Selfies: Bodmer and Catlin

 NOTE: For some reason I can't add posts to jbswest, so these new posts will be found here under jbsmusings.

George Catlin: "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains"
frontispiece from Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian (1841) 

As 19th century Euro-Americans set out to conquer America west of the Mississippi, visual artists moved with them and recorded the "wild" that remained (all the Native Americans who were there first were considered part of the wilderness).   Among the earliest were Titian Peale and Samuel Seymour, who went with the exploration journeys of Major Stephen Long of 1819-20.  Peale and Seymour recorded landscapes, flora and fauna and views of Native American tribes in their environments.

Visual artists who concentrated more on portraits of individual tribal members began their work in the 1830's were George Catlin and Karl Bodmer.  Both were on a mission to record tribal notables in their native dress and environments; both were men of their times in their outlooks and opinions.  Both believed that native cultures were doomed to be subsumed in the "conquering" of the west by superior European-Americans --a term that would be called "Manifest Destiny" in the next decade. To Europeans it was in part an outgrowth of Romanticism, a fascination with the tragic idea of vanishing "primitive" exotic cultures. An extension of this romantic ideal was the visual recording of the artist himself in the "unspoiled wilderness."

Both the American, Catlin (on his first trips west), and the Swiss Bodmer on his only journey to frontier America accompanying an expedition financed by Prince Maximilian of Wied zu Wied, covered the area of the northern Great Plains at about the same time, Catlin from 1832 through 1836, and Bodmer between 1833 and 1834.  They are best remembered now for their portrayals of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribal members and their activities and ceremonies--which took on romantic tragic overtones in 1837, when they were virtually wiped out by smallpox, brought in by white colonizers. 

Prince Maximilian, in the manner of his friend and mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, was an explorer and naturalist. In 1815-17, he had already been in Brazil accompanied by two German naturalists, collecting specimens and visiting and chronicling Amazonian tribes.  In 1832, he embarked on his two-year expedition to North America.  This time he brought along two associates, his valet and hunting companion, David Dreidoppel, and Karl Bodner, to make visual records of what they saw. 

For Bodmer, then in his early twenties, this trip proved to be the adventure of his life.  He was already a skilled painter and engraver.  This New World journey was the only one he made.  He returned to Germany, and subsequently, he would emigrate to France and join the Barbizon painters, with considerable success, though he had to resort to commercial illustration to make ends meet.

 

Catlin, self-taught, made a career of his portrayals of native Americans, subsequently including Central and South American tribes, and taking his artistic product on Barnum-like traveling shows, in both the United States and Europe. In Europe, he took advantage of touring Native American tribal dancers to augment his exhibitions, and when they weren't available, he dressed family members in Native American clothing and gear that he had acquired on his journeys. At a time when an artistic career had become an issue of free enterprise, both men capitalized on their North American paintings and sketches to enhance their reputations and more importantly, to earn themselves a living.  For Catlin, it was part of his modus operandi; for the more reluctant Bodmer, eager to resume his painting career as a European landscape and wildlife artist, it was in obligation to his patron. 

In an age of developing mass media, 81 of Bodmer's paintings were reproduced as aquatints in Europe in a two-volume account penned by the Prince called Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels in the Interior of North America (1841), first in German, and later in French and English.  500 of Catlin's sketches and paintings were gathered in a collection called the Indian Gallery, which he attempted to sell to the American government.  When that didn't work, he took the Gallery on tour to London and later the European continent.  Unfortunately, much of this collection was confiscated and stored to cover debts, so he recreated 300 works from his field sketches, naming it the Cartoon Collection.  Catlin too took his work to the public via the print medium. In the same year that the Maximilian/Bodmer volume came out, his Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian, also in two volumes with 300 of his works reproduced as engravings and the text written by himself was published in England.

