

men who came from the edges of the brush country, that section lying south of San Antonio, the southern boundary of which was marked by the Nueces River. Beyond lay the real brush country, La Brasada, reaching to the Rio Grande.

These were men who made their living working cattle in La Brasada. They did a little farming at times, growing corn for themselves and their horses, or producing little patches of hay for the saddle horses during drought and winter time, but their main occupation was dragging cattle out of the ramaderos of the brush country.

Probably in late February 1862, the word was circulated around the west (now central) Texas area that volunteers for this company were to muster at Pleasanton in mid-March. When it was formed it would become Company E (in modern military usage it would be called Echo Company) of Woods’ Cavalry. Duaine says it “was called together under the giant live oak trees that grew [in] Pleasanton . . . [the men] came from Atascosa, Wilson, Live Oak, McMullen Counties.” (Duaine wrote that the muster was at "the old red rock courthouse," but it wasn't completed until 1886. See comments below.)

Under the big live oaks, Lewis Maverick made out a muster roll, starting with himself as Number One, Captain of the Company, and listing 103 men. He recorded each man in the Company in a neat, highly legible hand that is easily read today.5

Next time: the Officers and Men of The 36th Texas . . .

Sources:
1. Purgason, Howard. Calvin Turner, Texas Ranger
Handbook of Texas Online, s.v.,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/mjs1.html
2. Fehrenbach, T.R.. Lone Star, 438
3. Fehrenbach, T.R.. Comanches, 421
4. F.G. Tinsley in A.J. Sowell, Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas, 306
5. Duaine, Carl L.. The Dead Men Wore Boots, 22-23