Log Cabin Days

Among the books in my tall stack of research for the current epic is one with the very dry title of "Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture" - which has actually proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together- which is good, especially since I need to write a description of building such a thing as a log building. Little details like how many days it would take to build one, what size it would generally be, and the layout - these little details count.

Previously, the one description of the process that I could bring readily to mind was "Little House on the Prairie" - and it turns out that Pa Ingalls was not building that cabin to much of a standard. He may not even have been all that skilled as a carpenter, but since he was working on it mostly by himself, and in a place where the swiftness of getting a roof of some sort over his family counted for everything - allowances were made.

That was almost everyone's first and most urgent need, upon settling on a new grant or homestead, that and planting some kind of crop in the ground; building a cabin, to meet immediate shelter needs. This book differentiates very clearly the difference between a log cabin, and a log house. A log cabin was small, twelve to fourteen foot square, windowless, with a dirt floor. They were scratch and hastily put up to use as a temporary dwelling place, whereas a log house was larger, permanent, and much more carefully constructed; even quite elaborate as to comforts. For much of the 19th century, at least in Texas it was a matter of some embarrassment to still be living in a log cabin after a couple of years; rather like living in a trailer would be. In fact, many log houses were covered with siding and paint as soon as their owners could afford to do so. If they had lived in a little cabin before building the permanent house, the cabin was frequently reused as a smoke-house, or a stable.

Pace "Little House" and a whole raft of western movies, I'd always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a "Lincoln-log" house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.

Logs were prepped before construction, either by rough-hewing --- cutting a shallow straight face on two opposite sides, or "planking"--- cutting a thick plank out of the center of the log. In a very small number of cases, each log would be square-hewn, on all four sides, resulting in a heavy, square beam. More usually, only the bottom log--- the sill, and the topmost, the "plate" which supported the roof rafters would be squared. These logs would usually be the largest; if the structure was to have a wooden floor, the sills would be mortised, with the floor joists lap-jointed into them. Sometimes a third sill would be added, for extra support.

A log house went up pretty fast, apparently, once all the timbers had been cut and prepped: the book gives an estimate of two men working two days for a fairly simple, square (single pen) structure, and three men working three days for a more elaborate one. Roofs were usually constructed with the gable-ends on the sides of a two-slope roof, with pairs of rafters lap-jointed or mortised together at the roof-ridge, at about a 45-degree angle. Long laths or slats run cross-ways between the rafters. Most log houses were roofed with cut shingles. Porches and sheds attached at a later date would usually have a shallower roof line, described as a "witches' hat" in silhouette.

Doors and windows were cut in the walls after basic construction was completed. They were neither large nor numerous, since cutting them weakened the structure. The carpenters would set wedges into the spaces between the logs to prevent them sagging, and cut vertically until the desired size was reached. Then a door or window frame of planks would be nailed or pegged into place to stabilize the cut logs. Another reason for having a minimum of windows in many parts of Texas, especially in the early days was the ever-present danger of Indian attacks. A number of houses from that time actually had so-called shooting holes, two or three in each wall. Windows were secured with wooden shutters; before glass was available, filled with oiled paper or thin-scraped oiled rawhide, which admitted some light.

In all but a handful of log houses made from carefully fitted hewn timbers, there was a gap between each log which needed to be filled in order to make the house weather-tight. Since so many houses would have been built with new timber it was necessary to allow for shrinkage and warping, as well as the natural taper of the logs. The gaps might be filled with thin slats nailed or driven into place, flat pieces of stone and mortar, or clay mixed with animal hair, straw, or moss - or just plain mud. In a house built of logs which had been roughly hewn, bark left on the top and bottom helped the chinking material adhere to the rough surface in between logs.

About the most common floor plans for log houses in Texas was called a "dog-trot", or "dog-run"; two single-pen rooms with a covered but open breezeway in between. Sometimes each room had it's own fireplace; but many house built after the Civil War did not have fireplaces at all, since metal stoves had become so widely available for heating and cooking. Quite a few houses originally built with fireplaces, were retrofitted with stoves and the chimneys and fireplaces removed. Larger windows were cut when glass became cheaper and more widely available.

