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Cian's Scones

7/27/2023

A replica of the Stone of Scone outside Scone Palace.

A recent cold, foggy morning inspired me to dig through my recipe box for the yellowed and tattered newspaper clipping that has a recipe for Traditional Irish Scones. I have no idea how long I've had this clipping, but if I had to guess, it's 20 years old.

Scones themselves are much older. They probably originated in Scotland in the earth 16th century. The first scones were most likely made with oats and baked on a griddle (or, as the Scots say, a girdle.)

How they acquired their name has been lost in the fog of time. Some have suggested that their name it comes from the Dutch word ‘schoonbrot’, which means beautiful bread. Others believe the name is related to The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny,. This is a rock that Kings of Scotland were seated on when they were crowned, and it has an interesting history of its own. Perhaps both the food and the rock were both named after the town of Scone, which is close to Perth.

Anna, the Duchess of Bedford (1788 – 1861) is credited with making scones a part of the English tradition of Afternoon Tea when she ordered the servants to bring tea and some sweet breads one afternoon. The treats included scones, and they became popular throughout the United Kingdom and, eventually, the world.

The tattered and yellow clipping calls this variation Traditional Irish Scones. I have no idea how authentic the recipe is, but when I pulled it out, it occurred to me that the main character in my next novel, The Worst Enemy, is Irish. Would Cian's mam, I wondered, have made something similar to these for his breakfast? Cian learned to cook from his Mam, and this skill helped ingratiate himself to his fellow prospectors in Colorado's gold mining frenzy and his fellow soldiers in the Union Army. If Cian cooked scones in either place, it likely would have been in a dry, floured pan over a medium-low heat, turning once to brown both sides. You can try it this way, too!

If you don't have buttermilk, you can make an acceptable substitute by adding 3 TBS of Vinegar to 3/4 cup of milk and waiting for it to clabber, a fancy word for develop lumps.

Traditional Irish Scones

3 cups all purpose flour
3 TBS sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 TBS chilled unsalted butter
1 egg, beaten to blend
¾ cup plus 3 TBS buttermilk
1/3 cup dried currants (raisins, dried cranberries or dried blueberries can take the place of the currants.)

Preheat oven to 425

Mix flour, sugar, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.

Slice butter into pats and drop them all over the flour mixture. Use a fork, a pastry cutter, or your fingers to blend in the butter until the mixture resembles a fine meal.

Mix in fruit pieces.
Mix in egg and enough buttermilk to form a soft dough.

Turn the dough out onto a flour surface. Pat the dough into three ¾ thick rounds. Cut each round into quarters. Or you can use a round cookie cutter to cut out the scones.

Transfer scones to a lightly floured baking sheet. Brush tops with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until scones are golden brown and cooked through, between 18-20 minutes.

Makes 1 dozen scones.

Cian is a character in The Worst Enemy, book 2 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, a trilogy of middle grade historical novels set in New Mexico during the American Civil War. Book 1, Where Duty Calls, came out in 2022. The third book, The Famished Country, will come out in 2024.

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Gabriel Paul, Civil War Hero

7/20/2023

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Just about anyone can name a general from the Civil War. Gabriel René Paul’s name doesn’t come as readily as others, but he was an important figure and his story is an interesting one.

Gabriel René Paul was born on March 22, 1813, in St. Louis, Missouri, a city that had been founded by his maternal grandfather, the prosperous fur trader René-Auguste Chouteau, Jr. His father, Rene Paul, was a military engineer who had served as an officer in Napoleon’s army and who was wounded at Trafalgar. Paul followed in his father’s military footsteps, entering the United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point, when he was only 16 years old. He graduated in the middle of the Class of 1834, ranked 18th of the 36 graduates.

After graduating, Paul was commissioned as a lieutenant in the 7th United States Infantry. He served in Florida in the last 1830s and early 1840s, where he participated in the Seminole Wars. Like many of the other men who would become generals during the Civil War, he served under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War. He saw battle action at Fort Brown, Monterrey, Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Churubusco, Molino del Rey and Chapultepac. He was given an honorary promotion, or brevet, to the rank of major when he led a storming party and captured a Mexican army flag during the battle of Chapultepac. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Paul served in several different frontier army posts and participated in several expeditions up the Rio Grande and into Utah.

When the Civil War began, Paul was a Major in the 8th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Union in the New Mexico Territory. In December 1861 he was appointed Colonel of the 4th New Mexico Volunteers and commander of the fort. After the Battle of Valverde, Colonel E.R.S. Canby, the commander of all Union troops in New Mexico, sent a message to Paul telling him to hold the fort at all costs. However, when Colonel John Potts Slough arrived with his Colorado volunteers, he announced that he outranked Paul because he had been commissioned a few days earlier than Paul had. Slough deliberately ignored Canby’s orders and proceeded south with his troops, who engaged in the Battle of Glorieta, leaving Paul to guard the fort.

A portrait taken after Gettysburg. If you look closely, it is clear that his eye socket is empty.

