The Rio Grande~Pathway of the Colonizers

The Rio Grande River is the border between Texas and Mexico, the fifth longest river in the United States, and many simply don’t know about it. But Don Juan de Onate and an army of soldiers and colonists knew about it and in 1598 crossed it and then followed through the mountain pass which became known as El Paso del Norte, today’s El Paso, Texas, my home town. The Rio Grande plays a role in the novel based on my father’s tale “Dos Gringos.”

As a kid and a Boy Scout, we used to splash in the river, known to be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” actually a muddy waterway about knee-deep. But, in Onate’s day it was crystal clear and a life-saver for his army. From there he marched north with his soldiers, horses, and mules, fighting Indians and eventually founding Santa Fe, now the oldest continual state capital in the United States. The Rio Grande flows out of the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado and streams straight south, splitting New Mexico, to El Paso where it forms the American border with Mexico and then on to the Gulf of Mexico, a total of about 1900 miles.

North of Santa Fe, near Taos, New Mexico, I recently visited this river of my youth, but there near its source, the river was a noisy rushing stream in a rocky deep canyon. Beautiful.  What a piece of history.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Texas History Rewritten

Napoleon said, “History is what men have decided upon.” When I saw a PBS television show a few years ago about The Battle of the Alamo, I knew what he meant.

 As a high school student in El Paso, Texas, we dutifully learned all about the founding of The Republic of Texas and the famous 1836 Battle of the Alamo.  But we never were taught about the thousands of Hispanics who lived there long before its settlement by the migrating Anglos from what were later the southern states of the new United States of America. These Hispanics were the Tejanos, an independent frontier people who immigrated from the Spanish Canary Islands originally in 1731 and settled in San Antonio which was then northeastern Mexico. This was long before the stories of Davy Crockett, James Bowie, or John Wayne. They were farmers and merchants, who rebelled from Spain, and produced leaders such as Juan Seguin who commanded a force that fought Santa Ana and helped establish an independent Texas.  And there was Jose Antonio Navarro who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence.  

I am glad to now know, after all these years, about this small but brave people who settled Texas, fought for its independence and died along the famous names we learned about  in the Texas history books.   We read now again in Texas the identity and role of the Tejanos is being dismissed in their textbooks. Napoleon was right.

Read more about Texas. Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Pancho Villa in “Dos Gringos”

Readers of “Dos Gringos” know that the infamous Pancho Villa is not a major character in the story. But surely his side of The Mexican Revolution is very much there, and represented by “The Hawk” who personifies the spirit of the revolution and is the savior of the common man for young Tomás. Villa killed his first man at 16, a man who had raped his younger sister. He worked in the mines near Parral, Chihuahua, where much of the “Dos Gringos” story takes place. He soon tired of the laborer’s life and added bank robbery to cattle rustling and murder on the list of crimes for which he was wanted by the Díaz government.

He  joined Francisco Madero’s revolutionary forces, thereby making a historical transition from bandido to revolucionario. The charismatic figure was able to recruit an army of thousands. Villa also became something of a folk hero in the U.S, and Hollywood filmmakers as well as U.S. newspaper photographers flocked to Northern Mexico to record his battle exploits–many of which were staged for the benefit of the cameras. Villa ruled over northern Mexico like a medieval warlord. During fiestas the mustachioed legend would dance all night with female camp followers, although he didn’t drink. According to one of Villa’s last surviving widows, he officially married 26 times.

He attacked Juarez and my Norwegian grandmother, after she and my grandfather moved there to be near my newly wedded father, told me of Villa’s cannon ball landing in her front yard, which I remember was a quite small piece of ground.

In 1923 he was assassinated while returning from bank business in Parral. Today Villa is remembered with pride by most Mexicans for having led the most important military campaigns of the constitutionalist revolution. Don’t underestimate the respect his name still garners in Mexico. If Villa in not personally in “Dos Gringos,” his spirit surely is.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Mexican Revolution Centenary

The story of “Dos Gringos” takes place in August, 1916 in the midst of The Mexican Revolution. The Revolution began on November 20, 1910 and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were strategic locations in that civil war which lasted a decade into the 1920s.  November 20, 2010 is the official centennial date.  Many affairs will take place in El Paso about then.  The El Paso Public Library will sponsor a weeklong event the last month of October and I have been invited to attend, to discuss “Dos Gringos” and sign books, etc. Other events are scheduled about that time and I am working on a schedule.

I remember my Norwegian grandmother telling me of a cannonball landing in her El Paso front yard, presumably from one of Pancho Villa’s attacks on Juarez—or even El Paso. Many of the places in El Paso now in the history books were common to me as a teen, but now I know why. It has been quite an education writing this book supporting my father’s tale and I am happy to meet old friends and make new ones. I am looking forward to the October visits to my old home town.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

The El Paso Times reports on “Dos Gringos”

Ramón Rentería of  The  El Paso Times wrote: “Fred R. Andresen recounts the early life of his Norwegian immigrant father in “Dos Gringos,” an action-adventure novella set in El Paso and the ore-rich mountains of Chihuahua in 1916, as the Mexican Revolution still flared.”

Renteria summarized, “… a penniless Norwegian and an Irish drifter meet in an El Paso bar, where a Pittsburgh con man hires them to fix a gold mine in Mexico. Andresen’s easy, quick read also touches on other historical aspects of intrigue during the Revolution: spies, gunrunners, and Germans in Mexico determined to try to keep the United States out of World War I.”