In later years, many log houses were added on to, or covered with siding; after all, there was a whiff of poverty attached to living in such a house and sometimes it is hard to tell, at a casual glance, that there is a log house underneath the siding and plaster, the porch added at the front, and the shed kitchen on the back. Having read this book, I am resolved to look very carefully at the oldest neighborhoods of some of the small towns around where I live - knowing that there may be a log house, lurking in the heart of suburbia.

The Cowboy Way

I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows,  given that the classic "cowboy" functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final years of the frontier per se offered all kinds of interesting potential story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives -  but still.

For the generic cowboy was a himself hired hand. Yes, indeed - working for wages as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle -  of all the domesticated animals only very slightly brighter than sheep.  And, not to put too much of a fine point on it - herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-skill, low-paying labor, most often seasonable, and most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn't do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, mostly until better employment opportunities came along.

You have to wonder, especially when there were so many other truly heroic epic adventurers available to hang the hero worship on. How did the cowboy even begin to loom so large -  especially when the cattle business (and it was a business!) didn't really begin to thrive until all the excitement was practically over? What about the mountain men, living on their wits in the early days, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? And surely the miners in the various gold and silver booms -  they worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves in the earlies and for their employers later on. And what about my own personal favorites among the frontier archetypes, the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were quite a bit more likely to have adventurous encounters with the lawless element, or particularly hostile Indians -  although even the stereotype of the Western towns being particularly lawless falls down a bit in contemporary comparison to elements of big cities in the East. Why one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, moves and television shows is enough to make you shrug your shoulders and say  "que?!" to the camera, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

So how did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? Damned if I know, although I can take some guesses. The popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. Right time, right place; and it has often been noticed that the typical Western TV show or movie perpetuated ever since is more often set in about the 1865-1885s time frame. Telegraph and the transcontinental railroads are in place, the Indians are reserved (with sporadic exceptions necessary to the plot of the moment, of course) and all the little towns have wooden sidewalks and glass windows, suitable for a reckless cowboy to ride his horse down one and crash through the other. But still  a pretty limited visualization of the frontier west -  surely there was more, even in the late 19th century for popular culture to fixate on?

I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn't based on a melding of one particular and very old archetype and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight,  able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in the lively yet strangely scholarly tome "Cracker Culture", the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock rather favored herding barely domesticated animals (and hunting wild game) rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench -  even if it didn't pay very much at all.

It was totally fascinating to go back and explore the roots of the cattle industry - as I did for the final volume of Adelsverein ( or "Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms") -  just to discover how very, very different it was from what has always been popularly presented. Owen Wister didn't get the half of it. It turned out to be something very different that you might think, just watching old movies and TV shows.

The front of the Alamo is instantly recognizable; almost like a stage set. Everybody knows the bed-stead outline with what would have been a pair of towers on either side, a pair of shell-supported niches on either side of the door, and the window over it … were there ever statues in those niches? I’ve always wondered about that. It was a mission church, when first built, then a chapel for the Mexican Army garrison, and at some point the roof over the nave and sanctuary collapsed in. When the Alamo achieved fame everlasting, in the space of 14 days and a murderous hour and a half of pitched battle on a dark April morning, the church building had made into a bastion, filled with a platform and a ramp of packed earth and rubble to make a gun-platform for three cannon at the apse end. Later, it was repaired, and re-roofed, serving for decades as a US Army garrison and warehouse, as what was left of the mission compound was torn down, and the town of San Antonio de Bexar crept closer and closer to the old mission buildings. Eventually, the Army decamped to a new-built compound a little way north of town, and the old chapel became a shrine again.

What hardly show in the usual pictures are the trees and gardens on either side, and in the back, which served as a backdrop for the San Antonio Living History Association’s “Fall at the Alamo” last weekend. My daughter thought there would be quite a few more re-enactors than there were – and as it turned out, I was much more interested in the re-enactors who had demonstrations and talks about early Texas than she was.

She was enchanted by the lace-making demonstration, however. Two ladies were hand-making thread lace, weaving thread from dozens of slender ivory or wood bobbins, each bobbin trimmed with a bauble of beads. The lace pattern was mounted on either a pillow or a little round drum, studded with pins in a precise pattern, and the threads were woven around the pins and twisted with other threads – it was fascinating to watch. There was a spinner, with a basket of hanks of yarn, dyed with natural dyes, all in very muted shades, including a pink made from cochineal … which according to another re-enactor, dressed as a Delaware Indian, was one of Texas’s main exports, in the early days.