 

Both of these works contain a print that was not among the Native American portraits: they are self-portraits of each artist "in action" on their painting journeys.  The frontispiece of Catlin's book, captioned "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," shows him in the act of painting Mah-To-Toh-Pah (Four Bears), the second Mandan Chief, dressed in the same ceremonial outfit and in the same pose as the portrait that graced the Indian Gallery (the chief later gifted Catlin that shirt).  Four Bears assumes the stance of a baroque European King--the famous Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV comes to mind--which is being echoed in his image on canvas.  Surrounding them are tribesmen, with six of them reclining in the foreground, once more in a traditional Baroque manner.  Behind them are two tipis, and some tall, cypress-like trees.  Catlin, with his deerstalker cap and his pristine buckskin outfit, one foot braced on his equally pristine easel, delicately works on the image.

 Art historians have been quick to point out that the Mandans lived in fixed lodges, not tipis, and others have been equally insistent that as a frontispiece for the many Native American tribes contained in the book, this was intentional, and for the average reader, tipis would have been just fine. The title, "The Author painting a Chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," is equally a stretch: no mountains are shown.

George Catlin: "Catlin Painting Ma Toh To Pah," from the Cartoon Collection
Courtesy National Gallery of Art Washington, DC;  oil on card

Catlin also produced a sketchier watercolor of the same scene with no tipis, but a generic Plains riverside setting, the easel constructed like a tipi shaped support of three tree branches, and the canvas casually flapping on a ruder support. He is surrounded by a similar crowd of tribespeople, but this time with more women and two small dogs replacing two of the foreground recliners, which echoes a written account by Catlin of making the same picture. The onlookers in this version are almost like cartoon figures, reflecting the same humor brought to many of Catlin's other sketches. This version is generally dated around 1860, when Catlin was reproducing his work for the Cartoon Gallery.

 By 1846, the Mandans themselves were gone, virtually eliminated by the smallpox epidemic in 1837.  Catlin himself was in London, exhibiting his Indian Gallery and still attempting to get it sold to the American government or the newly established Smithsonian Institution.  This self-portrait is really Catlin promoting himself and his lifework, trying to make a living, and showing himself in action at his craft.

Karl Bodmer, "The Travelers Meeting With Minatarre Indians," Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels In The Interior of North America (1841)

Bodmer's print shows the artist, but in a somewhat different context.  The setting is outside Fort Clark, where the party wintered in 1833-34, and the three members of Maximilian's party are depicted meeting Minatarre (or Hidatsa) tribal members for the first time. To the left is a local guide and interpreter, usually identified as Toussaint Charbonneau, the same man whose late wife, Sacagawea, had been the indigenous interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition thirty years previously.  Here he gestures towards the Europeans, Maximilian in a green coat and hat in the colored version of the print, with Bodmer beside him, wearing a top hat.  Between and behind the two is Dreidoppel, wearing a cap.  Art historians have identified one of the Hidatsa as Ahschüpsa Masihichsi, who was also portrayed individually by Bodmer.

Like Catlin's self-portrait, there are no field sketches for this composition, and the print is generally accepted as a representation made after the trip and inserted as an illustration made especially for Maximilian's publication.

Presumably Bodmer made it for the book, a project he would work on for Maximilian for a decade after the expedition's return and too expensive, in the end to offer the Archduke a profit.  The three explorers, like Catlin are dressed in their best--more symbolically than likely--they had already been on the road for a year. Bodmer presents himself as one of a group expedition rather than an individual artist, and there's no indication of the role he played as its visual chronicler; rather he bristles with weapons and appears to hold a pipe.  The focus is all on his boss, the Prince, the only one in green and immaculate white trousers in the colored version of the print.

Though in the present day, Bodmer is considered the more talented as a portrayer of vanishing tribal chiefs than his American counterpart, his real artistic interest lay in the landscapes and wildlife he depicted rather than his human subjects, a fascination he would retain in his later career. 

                  

Neither artist really considered their images as independent creative art in the Romantic sense; both were doing imagery for different purposes--both to document a region of America that would quickly disappear, but in Bodmer's case to chronicle both the land and the people who inhabited it, and Catlin to record the people who vanished within his own lifetime.

