The project is an overlay of the demographies settling of Texas from 1850, the families, but even more of the land of the Edwards Plateau, the limesetone, the creeks, the
The Herbs of Bandera Pass are typical of that part of the Edwards plateau of Texas extending east to Austin and west to big bend so hold modicum between and of course it depends on how you approach the pass whether from the north through Verde Creek and the gradual slopes up or from the south, or from bandera more slopes up for the rocky part of the pass is westly found, I mean where the water of sthe creek begins to flow, but of course there are creeks all over the that part, flowing. a narrow, V-shaped natural erosion cut in the long limestone ridge separates the Medina and Guadalupe valleys just south of the Bandera-Kerr county line. The plants of the Pass are then discovered according to rainfall and soil, and range according to goat cropping and cedar spread, for the land was first open fields of grass and game, which is why it attracted so many different types of Poles, Hispanics, apaches, commanches, Tonkawa, Delaware and hence calvary posts around the contest for living that takes every day outside in Texas wih the armadillo and possum and deer. The patina of cowboy and cattle drives put over this and the patina of exotic game ranches and King anch gass put over that, wth fire ant and live oak decline and the great feral hog invasion make a mixture of tales. Big games hunters probably don’t know the hedeoma ever when they smell it up from their feet. But that is what the Herbs of Bandera Pass intend to remedy, along with the confluence of cattle trails from the south and Indian trails from the east and north, not to speak of the coral snake and great rock granite boulderes tha sit atop the springs, that the shelter shrines to our Lady of Guadalupe built by Hispanic wrok gangs who lived on the land whole seasesons cutting cedar couldn’t cure, or the mescal beans turned orange after passing through the digestion of a a goat couldn’t, the knowledge of the influx and out go of all these forces, peoples, animals and inscects in the grasses and and herbs, for what isn’t an herb so to speak but anything that has some use for decoration or health or medicine or cooking something a little beterl. So there at the pass met all types of folk trading of flint from the north and for the mescal bean and buckeye around the large stone middens of hundreds of years not all in the basement of the Picklle University warehouse. Depending on where you walk is what you’ll see. Along the creeks you get horsteale reed, on the rocks agarita, in the grazed fields Mexican hat, at the tops and bottom and canyoun mescal bean, in the deserts candillia, in the orchards of course fruit, but that depends on the soil and maybe you have well to irrigate, and of couse you need protection against flood with it always notable in these lands, and of course if you’re so bold to go east of Austin as far as the Swedish farmlands of Elgin you have to deal with osage orange of old and cisterns, but not the cypress of the creeks.
“Bandera Pass is a narrow, V-shaped natural erosion cut in the long limestone ridge separating the Medina and Guadalupe valleys just south of the Bandera-Kerr county line. in Austin.The pass is indicated as the terminal point of an Old Comanche Trail from Nacogdoches. In the 1850s Bandera Pass saw a stream of soldiers and new settlers passing between the lumber camp on the Medina named Bandera and the new cavalry post of Camp Verde beyond the pass in the valley of Verde Creek. Probably the strangest procession ever to cross the pass was that on August 26 and 27, 1856, of the herd of camels on the last leg of their journey from the Middle East to Camp Verde, where they were employed as beasts of burden in the short-lived Camel Corps of the United States Cavalry. With safety guaranteed by the presence of the cavalry, the pass continued to gain prominence as the gateway between the ranch country of South Texas and the high plains. After the abandonment of Camp Verde by both Union and succeeding Confederate forces, local minutemen and vigilantes stood guard at the pass throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. Their duty was to intercept carriers of contraband and livestock rustlers who were taking advantage of the wartime breakdown of law and order in the remote area. After the return of normalcy, Bandera Pass again saw streams of heavy traffic, now of cattle being driven north to Kansas on what came to be known as the Western Trail. During the period of the trail drives from Texas to northern railheads, Bandera became a booming center for trail outfitters and contractors, as did Kerrville, and most young men of the locality found employment as cowboys. The old trail became the road for wagons and later automobiles from Bandera to Kerrville and was first paved about 1940. It was designated Farm Road 689 and later incorporated by the State Department of Highways and Public Transportation into State Highway 173, which originates at Devine and ends at State Highway 16 near the city limit of Kerrville.”
