The Vanished Texas Coast with author Mark Lardas

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[00:00:46] Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash income, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash income now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Welcome back to Crime Capsule. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris, the big one.

[00:01:17] We joke about it here on the Gulf Coast but honestly, the joke is never really all that funny. From June to October, the official period of hurricane season, all eyes in the region turn to the Gulf of Mexico.

[00:01:33] And the Atlantic conveyor system that brings these monster storms to our coast. Every year we wonder, will this be the year of the one that wipes out Miami or Charleston or New Orleans? All cities that have hung on year after year watching those forecasts with anxious eyes.

[00:01:54] But imagine if you didn't have radar. But know about the Atlantic conveyor belt. Had no clue that a wall of water dozens of feet high was headed straight in your direction. By the time the skies darkened and you saddled your horses and made for the hills, it was

[00:02:12] already too late. Prior to the 1900s, that was all too common. As coastal cities and towns from Texas to the Carolinas weathered the fury of nature's strongest storms. And not all of them lived to tell the tale.

[00:02:29] And yet, though their wood frame buildings are today no more than flotsam and jetsam in the sea, our memory of them survives. And today on Crime Capsule we are delighted to have historian Mark Lardis join us to tell us about Indianola, Texas.

[00:02:48] A once thriving port city that suffered a series of disasters from which not even this regional trade capital could recover. The author of The Vanished Texas Coast, Lost Port Towns, Mysterious Shipwrecks and Other True Tales published by the History Press, Mark is an expert historian among other pursuits.

[00:03:10] And we're grateful to him for digging up this story of a town that echoes what the British poet John Keats had etched on his own gravestone. Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Mark, welcome to Crime Capsule and thank you so much for joining us.

[00:03:30] Yes, good to be here. Now we have had a number of visiting authors with interesting careers come to Crime Capsule before. We have had journalists, of course. We've also had judges. We've had tour guides. We've had folks from a pretty wide range of professions.

[00:03:51] But I think you might be the first real live official card-carrying engineer. Tell me, you are not just an engineer. You're actually an engineer for one of the best known agencies in the world, which is NASA. How did that come to be? Okay, no.

[00:04:15] There really is an interesting story there. It's probably the oldest line you've heard. But my real interest has always been history. And when I was in high school, I decided I was going to be an engineer because that

[00:04:33] seemed to be the profession where you were most likely to make history. And in fact, my high school counselor said, I don't understand why you're going into engineering. You love history so much.

[00:04:49] And that's literally what I told him is I'd rather make it than just write about it. So I got a degree, oddly enough, in naval architecture and marine engineering and ended up working at Johnson Space Center really by accident.

[00:05:13] I ended up interviewing with someone from at that time Lockheed Electronic Company because they'd highlighted naval architects as one of the majors they wanted. And I was curious as to why they wanted a naval architect at JSC.

[00:05:35] And it turns out somebody at the placement office had accidentally highlighted naval architects. Okay. And so I looked at the interviewer. He looked at me and I said, well, we're both here. Let's see what we have to offer.

[00:05:50] And he's going on about how they're doing vibration analysis on the shuttle, which was then a new project had not yet flown. And he fills out part of this vibration matrix, which coincidentally we'd covered in my class the day before because ships vibrate too.

[00:06:12] He fills out part of it and while he's talking, I fill out the rest of it. And he stops and he looks at it and he says, this is right. You can do this. I said, oh yeah, we covered this in class.

[00:06:26] At any rate, they made me an offer and I thought, oh cool, I can go down and I can work on the shuttle program for two or three years. And then I'm going to end up, because Houston was a big offshore platform center, I can

[00:06:42] then switch to offshore platforms. And I ended up doing vibration analysis on the shuttle for a couple of years. Then I segwayed into a job where I was doing shuttle navigation analysis. And by this time it was 1981, we'd actually flown the shuttle a couple of times first.