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There are numerous studies of both Catlin and Bodmer's images on the internet: here are three of the best:

For Catlin's Frontispiece, see https://humanitiesusa.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/george-catlin-catlin-painting-the-portrait-of-mah-to-toh-pa—mandan-c-1861-1869/

For Catlin's Cartoon Collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.50492.html#overview Overview

For Bodmer, see https://maximilian-bodmer.org/about/maximilian-bodmer-expedition/

There are also two excellent monographs on these artists:

Catlin: George Gurney and Therese That Heyman (eds.) George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, W.W. Norton & Company,  third printing, 2008.

Bodmer: William H. Goetzmann, David C. Hunt, Marsha Gallagher and William J. Orr, Karl Bodmer's America, Joslyn Art Museum & University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Our Father(s), Our Mother(s), Our Kids

 "Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen."

 

ps33 now: http://www.ps33q.com

For 3 years from 1946 to1949 (First to third grades). I recited the above words out loud, right after the Pledge of Allegiance, at P.S. 33 in Queen's Village, New York.  These words are The Lord's Prayer, a Christian prayer taken from the New Testament.  I was 5 1/2 years old when we moved there from New Jersey, where my father had been an engineer at Fort Monmouth during World War II.

 

We had lived in government housing in New Jersey, in a community of both Jews and Christians (most likely other religions too, although I was unaware at the time).  My cultural upbringing then had been old world Jewish--my grandparents were all immigrants).    We celebrated Hanukkah and our non-Jewish neighbors had their Christmas trees. So far as I can remember, nobody talked or argued religion there, or maybe I was too young to know.  

 

I had been in some kind of pre-K program in New Jersey, but when we moved, I was bumped up to first grade. This didn't threaten my academic progress, but the bigger picture brought many changes.  I didn't figure out the significance of The Lord's Prayer until I was much older--I think I thought it was an extension of the Pledge.

 

But in my neighborhood, as Jews we were in the minority.  My friends on the block accused me of killing Jesus, to which I would retort: "I didn't kill anyone! And who's Jesus?"  There was a lot of explaining about that, and I was reassured that Jesus lived a long time ago, and neither me nor my family had committed murder.

 

There were other differences, though.  Eight measly orange Hanukkuh candles and a few presents couldn't compare to the bling of Christmas decorations, ever more glittery when the war was over.  My best friend's Christmas tree, replete with shiny ornaments, tinsel. bubble lights and that lovely piney smell made those little eight candles even smaller. Santa Claus brought the kids what seemed to be a huge number of fancy presents (we had plenty of presents too over the year, but they didn't come all at once)!

 

At PS 33, we had a big musical Christmas pageant with carols and oodles of colored candies for us all.  Not a word about what we as non-Jews celebrated (or any other non-Christian students either).

 

It was the biggest party of the year and we (non-Christians) weren't invited, any more than we got to wear frothy white communion dresses. At one point I was so desperate to be a part of all that that I secretly bought a small box of Christmas ornaments and hid them in my underwear drawer.

 

Things have changed a lot over the years.  We moved out of the city in 1949, and Long Island schools had no in-school prayers. I understand that P.S. 33 still lives (it's now called PS 33q - Edward M. Funk Elementary School).  From its website, the building still looks similar to I remember from the outside, but the school has students from all over the globe and is all about diversity and fair treatment of everyone, with includes a Chancellor's message about our recent election and how to talk about it in an equitable manner. (A link to the school's website can be found below).

 

Jump to Texas: at this moment there is talk about school vouchers including, of course, for parochial schools by Governor Greg Abbot our very own governor, and a proposal by the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to bring specifically Christian values to the public-school curriculum, including posting the Ten Commandments in all classrooms.  So far as I can tell, this is a direct contradiction to our constitutional rights of free speech and religion--whatever it may be.

 

I have a granddaughter who is 6 and whose parents are Jewish and Christian; exposure to other religions is great, and I believe in that--but not indoctrination by any specific one!

 

I can still recite the Lord's Prayer by rote--even though it's not part of my playbook! 

