JANUARY 25, 2020 Bart Bus is the amazing illustrator who did these five paintings for Matamoros. You can see more of his work – ranging from sci-fi to pop culture to classical – at https://www.bartbusart.com/ The first image here is of a few Union troops atop the bell tower, above the tent city near the …
JANUARY 18, 2020 The pirate Jean Lafitte was a colorful character, born around 1780. His grandparents were reportedly Sephardic Jews – his maternal grandfather was put to death for that crime in Spain, his grandmother converting, but nonetheless fleeing to France. Lafitte left Bordeaux for America – ah, those pesky immigrants – where he founded …
JANUARY 12, 2020 John Salmon Ford was a doctor, a lawyer, a journalist, a Confederate Colonel, the Mayor of Brownsville, eventually a Texas Senator, and a renowned Texas Ranger. He got his nickname, “Rip” Ford, during the Mexican-American War in 1846, when he was assigned the duty of writing condolence letters to the families of …
Rip Ford and the Texas Rangers Read More »
Tags: #Civil War on the Rio Grande, #Mexican American War, #Rip Ford, #Texas Rangers
JANUARY 11, 2020 A good case has been made by some medical historians that vampires of legend were actually just people with rabies. Consider the natural course of someone infected with the rabies virus. The virus travels from the site of the bite along the nervous system, up to the brain, especially the limbic system. …
JANUARY 7, 2020 This is why Matamoros is Dedicated to Gene Ringgold. When I moved to LA in 1976 – to do my Residency in Emergency Medicine at USC/LA County Hospital – one of my neighbors was a 60 year old man named Gene Ringgold, living with his wife, Margie. Gene was a longtime Hollywood …
JANUARY 7, 2020 General Bee was really more of a politician than a soldier. He negotiated a treaty with the Comanche in 1843, and he helped draw up the border with Mexico after the Mexican American War in 1846. After that he won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, and in 1861, when …
DECEMBER 27, 2019 Esther Hill Hawks was one of those real historical figures that I took a few liberties with. She and her husband, John, were both doctors, and ardent abolitionists, who organized reformist salons of the era. When the Civil War broke out, she tried to enlist as a physician, but was refused on …
DECEMBER 20, 2019 Jose Agustin Quintero was a Cuban revolutionary who fled a death sentence and escaped from the Spanish, coming to America in the 1850’s. He went to Harvard, got a law degree, was a poet, translator, and philosopher, becoming friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Quintero crossed paths with Jefferson Davis in social circles …
Jose Quintero, the Confederate States of America Consul to Mexico Read More »
DECEMBER 10, 2019 The extraordinary illustrator, Bart Bus, did five beautiful illustrations for me to choose from for the cover art on the novel and the CD. Here are two of them, depicting a sequence deep in the book – the Red River Campaign, where the Union Army was drawn into an ambush. Red River …
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