Dark Valley Destiny (17 page)

In 1846, at the urging of the Texicans, the United States annexed Texas and presently stumbled into war with Mexico. In promoting the outbreak of this war, both parties showed a maximum of chauvinistic belligerence and a minimum of pacific reasonableness. Both governments were spoiling for a fight. The Mexicans, who had the larger army, thought they could win; but between the incompetence of their
criollo
officers and the miserable training and equipment of their largely
indio
enlisted men, they never had a chance.

The Americans won the Mexican War and thereupon annexed the whole northern half of the Mexican nation. To most of this area—the present states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada—Mexico held only a paper title. This title went back to the grandiose claims of sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese kings, who averred that they had divided the entire non-Christian world between them; the Pope, they said, had given them clear title to their respective hemispheres. Spain claimed all of North and South America except for the bulge of Brazil. Needless to say, neither the Americans nor the Mexicans, who still argue about who had a "right" to these vast lands, gave any consideration to the wishes of the people, mostly uncon-quered aboriginal tribesmen, who actually lived there.

In the end the United States paid a modest sum to Mexico, and the end of slavery in Texas was postponed for another twenty years. With the annexation of Texas, the English-speaking population rapidly increased. By 1852 these new Texicans, as they called themselves, had settled the land and coped with the problem of the warlike Comanches.

Violence continued unabated as the Comanches raided, robbed, raped, burned, and murdered, while the whites retaliated not only on the raiders but also on any peaceable Indians they encountered. At length the Comanches allowed themselves to be herded into reservations. One group settled on the Brazos Reservation to try out the white man's plan to transform them into farmers. Their efforts, however, were defeated by drouth, grasshoppers, and the harassments of neighboring whites, who were prevented only by the U.S. Army from invading the reservation to kill every living Indian.

For all the villainy and brutality of white-Indian relationships, it must be remembered that men have followed similar courses all over the world whenever a technically advanced people has confronted a more primitive one. For peace to exist between populations separated by such a wide cultural gap

. . . requires some sort of constituted central authority and a considerable degree of control by the tribe over its component individuals. In the absence of such control wars are easy to begin but almost impossible to stop. Our own frontier history is full of cases in which peace, made in good faith on both sides, was broken through the acts of irresponsible individuals. Most Indian tribes had no effective techniques for preventing determined men from going on the war-path, while our own government was unable to control its frontier population.
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Stephen E. Austin in the 1820s recognized the lawlessness of the frontier: "Among the ignorant . . . Americans, independence means resistance and obstinancy, right or wrong. This is particularly true of frontiersmen."
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Violence did not cease when practically all the Indians were finally expelled from Texas in 1859. A white man who long tried to get justice for the Indians, and whose melancholy task it was to manage their exile from their native land, was Major Robert S. Neighbors. His efforts to obtain fair play were rewarded by an Indian-hating fanatic, Edward Cornett, with a fatal shot in the back. But in Texas nobody was allowed to shoot a white
man
—even an "Indian-lover" like Neighbors—in the back; so Cornett was lynched.

In the Civil War most Texans sided with the Confederacy, as did the Howards and the Ervins. Those who did not suffered for their convictions. Sam Houston, governor in 1861, held out for the Union and was driven from office. Less fortunate Unionists were terrorized by torchings < and lynchings until most of them fled the state.
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Robert Howard gleefully recounted the massacre of a party of German settlers who, unwilling to aid the Confederacy, tried to flee from Texas to Mexico.
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While Texas saw practically no Union-Confederate fighting, the ;
frontier
garrisons were sharply reduced to supply the Confederate ranks; and as a consequence the warlike Indian tribes resumed their raiding undeterred. Although in the two decades after 1865 the Indian Wars broke the final resistance of the Western tribes, Texas continued to be plagued by bands of white horse thieves, who dressed in Indian regalia! so that the blame would fall on the aborigines. Fearing retaliation if they proclaimed the truth, the victims of these raiders pretended to believej this fiction.
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The last battle of the Civil War was fought in Texas on May 13, 1865, near Palo Alto in the southern tip of the state. A Confederate* regiment met a smaller body of Federals and forced them to retreat, only to learn later that the war was already over and everybody might as well go home. The Civil War ended slavery, but the former slave-owners were outraged by what they viewed as confiscation of their honestly acquired property. As late as 1910, when Confederate veterans held conventions in Texas, they passed resolutions calling upon the U.S. Government to pay them compensation for the loss of their slaves, notwithstanding the fact that Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically declared all claims to such payments "illegal and void."
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Texas underwent the pains of Reconstruction and, with the election of Governor Richard Coke in 1874, the reestablishment of Democratic Party rule and the advent of the white-supremacy movement. Howard often alluded to the outrages of carpetbaggers and Negroes during the period of Reconstruction. Many of these outrages were real enough. Anglo-Texan anger and acts of violence were largely directed against black freedmen who were being offered the full rights of citizenship and against Texan Unionists who had fled the state during the Civil War and now returned to take up their old way of life.