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Commentary on religion in Texas public education: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-legislature-2025-ten-commandments-public-schools-legislation-dan-patrick-louisiana/

The First Amendment, U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances: https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-i

 

 

Link to ps33q: http://www.ps33q.com

The Mysterious and Wonderful Marine Parkway Bridg

Marine Parkway Bridge aka Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge

When I was five years old, after the end of World War II, we moved from New Jersey to Queens Village in the east part of Queens, New York.  My dad had become a builder by then, and we lived upstairs in a new four plex that he had constructed.  Often, we would visit my grandparents who lived in Brooklyn, where my mom had grown up.  The only convenient way to get there was by car (New York City subways never came that far east).

 

We would take the circuitous Belt (and Cross Island) Parkway that ran not far from my house to Bay Parkway, the closest exit to get to my grandparent's place in Bensonhurst.  This parkway ran all along the outskirts of Queens, by what was then called Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport, still under construction, and wound around Jamaica Bay into Brooklyn.  It would pass through what still swampy land dotted with surplus Quonset huts for the temporary housing of postwar veterans, as well as residential areas and Floyd Bennet Field--the area's earliest airport.  Once past that, you got into the densely urbanized area of what we considered the "real" Brooklyn. The whole trip, door to door, took about an hour.

 

The Belt Parkway in the 1940's

When you're five or six, an hour seems to be a very long time.  We usually headed home after dark, the trip seemed very boring, particularly in what seemed to be the empty parts 

between the urbanizations of Brooklyn and Queens.  In those days, the parkway was illuminated by rustic-looking yellow sodium lights that would come and go with a kind of hypnotic regularity

A sodium light

along the length of the highway.  To break the monotony, I would look out to our right, where there were the expanses of Grave's End, Sheepshead and Jamaica bays, and beyond that, the Atlantic.  The other side of the bays was occupied by a long, narrow Peninsula known collectively as the Rockaways, and east of that, Idlewild, and the barrier island of Atlantic Beach and Long Beach. At the Brooklyn end, Rockaway Peninsula was connected to it by the Marine Parkway Bridge.

 

All we could see at night out there was a faraway string of white lights, like a long necklace across the bays, and the illuminated bridge.  During the day it looked like the narrow spit it was, widening as it extended east towards the Rockaways.  But since we had never been out there, it looked exotic and distant in the dark, and the lit bridge seemed to beckon towards whatever glittered out there.

 

The bridge itself was (and still is) an elegant, lacy-appearing structure, with a vertical lift unit at its center to allow taller marine transit.  This section is framed by its lifting mechanism within two tall towers with inward curving tops that seem to embrace it.  It was a fitting transport to those fairy lights on the other side.

 

The entrance to the bridge near Floyd Bennet airfield was gracefully landscaped--a nice island between urbanizations and salt marsh swampland.  It was all a part of a vast agenda, including the Belt Parkway itself, carried out in the later 1930's by Robert Moses, the urban planning czar of New York at the time.  He also established a park on the Rockaway side, dedicated to Jacob Riis, a famous muckraker and photographer of the century before.

Arial view of bridge (Photo: Anthony 22)

 

  In my first fifteen years as a New Yorker, I never crossed the Marine Parkway Bridge even though I had a boyfriend whose family lived in Far Rockaway, the totally urbanized beach town at the other end of the peninsula; we always got there by other routes.

 

I moved on to other places, and for the last fifty years I've lived in Texas.  I did go back often to New York, but never to that part of it.  But last month I went up there and made a trip to the wineries on Long Island's North Fork with my friend Debra, who now lives in New Jersey.  Since we both had grown up on Long Island (we soon left Queens and moved on to Nassau County, to Great Neck), and her family in Cedarhurst (also in Nassau County, but further south), we decided to do a drive-by of our childhood homes.  After that, she was taking me to Newark Airport to go home.  The route we decided upon took us through the Rockaways and then westwards--to cross the Marine Parkway Bridge.  At last, I got to see what was out where those fairy lights were.  They were, of course ordinary light poles, but they did string out through and beyond Riis Park, a flat beachy place, to the bridge. And I got to cross it after waiting 76 years! The elegant bridge itself, though long in its component parts, is relatively small compared to so many other bridges around New York and was all-too- quickly traversed, with no trace of Oz on its far end, just some beaches, whose history is interesting, but not to the five-or 83-year-old me.