I come to these tasks honestly, being first preoccupied with the spiritual sense of the American colonies, their conflict with the natural and embodiment of it, the history of their adventures and bloodshed, their attempt on the unknown world of the sixteenth century. After this work was completed in a dissertation I came to examine the early settling of Philadelphia where I learned my family was among the first to occupy lands about 1717 in Montgomery Co, Skippack, Worcester, Oley. Having traversed many lengthy trails and records in the aggregation of these materials documented further by an aunt who curated these artifacts and records herself, I came as an executor into possession of the records of five generations of my wife’s families and their settlement of Texas from the 1850s,, the Clarks and Cosgroves of Bandera, the Parsons of Hondo. These matters involve both independent arrivals in Texas as with Amasa Clark and more organized settling at the influence by the impresario Henri Castro in Hondo, instrumental in founding the colony that settled that region. These matters and attitudes that come to an outlier at birth can not be taken credit for. Appalled at the orphan children my own age behind the bars of the orphanage that rose up with stone walls as a prison I could not from the back porch of that row house on Segwick St. in the first five years of life without seeing, I come by birth to the attitudes of love and joy as a gift, positive and negative. By birth I say, hence they are a gift, not my own but I wear them and always and only have been given entrance into human society by these gifts of enthusiasm and readiness, but they were accompanied with a strong concern for the outcast and lowly, even if I was not one. I was the tenth generation of that Swiss family of the Palatinate made palatable by the many examples of Mennonite piety and involvement shown in their personal histories, which I considered noble, taking for granted from my own experience of the Truth that not to take a life, to live with the earth and not against it and to serve others is the greatest truth. however I did not know any of this at birth, so these things were just in me. To explore the gift I have been given these materials celebrate my own practice of the truths as shown in my serving as horticulturist of the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden and conservation of hill country watersheds, serving as faculty on two traditional black American colleges, and always and foremost desiring to walk in peace even while engaging conflicts. However, before I met the Lord that summer all manner of spiritual events approached me, even as child, or especially as a child I saw and felt but could not name the spiritual horrors, but even then He covered me with his feathers, for I went astray many times by age 16 and my conscience was burned often by compulsions you have to live with life long, tell no one, or some one, as you will.
Conflicts make you what you are, set boundaries. I talk to myself like this in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, going over again and again the perils, and mishaps to counter in a sense and understand those that fall and have fallen to my sons. To imagine I have been given sons, who I raised with a compassionate wife in the enthusiasms above, is amazing in the aftermath, what I call the afterlife, since I have influence on them no longer beyond an occasional conversation when they may-hap visit on me astonishing revelations of their lives and of each other, experiences and facts which I know myself but could not document with such completion as they give, which grieve me beyond telling, but there is nothing I can do. I had my chance and took every opportunity when I did, believe me, I did. I was all in as a father, friend, coach, brother, wayfarer, then they made their own choices, as I did too. It was a three way partnership altogether, now grown apart by the forces of age and travail that grieve all of us who come to end of our lives. “Oh where has all the bright company gone who is fitting for the diamond’s dance, who left, who left the studded cuff of night,” which I remember as a version of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillens, “They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring here;” this indeed was responded to in Edith Sitwells Where has all the bright compay gone, which Babette Deutsch in Poetry in Our Time wrote, “like the medieval hangings that kept the cold away from secular kings and princes of the Church, the finest of [Dame Edith’s] poems have a luxurious beauty that serves to grace the bareness, to diminish the chill of this bare, cold age.”
Texas Rare Earths
In sort he min(d)e in Sierra Blanca, presently process in CO, will move to Hondo to a 550,000 sq ft plant
The Round Top Mountain near Sierra Blanca, in Hudspeth County, Texas, holds one of the biggest deposits of heavy rare-earth elements (REE) in the US.USA Rare Earth has announced it will process rare earths onsite and projects the mine is likely to yield 16 or 17 rare earth elements and more than 300,000 metric tons of rare earth oxides. (One metric ton equates to 2,204.62 pounds.) “Once we are fully operational, we will have a fully end-to-end domestic rare earths supply chain that will make our country and economy more secure,” says Director of Environmental Services & Sustainability Aleisha Knochenhauer with USA Rare Earth. here
The Round Top project is located approximately 12.8km north-west of Sierra Blanca in Hudspeth County, Texas.
The REE and critical minerals deposit is located in the Trans-Pecos region in far-west Texas that forms part of the Chihuahuan Desert, the biggest desert in North America.
USA Rare Earth also entered into a strategic relationship with Australia-based Arafura Resources to process heavy rare earth concentrates from Arfura’s 100% owned Nolans Bore Neodymium-Praseodymium (NdPr) deposit in Australia’s Northern Territory, at the Colorado pilot plant, in December 2019.