He actually had a bottle of cochineal insects, little grey-whitish scale bugs that feed on cactus plants. When dried and pulverized, a red dye is extracted from these little insects, a red dye which takes superbly to wool. He had a table full of samples of commodities harvested or produced in Texas in the early days – by early, meaning Republic of Texas or earlier. Some of them I had already known about – like pecans. And leather goods, rice and salt.

I think very fondly of re-enactors when I am working up a book; there is no better way to get an idea of actually how something was accomplished, like starting a fire from flint and steel. Another re-enactor showed us how – not just with a chip of flint rock and what looked like a link from a steel chain, but also with the aid of a little scrap of carbonized cloth to catch the spark, and a wad of vegetable fiber – from, of all things, a mouses’ nest – to feed that little spark and nurse it along. I would have never thought of that, so accustomed to using matches or a lighter in these days.

 As nearly as I cound see, the gentlemen re-enactors took it all very seriously, being turned out in the finest early 19th century finery; waistcoats, high-buttoned jackets, tall books and all - even to fancy spurs with jingle-bobs on them. My, their spurs really do go jingle-jangle! One of the marked differences in the two movies about the Alamo (The John Wayne one, and the Billy-Bob Thornton version) is that the more recent one seemed to be a bit more authentic as to costuming. I recall reading an interview with the costume designer, who was asked some sort of question about  if the cast was dressed in the usual sort of western gear, and the designer replied that, no - nothing especially western, just what would have been the proper fashion for 1836, or maybe during the decade or so before. Kind of interesting to contemplate - that the Texians at the Alamo, when dressed in their best, may have looked very much more like Mr. Darcy than Shane. So - no cowboy hats or boots, no jeans, nothing like what people are used to think of as "western" dress, which is rather more a creation of the later 19th-century west. These gentlemen of early Texas wore tall top-hats, or billed caps, tail-coats or hunting coats made of heavy canvas or buckskin, trimmed with fringe - and very fancy waistcoats. That was a very male bit of a splash- the fancy waistcoat, especially when accessorized with a huge hunting knife.  

The Mild, Mild West

I succumbed to the blandishments of the overloaded bookshelves at Half-Price Books recently, whilst getting a good price on some redundant DVDs. I just knew I shouldn’t have wandered into the section housing assortments of ‘Texiana’ but I did and I was tempted. Since I can resist anything but temptation, I gave in and bought a slightly oversized volume (with color plates!) with the gripping title of “German Artist on the Texas Frontier: Friedrich Richard Petri” for a sum slightly less than the current price on Amazon.

Who was Friedrich Richard Petri, you might ask – and rightfully so for chances are practically no one outside of the local area might have heard of him, he finished very few substantial paintings, was only resident in the Hill Country of Texas for about seven years, and died relatively young.

He was one of those student intellectuals caught up in the ferment of the 1848, along with his friend and fellow-artist (and soon to be brother-in-law) Hermann Lungkwitz. Upon the failure of that movement to reduce the power of the old nobility in favor of something more closely resembling a modern democracy, the two of them resolved to immigrate to America, that promising new land. Once there, they settled upon traveling Texas, where the Adelsverein had previously established substantial enclaves of German settlers, and the weather was supposed to be particularly mild – a consideration, for Richard Petri was plagued by lung ailments. Besides Hermann’s wife, Petri’s sister Elisabet, other members of their families joined them: Hermann’s widowed mother, and his brother and sister, and Petri’s other sister, Marie. They would become part of the second wave of settlers in the Hill Country; probably just as well, because neither of the Lungkwitz men or Richard Petri had any skill or inclination towards farming, or any other useful pioneering skill. Hermann and Richard were artists, Adolph Lungkwitz was a trained metalsmith and glass fabricator.

