"An Unborn Empire" - Robert E. Howard's Texas

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"I believe you would find much of interest in the museum in the administrative building of old Fort Concho, established, as I remember, in 1868 and abandoned as a post in 1889. A public school now stands in the middle of the parade-square, but many of the old buildings are still standing, some of the officers’ houses now being used as residences."
        —Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, February 11, 1936

Robert E. Howard spent some time in San Angelo and visited the Fort Concho museum. Once again, Damon C. Sasser had a nice article on the old Two-Gun Raconteur website titled, "Fort Concho and 'Dead' Ellis." 

Here is the link: web.archive.org/web/20111114111156/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=13340

The following video is a brief introduction to the Fort Concho Museum, which remains open for visitors today:

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"I’m enclosing a post-card view of a grotto, built in imitation of the famous one of Lourdes, the work of a very interesting character in Rio Grande City - the Rev. Gustav Gollbach, of the Oblate Fathers. I found him a remarkably interesting man, of unmistakable culture and eruditon. He is a native of Hesse - a province against whose inhabitants I always had an instinctive prejudice, from memories handed down since the Revolution. I can remember when 'that old Hessian' was a term of anathema in the Southwest. But my prejudice - which after all was active only in my extreme youth - did not extend to the Reverent Gollbach. He was dolichocep -halic, typically Nordic, with light blue eyes and fair skin. He has thirteen thousand Mexicans under his spiritual guidance, and body and soul they are much better for his aid. Although the Catholic religion is fast losing power in Old Mexico and along the Border. Ten years ago the priest was all-powerful among our southern neighbors. Now he is as likely to get a bullet in the back as a layman. I have an idea that a priest on this side of the Border really wields more power than one in Mexico."

    -Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, April 1932

For us Catholics, it is the beginning of Lent, so when I came across this article by Damon C. Sasser on the old R.E.H. Two-Gun Raconteur website via the Wayback Machine, I thought it apropos. The article's title came from the letter above: "I Found Him a Remarkably Interesting Man, of Unmistakable Culture and Erudition." 

Howard was recounting a trip to Rio Grande City, where he met the Catholic Priest, Father Gustav Gollbach (September 24, 1878-December 26, 1955). A native of Germany, he took his first vows with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1901, and was ordained on April 21, 1906. He came to Texas not long after, serving in a number of parishes before making his way to Rio Grande City in 1924. He was the pastor of Immaculate Conception Church there until 1937. In 1928, he built a replica of the grotto shrine at Lourdes and Catholics, and many non-Catholics, from all around began visiting it. The postcard that Howard sent to Lovecraft was of the Grotto.

Link to Sasser's great article here: web.archive.org/web/20111114102345/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=12585

And link to Texas Historical Marker regarding the good Reverend here: www.txhistoricalmarker.com/marker/4585

And a video from the 90th anniversary celebration in 2018:

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"I remember a night I spent at Rockport, a little port not very far from Corpus Christi. I stayed in a big rambling hotel close to the water’s edge, and learned that in one of the more recent hurricanes — one which did great damage in Corpus Christi — a derelict hull rammed the hotel and almost demolished one side of it. But the proprietor of the hotel waxed irritable at the suggestion that the town might fall prey to another hurricane some time, and he said that Rockport was in no more danger from the elements than any other town in the country. Not wanting to antagonize the man, I agreed with him, commenting on the peril of oceanic inundation of Denver, Colorado, and the risk of tropical storms run by the inhabitants of Butte, Montana, and Madison, South Dakota. But he seemed to suspect a hint of irony in my innocent remarks, and thereafter treated me coolly."

        -Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, June 1931

Damon C. Sasser had another nice post about Howard and Texas history that was titled from a quote by Howard "Storms and Inundations have Always Sent Shivers Along my Spine, Even in the Contemplation of the Them" on the defunct REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we have a copy of that article preserved: web.archive.org/web/20120104204452/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=15600

There are also a number of videos about the Corpus Christi storm of 1919, but too many of them are talking heads and show little in the way of pictures from the storm. The best one I could find that is short necessitates a link as the video is embedded on their website. Link to it here: www.caller.com/videos/news/2019/09/12/corpus-christi-after-1919-hurricane/2302817001/

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"Strange how the world grows. Texas is truly an empire state, with its new towns springing up like mushrooms. I’ve seen several of them spring and several slump back.

