Category Archives: Texana

Move toward a declaration

Posted on November 7, 2007 | Comments Off on Move toward a declaration

On this day in 1835, with armed hostilities already in play, Texas colonists took the first step towards what would become their March 2, 1836, Declaration of Independence from Mexico.

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Hi-O-Silver, Awaaay

Posted on October 29, 2007 | Comments Off on Hi-O-Silver, Awaaay

An OCS buddy suggested getting some Lone Ranger DVDs for Mr. Boy. I’d already thought of that and ordered one. It took some coaxing. He wanted to watch his Ninja Turtles, instead. But a few minutes into one episode and he was hooked. "I liked the action," he said, meaning the gunplay and the way the Ranger and Tonto and the rest are always swinging into the saddle to ride off somewhere. He even liked the black-n-white episodes, when he was sure he wouldn’t. I’d forgotten how stilted and contrived Clayton Moore’s lines were. Goody-two-shoes with sixguns. Did I see them for that when I was young? I think so, but I had fewer choices then.

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Abilene

Posted on October 23, 2007 | Comments Off on Abilene

The wind still blows every day across the pretty flat land around Abilene, Texas. But it didn’t always, at least not around Abilene, which wasn’t established until this day in 1883. More on the city here, and the B-1 bombers of nearby Dyess AFB here.

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Old growth cypress trees

Posted on October 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Old growth cypress trees

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You don’t see a lot of old-growth trees in Central Texas, like these Cypresses at Krause Springs in Burnet County southwest of Austin. The soil is too thin and the storms too frequent to prevent even old trees from being uprooted with regularity. So these monsters, some at ten- to twenty-feet in circumference, were a revelation when encountered over the weekend at the Cub Scout camp out.

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Caver rescue

Posted on October 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Caver rescue

They were lost in the one-way, two-mile cave where you spend most of the time on your belly squeezing through narrow openings (sounds wonderfully claustrophobic) and glad to be rescued. Why, they’d even do it again! But, next time, not at the taxpayer’s expense, we can hope.

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Posted in Scribbles, Texana

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Lost in a cave

Posted on October 14, 2007 | Comments Off on Lost in a cave

Austin and Travis County emergency medical teams have enlisted the help of experienced spelunkers in searching Airman’s Cave, a 12,000 foot underground complex of tight squeezes near Barton Creek for three lost cavers who did not report in at midnight Saturday as expected.

UPDATE: Make that four lost cavers–three female, one male–possibly University of Texas students. More here. Photos and some history of Airman’s, and why it’s called that.

MORE: What was lost has now been found, and they were three, not four, afterall. 

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Posted in Scribbles, Texana

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The moldboard plow

Posted on October 11, 2007 | Comments Off on The moldboard plow

Antique shops and heritage museums everywhere are littered with the old, rusted farm implements of our onetime agrarian society, and Texas is no different. Now and then you can even find a mouldboard plow, "the plow that broke the plains." The first American example apparently was the work of Thomas Jefferson, based on what he’d seen in Europe. This early, great technical advance, later improved by American John Deere, is still in use. Although no longer, of course, pushed behind a mule.

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Posted in Scribbles, Texana