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Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025)
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Kendall Dineen
So good, so good, so good.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Kendall Dineen
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Dineen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Tim Seider about his new book, Wrangling Military Life in Texas Presidios, which is coming out on the 25th of this month. So you should look out for that and pre order if you can, from the University of Texas Press. This fascinating history reveals that Spain's soldiers in Texas didn't just follow orders, but instead found ways to assert their autonomy as they negotiated complex and sometimes contradictory roles within the empire and their community. Thank you for talking with us today, Tim.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Of course. Thank you for having me.
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Kendall Dineen
So can you kick us off by talking a little bit about how you came to the project or the question of the book?
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Dr. Tim Seider
Absolutely. So I'm actually not so much a Spanish historian. At least when I started the project, I was not a Spanish Texas historian. I was much more a historian of native peoples that lived in Texas. And I was writing a lot about a tribe known as the Karanqua peoples of the Texas Gulf Coast. And whenever people wrote about the Karanwas, they always viewed them or wrote about them in ways that were incredibly biased and just downright racist. And so my whole idea was I wanted to inhabit the viewpoint of the Caron peoples. And so I wrote an article in doing that and then I realized that by inhabiting their viewpoint, I was getting really biased towards the Presidio soldiers. Like, I wasn't taking their viewpoint and taking their perspectives from. So I wanted to fix that because we know, like, the best history is nuance, and we look at all the different perspectives in a holistic way. So I started studying these Presidio soldiers, and I fell into a rabbit hole that I couldn't escape. And I just so loved learning about their lives and their daily experiences that I ended up writing a book. Ultimately, the book was meant to be an article, but the article just kept growing and growing and growing. And I had wonderful advisors at Southern Methodist University, particularly Dr. Andrew Graybill, and he pushed me to make it a full length book. And then now it is.
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Kendall Dineen
That's fabulous. How does your history of presidial life build upon, but also, like, differ from existing histories?
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Dr. Tim Seider
That's a great question. So what I'm doing with the book in the field is groundbreaking in the very particular field because it's a social history that's told from the bottom up. So we learn about the daily lives of these soldiers. But that type of social history is really that groundbreaking in a lot of other fields. But in this particular subject, dealing with Presidio soldiers, dealing with life on the Texas frontier, most historians and scholars of the past had always tackled it from a very macro level. They would focus on the presidios, the amount of troops that would be at the presidios, the weaponry of those soldiers, and then also the commanders that were in charge. They never focused on the privates or the daily men who made their life defending this frontier from powerful indigenous groups. They always focused on the captains, the highest class people. So I wanted to turn things around and focus on the everyday man and just learn what their day would be like. And it's fun for me and I hope fun for my readers, because you get to see an inside glimpse at what life was truly like in Spanish Texas during the 1700s. So if you ever found yourself in a excellent adventure like Bill and Ted and you found yourself in Texas during the 1700s, you should read my book or try to read it beforehand so you have a good idea of what you can expect.
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Kendall Dineen
I will say, you know, monographs are not known for being fun reads, but your book is, like, truly fun to read because you include all of these really rich, interesting stories. Right. Of individual people. And it's very, very fun to read.
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Dr. Tim Seider
That's. It's really nice of you to say. I really appreciate that. And that's what I was going for. I think that the historical profession has a bit of a problem, and that is that people, and especially some of my students, don't want to read our research because it is written for other academics and other scholars. I think that you can do both. You can write for a popular audience and other academics. And fortunately, the source base I had was just chock full of dramatic things like very much telenovelas from the archive. So it was easier for me to do that.