The Colorado pilot plant is claimed to be the first processing facility outside of China which will be capable of separating the full range of rare earths.
After a successful demonstration, the pilot plant is planned to be moved to Texas and scaled up for commercial operation.
Blue Line Corp.’s expansion is part of a joint venture with Lynas, an Australia-based rare-earth mining company. The company is planning a 550,000 square foot expansion to its facility in Hondo, Texas.
During the initial phase of expansion to rare earth mineral processing, Blue Line Corp. is expected to focus on the separation of terbium (used in solid-state devices), dysprosium (used in magnets and lasers), and other heavy rare-earth.
“[KM] is going to fail with their Space Alien Reveal. The failure should be quite spectacular. The Reveal itself will be exciting, and puzzling, both to the normies, as well as the cadre of shills in the woo-woo world of the internet. Kerry and her ‘interviewees’, as well as the Pleadian, and other ‘space races’ story tellers, will all have to redo their approach as the ‘truth’ is brought out by the [KM] in the form of ‘official government sources’. Clif high spider beings from mars it will be obvious that the audience for the Old Testament of the Bible, the Torah, was entirely focused on a single, smallish, tribe of humans. The book had been warped over time to support a global psychological operation on the part of the [KM]”
5/21/22 Advertisements for anonymous. Civilization made itself over in a series. First nations of nature were first in the natural but last in the societal worlds, there they were third nations. First, second, third presumes a fourth and so it goes, but the attitude behind this writing presumes a person, a child of 5 to 15, who lives in the first world of nature to understand it. It is a ghost plane because it exists in bits, pieces, parts, memories, guesses and feelings.
First nation status of the tree, the grass, the hill, the river, the rock and the four elements in all their forms are tainted with the third world of vanity. The child only knows this after the fact, as is just, for the first world in the moon, the crawfish, strings of turtle eggs in lakes, the sudden wind of a storm is known in itself, with observation, cognition late arrived. The presumptive child has to live in a time in this natural place. Time intrudes the further it gets toward its implicit explicit end. It speeds up, but for the child in the natural there is little time, only the moment when the sun, having run all day, collapses at the end of day, then renewal, and the child up before dawn is out again. The child we speak of here does this early in life and late, with an implicit sorrow that energy, joy, life must end. The journey of this writing is to leave a record of the event before it ends, to show the interplay of the elements on the skin, in the hair, with running feet and pure emotive exhaustive joy of life. So here the four elements of the five year old transplanted into the coal seams, the spring seeps, the rivers, the paths of forest in the midst of the civilization of vanities makes its play. And if we walk where the Seneca walked, the Comanche, and know it without thinking, with the intuitive grasp inviolable, we are no more a part of those tribes as we are of the one to which we are born, when the tribe becomes a family, a place, a time compounded from records of millennia of the entire civilization of the earth in all its parts. In it, not of it, we call him Hieronymus, and he has as many foibles as the rest, yet with a solitude surrounding. He is Hieronymus in himself, but Bruppbaker when he goes out to cross the bridge that spans the ghost plane or the Ohio River. My wrestling is with the pollution and whether and how it entered the soul. Alice Christner’s book confirms many experiences with details otherwise lacking. Written in ‘66 my own exp are ‘47-58 before I was airlifted out, and my details are first hand of the pollution and the underbelly which the Community Club and Alice are at pains to glaze. Acknowledgments to Ken Morrison my neighbor for many years in tribute to his careful and perceptive writing of the Abenaki, and thanks to friends such as Bill Lee aikido sensei who first loaned me works of Laurens Van der Post on the Bushman and Van de Wetering on zen solitude. Also to Bonita Porter who instructed me in all the fine points of book condition, issues and printings so that I read Hart Crane in the original, and Stephen Spender among many. If I have not been a part of any intellectual society all these years I have been part of the discussion of the natural among the basket weavers, potsherds, Navajo and Hopi documents and records of the Peabody Museum before becoming an adventurer of clay itself with thousands of hours of sculpture of the natural and the human. Appreciation of the book led to Howard Norman’s collections and translations of the Cree, but in the grasp of first nation society, beyond walking the Backbone of the Chartiers over and over again, knowing and unknowing, my experience has been vastly increased by acquaintance and marriage of Eden, whose family on all sides first settled on the Edwards Plateau of Texas with all that implies from 1850 and for their careful appreciation and preservation of the land and respect for the nations that had lived there before. To get as close as possible to the natural, Barry Holston Lopez proves a brave example, we moved to the
Sonoran Desert and there lived the rest of time in the deserts and mountains surrounding. Thanks to the editors who if they knew of the subterfuge tolerated it anyway with a wink, so that neither of us knew what the other did, many of these chapters appeared first under pseudonymns, rationalized many ways, but most of all to get the work out before it or the writer were lost to consciousness, for we are all lost and found. It was found that print lasts longer than digital just because it is commercial, bought and sold, and is catalogued instead of evaporating into ether and cloud, so acknowledgment is due O/W Engaged for the many chapters in this search for the known poem as if we were the only ones left after reaping.
