Writer's Block and Homicidal Assholes -- A Likely Pairing

 “Something completely necessary [in your writing] is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade….

“Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back into place. It wanders off to die.”

Anne Dillard "The Writer's Life"

Yup, pretty much says it all. So, after watching about six month's work go into the shitter after having written myself into a corner and pitching a bitch about it, I was annoyed enough to drive two or three hours up into the furthest reaches of the outermost boondocks of stone-deep, bone-deep Texas Red River bottom-land woods, to the upper edge of Delaware Bend (or "Thieves Neck" as it was popularly known back in the day). I pulled off the dirt road road and grabbed my backpack and set out cross-country through the dark tangle of ancient river-bottom forest.

I probably should have started earlier in the day. It had been raining  and was still gray and cloudy and about 50 degrees and occasionally pissing a cold dribble. My boots were dragging a couple of extra pounds of mud each within 50 yards.

I wasn't just randomly wandering. I was focused on finding a landmark whose description I'd run across that hadn't been seen in twelve or fifteen years. It might well no longer even exist. All the descriptions of the location, including that "recent" one were shit. Even Google earth couldn't penetrate the forest canopy to help much.

I'd gotten some old 1895-1902 survey and USGS maps which didn't show it, but did show some other useful landmarks. And I'd researched 1980s and 1990s newspaper interviews and oral histories of long-dead people who'd lived in long-dead towns virtually no one remembers anymore. Some mentioned it in passing.

It was enough. I figured I had its only possible location narrowed down to within a couple of hundred yards, but slogging through the underbrush-choked woods in the darkening gray afternoon, I reflected that actually getting to that couple of hundred yards was going to be pretty fucking sporty.

I mentally shrugged. I'd been to a lot worse.

I got lucky and found an old 4WD track that dove off the edge of the hill and down through the brush toward what I suspected would be a shallow crossing at a creek bottom. No vehicle could have used it in years, as the original  ruts had washed out into channels three or four feet deep, often to bedrock, and I doubt anything short of a tracked vehicle might have been able to negotiate it, and maybe not even that. But the otherwise nearly-impenetrable forest hadn't bothered to reclaim it, so I was able to slip and slither down the steep, rock-lined, mud-covered slide till I found myself standing on the flat bottom of a small, unnamed creek.  

It was a shallow affair, mostly just wet rocks really, and varied between 10 and 15 feet across. Trickles from deep pools quietly dribbled over white slabs of stone down to the next minnow pond, then to the next. Spread-hand-sized ammonite fossils peeked out from between broken layers of the stone everywhere. Looking at the laid-over vegetation on both sides of the creek, it was clear that within the last 24 hours the water had been three or four feet deep and thundering violently down the steep creek grade toward the swampy lake-shore I knew lay a few hundred yards downstream. Both that shore and the gigantic lake itself were unseen theoretical map entries, as in this dense vegetation even the creek disappeared at the next small turn below me. I eyed the lowering clouds though the thin canopy above me for any sign of heavy rain, which would make for a bad time at the bottom of this water funnel, but no evidence of anything but sullen gray presented itself.

The light was getting dimmer, compounded by the same forest overhang that had defeated the satellite mapping. I was going to have to hump it along unless I wanted to climb back up out of this after sundown. This was copperhead and water-moccasin country. I was vaguely surprised I hadn't seen any yet. I figured the cool weather was making them too torpid to be active, but I had no desire to test that theory scrambling through crevassed loose rocks and brush in the river bottoms in the dark; nor did I have any wish to get cross-threaded with a family of the gigantic near-nocturnal wild hogs endemic to this area. As always I carried a large-bore pistol, and figured I could run them off with a few rounds as they don't much like people or being shot and will avoid either where they can. 

But they're not really afraid of anything and barring a one in a thousand lucky hit, I had no real hope of actually killing an angry one- or two-hundred pound adult with anything short of a rifle. Smart animals, fast, and tough, tough, tough.

I broke out the map and compass and shot an initial positioning azimuth so I could find my way back in the dark to the chutes-and-ladders jeep track that jackknifed down the hill if I had to. Mind, I had no intention of doing so, and in any case, reversing the relatively short projected hike should be a no-brainer, but such small prudences have pulled my ass out of more than one fire.

Then I set out up the creek. I had to climb up out of the creek bed to get around the deep pools, sometimes having to break a path 30 or 40 feet from the edge of the water. On those occasions, the undergrowth and overgrowth of the forest was so complete that I'd have had no idea that a creek was so immediately close if I hadn't just come from there.