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Kendall Dineen
So speaking of fun things in the book, I think your opening anecdote is really fun. Right. So you open with this anecdote about the 18th century Spanish monarch, Carlos III, which I'm assuming informs the book's title. Right. And so I'm wondering if you can tell the listener a little bit about Carlos and his menagerie of exotic animals. And soldiers in Texas responded to some of his very dangerous requests for collecting.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Those animals, of course. So the story goes like this, that in 1770, early 1770, King Carlos III wants to create a royal zoo. And he wants the zoo to rival all the other zoos across Europe. And so he asks all of his high ranking officials that are scattered across the globe to send him, in his words, curious pieces. And so you have people like the Viceroy of New Spain send him dragon like iguanas. You have another high ranking official from Chile send him llamas. And the governor of the Philippines will outdo everyone and send over three Asian elephants. But years will pass, and King Carlos and his house of beasts, as he terms it, will grow and grow and grow. And as he's walking through it in the year of 1775, he realizes that he has bats, doves, macaws, parakeets, parrots, storks and so on, but he doesn't have pelicans, pelicans from the Americas. So he writes a Florida letter to the Viceroy of New Spain, who sends that letter to Texas. And the governor of Texas sends a letter to a fort on the Texas Gulf coast known as La Bella, and requests that those soldiers go out and collect some pelicans for their king. Now, from all the research I did, it seems like these soldiers simply ignored the command completely. And that's because they didn't want to risk their lives in Karonkwa territory. The pelicans resided in the territory of the Karonkwa peoples of the Texas Gulf Coast. And these Karanquas did not take intrusion lightly. And so what I like to say and what I kind of try to push across in my book Is that Spain had a paper empire, that the king of Spain, King Carlos iii, looked at his maps and he saw that Texas was under his control, and that's where he can get pelicans. But the reality on the ground was totally different, that the people living in Texas, the Hispanic people living in Texas, were at the whim of the dominant native peoples. There's a fantastic book by Kathleen Duvall where she comes up with this term called a native ground. And Texas is certainly a native ground. It is its policies, its diplomacy, its negotiations, all in Texas, are dictated by native peoples, not the king. And this is a perfect example showing that to be the case that the soldiers at La Bella refused to wrangle pelicans for their king.
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Kendall Dineen
It really is such a great, great opener. It gives you the exact sort of flavor. Right? I mean, obviously, this is the point, but of, like, what this book is going to be about. It's. It's an enticing intro to the book. Okay, so you just mentioned this fort, but I wanted to ask you about how the fort that you focus on, La Bella, is. Which is Spain's only fort on the Texas coast. Like, how does that come to be? Because it seems like it was sort of a journey.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Yeah, I love that question, because it really is a journey. To answer it fully, we have to go back to a French explorer known as La Salle. And La Salle is going to come to Texas and try to colonize Texas. His venture is going to fail. He's going to make an enemy of the Caronquas, and that's not going to go well for him. But the Spanish are really paranoid, and they're paranoid because they think the French that are potentially trying to settle in Texas are going to invade and try to steal some of their minimally wealthy northern holdings in colonial Mexico. And so the Spanish will come to where La Salle's colony is and set up their own fort, Literally build it right on top of La Salle's colony. They'll call it Fort La Bahia, and which is like the fort that's close to the bay. Over time, however, because they upset the caronkwas, and because they're not doing all that well and thriving in the area, they're not able to grow a lot of corn to subsist off of, and they're dealing with scurvy, they have to move the fort multiple times, and presently, or they end up in what is now known as Goliad Texas. And Goliad Texas is around, like, 50 miles away from the bay. So this fort which is called on the bay because of karonko power and influence, ends up moving 50 miles away from the bay to get out of the caronquist territory. And so I pick up from that point in my book, I pick up at that point in which La Bahia is at this new location in present day goliad, and talk about what life would be like at that new location.