Hedeoma was the way I wanted to memorialize Carroll Abbott, who died the year Native Texans was published. The whole thing was due to him, Henry Burlage and Alta Niebuhr and many others. Saint Coop printed a review of it here.
"If you were to take one plant with your immortal soul into the afterlife, then Hedeoma (Hedeoma Drummondii) would meet Amaranth. Medina County is starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes wanted thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma. Albertus Magus claims drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of the inferior pennyroyal, M. Pulegium, and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we would soon be drowned in milk and honey."
Alta said it should have been called A Philosopher Looks at Plants. She provided copies to her herbalists. That's when Brother Lynch of St. Edward's wrote to her and said it humanized botany more than he could have dreamed. Dr. Blackstock said it read like a novel. An editor at TCU press said she had hoped it would have had more philosophy. These folks could subscribe to Human Botany.
It was perilous. The day the ms was typed a stranger appeared at the door who had read one in the Newsletter. She had a book contract with Texas Monthly Press to write about herbs. Knowing nothing of Native Texans she wanted me to read her manuscript and tell her everything I knew about native plants! Native Texans was then enthusiastically greeted by two different regional Texas presses, Eakin and Corona, and canceled.
In another way of saying, the sun shining on herbs in jars on a window ledge in Chicago, at the home of a friend of Jack Dodds, caused this out of nothing. Within a year of migration to the Texas hill country that fragrance produced a desire to grow herbs, which compassed the hills in their seasons, at that time well outside Austin, and affected with rock walls, pumpkins, retama, red bud, limestone, sheep, pot studios and screened porches, reading Edith Sitwell in robin migrations and the click of the equinox in hammocks under oleanders, under chinaberries, on roofs, and in childhood from the hills of western Pennsylvania. I wrote the poem that became The Way into the Flowering Heart on that sheep ranch. The influence of eastern Pennsylvania was in the blood.
Out of these herb jars came A Calendar of Poems and its counterpart, Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries, but the peaks of roofs were coming over hill tops, so I moved into town. If you call it destiny it is inescapable, so after moving closer to the city, living in Hyde Park, I came one day upon the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden, four acres of herbs and medicinal plants fallen out of favor and cultivation with its proprietor, the College of Pharmacy. Amazed to discover this vestige of pharmacy's past by accident, and after much nay saying about the possibility, for the place was all but closed, Henry Burlage, Dean Emeritus, concocted an encounter with that present Dean to the effect that the place would remain open with himself as the Director, I the horticulturalist. The joy of this venture lasted three years and involved all sorts of trials and encounters, but when friend Henry took his last trip to the ER the end was in sight. The property was deeded back to the UT in trade for a new pharmacy building on campus. All these matters engaged the herb and native plant people, Carroll Abbott among them, who more or less founded the native plant movement in Texas, being an ex-politico, but who subsisted on sales of native plant seeds and bluebonnets with his Texas Wildflower Newsletter. These were days when
Further access to hill country land, explorations over the Edwards Plateau, visits with Carroll, walking up and down rivers and always growing plants. My botanist wife had written for the Newsletter and hungry editor that he was Carroll often solicited articles. But who ever does what's in their best interest? These invitations fell fallow, but even after moving to Dallas to pursue something that would pave the way for a medical career invitations kept coming. Carroll by then had contracted cancer, which he movingly wrote of in the Newsletter that I still read. One night I dreamed of him in such a woebegone state, depressed, in the dark, ashen, that I couldn't stand it, and instantly started writing that first piece, Equisitum, followed by Croton and Prickly Poppy and a whole flood. He printed the first two in the last Newsletters. My whole purpose was to make him laugh. From what he said it worked. So I finished writing this, called it Native Texans as a joke since these plants are universal. Croton, equisitum, milkweed, mullein, hedeoma, horehound first appeared in native plant newsletters.
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