In late May 1862, Paul mustered out of the New Mexico Volunteers, and holding the rank of Major in the Regular Army, was sent east to work on the defenses of Washington. While he was stationed there, his wife went to the White House and pleaded President Lincoln for a promotion for her husband. Lincoln documented the meeting with a note that read “Today Mrs. Major Paul calls and urges appointment of her husband as a Brigadier [General]. She is a saucy woman and will keep tormenting me until I may have to do it.” Less than two weeks later, President Lincoln signed Gabriel Paul’s commission as a Brigadier General of volunteers. He was given the assignment of brigade commander in the First Army Corps, and he led troops at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville.

At Gettysburg, he was transferred to a brigade in 2nd Division, where he led the soldiers of the 16th Maine, 13th Massachusetts, 94th and 104th New York, and 107th Pennsylvania Infantries as they threw up makeshift barricades and entrenchments in front of the Lutheran Seminary building during the early parts of the first day of fighting. When some 8,000 Confederates backed with 16 cannons began making significant inroads into the Union First Corps’s exposed right flank along a prominent rise of ground known as Oak Hill Ridge, the Second Corps was called in. When Henry Baxter’s brigade was nearly out of ammunition, Gabriel Paul’s brigade was brought forward to take its place. It was soon after his men had arrived on Oak Hill that he was struck in the head by a bullet that entered behind his right eye, passed through his head, and exited through his left eye socket. The men who watched him fall believed that Paul had been killed and left him where he lay as the battle intensified. Late in the afternoon, the First Corps and Eleventh Corps troops surrounding Paul’s brigade broke and began to retreat. Baxter’s and Paul’s men followed. When the division reformed on Cemetery Hill, it was discovered that 1,667 of the approximately 2,500 men who had gone into battle that morning had become casualties. Paul was one of the 776 men killed, wounded, or missing from his brigade.

When soldiers returned to the field to search for living among the dead, they found Paul and carried him to a field hospital in the rear. Later, Paul was brevetted a Brigadier General in the Regular Army “For Gallant and Meritorious Service at the Battle of Gettysburg.” He was completely blind and his sense of smell and hearing were seriously impaired for the rest of his life, and he suffered frequent headaches and seizures, yet he refused to leave the service. He worked as Deputy Governor of the Soldier’s Home near Washington, and then was the administrator of the Military Asylum at Harrodsburg, Kentucky. On December 20, 1866, he finally retired.

For the next twenty-two years, Gabriel Paul’s health deteriorated. During the final years of his life, seizures were an almost daily occurrence, and he suffered up to six epileptic attacks a day. When he died on May 5, 1886 twenty-two years, ten months, and five days after the battle of Gettysburg, his doctor pronounced that the cause of death was an “epileptiform convulsion, the result of a wound received at the battle of Gettysburg, Pa.” He was buried in Section 1, Lot 16 of Arlington National Cemetery.

The Battle of Gettysburg claimed the lives of more generals than any other battle in the American Civil War. Six general officers fell either dead or fatally wounded at both Antietam and Franklin. By most accounts, nine generals were either killed or listed among the mortally wounded at Gettysburg. The casualties include four Union (John Reynolds, Samuel Zook, Stephen Weed, Elon Farnsworth) and five Confederates (Lewis Armistead, Paul Semmes, William Barksdale, Dorsey Pender, Richard Garnett.) If we include Strong Vincent, who fell atop Little Round Top and who was posthumously honored with a promotion to brigadier general, the number climbs to ten, five for each side. I think that Gabriel Paul should be included in this list, even though he didn’t die until much later. He represents the countless many whose lives ended due to the Civil War, even if they didn’t die.

Gabriel Rene Paul is a background character in The Worst Enemy, book 2 of Jennifer Bohnhoff's trilogy Rebels Along the Rio Grande. Written for middle grade readers and above, the trilogy tells the story of the Civil War in New Mexico Territory. It is published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing. Contact the publisher for class set discounts and teacher's guides.

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The Half Dime

7/13/2023

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Coins aren’t common currency anymore. In these days of debit and credit cards, most people don’t carry a pocketful of change. When they do, they find that cashiers don’t know what to do with coins. Computerized cash registers have made counting back change a lost skill.

But most of us still recognize coins. Pennies and dimes haven’t changed much in the past few years. The nickel got a bit of an update, with a larger, half forward facing Thomas Jefferson replacing the old side view. Quarters frequently change, with women and states replacing the eagle. Even with these changes of design, most Americans over the age of five can identify their country’s coinage.
America had some coins in the past that are no longer minted. The half dime is one of them.