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Kendall Dineen
That's a perfect setup for my next question, which is life, like, first at the fort. And I think for this question, like, maybe if we could focus on how soldiers are navigating the remoteness of the fort and also efforts to curtail, you know, their sort of few entertainments.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Sure. To put it simply, life at these forts is incredibly difficult. Very, very difficult. As I mentioned earlier, you have some families that are dying of scurvy or suffering from scurvy because they're not able to ship in enough food and they're not able to grow enough food because one, their practices in building irrigation doesn't work out like it does in San Antonio, a little bit further north, around 100 or so miles. But secondly, every time they go out to tend their fields, they get often attacked by native peoples. And so they can't provide for themselves. They can't really work any type of job. They can't go out and brand cattle and corral them. They can't tend their fields. They can't really labor outside of their settlement. So what do they do? They turn to forms of entertainment. And those entertainment could range from flicking marbles to playing cards, to actually watching cockfights. And these cockfights were actually a huge popular attraction during the time period. And the entire community, including women and children, will come to these fights and watch these animals fight to the death. And while they were watching that, they would often gamble with playing cards and gamble away some of their presidio equipment, at times sometimes gamble away some of their cooking ware. And we found, or I found, that women were very much involved in this gambling. That when we think about women of the past, we think of them as being very, you know, womanly like that they had to stay inside, indoors. That really isn't the case in Spanish Texas. And we see women using the house advantage to win money for themselves. So they play this game called 31. And it acted just like blackjack does today, where you try to get as close as you possibly can to 31. Well, the women would be the dealers, and they realized that the house had an advantage. And because there wasn't a lot of ways to make money they would be able to skim a bit off the top by having that house advantage and provide for themselves and their family. Now, all these entertainments, they were supposed to be regulated by the crown that. The crown, the Spanish royalty, Spanish bureaucracy, once it's cut of the profits. But because Texas is so far away, yes, it makes their life difficult because to, like, ship in all their supplies, but it also makes their life a little bit more free and independent than other places in the empire, because they really don't. The Spanish crown doesn't really have as much control over them as they believe they do. And so hopefully that answers most of the question.
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Kendall Dineen
Yeah. And I'm glad you drew our attention to the ways that, like, women in this area and this time were not sort of just like confined to the domestic sphere. Right. Cause that is something that your book traces pretty consistently. I didn't have a question specifically about that, but I think it's a great aspect of your book, so I'm glad you're able to touch on it.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Yeah. And if you're open, I would love to add more to it because I think that is something that is often not recognized as it should be, in that women in Spanish Texas, particularly, were some of the most powerful individuals in the settlement. And that's largely because their husbands would die frequently, and the Spanish law allowed for property be taken over by the wife after her husband passed away. And women had a lot of legal protections. And so what ends up happening is that you have all these widows in Spanish Texas that have a lot of money, they have a lot of cattle, and they act as people to give loans out to the settlement, act as almost bankers for the settlement. And young women, too, are. Are also different than most other colonial Mexican women in the sense that in colonial Mexico, like if you're in Mexico City, women are expected to learn how to sing, how to sew, how to stitch. But in Spanish Texas, those types of kind of expectations are different. Women and girls learn how to ride a horse because they have to. They had to learn how to do math to help their family run their businesses. They had to learn how to brand a cattle, how to manage cattle, because they own some of the largest ranches in all Spanish Texas. So I always like to say that in terms of rights, the women in Spanish Texas had some of the most rights in all of the Americas. And among a lot of different European empires, they were really much more powerful and people give them credit for in Texas. And there's a phenomenal book that I have to point out it's by Amy Porter. It's called Their Lives, Their Wills. Highly, highly. Would recommend any listener check out that book if they're interested in more in terms of this topic.
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Kendall Dineen
That's great. I'm glad we got the chance to talk about that. Yeah. Okay. So can you talk a little bit about how soldiers were dealing? I know you've mentioned scurvy, but how are they dealing with just the really unhealthy conditions of the fort?
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Dr. Tim Seider
Sure. So you have two different avenues really. The first avenue is available for the people that are like kind of highest class civilians and settlers, I should say. In the actual San Antonio and La Bahia Nacogdoches communities, these high ranking officials and high ranking individuals, whenever they felt sick, they often tried to remove themselves from Texas. That Texas was viewed as a very unhealthy place because of its great humidity, because of its great heat. And at the time there was this belief in Europe that the human body had multiple humors or multiple aspects of their body that kept them stable and healthy. And a good way to stabilize your humor is to move to a place that has less humidity, as less strenuous. And so people tried to simply leave Texas and go to hot springs to be healed. At hot springs. They tried to go to medically trained physicians and colonial Mexico, Mexico City, but that was typically only available for the highest class people in Texas. Most other people in Texas, they healed themselves by relying on unlicensed barber surgeons, pretty much doctors who don't have a license but learn their trade through apprenticeships. And they also relied on local women who were very like, they were indigenous women that were Hispanicized. And these indigenous women had been living in Texas for such a long time that they knew all the medicinal herbs. They knew that shepherd's purse would stop bleeding. They knew that if you crushed up yaupon leaves and you grounded it up and you turned into a tea, that it could give you a lot of energy because it has a lot of caffeine. And so the community relied on these indigenous women to be healed. They don't rely often on official licensed doctors because no licensed doctor wants to travel up to Texas to heal the community because there's no money in it for them. So those are the two avenues. You either leave Texas or you rely on indigenous medicines to heal yourself.