Traveling by easy stages down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then presumably by regular packet boat to Indianola, the Petri-Lungkwitz families arrived in New Braunfels. They rented a small farm there in the spring of 1851, but did not intend to settle in New Braunfels permanently. It seemed they wished to look around; and so they did, house-hunting and sketching scenes and quick portraits of each other and the people they met. Hermann Lungkwitz later made use of these sketches and scenes in an elaborate lithograph of San Antonio. In July, 1852, the families settled on 320 acres at Live Oak, about five miles southwest of Fredericksburg – and there they settled in, trying to make some sort of living out of farm work and art. They were unaccustomed to the former, although from this account, they seem to have sprung from stock accustomed to hard work, if not precisely in the sort of agrarian work required to make a living in a frontier settlement.

They seem to have gotten along pretty well at that, for the book is full of sketches, watercolors and finished paintings by Petri and Lungkwitz; accomplished and vivid sketches and water-colors of their friends, their families and the countryside around. There are landscapes of the rolling limestone hills, the stands of oak trees and meadows around Fredericksburg, a distant view of the town, with a brave huddle of rooftops, a poignant sketch of Elisabet, mourning beside the grave of hers and Hermann’s baby son, who lived for only three weeks after his birth. There are drawings of their farmstead, of neatly fenced areas around the two small log houses in which they lived, charming sketches of his sister’s children and their pet deer, of theatrical productions in Fredericksburg – all elaborate costumes and ballet dancers – and of the women in the family going to pay formal calls, balancing their parasols, sitting primly in the seats of an ox-cart. There are sketches of friends, of officers from the Federal army’s garrison at nearby Ft. Martin Scott, of sister Marie’s wedding to neighbor Jacob Kuechler. And there are elaborate sketches of Indians, mostly people of that Comanche tribe which had signed a peace treaty with the German settlers of Fredericksburg and the surrounding areas, for Friedrich Richard Petri had a sympathetic eye and considerable skill. Oh, this is indeed the American frontier, but not quite as we are accustomed to think about it – that never-never land which comes to mind whenever anyone thinks “Old West”.

And that is why I bought the book, out of funds that I could not well afford, because I have used some of Richard Petri’s sketches to form my mental image of the German communities in ante-bellum Texas. The sketches are lovely, detailed and revealing. How people dressed, what their houses looked like, that sort of fences they put around them and the sort of gardens and native plans they let grow, how they went about their work and leisure. This is not the tiresomely familiar ‘old west’ of so many old movies and television shows – black hats and white hats and the tense shoot-out in the middle of a dusty street. This is something altogether different; a peaceable and cultured ‘old west’, of singing societies, and community theatrical presentations and concerts, of homes where the Comanche Indians came peaceably, without leaving a trail of fire, theft and murder behind them. I will write more of this particular ‘old west’, which is why I bought this book in the first place. (An extra from the public library in Gonzales, as it appears from the markings within)

Richard Petri fell ill in late 1857 – of his old lung complaint, or some combination of that and malaria was never quite clear. While his brothers-in-law and other relations were busy in the fields and about their other business, he went down to the nearby Pedernales River and drowned. The supposition is that he was ragingly thirsty, or hoped to cool his terrible fever in the waters. A combination of inability to earn a living by farming, in combination with the turmoil brought on by the Civil War drove the remainder of the family from Live Oak. Hermann and Elisabet and their children moved into San Antonio, where he partnered with an old friend there in a photography studio. Marie’s husband Jacob Keuchler survived the massacre of Unionists on the Nueces, and returned from exile in Mexico after the war to become Commissioner of the State Land Office. And a portion of Richard Petri’s collection of sketches was eventually reassembled, although the number of actual finished paintings is on the light side. Many of them were apparently sent to Germany, and might still exist there, in attics and storerooms, or in the dark corners of old-fashioned parlors, in the houses of people who think of them in passing as just a nice 19th century rural water-color, and never realize that they have a relic of the mild, mild west in their possession.

 (I drew on some of Petri and Lungkwitz' paintings, sketches and water-colors in other books in working up my mental landscape of Fredericksburg for The Adelsverein Trilogy. They are briefly mentioned as neighbors of Hansi and Liesel Richter as 'those artistic people", and a small painting by one of them - a gift from Liesel to her sister Magda - is one of the items which Magda Becker and her children carry away from their own farm, when they are thrown off the Becker property during the Civil War.)