 

The crossing had one other thing of cool meaning for me: when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball--and Robert Moses became a villain to me because he was instrumental in getting the Dodgers to move to Los Angeles in 1957, and all of you know the rest of that.  In 1978, the Bridge was renamed in honor of Gil Hodges, star first baseman for Brooklyn when I was a kid.  So there, Czar Moses!

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Histories of the Bridge and its environs can be found at: https://www.untappedcities.com/secrets-marine-parkway-bridge/ and also, of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Parkway–Gil_Hodges_Memorial_Bridge

 

La Otra Mirada [The Other View] Comes to America

 La Otra Mirada, a Spanish TV production from 2018-2019, finally arrived in the U.S. via PBS and Amazon, under the title of The Boarding School.  Set in an elite school for girls in 1920's Seville, the first season chronicles a year in which a false dawn of Feminism occurs among both adolescent students and female teachers within a traditional, paternalistic society.

 

The plot is driven by two events:  The first is the assumption of Manuela, the young progressive director of the school to this position formerly held by her mother, its founder. The second is the arrival of Teresa, the enigmatic daughter of the murdered Spanish Ambassador to Lisbon. He leaves behind a cryptic note to her, with the name of one of the school's students on it, which sends her off on a quest to solve the mystery of his assassination.

 

As with so many TV series, the first season has several directors and writers, but they succeed in giving in-depth characterizations of both some students and faculty members over this fateful year in 13 episodes.  Among the teachers, it focusses on Manuela and Teresa and two others, Angela and Luisa.  Each has her own situation as women in a world still severely limited by tradition.  Manuela, married to an influential lawyer, does not want children, and is in conflict both with rather her conventional husband, and her equally strong-minded mother.  Angela with four sons and a caring stay-at-home husband, finds herself falling in love with a woman, an artist and the single mother with her daughter at the school. Luisa, a woman, remains mired in widowhood, supporting and exploited by her worthless son.

 

Teresa is the outlier--a sort of female knight-errant, who has spent her twenties estranged from her father, but with enough independent money so that she can travel the world by herself, and live as she wishes.  She wears stylishly modern trousers, smokes cigars, and sleeps with whom she pleases.  The school for her is a temporary landing place as a base for her investigations incognito.  She and Manuela click when they meet, and Manuela offers her a teacher's job at the school.  Over the course of the year, Teresa finds that she is a talented, if radical educator, and she and Manuela work to make their female charges begin to value themselves as individuals beyond the views of Seville's (and Spain's at the time--and beyond) men, who view women as breeders and sex objects, and attractive ornaments.

 

A group of the students receive equal focus.  Most come from privileged backgrounds, and their parents seem to expect a sort of finishing school education to make them obedient wives.  Unexpectedly they receive far more, learning how to cope with the usual problems of adolescence and the upheavals of puberty, the courage to speak up and dare to think of a future beyond simple matrimony (some of their teachers are, knowingly or unknowingly, experiencing this as working mothers and career women, in one of few the careers available at a time where they are able to do so).  Several girls have far more difficult ordeals: one has a sister who dies suddenly, derailing her own ambitions.  Another, the Roberta of the fatal note, is raped by her fiancé, the heir of the powerful Peralta family--and decides to accuse him in court.

 

Most of the men don't come off too well, except for Manuela's understanding father, and Ramón, the cute red-haired janitor--and the only proletarian character in the series.  One Peralta brother goes through personal tragedy: Tomás, decides to support Roberta publicly at her trial, and is consequently disinherited by his family (he ends up as an assistant janitor at the school), and can never marry the girl student he loves. But men in Spain would have to undergo a lot in future decades, including a brutal war and repression for everyone before things would start to change.