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Kendall Dineen
So what happened to soldiers who one way or the other survived these, these unhealthy. What happened to soldiers who were insubordinate or who deserted?
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Dr. Tim Seider
Great question. Nowadays when we read history books, we always have our present day perceptions Kind of influencing what we think about a certain time period or era. And so considering that if we were to talk about desertion, we would think that these deserters would be punished a great deal, that if someone left the military and deserted their station at the Presidio, that they would be punished an extreme level. But in Spanish Texas and all across the northern borderlands, that really isn't the case. You have people all the time who are insubordinate and who desert their post. But because their jobs are relatively quite dangerous, and because there's not many men who want to fill in all the time, the captains and commanders are much more willing to forgive these offenses. And so there's some crazy stories in my books of people deserting, being gone for months at a time. There's one instance in which someone steals around. I think it's like 2,500 pesos, which is the equivalent of like 100 soldiers pay for a month. And he goes off, he lives his life for like a year. Then he comes back to San Antonio after spending all the money, and they let him join the Presidio again. So there really wasn't as much punishment as you would expect. They just wanted people to be defending the line. And even jail in these communities is much less strict than you ever imagined. For example, the jail they would have in these communities were pretty much just guard houses. And these guard houses often did not have doors. And they also had huge, wide open windows. And so you would have prisoners trying to accost passerbys to buy them liquor and cigarettes so they can drink it while in jail. Other times, the people guarding them outside of the jail, they knew because these communities were so small. And so they would make small little deals to let their prisoner go for the night, to spend time with his family, or in one instance, to sleep with some other man's wife and then come back to the jail and be totally okay. No issues at all. So justice and the law system in Spanish Texas just operated in much different way. What they would really use to make sure people follow the rules was community shame. So, yes, the jail cell doesn't have really any door and the windows are wide open. But that is purposeful because they want the entire community to see who's in jail. And the worst type of punishment you can receive, especially as a Presidio soldier or a male at these communities, is quote unquote, sweeping the plaza. So getting a brush and broom and sweeping it out so it's nice and clean. And the reason why this was viewed as one of the worst punishments is because, one, you are shamed in front of the entire community. But two, sweeping the plaza was viewed as women's work. And so it was in many ways making these masculine men feel like they weren't as masculine. And that was a apparently a very effective form of punishment.
- [21:47]
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- [22:47]
Kendall Dineen
Speaking of all these fun stories that you have in the book, like, I'm remembering one about a soldier who I think tried to assassinate like a governor or something like that.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Right.
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Kendall Dineen
I mean, it's pretty wild what people were getting up to. And yeah, the punishment is not what you would expect. Back to a lot of you, that's.
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Dr. Tim Seider
One of my favorite stories, for sure.
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Kendall Dineen
Okay, so I want to ask you about the. I mean, you've talked about the Caronkwis a bit, but, like, what should we know as readers or potential readers of your book? You know, at one point early in the book, you described him as the Jewelers of Texas, which I thought that was really fascinating. So, you know, what do you want to tell us about this indigenous people?
