(content guitar music plays) - Hello and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Lloyd Uglow, author of a Military History of Texas.

Thank you so much for being here today.

- I'm really glad to come.

- So this book, based on the title it's clearly a large undertaking.

Why did you want to write A Military History of Texas?

- Well, for one thing, military history is a specialty of mine.

More than that, though, it's a great interest of mine and kind of the joker in the deck here is that I just felt like it was something I ought to do.

Not that I wanted to do a whole lot because it was a pretty massive undertaking, but you know when you feel like I need to do this, that was the thing that really pushed me on to do it completed and all.

- [Christine] So when you say a military history I mean it's like all of the military history of our state, starting from pre-colonial, pre-European settlement all the way up through today.

How do you go about condensing that much history down into a relatively slim considering how much you're covering volume?

- Well, that was a challenge.

The initial draft that I sent to my publisher he had me reduce it by probably 20 or 30,000 words.

So there was a lot of reduction in there.

One thing I was trying to avoid was to make it too shallow.

Obviously it's very broad, as you said, and when you go broad instead of writing a monograph on one specific topic, then you just can't include very much detail.

So it was difficult and at every chapter a judgment call to decide how much should go in and how much was expendable.

- Because you know, as you say, each chapter could probably and certainly is its own book topic, book length monograph of its own.

So it's a lot.

Well, I want to say, I think you balance that really well because I think each chapter, it gives you a broad enough overview but it does go into some detail.

It's not, it's not a survey necessarily.

Like there is some detail, there is some interesting facts all throughout the book.

So I think you succeeded in making it both broad and not just superficial.

- Well I appreciate that.

I had some good help from peer readers with the University Press.

So that showed me some things that I, as author probably just couldn't see because it was my own work.

- So how much research did you have to do?

You say this was a subject you've studied and you're familiar with, but I imagine you read a lot of books and looked through a lot of archives to put together this book.

- That's where the good old student worker comes in handy.

(Christine chuckles) I made use of my student workers, really over about a four year period and I just had them weeding out the sources that sounded good but didn't really have new information or interesting information.

And so they deserve a great deal of credit for helping me in that.

That's of course the kind of the initial stages of the research.

But it was helpful.

I tried to stick with both the classical sources, historians, you know, people like Webb for example, but other folks that have written new things in just the past 10 years say.

So I tried to give it a good balance there.

Balance was kind of the key.

- [Christine] Yeah, I was got to say that probably was a little bit difficult because certainly you may have older sources that are maybe biased or incorrect and maybe new research shines a new light on something.

So you want to balance exactly the new information or what we've learned with what has historically been taught.

- Yeah, and I tried to keep a balanced treatment of different groups in Texas.

Obviously this is a military history, you've got people fighting each other and I tried to not have the good guys and the bad guys in most cases, but try to explore the viewpoints of both sides or sometimes it was multipolar, so you had more than two sides, even in conflicts.

- That does shine through.

I think that's that you've done a great job of that too.

And it must be impossible when we'll get to it.

But you've got sometimes, like there's the French and the Spanish and the Anglo settlers and the indigenous people, which is not just one monolith, it's multiple tribes.

I mean that's a lot of different people coming together to have conflict and war, battles and things.

And they all had differing objectives.

You don't have all the Native Americans pulling for the same thing.

So yeah, it was a challenge but it was one that didn't kill me, so.

- Well see, you're here.

Yeah, you did it.

- Yeah.

- So you said about four years for the the initial research how long did this take altogether to put... - Probably about five.

Once I started writing it, in a year or a little more I got the initial draft and the initial draft was pretty smooth.

So when I went back in to change I had some definite places that I needed to change based on primarily the peer readers and their suggestions and also my publisher's desire to shorten it by a pretty good amount.

- I want to, let's clarify here.

I don't know that we've talked about this for our reviewers and our listeners.

One of the unique things about University Press publishing is that peer review, this is a scholarly, even though it reads more like a trade or popular history book, but these things are vetted and you have peer historians, faculty from other universities look at it, which I think, I work for University Press so of course I'm biased.

But I think that gives us right strength to the book and lends a lot more credibility than say, just any old history book that you could pick up from a commercial publisher.

- Yeah, it is a strength, it is daunting because I had my peer readers were both, there were two of them that were both what I'd consider giants of Texas military history.