After about a half-hour, I was getting frustrated as I was making only slow progress and my target was eluding me. I scrambled up over a sketchy timber-fall across the bottom of the creek bed and was about to pull out the map and figure my location to see if I'd passed it during one of my detours into the dark woods. As I swung my pack down, something caught my eye. I stared at it, trying to puzzle out what I was seeing.

It was layers of rock. Not natural. Man-made, or at least man-placed, like a crude wall near the top of the little rise in front of me. It  suddenly struck me — it was a bridge revetment, the stacked rocks holding the roadbed together as it approached the end of the — yeah, right there. The 15' wall of concrete suddenly leapt into focus, less than 50 feet from me, covered in old growth like an Indiana Jones jungle temple.

I'd found it.

 

Yeah, Don't Worry About It -- I Almost Missed It, Too,
And I Didn't Even Have The Yellow Outline...

The bridge had washed out in the late 1930s and had never been rebuilt, mostly because its owner even then was long dead and because the now-forgotten town it served knew it was going to be on the bottom of a lake in the next couple of years anyhow, along with the ferry landing and the road from the bridge that ended there. 

The bridge itself was built around 1850 to run whiskey and ferry passengers up into the Indian Territories (later Oklahoma), and wagon-loads of cotton bales back down out of the plantations to the rail hubs another 15 miles south, and rebuilt or reinforced some time in the vicinity of 1900 when the use of reinforced concrete became more than a passing fad in construction.

Bonnie and Clyde used it off and on to get ahead of the state authorities into Oklahoma in the 1930s. The ferry operator in those days used to get amused shit from the local loafers for not taking them into custody and collecting the considerable reward, but he said all he was interested in was not "noticing" them at all to keep from giving the assholes a reason to kill him. Bonnie and Clyde were no heroes to most of the regular folk.

But they were far from the worst. Before, during and since the civil war, the entire area was infested with death-dealers and psychopaths, murderers, rustlers, and bushwhackers. 

It was an R&R area for Confederate guerrilla/war criminal and slave-hunter William Quantrill and his homicidal bunch of merry pranksters down out of Missouri and Kansas which crew included Frank James who later introduced it to Jesse and the rest of the James gang. When the James gang came down, Jesse used to pay the local youngsters 50 cents, a helluva lot of money in those days, to watch out for posses. Bloody Bill Anderson would turn up when he was on break from killing every Union loyalist and Federal soldier he could find, and Ed Stein lived there, partner to the Lee gang and whiskey bootlegger to the Indian Territory. After being repeatedly acquitted for the crime in Federal court he ironically drank himself to death up in his Delaware Bend shack. His buddies the Lee Brothers, James and Pink, and their gang, would rustle entire large herds of cattle and kill every single human who got in their way as they ran the cattle across the river.

(James Lee having married a Choctaw woman could legally ranch on land in Indian Territory, and his land right down on the river was a hideout for every criminal in a couple of states because Indian land was as far out of reach of local law enforcement as being on the moon. Now and again, the Texas Rangers would get bored and would gather up a group of Rangers and hide out at the tops of the cliffs bordering the river. They'd shoot across, killing anyone they saw coming out of Lee's land down to the water's edge on the not-illogical assumption that anyone roaming around over there was probably a criminal and probably wanted in Texas.)

The Lee boys killed an estimated 40-50 people before they finally managed to annoy so many locals even in that hard place that they were tracked down and killed in a shootout at a camp cabin in Delaware Bend, after which their bodies were loaded in a wagon and hauled across that bridge to Gainesville, TX and dumped out on the Courthouse lawn for public edification as well to claim and collect the reward.

The bridge itself had been built by an ex-Republic of Texas unit commander and soon-to-be Confederate Colonel named James Bourland who owned the plantation which included the land the bridge was built on. Over the course of his US, Texas, and Confederate military and civil service careers which spanned the Mexican/American war, the Indian wars, and the Civil War, he was the author of a whole series of literal war crimes and atrocities. This included co-engineering the largest mass lynching in the history of the US. 

 

Col James Bourland, CSA
A Man Of Intemperate Disposition

As Provost Marshal of Cooke County under the martial law that had been proclaimed, he arrested between 140 and 200 purported Union sympathizers, had them tried by a hand-picked "citizens' court",  shot two who were trying to escape the noose, and in October 1862 hanged at least 40 over a two-week period from a large oak tree in the minuscule town of Gainesville, TX (population about 400 at the time -- the entire County probably only had about 4000). 