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Dr. Tim Seider
Oh, sure. I'm glad he picked up on the the Jewelers of Texas, because that was very much intentional. So to provide the best answer, I had to provide a bit of context at this time. The Spanish are not that big a fan of the Caronquas, and that's largely because the Caronquas are so powerful that they're going to maintain their homeland. They're going to maintain a strict border around their homeland for nearly like 570 years, like twice as long as the United States has been a nation. And so they are a very powerful group, even though they're very small in population. But the Spanish, they want to conquer them. At one point, they want to exterminate all the Karonkwas because they want to have a fort and a port on the Texas Gulf coast, but the Karanquas are not allowing them to do it. And so the priests who are trying to convert these Karanquas, the Presidio soldiers who are trying to kill the Karanqas, all of them are being so unsuccessful in their ventures and have to come up with a justification as to why they're not being successful. So what they do is they label the Karonkwas as the most savage people in existence, that they're barbaric, they're cannibals, that they eat anyone that comes into their territory, that they're giants, eight feet tall. And these myths have lived on to the present day. But most of those myths are totally inaccurate and made up. But the issue is that historians latched on to them and they continue to depict the Kronk was in this way. So I'm referring to the Kronk was as a jewelers of Texas, because they're usually referred to as the cannibals of Texas, which is not something that I think should be their identification. And it doesn't. It's really colonial propaganda. The Caronquas, however, were a very, believe it or not, very friendly people. And that at most first interactions with Europeans were very, very friendly and welcomed them with open arms because they made their living through trade. What the Caronkles would do is they would walk along their seashores, find beautiful shells like our state shell, the lightning whelk, and they would turn it into jewelry. And then we go into the inland and they would trade with a lot of diverse native peoples who had different languages, who had different customs. And so they were used to dealing with foreign looking people. And they would trade their jewelry. And this jewelry, we found it traversing over a thousand miles, finding its way all the way up in the Great Lakes. So I didn't want to depict the Kronk was as these evil people, even though they are in many ways the. The people in which the Presidio soldiers are most afraid of in my book. I wanted to depict them in an accurate light. And I think that them Being known as a jewelers of Texas is a much better description than them being the so quote, unquote, cannibals of Texas.
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Kendall Dineen
Yeah, absolutely. And it definitely makes me want to read more about them. Okay, so you have this. Obviously you're sharing all these different stories of all these different people, but you have this one figure who's kind of a through line through the book. So can you tell us a little bit about this figure?
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Dr. Tim Seider
Sure. I'm wondering if you've experienced this, too, but sometimes I've read history books, and my history book has this a little bit, too. I don't want to, like, downplay it too much, but you're reading a history book, and it just seems like there's one fact after another fact, one story after another story, and there's nothing holding it together where it doesn't really feel cohesive, just feels like a collections of interesting stories. I didn't want that to happen. I wanted there to be a through line that we were following a particular person's journey from their birth all the way to their death. And the person that I ended up choosing is this individual known as Antonio Trevino. And I located him because I was doing my article on the Carranqua Spanish War, and he was one of the soldiers that looks beyond the propaganda and is willing enough to go into the Kronkwas territory and treat with him in a peaceful way. So I thought to myself, this guy is interesting. And fortunately, there are a lot of sources that he either wrote or he is involved in. So I was thinking to myself, okay, great. I have this source base to fully flesh out his story. And so we follow him from a young man to him joining the Presidio, to him working his way up the Presidio ladder to becoming a lieutenant and leaving Texas entirely. And so my whole book takes place during his lifetime. And the last chapter, however, I flipped things around. While the first, I think seven or eight. I'm forgetting how many chapters it is. Well, the first seven chapters deal mostly with this male, you know, Antonio Trevino, this masculine Presidio soldier. I didn't want my book to only focus on men. And the best thing I could have done was incorporate more women's story throughout the text. And that's what I wanted to do. But at the point that I came up with this, my book was nearly finished. And so I wrote a whole chapter that was from the perspective of his wife. I think the chapter is fantastic because it tells you what the daily life of a woman would be. So it's not focused on all the males. But I also want to point out a critique I have for myself, and that is that I don't like the fact that the women. Like, the chapter on women is just at the very end of the book, and they are confined to a single chapter. So if I were to write this over again, that's what I would definitely change. I would try to incorporate more of these women's stories throughout the text instead of just having them in a final chapter. Now, while that final chapter, in my opinion, is very on point and it tells you very much, like, what these lives would be like, there's definitely room for improvement. But I gotta move on to my next book project.