[00:07:07] And then I ended up getting an offer to do shuttle navigation real time during the missions, which That's amazing. Yeah, I mean it was like, oh this is cool. So I started doing that and about the time I'm thinking, well maybe I should cash in

[00:07:26] my experience and go back to offshore design, they had the big oil bust in Houston. This was in the 80s. And yeah, and of course one of the reasons I'd gone to Houston in aerospace was if there

[00:07:40] are two industries that are contradict cyclical, it's oil and space and aviation. Because when oil prices are up, then you know, that's historically when aviation has been down and vice versa. Except of course in 86 they blew up the shuttle and I couldn't go, I couldn't

[00:08:02] get into the offshore industry because it was in deep recession and I barely hung on to my job and ended up staying there for a while. Going through the worst of the shuttle downside, ended up working on the design of what was

[00:08:22] supposed to be the ISS, not the ISS, the space station freedom. And then that got canceled at which point I decided that space was just too cyclical and decided to go into something that I felt would be more secure like, oh e-commerce.

[00:08:45] And this was in the early 90s. That was actually a rocket ride for a while but of course in 2000 you had the big bust there and coincidentally that was about the time that happened, 9-11 happened and I ended up unemployed for nine months.

[00:09:11] And a friend of mine, well wasn't even a friend, he was just somebody that I'd worked with at McDonnell Douglas years and years ago, found out that I was looked out of work and

[00:09:27] he was NASA fairly high up at JSC and he said just let me know who the hiring managers are, what jobs you're applying for. I'll put in, I'll give you the name of the hiring manager and well it turned out

[00:09:47] one of the jobs I was applying for was being the boss for that was somebody I'd worked for when I was at McDonnell Douglas years ago. I interviewed for it, ended up back in the shuttle program in 2002 just about the time

[00:10:08] they lost yet another orbiter and ended up writing but ended up staying with the shuttle program until it ended. At which point I was doing space navigation rendezvous analysis which sounds really impressive

[00:10:29] and yeah it's a lot of fun but how much demand do you think there was for that in 2011 when the shuttle program ended? Yeah, yeah you definitely have to keep the tea leaves there definitely have something to say.

[00:10:43] Right so I recast myself as a tech writer and then spent another almost dozen years doing technical writing in all sorts of fields. Oil drilling platforms, apartment management, airlines, tanker manuals on how to run super

[00:11:19] tankers it was interesting and then I finally got this job where I was documenting call centers which wasn't much fun but it sure paid a lot and that's at that point this was 2021 and

[00:11:34] at that point I've decided I was doing well on the writing I'll get back to that but that my plan at that point was I was going to retire from the day job in 2020 January 2022

[00:11:50] and then just write full time because I could cover all of my expenses doing that well then in June of 2021 I get this call asking me if I'd be interested in working on the lunar gateway program.

[00:12:06] You've been trying to retire for so long and yet they keep bringing you back. Well no the thing you got to understand about this is when my wife and I moved down to Houston

[00:12:18] in 1979 we were just 10 years away from the first moon landing and the two of us thought it'd be another 10 years before we're heading back to the moon so yeah the shuttle was fun

[00:12:30] but what we really wanted to do was work on a lunar program and it had never happened now all of a sudden I get this call and ask me if I'd be interested in doing that and the lunar gateway is

[00:12:46] a space station that's going to be orbiting behind the moon and will be manned part of the year so from an engineer's standpoint it is a as attractive a project as you can work on

[00:13:01] especially if you've been in in the space business for as many years as I had been and I decided okay you know even though I'd been out of it for 10 years I had a

[00:13:14] some skills that they very badly needed um and it's like I said this is something I'd dreamed about since I was a kid um I grew up during the Apollo or Gemini you know I was in in school during

[00:13:30] Mercury through Apollo um and now they're offering me a chance to be part of a moon program so they they managed to hire me and I've been there ever since and I was forced to cut back on

[00:13:48] the number of books I'm writing so but the thing is it's it's literally how do you say no to a job you've you've wanted all your life so I'll stay there until they lay me off and eventually they will because

[00:14:03] this is how all the space programs go you know every everything's um you know they they're they're go go go until they finally get it up there and then they don't need the designers anymore

[00:14:18] by that time yeah I'll be ready to just sit back and and write now as for how I started writing back up I was always the guy that took on any writing task in my group because I've always