I was talking to a man the other day, an oil magnate – rather remarkable fellow, by the way, ex-cowpuncher, worked his way up from the bottom, such a large man that I looked and felt like a dwarf beside him and I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, too. He was talking about his holdings down around Catarina – Catarina! Four years ago the site of Catarina was a wilderness of greasewood and mesquite. Now it’s booming like hell – and may slump as quick. Another town, Crystal City, not far from there – a fair-sized town now and growing all the time. I lived there when the first store went up during its earliest boom. Ho hum. Sometimes I feel like one of those pioneers – I’ve passed through many a booming town and never made a cent in any of them."

        -Robert E. Howard to Unknown, Unknown Date (though it may be Tevis Clyde Smith as Howard opens with "Salaam")

I like this quote for the line "Texas is truly an empire state," as it fits nicely with "An Unborn Empire." Damon C. Sasser, once again, provides us with an excellent post on the old REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website about this once great oil boom town that, as of the last census, has a population today of 118. The picture above is of the once popular Catarina Hotel & Cafe, in this town now dubbed only fit for ghosts.

Link to Sasser's article here: web.archive.org/web/20111115131758/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=11369

[charleshelm]

I hunted for many years not far from Catarina. After I stopped, it boomed down there as evidenced by Google Earth, because of shale, then it busted. Again.

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Mar 3, 2020 19:54:57 GMT -5 charleshelm said:

I hunted for many years not far from Catarina. After I stopped, it boomed down there as evidenced by Google Earth, because of shale, then it busted. Again.

I've never been through there. Closest ever was heading down 35 to Laredo. 

Did you have a deer lease down there?

The shale really did create another Texas boom with which Howard was all too familiar. Here in Huntsville, we weren't too impacted by the shale boom, other than our hotels were full and a house down the street was rented by the shale oil workers. I saw them one day while running and I asked them about it, curious as to where they were working in the area. They weren't in the area - they were two hours away! The company they worked for bought the house so the workers would have a place to live. Like Howard often said, many were from out of state and there temporarily working. It was cheaper to have them live away from where the shale fields were located as the housing was cheaper. Crazy!  But they made good money . . . at least while it lasted.

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"The Judge was a close friend of Brann, the Iconoclast, who was keeping Texas in an uproar, and this shooting occurred not long before Brann and Davis shot each other to death on the streets of Waco."

        -Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, October 1930

Another post by Damon C. Sasser on the old REH Two-Gun Raconteur website is about a good old fashioned Waco shoot out! The article, titled "'Murdered by Baptists' — Death of an Iconoclast,"provides Howard's full recounting of the story and then addresses the history of the shootout between Judge Gerald and the Harris brothers. Great stuff you just can't make up.

Here is Sasser's preserved article: web.archive.org/web/20111114164616/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=11886

And for those interested, the Waco History Project has a nice write up on the shooting: wacohistoryproject.org/Moments/geralds.html

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“Relatives of mine were in Galveston when it was washed away in 1900, but fortunately, all were saved, though many of their friends were drowned. One of their friends, having been out of the city at the time, hastened back to find that his whole family had perished. He fell like a dead man and when he recovered conciousness, days later, his hair was white as snow. Aye, men’s hair turned white then, and the hair of young men and the soft locks of girls. And there was a woman who walked across an ironing board from one crumbling building to another, stronger one, with a child in her arms, and the black night howling over her and the screams of the dying in her ears - the black waves foaming and lashing under her feet and the corpses wallowing and bumping against her feet. And just as she stepped into the comparative safety of the other building, the walls she had left collapsed and thundered into the raving waters and screams of her friends were drowned - with hundreds of others, their bodies were never recovered. Many were swept out to sea; the salt-marshes were littered for many a mile. And strange to say, a babe in a cradle was washed far inland and lived when so many died - people found her floating in her cradle among the debris and they took her and raised her, not knowing her name or anything about her, but she lives, a woman in South Texas, to this day.