- [29:13]
Kendall Dineen
Yeah, well, it is a great chapter, and I would love to hear a little bit more about what you found out about Trevino's wife. And also, you know, because I. I work with, like, black feminist archival research methods, which do something, I think, a little similar to what you're doing because you're having to find information about this person without knowing their name. Right. And having to, you know, I think of, like, Saidiya Hartman's Critical Fabulation, like, having to kind of imagine, right. With the details that you do have, what this life might have been like. So if you could tell us a little bit more about her and your process of, like, yeah, putting her story together.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up, the Critical Fabulation, because I remember, like, really looking into that when I was writing this chapter to make sure I did things as respectfully as possible. But, yeah, that was the issue is that whenever, time, every time I look through the archival record, women, while they are mentioned on documents like wills and other legal documents, like, women are obviously in Texas. They're not afraid to sue men. They do it all the time. Women generally just aren't mentioned. Like, we don't get their names all that frequently. We don't get a lot of information about their lives. So I decided to do. Because I don't have Antonio Trevino's wife's name, I try to look up as much information I could find on every single woman that I could locate in the archive. And I compiled all those experiences into this chapter and pretty much talked about, okay, like, this is likely her personality. If she came from this area, she's likely independent. She likely knows how to ride a horse. She likely knows maybe a bit of math and potentially can read and write just a little bit, maybe not a lot. And then I talked about what some of the major experiences she would have to endure and face. And how in these communities, while women are certainly protected in some ways, they are not confined to their houses, as many people would believe, that they are walking in and around men all the time. And so they have to deal with sexual assault, they have to deal with harassment. And so I try to bring forward some of those cases and show the readers how our unnamed Tehana, as I call her, would have potentially reacted to those situations. I also talk about why she might have married Antonio Trevino. Like, it may not have been based off of love. It certainly could been of based off of love. The issue we have in the archive, what I found very interesting, is that happy couples don't often leave behind a lot of legal documents that most of the time, when women are coming up in these, like, bureaucratic documents, I'm looking at, because most of my source base is the Spanish bureaucrats and writing down everything, it's usually these couples are fighting, which gives this interpretation or this picture that every single woman and man union in Spanish Texas is fighting. And they're always unhappy. But that isn't the case. Like, Antonio Trevini and his wife could have been very happy. We just don't know that from the archive. I tried to do all that to build as cohesive picture as possible. It was very difficult. And I actually wrote this chapter the fastest of all of them. So I've been wanting, like, I'm happy with how it turned out, but, yeah. And looking at the project now, there's things that I would definitely want to change if I were to do it over again. But I think it's a fantastic chapter and I try my best.
- [32:37]
Kendall Dineen
It was my favorite chapter.
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Dr. Tim Seider
Oh, fantastic.
- [32:40]
Kendall Dineen
I mean, it's all great, but, like, of course, it's. So that's just, like, right up my alley. Right. Piecing together. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about this, like, resource that you've developed that you mentioned in the book called texasdocuments.com so what is that, and what can our listeners do with it?
- [32:57]
Dr. Tim Seider
Sure. An issue I find that my undergrads have when they read history books is that they want to go to the sources that the historian used to learn more, but they don't know. They don't know how to navigate the footnotes. They don't know how to follow the breadcrumbs to the original trail. And those sources that historians use are often incredibly hard to locate. And it involves you at many different times, traveling to a physical archive, getting the document in front of you, and learning how to translate it. So it's not feasible. But fortunately, because of the efforts of the Dolph Briscoe center, because of the efforts from translators like John Wheat and also like Frank de la Teja, a lot of the documents I used were fully translated. They also had pictures of the untranslated versions, and they digitized nearly all the documents. And so me and a colleague of mine named Gary Pinkerton, we organized pretty much every single document in the Bayer archive, and we made it online and easy to navigate through this website. Texasdocuments.com so if you want to find a source in my book, you can Simply go to texasdocuments.com, click on the Spanish Texas starter pack, and I'll have every single source I use my book available for you to access, read both in the translated version and the untranslated version. And the website itself is also meant as a research guide on various topics pertaining to Texas history. So on the website itself too, we have like a research guide on Spanish Texas. And that research guide would tell you the five best secondary sources or academic books on Spanish Texas. It also give you immediate access to the five best primary sources on Spanish Texas. And the reason why I created this website, because I always have my students doing research projects and asking me, I can't find any secondary or primary sources. And so I wanted to create this website so I could point them to a website where they can have really high quality historical information at their fingertips almost instantaneously. So hopefully it's helpful. I'm still building it, but that's a phenomenal resource.