Of these 7 had been convicted by a 50% vote of the jury and 19 had been acquitted and had to be re-tried in order to be found guilty. At least 14 were simply lynched by impatient citizenry lead by Bourland and the County Sheriff when it became clear the jury intended to send them all home. The wagon-loads of usually-unclaimed corpses were mostly buried along Pecan Creek which is now near the center of the town, as is the location of the now-gone hanging oak. The shallow graves were rooted out by hogs and whatnot, probable ancestors of the ones I didn't want to meet in this forest, with stories of body parts being dragged down the street by the animals being common.

 

Artist's Rendering For A Newspaper Of The Day

 

At some point or another, Bourland or his people also purportedly hanged a woman in her own front yard in response to her hotly salty words in court about him when her husband was arrested for desertion and brought to court with a choice of hanging or going back to the Mississippi war front. He went, but she was dead within two weeks.

Bourland was not a fan of criticism, and had no discernible sense of humor.

Jefferson Davis was so horrified by the reports coming out of Texas that he lifted martial law, put civil law back into place, and fired the CSA general who'd been running the place.

This meant Bourland was out of a job as Provost, but he shortly got himself appointed commander of a "border security" regiment and eventually all the troops in Northeast Texas and continued his depredations, most of which remain hidden history to this day. What is known is he was so brutal with his own troops and shot so many prisoners "while escaping" that his own disgusted commanders filed a formal complaint against him with CSA command.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but at the end of the day, the guy was a homicidal asshole even by the standards of HIS times.

His lawyers later conned President Johnson into granting him a general pardon at the end of the war, which pardons were as common as dirt in those days so that the country could get back in gear instead of letting lawyers re-litigate every detail of the war for the next 50 years in court. Johnson probably had no idea who Bourland was other than another of a hundred things to sign today.

Bourland was in fact actually put on trial for his war crimes, but the pardon as well as an 1866 Texas law that said that actions taken under authority of the Confederate government were automatically defined as legal made him essentially untouchable. This latter law was designed to validate the ordinary day-to-day governmental proceedings of the CSA so that criminals who'd been convicted and sent to prison and court action on granny's probated will which were done by CSA courts would not suddenly be reversed because they were "illegal courts" which would cause unending chaos. The problem wasn't with the intent, but that it was written so broadly even the occasional war criminal like Bourland fell under its umbrella. At any rate he thereafter kept a low profile until his death on his plantation up in Delaware Bend at around 79 years of age.

This was the land on which I was standing next to the forest-reclaimed bridge. Of the 30 or so slaves he was known to own, I could find no records that any of them ever came back up out of the cotton fields on the river bottoms, although records in those days were pretty murky and slave graves up in those parts don't have much in the way of markings.

The entire Delaware Bend area was listed in an east-coast newspaper even as late as the late 1800s as one of the three most dangerous places in the United States, the other two being Leadville, CO, and Tombstone, AZ.

In short, there's a lot of dark history in these quiet, grim woods. As there is everywhere, I suppose.

The forest had completely overrun the roadbed, with full-sized trees right up to the edge of the concrete abutment I'd finally spotted. The top edge of it was probably 30' above the creek bottom. I scrambled all over it, getting pictures, measurements, mapping, and GPS data. I had been right — the previous best location I could find ANYWHERE was at least 200+ yards off (more than two football field lengths), which in this environment had just as well be a mile. The north abutment was the camouflaged monolith I'd found. The south abutment had long since collapsed into an overgrown and mossed slab of broken concrete, obvious from above, less-so from the creek bottom where it laid. Nothing remained of whatever had spanned between them.

Huffing and puffing after the climb back up out of the creek bed, I got back to the clearing and my SUV just as it was getting dark for real. I spent about 20 minutes peeling the gummy mud off my boots before I got behind the steering wheel. I sat there for awhile under the dome light transcribing sloppy field-notes about long-past matters and ruined structures that had nothing to do with me or my life, and found myself whistling tunelessly as I did. And I suddenly realized that I'd let the six months of work go, and already knew what I was going to replace it with.

I hear that some people just watch TV or go walk the dog when they get stuck.  It figures that this pain-in-the-ass waste of a day would be the version that works for me. 

(shrug) What are ya' gonna do?