 

I don't want to reveal any more details of the very complicated plot with the focus on so many characters and situations, but the writers and directors of the series do an amazing feat of keeping it all together, right to the season finale, where many things find solutions, but others do not, as in real life.

 

I understand that the second series was only eight episodes and had an indifferent critical reaction.  I really don't want to see it.

Spanish women would go into a repressive eclipse with the triumph of the Franco regime in 1939 that would turn the clock back for nearly three decades.  As I was growing up in postwar World War II America, the situation initially for girls and women was only marginally better (think Mad Men). But I, like them have  passed through successive changes and have lived in both places (and was fortunate to be married for a while to a very free-thinking Spaniard too).  Hopefully, all this won't cycle back.

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The first season is currently broadcast on PBS stations, with all episodes streaming on PBS passport, and also available on Amazon Prime.

                                                   Pistol Packin' San Antonio: 

1882 Dedicated to the very diverse victims, white, brown and black, from children to the           elderly of Uvalde, Buffalo, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Las Vegas, etc. etc. etc. 

  DEADLY WEAPONS. -Chapter XIII. of the Revised City Ordinances), page 38 and 39, provides as follows : 

  " Section I. If any person shall, within the corporate limits of this city, carry arms about his or her person, a bowie knife, dirk, butcher knife or razor, or any fire arm known as a six shooter or pistol of any kind, or having around his or her person what is known as brass knuckles, slung shot, club, loaded or sword cane, or any other weapon manufactured or sold for the purpose of offence or defense, and capable of inflicting death or great bodily injury, such person shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof before the Recorder of the city,shall be fined in a sum of not less than twenty-five dollars nor more than one hundred dollars, and in default of payment shall be confined in the City Prison, or placed in hard labor upon the public works of the city, for not less than twenty-five nor more than thirty days, to be determined by the Recorder; provided, that this ordinance shall not apply to any legally authorized conservator of the peace, when he may be in the legal discharge of his duty, Section 2. That it shall be the duty of all civil officers from other counties than Bexar, visiting San Antonio, officially or otherwise, who have authority to wear arms, Bexar, visiting San Antonio, officially or otherwise, who have authority to wear arms, shall, upon arriving in the city. report to the Mayor, who shall examine their papers as to their right to wear arms, and endorse the same; otherwise to be dealt with as the law directs." 

 If anyone reading this blog gets angry reading the above quote and wonders when this law came out, they should note that it was written and published for the city of San Antonio in 1882, when the attitude towards weaponry in the city was radically different, it seems, from today. 

 Movies and fiction would have us believe that in the 1880's, the west was totally lawless: most everyone had a six-shooter and in most places, it wasn't safe for ordinary people to walk in the streets. While it was true of some locations, such as the Tombstone and Dodge City, where gunfights really happened in the 1880's, there were far more where it didn't.

 The city of San Antonio did have a famous shooting in 1882. It happened in a saloon and vaudeville house owned by Jack Harris, who was assassinated by Ben Thompson of Austin. Two years later, Thompson would be killed, apparently in revenge along with an acquaintance, King Fisher at the same

venue. The theater's location, above a cigar store at the corner of Soledad Street and Main Plaza became popularly known as the "Fatal Corner," though the building itself burned down in 1886. 

 But these two related events were highly unusual for San Antonio and caused a sensation in the local newspapers. There were certainly violent acts related to drunkenness and gambling in the city, but these were largely confined to Main and Military Plaza areas, in which commerce flourished by day, and drinking in the surrounding saloons at night. By 1889 a "Sporting District," which contained the bulk of 

the saloons and prostitution establishments was established by the city government. For families, there were beer gardens in the German tradition in the more genteel residential districts, which were extravagantly touted along with San Antonio's other businesses in the 1885 in The Industries of San Antonio, Texas.