[00:14:36] been good at it then in the 1990s I started writing articles about ship modeling because I was a ship modeler and ended up writing a couple of history articles as well and then uh around 2000 I'd written several articles for an um Osprey magazine magazine published by

[00:15:01] Osprey Publishing and they ended the magazine and I emailed the editor and said what do I do now and he says why don't you try writing a book and I said I've never written a book before and he said

[00:15:17] just think of it as a magazine article only really long yeah I um I might I might have to have a word with that particular guy about some of his categories and concepts but you know okay

[00:15:31] we'll roll with it uh huh well the the thing is he was he was right I mean the the thing is they give you an outline for every one of the lines that they have and you break it down into

[00:15:45] a series of chapters which are really about the size of magazine articles and he walked me through the process and the first book that I had was a book about American heavy frigates

[00:15:59] which were the 44 gun frigates like the constitution and oh that was fun and it picked up enough change to pay for one of my son's tuition for a year and oh that was very handy yeah that was and it's

[00:16:18] like I said it was a lot of fun so uh the next thing that I did was a book about the the space shuttle and this was before I had gone back to NASA and I'd already signed the contract and then

[00:16:33] got the job um working at one of the NASA contractors uh but from there I would do a book or two every year for um for Osprey and then I decided I wanted something with a little bit more meat to it

[00:16:53] so I ended up writing a book about the port of Houston for Arcadia Press and this was before this was before they went all um all pictures so it was heavily pictures but it was also about

[00:17:11] 11,000 12,000 words in the chapter headings which were two or three pages that was a lot of fun I did some more for them um and then it's like I said I got interested in doing some

[00:17:31] long form books like that uh history prestos and by then they'd merged with Arcadia and the first book that I did for them was something called Vanished Houston Landmarks which was about 15 things in Houston that had been really really big and in fact at one point

[00:17:54] defined Houston and then just disappeared and were gone today um the next book I did for them was the one that we're talking about here which is the Vanished Texas Coast uh Lost Port Towns Mysterious Shipwrecks and other two tales

[00:18:12] and that kind of followed the same theme that there were 15 stories that were really important to Texas that had been largely forgotten. I do have some questions for you uh which uh which are which directly pertain to that um this this book is a remarkable compendium

[00:18:40] of stories of naval battles of pirates of explorers you know the the subtitle which you which you offered I loved your subtitle is a very accurate description of what is in fact to be

[00:18:54] found within the covers of Vanished Texas Coast and there even is for our listeners who love a good paranormal experience or two there might even be a ghost in in these these tales. Now I'm not

[00:19:10] going to spoil anything there and we'll leave them to discover that on their own but what struck me about the range of examples that you offer in this particular bookmark the diversity of cases is that they actually go back all the way to the very beginning of recorded

[00:19:29] history in the Americas and I thought that was fascinating that you know you're looking at Vanished Texas Coast before there even was a Texas in this particular case. Did you expect that when

[00:19:39] you first began the research and the collection for this book? Oh yes that was part of the reason I wrote the book um the the thing is when you talk about Texas everyone thinks about

[00:19:51] what we think about cattle we think about cowboys we think about railroads but the thing is that Texas has always been heavily influenced by the sea it was discovered by the sea you know that's one of

[00:20:07] the chapters in there um you know there were important shipwrecks along here um the during the it was it managed to get its independence from Mexico largely because it controlled the

[00:20:26] Gulf of Mexico because that was the only way you could get an army you could march an army into Texas over land but you couldn't supply it um you know during the American Civil War

[00:20:40] the United States Navy was victorious everywhere but west of the Sabine River and then once they got west of the Sabine River weird things happened to them um and the thing is that even

[00:20:59] after the Civil War and into the modern era the sea has been a big influence on Texas especially economically because that's still how you get the big payloads out of Texas through its ports you know and the offshore industry and things like that one of Scotland's most notorious

[00:21:26] unsolved murders to think that someone could turn a cheese wire into a grot and take someone's life the level of violence the uncertainty and the randomness frightened people she always thought the killer was going to come back after her society needs to find our killer who is the

[00:21:45] cheese wire killer listen to the fool series now wherever you get your podcasts and I think one of the things that folks may not fully appreciate frankly um is just how extensive in terms of size the Texas coastline actually is it is enormous and I'm sure there are