So when they said to do something, I did it.

(they chuckle together) You know, the temptation to an author I think is always, this is my baby I don't want to change a word.

I tried to just close my eyes and and say, "Yes, sir."

Basically if I got a suggestion and I got quite a few suggestions from the peer readers but I think I did all of them except one and I don't even remember which one that was but I remember there was one exception.

But other than that I so appreciate those guys and they were both guys.

They just helped make the book much better, much more concise, I believe.

- Which is important for, again a book of this magnitude.

So let's touch into the content.

We obviously we can't cover everything because it took you over 400 pages to do that and we don't have much time, but I want to just kind of touch on some of the sections in the book.

The first chapter is like we said, this is a full military history.

So that first section is pre-European contact.

So this is the Indigenous people and their wars.

Obviously those records are not going to be written if at all, maybe or not written in English to start with.

So how do you research, how do you find records from pre-contact war?

- Well, there aren't records to speak of.

There are records of first European contact, which probably gives a pretty good idea of what the preceding few centuries looked like.

But not even that necessarily because the Europeans had influences over areas before they ever set foot on those lands.

So you can't take that for gospel truth but you have that and then you have the records of archeology which help.

But even that, in Texas, those records and those findings are not very big so far, not very extensive.

So what I did was basically extrapolate from findings in other parts of the Great Plains area.

And it is a guess, but I'd call it an educated guess when you can back it up with that kind of material and make your conclusions from that.

- I think that's all you can do.

But I find that to be one of the most fascinating pieces because when I think military history of Texas I think of the wars that have been covered that I learned in Texas history class, the revolution, the Civil War, things like that.

So that was really fascinating to me to try to get a peek into what it was like, what kind of battles were happening before that.

And the next section too, the colonial era which is when we have different, there's no kind of main settler group yet.

We have the French moving in, the Spanish moving in, and then of course they're clashing with the Indigenous people.

Yeah, what was that... it's a kind of transitory time it feels like.

- Yeah, yeah it is.

Nobody really could say they owned Texas.

The Spanish established settlements, but they were hanging on by the skin of their teeth much of the time.

And their presence was incredibly small a lot of times.

I mean, the smallest of small towns in Texas had almost as many people as the Spanish had in Texas during a long period of time in the 1600s and early 1700s.

So that was interesting.

And then of course we had Indian tribes, Native American tribes, large and small.

We have the Comanche who are going to eventually come in in the 1700s and become the strongest tribe and they're going to go up to 20, 30,000 people maybe.

And then you have other tribes that are numbered in the hundreds.

So it's a mixed bag of players in this game and all of them have a lot at stake.

- This is also a time when the horse is being introduced and that's changing the nature of warfare, whatever it was pre-contact, I think the horse probably completely changed obviously how the settlers fought battles but how the Native tribes, they probably revamped their entire fighting style based on that new animal, that new resource tool they had.

- Yeah, that and the introduction of firearms by the Europeans, those two things are going to really give opportunity to alter the balance of power in the whole region of Texas, especially out on the plains.

- So we'll jump forward again, this is the third chapter, is the Spain and Revolutionary Mexico.

So we've moved to a time when Spain mostly owns Texas and Mexico and this is an era where a lot of revolutions are happening.

There's been the French Revolution, well one of many French revolutions, the American Revolution.

And it seems like the people of Mexico said, why not us?

- Well the people had the witness of an American nation just north that had gone through a similar revolution to what the Mexicans were going to go through.

We had thrown out our European overseers.

They threw out their European overseers and Americans and many of the people that moved to Texas during the 1820s from the United States and the 1830s, they are going to be very interested in this idea of republicanism.

And they are going to back folks in Mexico who want to make a republic much like the United States with kind of low level of authority weak central government, strong state governments.

And then in Mexico you've got those folks but then you've got an equally large number of folks that prefer a strong central government.

So politics comes in a great deal to affect the military balance and even who outside forces like the Americans are going to want to back Mexico or the ones they're rooting for to win in Mexico.

- And then we move forward to maybe the most well documented and maybe well studied piece of Texas military history which is the Texas Revolution.

And I imagine that might have been a hard topic to write about too, because everybody studies that, everybody knows about, we all learned about that in our history class in elementary school or whatever.