- [35:06]
Kendall Dineen
Yeah, that's so cool. Okay, so I wanted to ask you, what do you want readers to do with what they learn from reading your book?
- [35:16]
Dr. Tim Seider
Okay, I think this is a really good question. I have been thinking about this for quite some time, and I have multiple different trains of thought. I think the first and the foremost in my mind is that history, especially, I mean, Texas history does not start in 1821 when Stephen F. Austin crosses the Sabine. And when we talk about Texas history, that often focuses on the text revolution and everything that happened beyond and after the text revolution. It doesn't focus often on the Spanish Texas history or the Native American history. And so I'm hoping my book opens up readers to a new aspect of Texas history they never read before. And it does so in a way that entertains them that they're actually enjoying reading all this dense historical information. And then finally, I want my book to demonstrate that the Tejanos and the indigenous Peoples that lived in Texas were incredible. Like, they were resilient, they were savvy. They were really smart in how they approached everything, and they were just trying to make a life for themselves. And the Spanish crown did not make it easy for them, but they were able to find ways to survive regardless. And they ultimately learned at the end of the day that the best thing they can do is work with native peoples. That when they first start to sell Texas, they think they are more powerful than the natives. They are wrong. The indigenous peoples are more powerful than them. And they finally, after like, a hundred years, realize this, make peace with a lot of different indigenous groups by paying them what I would label as protection payments. And things go well after that point. So those are the main two takeaways that Texas history should not be confined to only, like, the white history, that we need to incorporate all peoples, and that this space prior to the 1800s was dominated by native peoples and will be continued to be dominated by native peoples, really all the way up until the 1820s and 30s.
- [37:15]
Kendall Dineen
So I have one question left, but I just wanted to say that, you know, since you and I, we've known each other since grad school, right. I was in the English department. Smu were in the History department. And years ago, I think it was, like, 2020 when I took that history seminar with Neil Foley. You know, I remember reading your paper back then, which. Right. Like, it was Wrangling Pelicans. And I remember thinking, wow, Tim is a great writer. We should get him over to the English department. But I'm so glad we did it because it was really cool to see, you know, the final iteration of that paper that I read years ago. And it really is a fabulous book.
- [37:50]
Dr. Tim Seider
That blows my mind, really. Like, it's wild how everything connects in some small ways sometimes. And it's wonderful to see how much progress has been made since we. We first met way back a million years ago.
- [38:07]
Kendall Dineen
All right, so my final question is, what are you working on now?
- [38:10]
Dr. Tim Seider
Yeah. Oh, I have. I have a lot of projects ongoing. One that I'm really excited for is a museum exhibit that the book is kind of. The museum exhibit's based off the book, and it's also connecting to the American Revolution. So I'm working with a phenomenal architect named Gus Hinojosa, and we are putting together a traveling museum exhibit that's going to be hosted for just at the Heritage Society at Sam Houston park in Houston. And it's going to be just pretty much describing what life would be like in the 1700s. And also describing how Spanish Texas help influence the Americans winning their Revolutionary War. And then another big project I'm working on is just a general history of the Caronqua peoples of Texas. That this is my true main focus for about a decade or more. I just need to get down and finally write the book. But fortunately I have all the sources now, so I just. I just gotta write it.
- [39:09]
Kendall Dineen
That's the easy part. Right? Yeah. Well, when you write it, I look forward to reading it. And maybe we can have you back to talk about that.
- [39:15]
Dr. Tim Seider
Oh, that'd be great. Thank you so much, Kendyl.
- [39:18]
Kendall Dineen
Yeah. Thanks for being here. This was awesome, Tim.
- [39:20]
Dr. Tim Seider
Absolutely.
- [39:35]
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- [39:50]
Kendall Dineen
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [39:53]
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- [39:55]
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- [39:58]
Dr. Tim Seider
Liberty.
- [39:59]
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