 What is, to this writer, is more interesting is really how mundane San Antonio was in the 1880's. Finally becoming attached to the greater United States by the introduction of its first railroad line in 1877, and a second four years later, this decade saw the paving of downtown streets--with hexagonal mesquite blocks, a streetcar system, gaslighting being replaced by electricity, and reliable water service. An indicator of the progress in the city was the publication in 1882 of Stephen Gould's The Alamo City Guide. San Antonio, Texas, Being a Historical Sketch of the Ancient City of the Alamo and Business Review; With Notes of Present Advantages, Together With a Complete Guide to All The Prominent points of Interest About the City, And a Compilation of Facts of Value To Visitors and Residents. 

 Gould had been a journalist in San Antonio for some years, and was secretary of the short-lived Mercantile exchange until its demise in 1884. He also seems to have been a one-man chamber of commerce. 

 At the time of the guide's publication, the city had a population of about 20,000 people, which would nearly double during the decade. It had been multi-ethnic since Texas joined the union in 1846, at first being equally divided among its Hispanic, German and Anglo-American inhabitants, with a small number of African Americans, at first enslaved, then freed. By 1880, the proportions shifted, with increasing numbers of Anglo-Americans coming from other states, but the city still retained strong elements of Germanic and Hispanic cultures. 

 There were gunsmiths in the city to be sure, but the firearms trade was aimed at hunters and shooting clubs, which had its origin in San Antonio's German community who sponsored very popular target shoots with medals. 

 A look at contemporary newspapers, the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express, reveal few accounts of violence beyond the "Fatal Corner" incidents. Death was far more likely to claim its inhabitants by epidemic diseases and accidents. As Gould put it: 

  "Visitors should remember that San Antonio ranks as one of the best-governed cities in America. The citizens are law-abiding, intelligent, and refined. They are composed of representatives of every nationality in the civilized world, and with accessions from all of the older States of the Union. of human life and personal property are as safe here as in any of the cities of America or Europe, and compared with many far more pretentious cities, San Antonio occupies the first rank for the maintenance of law and order." 

 Almost every issue of the San Antonio Express-News in the twenty-first century reports some sort of murder within city's the urban confines. Part of has to do with the fact that we're now over 1.5 million inhabitants, but I wonder if the number is so high may in part be due to the fact that the 1882 statutes are long gone? It would be hard to imagine a member of the Shooting Club walking calmly down Commerce Street, picking off pedestrians, merchants and the occasional mule, as he went. _______________________________ 

 Stephen Gould's Alamo City Guide is available online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009597033

 On the Vaudeville Theater shootouts, see: Alice C. Geron and Gary W. Yantis, Fatal Corner which appeared in San Antonio Monthly in July, 1982, and republished on the Watercress Press website: http://watercresspress.com/previous-site/Fatal-Corner.htm 

On shooting clubs in San Antonio, see Paula Allen's articles in the San Antonio Express News, August 7, 2020: https://www.expressnews.com/life/life_columnists/paula_allen/article/San-Antonio-s-German-style-shooting-club-of-the-15468421.php

 

A recent Texas Public Radio podcast series on the sporting districts can be accessed at https://www.tpr.org/history/2022-04-01/no-boundaries-how-san-antonios-red-light-district-grew

 The best book of 19th-century Photographs with commentary is still, Cecilia Steinfeldt's San Antonio Was, San Antonio, San Antonio Museum Association, 1978.

Life, Death and Vax

This is my second rant on Vaxing, but I feel I have to say it again--and more strongly. The past two years of Covid 19 has given modern Americans, and everyone else in the world, a taste of what major epidemics used to be like. Of these, the Black Death in the 14th century and the 1918 Influenza epidemics are probably best known to us, because they were thoroughly chronicled in Western European and American society, but they occurred all over the world, nearly all the time. The introduction of measles and smallpox to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries virtually wiped out the lives of the indigenous people who had lived there for millennia. When outbreaks of an infectious diseases like smallpox or