[00:22:14] statistics on this but you probably know better than than I do it's got to be uh sort of after California and Florida it has to be in the top five of American states as far as the length

[00:22:28] of its coastline maybe after Alaska as well depending on how you defined it possibly even in the top three where does it rank probably well it depends on whether or not you include Michigan's coastline because number one really is Alaska number two is Michigan because of the

[00:22:48] two peninsula's I mean you know uh three is California I think Texas is four uh maybe Florida um I'm not one that memorizes statistics I I tend to look for for the big picture but yeah

[00:23:08] it's it's a big coast it runs at least a thousand miles oh it's truly fascinating and when you consider just how long you know human settlement has existed you know in this particular area some

[00:23:22] parts of it are very lush they're very verdant you know and then it's not sort of you know scrub grass and prairie I mean it's like lush bayous and so it's beautiful country down there

[00:23:32] it's it's no surprise is it as you're doing the research for this book that you're going to find examples in cases going back century after century after century yes and it's as I said

[00:23:45] when I structured the book I deliberately tried to set it up so that one third of it was before Texas became a republic the second third was from the Texas Republic to about the civil war and then

[00:24:04] the final third being from say the 1870s to the present well let's turn our attention to one of the cases which kind of maps on to it's interesting it's kind of in that transitional zone between the

[00:24:20] Texas Republic the civil war and you know into the the turn of the 19th century and our series that we have been working on is lost cities and I have to say mark you have in this particular volume

[00:24:38] a true lost city I mean it meets the definition in every respect and it's so lost that even as a native of the Gulf south and a resident of the Gulf south I had never heard of indianola Texas before

[00:24:59] I mean you know lived here for a long time and we all know Galveston and its hurricanes but who boy you know indianola it got a one-two punch we'll come to the main action

[00:25:12] in a second but first locate indianola for us okay indianola is I guess you could say it's on the upper Texas coast sort of in the middle you're getting into the into the transition

[00:25:33] between the upper coast and the middle coast and it's in matagorda bay or was in matagorda bay it's no longer as you pointed out it's no longer there and the only thing that it had to recommend it as

[00:25:48] a port was its location because it was the shortest overland route to san antonio and the shortest overland route to the parts of the hill country that the germans settled during the texas republic

[00:26:07] the new brownfells fred bricksburg area bernie blanko etc yep um yeah it was an open roadstead it was shallow but it was the shortest road and when everything traveled by either boat or wagon

[00:26:24] you picked the port closest to where you wanted to go and uh you know so it was founded in the 1840s by prince carl of som brownsfells that's why you've got new brownfells in texas and he was going

[00:26:45] to bring a whole bunch of german colonists over to texas and you know they were going to get wealthy on farming here and they actually did the germans did very very well here um but they needed a port

[00:27:02] to get to where their land grant was so they created this port called uh carlshoffen which is literally carls pork uh carls harbor um at indian point um and that became later became indianola

[00:27:25] it was finally uh first house went up in 1845 during the mexican american war that was the port that most of the u.s. armies supplies went through and again it's also the start of what's

[00:27:42] called the sonoma trail which is an overland call it a wagon route but overland uh route that goes to sonoma valley in california that goes all the way to the pacific coast um so it was

[00:28:02] it it was blessed by geography um it certainly wasn't blessed by the harbor that it had because it's very shallow and they they ended up eventually building these long long wars that

[00:28:20] went out to where it was deep enough to anchor a ship i've got an illustration of that in the book but before that you had to anchor offshore and unload your cargo into boats and then

[00:28:36] take the boats up to shore pretty common in some of those areas along the gulf coast that was very frequently done in lake lake poncha train here in new orleans um you know you would have to

[00:28:48] anchor your ship out in the lake and then yeah take your your smaller draft vessels you know into the local bayous and waterways and so forth you write in your book that the

[00:28:58] the founding of indianola involved you know a few a few hundred souls right a few hundred kind of settlers and so forth but by the 1860s right before the civil war it had really

[00:29:15] blown up as they say i mean it had ballooned the the talk of rail you know had accelerated it had gotten these shipping lines established and and it was really kind of on track to become