“God, what black horror must have gripped the hearts of the people, when the doom of winds and waves struck them in the night - when they rushed from their houses with the thunder of the crumbling sea-wall in their ears, and were caught in the black madness that thundered over the doomed city - that shattered their walls, broke their roofs, swept their houses away like straw and strewed dead bodies for a hundred miles among the marshes. Who was spared when the tide broke? Old crippled men cried in vain for aid; the babe at the breast was torn away to drown alone; women whose hour was upon them were hurled out on the breast of the black horror, and their shrieks of agony were choked by the clamor of the waves - aye, babes struggled into birth in that horror, meeting death instead of life. The very tombs were broken open and moldering shapes floated among the living and the newly dead. Trains, halted by the rising water on the mainland, were deserted by their frenzied passengers - and these passengers told tales of corpses floated up to the windows that seemed to fumble at the panes with dead fingers.

“Galveston must have seemed like a city of the dead when the tide abated. And thirst and hunger and the black horror of madness fell upon the survivors stumbling among the ruins where ghouls ran looting the dead, hacking off the fingers to get the rings.

“God grant no such fate befalls the city again.”

        —Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, August 1931

Having covered the Corpus Christi Hurricane, I thought I should cover the famous Galveston Hurricane of 1900. In Howard's opening describing the hurricane to Lovecraft, he mentions his relatives who survived. I tried looking up who these relatives were with no success, so I contacted Rob Roehm, the Howardian expert on anything about Howard's family, and he had a ready reply. He explained to me that the relatives were Hester's brother's widow and children. Hester's brother was Robert T. Ervin.

The absolute best book on the Galveston hurricane is Erik Larson's book: Isaac’s Storm. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is one of Larson's dual narratives, this one being between Isaac Cline, who worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau and the hurricane itself.

If you are not familiar with the hurricane, Fox News did a nice retrospective that shows current pictures of Galveston, describes the storm, and details the aftermath. It also highlights the museum in Galveston dedicated to the storm, the Bishop's Palace, the Opera House, and the statute dedicated to the tragedy. A little bit of everything. 

[charleshelm]

I hunted on one of the Briscoe ranches for a number of years, Asherton was the closest town. I've been on the Briscoe Catarina as well.

I had family in the Galveston storm on my mother's side. Crazy times. Amazing more didn't die. And when the dead started washing ashore...

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“By the way, as an evidence of our democracy, it looks like this district is going to elect a full-blooded Syrian to the legislature. He runs a small dry-goods store in this town—a very short dumpy sort of fellow, brachycephalic, swarthy, curly-haired—an Elamitish type if I don’t miss my guess. He and his family are the only Orientals in this town, the Jews having pulled their freight when times got hard. A funny thing in connection with this fellow—he was born near Lebanon, in Syria, but has been in this country so long he was a stranger when his brother and he revisited the old country a few years ago. In Damascus they mistook a Moslem washing-place outside a mosque—a holy place where the Mohammedans did their ritualistic abolutions—for a public toilet, and were mobbed by a gang of maddened Islamites, who chased them for blocks, and were only pacified by money, and the assurance of the culprits’ native kinsmen that the offenders were only American barbarians whose ignorance was too abysmal to be resented.”

        —Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, August 9, 1932


Damon C. Sasser had some great articles on the now defunct REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website, but this one has to be, hands-down, my favorite. This article takes a small story in which the dry goods store-owner is not mentioned and not only explains the interesting story behind Howard’s story, but also explains the presence of a Robert E. Howard artifact—the camel inkwell carved out of olive wood. If you are going to Howard Days this year (or any year), read the article he posted back on July 15, 2011, titled “Cecil Lotief and the Gift from the Middle East,” before you go.