How do you condense that into a concise chapter?

- Well that was difficult.

it's one of the most extensive, it may be the actually the longest chapter, I can't remember.

- I think it is, yeah.

- But it covers the shortest period of time.

You know, some chapters cover 80 years, the second chapter probably covers 200 years.

But then this covers about, well, less than one year.

I tried to get the high points, I tried to get the important points, and I also tried to get some military analysis in and to actually show the balance of forces.

How many men did Santa Ana have?

How many men did the various Texan commanders have?

How were they armed?

How did they fight?

What were their tactics?

Various things like that I tried to put in and I kind of bit the bullet as far as making this a large chapter.

It just had to be.

- It had to be, well, I mean it's like you say, it's a pivotal moment too in our state's history.

This is, there's a reason it's the most written about and the most well studied.

It changed everything that came after it.

So, I mean you had to do that.

And I think one of the strengths in this chapter and I would also say the Civil War chapter you do mention the politics a little bit, but you really stick mostly to the military history.

We don't spend a lot of time, a lot of these other full book link treatments spend more time on the lead up to and the differing factions and the mood and that's to the strength of the book, I think we stick to the military, its focus is clear and that helps keep it shorter probably too.

- I thank you for that.

I appreciate it.

- So after, we'll skip the Texas Revolution, we don't want to go into too much detail there because I think the middle period between when Texas gains its independence although Mexico might disagree with that.

And then when we join and are annexed by the United States, that's an interesting period too because the war's over, but maybe not really.

- Yeah, it's kind of a limbo situation.

You know, you had Santa Ana when he was captured by the Texans at San Jacinta, they are going to basically have him under duress and he as the head of state of Mexico is going to agree to the treaty, but he can claim afterwards that it doesn't count because he wasn't real.

You know, how could he disagree when they might execute him if he didn't agree.

And it's got to be a time period that I don't find very interesting.

Sorry for the confession there.

You know, there's lots of things in history that I don't find interesting and a lot of things that I do.

But the Republic of Texas period I think is not so interesting.

For one thing, it is such a tiny nation.

For one thing their budget is so small, maybe more than anything else in that chapter, in that time period, I see the effects of budget, the effects of having any money at all to spend on military activities or no money or going into great, great debt, which Texas did under Lamar's administration because he was a real war hawk.

Sam Houston, the complete other side of the coin even though he is such a famous war leader, he tries to keep the peace as much as possible because he knows that Texas cannot afford big military expenditures.

So it's an interesting time period, interesting chapter.

Not my favorite like I say, but it is a time that really shows the strengths and weaknesses of Texas, I think.

- Well that, I'm glad you bring up the budgetary problems because I think that kind of leads into the next section which is the annexation of the U.S.

I mean of Texas to the U.S. that brings in for the first time like the full power of the U.S. military.

We can now we can set up forts and outposts and that gets us into another war.

But you know, the strength of joining the U.S. really shines through in that next chapter.

- There was really a double edged sword on that one though, Christine, because the Texans were very glad for the United States government to foot the bill on building forts and providing for military forces.

But Texas wanted to have a lot of control and the United States government, if it was footing the bill it wanted those things to be under U.S. control.

And I think you can see both sides of the coin there but things were not completely smooth between the two.

- Sure.

- In that area, money I guess is never smooth.

- It's not surprising to me that Texas would want to have full control of what's going on in the state.

So we have another war to now decide that southern border.

But then, you know, there's still a lot of frontier wars and things happening on, I guess the western front of Texas with the Indigenous people who are not wanting to give away their land necessarily so freely.

- Yeah.

They of course had just as much claim to Texas or to at least parts of Texas as anybody else did including the people from the United States who lived there including the people from Mexico who had settled there and the earlier Spanish settlers.

So everybody has a somewhat legitimate claim to at least parts of Texas and it's a shame they couldn't divvy it up and and live and let live, but they wouldn't and couldn't.

And so you've got those two periods, the struggle between the people of Texas and the United States government on the one hand, and the Native Americans primarily out on the northern and western frontiers on the other hand, pre-civil war.

Then you have kind of an intermission with the Civil War where there's not as much activity on the frontier as the people of Texas the Anglos in Texas and the Hispanics in Texas kind of pull back and fort up as they say.