“Andresen, an international businessman was born and raised in El Paso. He grew up in…a brick house in the desert north of El Paso, where his father worked for many years as an expert machinist with El Paso Natural Gas Co.”

His first book, “Walking on Ice: An American Businessman in Russia,” a collection of essays based on six years he spent working in Russia, was widely praised.

 For the whole article please see http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15285818?IADID=Search-www.elpasotimes.com-www.elpasotimes.com

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

“The Zimmermann Telegram” and The Mexican Revolution

 One of my favorite books is Barbara Tuchman’s “The Zimmermann Telegram,” about Kaiser Germany’s wild attempt to keep America out of World War I. The Americans were quite happy with their isolation from all that death and destruction in Europe. But, we were shipping guns and supplies to England and the Kaiser didn’t want to pull America into the war by torpedoing one of our ships. So Zimmermann, the Foreign Secretary for the German Empire, sent a telegram to the German Ambassador in Mexico City, via Washington, to offer the President of Mexico that if they sided with Germany, when the war was over, Germany winning of course, they would help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Those wily Brits in the famous Room 40 intercepted the cable, broke the code, and told the Americans. For the Germans, as is often the case in the affairs of men, it achieved just the opposite of its intended purpose. Even before this strategic event in January, 1917, Germany was financing the guns being supplied to both sides of the Revolution. Much of those guns and ammunition came from a big hardware wholesaler in El Paso, Krakauer, Zork, and Moye which figures into my book “Dos Gringos,” as does the black suited man who traveled about Mexico delivering the arms to both the Federáles and Pancho Villa. That man was my grandfather, for whom I am named. Read “Dos Gringos” for more of the story, and read Barbara Tuchman’s book, “The Zimmermann Telegram.” Trust me.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

The Desert was my Playground

 After reading “Dos Gringos” many have asked about growing up in El Paso and the desert outside of twon. I wrote a number of memoirs for my children and I will share some on this web. Read down for some of the thrills this boy enjoyed.

The sun rose over the Huecos to the east and set over the Franklin Mountains that spread across the desert to the west. On the other side of the Franklins, the tail end of the Rockies, was the Rio Grande River  and Mexico. Several winters it snowed on the desert and that was a momentary thrill.

Rain came sporadically, only totaling three or four inches a year. When it did rain, the mud puddles became pools of fun and overnight spawned wiggly little tadpoles that turned into peepers and quickly died in the following heat and drought. I tracked my muddy feet through the house. The soil being “caléche”, an almost impervious white calcium layer, the rain puddles could not percolate and would evaporate in a day or so. The sweetest smell of my childhood was the desert after a rain. The greasewood or creosote bush, its small green leaves washed by a rain, gave off a pungent fragrance, like a thank you to the heavens for a welcome drink.

Read more »

A Desert Childhood

An ivory-white army, resplendent in the illuminating golden rays of the setting sun, marched invincibly across the black horizon of a receding storm. Sixty miles behind them, through the crystal desert air washed clean by a spring rain, was the undulating profile of the Hueco Mountains. Between them and the safety of our red-brick front porch, stretched the white army. I couldn’t tell which way they were moving, but somehow I decided they were marching north. That is the way the blooming yucca plants seemed to the imagination of a seven-year-old boy, standing with his mother behind the flower box on the front porch of a three-room brick house in the West Texas desert north of El Paso  in 1939.

 The above is the first paragraph of part of a childhood memoir I wrote for children. I recently was interviewed by an editor from the El Paso Times about my book “Dos Gringos” which he had read and enjoyed. He asked about my childhood in El Paso and I told him I had written about much of it for my children and I sent him several pages. I may revisit those memories and post some of them here.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

About Genealogy and the Alligators of El Paso

I have never been big on genealogy, but of course curious about where my own ancestors came from and why. And I changed mind a bit after attending, with a friend, a meeting of the Genealogical Society of Hispanic America-Southern California.

There was a speaker who talked on the history of the area around San Bernardino and Riverside called Agua Mansa and La Placita settled in the early 19th century by Spanish colonists from New Mexico. Many of the members were descendent from those pioneers who trekked all that way along the trail lacking water and attacked by Indians. Nothing remains of Agua Mansa today, except the burial ground, on the hill above the river. Read more »

El Paso~Change and No Change.

Writing “Dos Gringos” was a satisfying experience. Although most of story came from my father’s tale of his escapades in The Mexican Revolution, being there in that border city, El Paso, my home town, after fifty-two years of world travel, was a rebirth in a way for me. In many ways, nothing had changed in that town, except now it seems English is a second language.. It is still a city far away from others. It occupies the pass which the Rio Grande River carves its way south from its mountain source in northern New Mexico, then south separating Texas and Mexico all the way to The Gulf of Mexico.  Growing up there, I sort of thought myself as a mixture, by parents Norwegian and German and half my friends Mexicans.

I am rediscovering its history: from the Indians, the Spanish beginning in 1598, the following  conquistadors, then Texas in 1836 and the wild life of the frontier, its roll in the Mexican Revolution. I grew up on the desert during World War Two and the occupation with the huge military presence and the rockets at White Sands Proving Grounds on the horizon north of my house. Today the drug related crime in Juarez worries the Americans.

Is there anything for me after “Dos Gringos?” I don’t know, but the place is filled with stories.

“Dos Gringos” coming soon!