cholera spread, people in their paths could only wait, hide and pray--in the nineteenth century, for example, newspapers might chronicle the day-by-day progression of an epidemic towards you, but there wasn't much you could do about it. You could wait to contract childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and chickenpox--your parents were probably expecting them to get you and to stoically nurse you through, knowing that in surviving them, you were immune from getting them again. My generation (I was born in 1941) is probably the last to experience some of these epidemics. Sanitary conditions had certainly cut the rate of baby deaths and many of the risks of it to our mothers. We were immunized against smallpox and diptheria by then, but not measles, mumps and chickenpox. I got them all between the ages of 6 and 7. The only one I remember was measles. I came down with it at my grandmother's house, my temperature spiked at 104, and I became delirious. I was put to bed in my grandparents' bed (I don't know where they slept during the 3 weeks I was sick), and my mom camped out there too. I can remember having weird visions in the darkened bedroom. And all everyone could do was wait and hope. Well, I'm still here. The following year (1948), I had rheumatic fever, and was supremely lucky to receive penicillin, just becoming authorized for civilian use.

As more immunizations became available, we rushed to get them. Everyone was vaccinated for smallpox at birth, but when I was in second grade in 1949, a foreign tourist came down with a case in New York. Everyone in my school, students, staff and kids, were marched down to the school cafeteria, and revaccinated. No questions asked. There were only 12 cases of smallpox that year, all in New York, and most occurring in the hospital where the carrier was. Since then, there hasn't been a single case in the U.S--and it's been wiped out worldwise since 1980..

In the early 1950's, prior to the Polio Vaccine, which debuted in 1955, polio came every summer; it paralyzed so many children--and Franklin Roosevelt too--and there were all-too-common photos of children limping along in heavy braces or encased in iron lungs to help them breathe. Public swimming pools, movies and anywhere kids congregated were closed down. I escaped going to sleep-away summer camp that year, and so avoided a situation in which several campers were infected, and one died. I played with my nextdoor neighbor the day before he came down with it and my mother had I fit. We all worked to save money and held fundraisers to contribute to vaccine research, and when it came, we all lined up with enthusiasm to get it. The speed in which Covid 19 vaccines were researched and then made available--for free, has no medical precedent for such a major event. I must say outright that I can't understand why anyone would not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19, or any other potentially fatal disease. Reliable scientific studies have revealed that since vaccines for diseases such as measles, diptheria, polio and numerous other infectious diseases have become available, the mortality rates of children under 15, which was historically averaging 46% until the middle of the 20th century (that for infants below the age of 1 was 26%) has been cut worldwide to 2% or less. I've taken every vaccine I could get, because I can remember what it was like before this was possible. I haven't turned into Frankenstein or a crocodile, and my brain is wholly mine and functionally sharp. Why wait? ___________________________________________________________________ An Article about Historical Diseases and Effectiveness of Vaccines: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/209448... An article about the history of Child mortality:https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

Lucy and the Four Bullies

Last week San Antonio Opera did a stripped-down Covid-friendly live performance of Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoor with rising stars Brenda Rae (Lucia), Scott Hendricks (Enrico), Scott Quinn (Edgardo), and Musa Ngqungwana (Raimundo). This semi-staged production cut to the chase: the chorus was eliminated, so the drama had to be carried by key soloists. It worked very well, and Rae did a spectacular mad scene. Composed by Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano and first produced in 1835, the plot was based on The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott, written on commission in 1835. Scott himself based it on a late 17th-century historical incident concerning a noblewoman named Janet Dalrymple, who, forced to renounce her true love and marry a suitor approved by her family, stabbed him on their wedding night and though he survived, she shortly afterward died insane.

Scott's novel has many plot twists and retained the real villain-- the girl's ambitious mother, who engineered the estrangement of the original suitor via fake news (in this case, forged letters). The novel, set in 17th-century Scotland, is full of the complicated politics of the time, and pits the heroine's (here renamed Lucy) family against that of her true love (Edgar), who are on opposite sides both politically and as the result of a feud that has been going on for generations. On both sides there are crises of property ownership and many machinations and changes of plan that eventually lead to Lucy's forced marriage to Arthur

Bucklaw, whose wealth and influence can salvage her family's fortunes. Lucy, like Janet, loses her reason, stabs her husband, again not mortally, on their wedding night, and she soon after dies. /a>