[00:29:30] one of texas great coastal cities right it was the second largest port in texas threatened was threatening galveston's preeminence and again a lot of that was simply due to geography that indianola was how you got into the heartland of texas galveston ended up

[00:29:53] growing up first because it was in the area that was first settled and that been pretty much the cotton planting area um but indianola was how you got to san antonio it was also how you

[00:30:10] got to the ranch country and a lot of what exported initially was tallow and hides and then later on it ended up being a big meat exporting port again because of technology because they

[00:30:26] they could refrigerate and freeze beef which they couldn't have done prior to about the 1870s so you know it was going to become i guess the chicago of the south um because they were they

[00:30:40] were shipping meat initially to new orleans but then eventually around the world from that standpoint it was really it should have taken off well before we turn to the civil war which was consequential for indianola and then the storms which became its undoing i have to ask

[00:31:01] you one question uh which this comes from a brief moment in your account um it's it it's absolutely not the sort of thing that one would expect to find in an account of this particular

[00:31:20] nature uh so i assure you mark that with great joy and delight i sat straight up in my chair as i was reading your book and i said what and then i said camels absolutely can you tell us just what

[00:31:37] in in in heaven's name are camels doing on the texas coast slide moving inland right seriously getting off the coastline remember what i said about the sonoma trail and a lot of that is really

[00:31:54] really erud desert and in the 1850s of secretary of war um jeff davis who went on to other things later on but uh but he came up with a brilliant idea that you could use camels as pack animals in that area

[00:32:15] so they ended up importing a herd of camels to use as a supply train and remember what i said about that was the nearest port to san antonio and the the road to california that's the reason they

[00:32:36] they unloaded them there technically the army did not set up a camel core well what an oversight and you know what what a major disappointment i researched that basically they were going to

[00:32:50] use it as a supply train um and they did that for a while but they were the they were essentially civilian drovers were running the camels the same way that civilian drovers ran the wagon trains

[00:33:06] during the mexican-american war and actually during the uh civil war as well well i have to say your illustration uh that you that your visuals in this particular chapter were wonderful and your illustration in particular of the unloading of this ostensible camel core was

[00:33:22] just a a it remains a joy to my heart uh mark and the best thing about it is clearly drawn by somebody who had never actually seen a camel right i love i love those like those

[00:33:36] medieval bestiaries where like you know you open it up and someone has drawn a picture of an armadillo and clearly they have never ever seen an armadillo they've only ever heard about it

[00:33:46] it's just marvelous well the the fun part about it is the sailors are accurate and the boat is accurate and what's happening is accurate but you're right i don't think they really ever saw

[00:33:56] a camel so but it must have been a mess getting those them getting them from the boat from the ship that came from the Ottoman empire to indianola and then offload them onto a small boat and then

[00:34:12] you know take these stubborn recalcitrant creatures and then unload them on the texas shore but they eventually ended up in california the whole lot of them we don't normally do this but

[00:34:27] on that note we're going to leave you hanging and pick back up with the camels and the doomed fate of indianola next week thanks for listening our guest has been mark lardis author of the vanished

[00:34:40] texas coast lost port towns mysterious shipwrecks and other true tales published by the history press to order a copy of the book visit your local independent bookstore or visit arcadia publishing dot com join us next week as we continue our conversation with mark see you then thanks

[00:34:58] as always to our producer bill huffman our production director rigid coin audio engineer ian douglas and our executive producers michael deloia interritor orlando i'm your host benjamin maras crime capsule is a production of evergreen podcasts and a signature title of the killer

[00:35:17] podcasts network you can find crime capsule wherever you listen to podcasts discover more great true crime and paranormal programming at killer podcasts dot com hey there i'm james host of dakota spotlight we're back with a new season you killed chris a friend's fight for justice

[00:35:45] it's a chilling throwback to 1968 a college freshman christine roth child was murdered on campus during her morning walk join us as we dive into this unsolved case and follow a friend's relentless pursuit of the truth all the way from the flower power era to today binge

[00:36:01] you killed chris on your favorite app or at dakotas spotlight dot com