The half dime, or half disme (pronounced deem), was a silver coin that had a value of five cents. It might have been the first coin struck by the United States Mint under the Coinage Act of 1792; some experts consider those first strikes to be practice pieces and therefore not real coins. It is a small coin, half the size of a ten-cent piece. Through the years, the pictures on the half dime changed. Early coins had a picture of the face of Liberty, her hair flowing backwards as if she were making great progress. By the 1830s, Liberty’s face had been replaced by a full Liberty seated on a rock (Plymouth Rock? I found no sources that told me.) and holding a shield. 84,828,478 Seated Liberty half dimes were struck for circulation in the mints at Philadelphia, San Francisco and New Orleans between 1837 and 1873.

In the 1860s, the use of nickel to replace silver in coinage became a popular lobbying point. In 1865m tge treasury became producing a new three cent coin made out of a copper-nickel alloy. The following year, a five cent pieces was added to American coinage. This new coin was larger than the silver half dime and less easily lost, making it the more popular of the two redundant coins. The half dime was discontinued in 1873.

In The Worst Enemy, Raul Atencio gives Jemmy Martin a half dime as payment for caring for his brother Arsenio. Since the Confederate soldiers and their teamsters had not been paid since leaving Texas, a half dime was a rare and useful gift. Later in the book, Jemmy uses that coin to pay for something that might save another boy’s life.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle and high school teacher who now writes novels for adults and middle grade readers.

The Worst Enemy, is book 2 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, her middle grade trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War. It is scheduled for release by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, on August 15, 2023 but can be preordered on Bookshop.

The first book in the series, Where Duty Calls, was a finalist for both the New Mexico Presswomen's Zia Award and the Western Writers of America's Spur Award. It can be ordered in paperback or ebook here. A free, downloadable teachers guide is available through the publisher.

Book three, tentatively titled The Famished Country, will be published in spring of 2024.

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Civil War Gravestones

7/6/2023

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Some of the people in Where Duty Calls and and The Worst Enemy, my two historical novels set in the Civil War in New Mexico, are fictitious, and therefore have no grave markers. They were never born, and they will never die as long as readers keep them alive.

But other characters in both stories were real people, with lives that began long before I wrote about them - lives that were filled with events that I didn't include in my novels. After the war was over, many of them went on to do interesting things -- some good, some bad. Some continued to live in the public eye, while others dropped into obscure, private lives.

William Marshall, who has a small role in my novel The Worst Enemy, was the last man killed on the first day of the battle that raged on March 20 in Apache Canyon. He had survived the day's fighting and was collecting discarded Confederate weapons and disabling them when one went of, mortally wounding him. Exactly what weapon and how he died is up for debate. Click here if you want to read more about why. Marshall's grave marker is in the cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Frederick Wade and John Norvell, who both served with the fictional Jemmy Martin, survived the war and went on to live long and full lives. Both were newspaper editors and writers, and their memories, published in newspaper accounts, helped give life to my novels. They appear in all three of the books in this series: Where Duty Calls, The Worst Enemy (scheduled to be published August 2023), and The Famished Country (scheduled to be published spring 2024).

Pedro Baca shows up in Where Duty Calls and will also appear in the final book of the trilogy. The real Pedro Baca was married to a different woman than my fictionalize character, and he had many more children. He was an outstanding member of the Socorro community and is buried within the church there.

After resigning his commission with the Colorado Volunteers after the Battle of Valverde, John P. Slough was first given command of a brigade in the Shenandoah Valley, then was appointed brigadier general of volunteers and finally became the military governor of Alexandria, Virginia. When the war ended, President Andrew Johnson, appointed Slough to serve as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Court. Slough returned to New Mexico and helped fund the Civil War monument in Santa Fe that was recently torn down. He also was instrumental in the creation of the Veteran's Cemetery in Santa Fe.

Slough had a fiery temper and a keen sense of justice that often put him at odds with the locals. His decisions to accept Pueblo Indians as U. S. citizens who could testify in his court and his attacks on the peonage system led for some to call for his removal. Slough died when he got into a disagreement with a member of the Territorial Legislative Council, who shot him in a pool hall argument. He is buried in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Another character with a fiery temper was James "Paddy" Graydon, who appears in Where Duty Calls. Three years after the Civil War, Graydon was involved in controlling the Mescalero Apaches in southern New Mexico. After Surgeon John Whitlock accused him of needlessly killing a number of braves, the two ended up dueling at Fort Stanton. Graydon was killed, and Whitlock was then killed by Graydon's men. He was buried at Fort Stanton, but twenty-four years later his remains were reinterred at the Federal Cemetery in Santa Fe that Slough helped create.

Like most Federal Veteran's Cemeteries, the one in Santa Fe contains row upon row of white headstones, giving it a look as uniform as a rank of soldiers. But there are a few exceptions. The most unique marker does not come from the Civil War period, but it deserves notice. It belongs to a Private named Dennis O’Leary, who died at Fort Wingate in 1901. According to local legend, O'Leary himself carved the statue, then committed suicide on the date he had inscribed. However, military records say he died of tuberculosis, a common illness of the period.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer who lives in New Mexico. You can read more about her and her books here.

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Cian's Scones

Gabriel Paul, Civil War Hero

The Half Dime

Civil War Gravestones

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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