Read Sasser’s article here: web.archive.org/web/20111114174405/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=11438

And More on Lotief from the Legislative Reference Library of Texas: lrl.texas.gov/legeleaders/members/memberdisplay.cfm?memberID=2087

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"But to get back to the Valley. It’s more historical than most people realize. There, for instance, were the famous ports of Clarksville and Bagdad, at the mouth of the Rio Grande; Bagdad, founded by the Spaniards about 1780, reached the pinnacle of her lurid glory during the Civil War, when the trade of the world flowed through her fingers — cotton, armaments, slaves. It was on the Mexican side of the river, Clarksville on the American. There were more than fifteen thousand people in Bagdad when the thirsty gulf rose and drank her, and her sister city, in a single night. When the dawn rose calm and clear over the waves, it was as if the sites of those river towns had been swept with a titanic broom. So a Catholic priest had prophesied, for men said it was the wickedest city in the world, with its criminals, cut-throats, pirates, smugglers, renegades and the scum of the Seven Seas. That was in 1867."

    -Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, March 2, 1932

Damon C. Sasser again gets credited with another fine post on the old website REH: Two-Gun Raconteur. This time with the little town of Bagdad, Texas, that disappeared in his article "The Doomed City of Bagdad, Mexico." This is an interesting piece of Texas history that is fun to think about. One can only imagine the rowdy times in Bagdad--and what a great setting for a Howard-like short story, western or weird western. Or, maybe he did, Shadizar the wicked!

Here is the link to Sasser's article courtesy of the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20111005160734/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=12980

And here is a link to more of the history of Bagdad and its cemetery: williamson-county-texas-history.org/BAGDAD_TEXAS/BAGDAD_TEXAS.htm

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"We visited the Howards soon after moving to the Cross Cut area in 1924. They lived in the same house in Cross Plains that is now the Robert E. Howard House Museum. I don’t remember any impression, one way or the other, at that time. Three or four years later, when I became interested in reading, he loaned me many books, including Tarzan of the Apes. He treated me well every time we visited and was friendly when they visited us. I liked him."
    -Norris Chambers from Damon C. Sasser interview, August 8, 2011

Norris Chambers knew Robert E. Howard and Robert E. Howard is now part of Texas history, perhaps the  epilogue to "An Unborn Empire." Sasser interviewed Norris Chambers in 2011 and posted the interview on the REH: Two-Gun Raconteur website. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, the interview is still available. And, even better, courtesy of the awesome work of Ben Friberg (give that man an award for all the work he does in preserving Robert E. Howard and REH Days), there is a film interview of Chambers available. Enjoy.

Link to Sasser's interview here: web.archive.org/web/20111114171638/http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=6126

[charleshelm]

Many thanks for all the work here. Interesting about the legislative candidate. Where I grew up there was a Syrian Club that was available to rent out for wedding receptions and other events.

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"Cross Plains is a small town of – well, I guess at present the population is about 1800. It varies; during oil booms the town has had a population of six or seven thousand."

    -Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, December 29, 1932

Giving Ben Friberg his due for all of the videos he has produced on Robert E. Howard Days, I thought I would spend some time linking to those that pertain to the two topics of "An Unborn Empire": Robert E. Howard and Texas. Wherever those two meet is what belongs in this little area of The Swords of Robert E. Howard. 

In this video, Margaret McNeel, a member of Project Pride, recalls her memories of her parents who knew Robert E. Howard. This gentle soul passed away just before the video was posted. She was 81.

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“We think Robert E. Howard and Texas go together like bacon and eggs.”

        —Mark Finn, “REH and Texas,” Howard Days 2013


Mmmmmmm . . . bacon. I love that quote from Mark Finn, definitely two great combinations. 

Since I have moved on to the Ben Friberg videos from past Robert E. Howard Days, here are two videos from a panel that is right up "An Unborn Empire's" alley: "REH and Texas." 

So, cook up a plate of bacon and eggs and settled back to watch a great discussion on our favorite combination.