And then after four years everybody's back at it.

Native Americans versus Texans and United States.

- I want to talk about the Civil War just briefly because I normally when in the past when I've studied the Civil War, it's always we focus on the deep south parts of it.

We focus on the Alabama and the Tennessee and all that.

It was interesting to read the Texas perspective in that we just had all these troops flood in and build these forts and now overnight they're in enemy territory.

So they have to kind of evacuate and flee hopefully safely without starting any battles on their way out to the coast.

- Yeah, the commander, the U.S. military commander in Texas, Twiggs, old time U.S. officer very loyal to the U.S. Army, but a southerner.

So he's faced with a real dilemma when Texas is making moves to succeed and join the other states that are forming the Confederacy.

What does he do?

He asked Washington for direction a number of times and really never got it.

So basically he decides and he sees that Texas is got to secede and he has to turn over the military property in Texas to the Confederates or really to the state of Texas at that point.

And it's remarkable that it turned out as a bloodless takeover, you didn't have a Fort Sumter in Texas.

Maybe you should have had a Fort Sumter in Texas, but you didn't probably because of Twiggs not getting the guidance that he had requested.

And so Texas just kind of shifts over all of a sudden from United States control to state control and then very quickly that as Texas becomes part of the confederacy confederate control.

- I also, I didn't think about this but where we were unique in the Civil War in that we had of course a long coastline and that was important for them to try to blockade and stop things from coming in.

But we also were the only state with a international border.

And I'm sure the union forces had a balancing act there on how to not engage Mexico in this war and not blockade them but also try to hold off Texas at the same time.

- And Mexico remember was going through its own problems with the war as government being invaded and for a while the French backed forces under Maximilian are going to take over the government and the real seat of power in Mexico.

So that's going on at the same time, again, you've got this multipolar situation and our people both United States or union forces and confederate forces down on the border are not sure exactly how to react to this fighting between the waristas and the imperial forces in Mexico that all of this spills over so much, the land along the Rio Grande on both sides was very much up in the air.

You never knew who was really in power or who would come out on top in, I mean for decades down there and during the Civil War is one of the most violent periods for them out of a real long violent history overall.

- Well, unfortunately, as I feared we're got to run short on time so we cannot cover, post civil war reconstruction era and the final frontier battles that happen in the 1800s and so on.

So I would encourage everyone to pick up this book and read it if you want to read about that.

And then also another one of my most interesting chapters I thought was the sections on the world wars because we've shifted now from having battles in Texas to preparing soldiers and preparing materials and things like that, which I think is a really interesting gear shift for Texas.

- Well Texas is by its topography and by its population distribution where you've got some really big urban areas but then most of the 254 counties in Texas are farmland or ranch land, very small populations.

And so Texas also being in a warm climate, it is perfect for training, you don't have winter shutdown.

And that especially applies to the training in both world wars, but especially World War II for flyers.

Texas becomes the place for training all of our hundreds of thousands of flyers in the war.

And it seems like almost every little town in Texas had an airfield out beside it.

You know, obviously that's an exaggeration, but.

- Well, we've got just about two minutes left.

So what would you like for our audience to take away and remember from this book?

- Well, it depends on who the audience members are because as I mentioned in the introduction to this book I wanted it to be interesting for the professional military historian, for the armchair historian, for the person very familiar with military affairs, and for the person, maybe this is the first military history book they've ever picked up.

So depending on which group the viewers and the readers fall into, I want them to have fun.

I want them to find Texas military history interesting by its variety, by just the microcosm it is of the larger world outside where during the Spanish possession of Texas, they're fighting Native American people but using basically the model they have gotten from European battles.

So they're building fortresses that look like miniatures of what the Europeans were building in the 16 and 1700s.

So it just depends on what the audience is interested in.

I've tried to make it so broad that it will interest a whole lot of people.

- Well, I think you certainly succeeded.

I think it's broad but it's deep and it's also easily readable.

So if this is your first history book you won't be intimidated by the way it's written.

Thank you so much for being here, for coming and talking.

I really appreciate your time.

- Well, I thank you very much, Christine.

It's been a delight to talk with you about this.

Thank you.

- That is all the time we have for today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The book again was, A Military History Of Texas and I will see you again soon.

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