Juan Seguin - Robert Hollmann

Juan Seguin. By Robert Hollmann.

Durban House, 2007. Frontier Legends Series. Paperback, 112 pages. ISBN 1-9300754-95-7 http://www.durbanhouse.com/

This Hollmann, http://www.lonestarlegends.org/., volume follows his Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Seguin was indeed one of the essential people in his time. Unlike his previous time-trunk and friendly dog companion, Hollmann uses a more direct device – a life-long friend of Seguin to provide the framework of the biography. And as a childish extra, Hollmannn injects the juvenile competitiveness for racing as a recurring option. The reader is introduced to Seguin’s family, long established in Texas, and within pages finds Seguin meeting Stephen Austin and a line of colonial notables important to the Texas Revolution. Seguin and his associates are concerned about Santa Anna’s aggressive manner and throw in with the developing stronger democratic tradition of the times, unlike the Seguin family’s support of the counter-revolution against Las Casas in 1811. Bowie becomes one of the favorites because of his ties to San Antonio and his marriage into the Veramendi family. Seguin commands the scouts looking for Santa Anna’s arrival. Eventually, his men become a part of the Alamo garrison, but he is detailed specifically as messenger to Sam Houston and is ultimately spared from the Alamo soldiery’s bloodbath. But Seguin continues on to become an officer at the Battle of San Jacinto after convincing Houston that his Tejano troops have earned the right to battle. After the battle, Houston asks Seguin to superintend the burial of the Alamo defenders. The volume ends there without reference to his government service thereafter or the later tragedy of Seguin’s demise partly due to prejudice. Seguin died in 1890.

Champ d'Asile - Texas First Novel

The Story of Champ d’Asile,

as told by two of the colonists.

Translated from the French by Donald Joseph and edited with an introduction by Fannie E. Ratchford. Dallas: The Book Club of Texas, 1937. 180 pages, green cloth hardback, illustrated end-pages, pictorial and map illustrations, with colophon noting its printing by the Rydal Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. No index. Various other issues from time to time.

Demonstrate your casual, in-depth knowledge of Texas history or European literature. Mention to your developing youngsters Texas first novel. Demonstrate your acute critical discrimatory skills; tell them it's awful and they shouldn't read it.

This particular volume contains two separate works, the novella and a summarized history of the Champ d’Asile adventure, joined under the covers for convenience and edification of the readers. Although our interest here is the novella, The Heroine of Texas by G ….n F ….n, written by a still anonymous French writer, the true and amazing adventure by Napoleonic exiles who briefly planted a shallow French colony in today’s Liberty County in 1818 is intriguing. All this was between the Gutierrez-Magee-Kemper-Toledo “liberation” of Texas and the James Long Expedition. The 1810s decade in Texas was hardly somnambulant.

The “Napoleonic Conspiracy” involved several closetsful of actors and mixed motivations whose legal justifications rested on the French presumptions of the LaSalle claim and the temporarily quavering colonial claim by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, King Joseph of Spain, to the New World colonies. Ideally, through Champ d’Asile and its extension, Joseph would assume royal powers in the New World and rescue Napoleon. To that end, Napoleonic exiles in the U.S. and sympathizers in Europe, planned in 1816 - 1817 and performed in 1818 the colonial exercise that folded within months and re-scattered the French royal refugee revolutionaries. But, what about the novella? The quickly arriving colonialists returned to France, and their stories were wildfire. There were plays, pamphlets, histories – some even approximately accurate.

You would have thought they were the returning Apollo 13 astronauts. It was big stuff. Texas was exciting to Europeans, even then. - WH

Colonial Tejanos

Sons of DeWitt Colony Tejanos

http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/tejanopatriots.htm

The Sons of DeWitt Colony has a revealing portion of their site devoted to “Hispanic Tejano Patriots in the Struggle for Independence.” It is a combination of quotations from documents, personal name lists, images, and links to the site’s writer, Don Guillermo, other related documents from the Bexar Remonstrance of 1832 to the Veterans Letter of Grievance of 1875 that grew from the racism of the period. In English and Spanish. - WH