With such a background of interethnic violence, it is not surprising that Texans should become one of the most ethnocentric peoples on earth. Having fought for their lives against Mexicans and Indians, they viewed both groups with contempt and hostility, despite the facts that several Hispano-Texans had died in defense of the Alamo and that the vice-president of Texas under the first provisional government was a Hispano, Lorenzo de Zavala. A Texan gunman, bragging of the many men he had killed, often ended the tally by adding: "And that don't count Indians and Mexicans, either!" Captain L. H. McNelly, a Texas Ranger renowned in the 1870s for his courage, had no more compunction about torturing and killing "greasers" than most men would have about swatting a fly; and the Rangers were described by an admiring historian as "Indian exterminators."
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As for the Negro, although Texas has changed with the rest of the country and a main street in Austin is now named after Martin Luther King, it took Texans a long time to regard blacks as anything more than lost property.

Robert Howard, who romanticized the frontier era, expressed a view not uncommon among Texans of his time when he explained that he did not consider it a criminal act to kill a man in a feud or in a fair stand-up fight.
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A casual attitude toward murder had been a feature of Texan culture ever since the first influx of Anglo-Americans in the 1820s. Besides brave pioneers, industrious settlers, genteel Southern aristocrats, and public-spirited citizens, the land attracted a horde of footloose, lawless adventurers. Sam Houston said:

All new states are infested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men, who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures. But Texas was absolutely overrun by such men. There seemed to be few of that class which could give character to the institutions of new states, which suddenly spring into power,—men who are brave enough for any trial, wise enough for any emergency, and cool enough for any crisis.
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With such a population, the Anglo-Texans' tendency (when not shooting Indians, Mexicans, or Negroes) to shoot each other is not altogether to be wondered at. "The bars of Houston," writes a contemporary Texan, "are among the beet places in America to get killed."
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And for over a century the utterance of any threat, slight, or lecherous remark about a Texan's womenfolk—or any words so construed—was tantamount to an invitation to murder or mayhem.

Between 1870 and 1880, West Texas underwent a complete transformation, something rarely seen in a single generation. The buffalo that for centuries had roamed the grasslands of the high plains were practically exterminated, and their place was taken by cattle. Instead of Indian and buffalo, the cowpuncher and his cattle began to move through the tall grasses of the open range. This was the fabled Cattle Kingdom, where restless beasts were herded over vast fenceless territories common to all. From the loneliness of these ranges emerged a uniquely Western man, the cowboy, or cowpuncher as he called himself.

The cowpuncher was more than a hired man on a horse. The two, man and horse, formed an efficient working unit, the likes of which is seldom seen, although neither was worth much without the other. Working against a hostile environment and the stubborn beasts they herded, the Texas cowpunchers managed to drive cattle hundreds of miles to their markets.

Cattle drives had to move slowly, to allow the cattle to graze as they went. The animals had to be watered frequently and herded carefully; for they were skittish, and any disturbance might set them off. A stampede not only jeopardized the lives of the animals and the men who herded them, it also presaged financial disaster; for it ran the fat off the animals and seriously reduced their market value.

The responsibility for the success of the drive lay with the drive foreman or trail driver, a rare breed of man whose task it was to bring the cattle through intact. The best of these trail drivers learned their trade on the ranges of the Cattle Kingdom of West Texas, where the isolation of the open ranges forced them to understand the behavior of their beasts and the psychology of their men in a way no one else had attempted.
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In clothing derived from that of Old Mexico, the cowboy was equipped for utility. His broad-brimmed hat not only protected him from the elements but also served in an emergency as a fan to encourage a fire, a wash basin, a canteen, a feed bag, and now and then as a prod or weapon against a cantankerous cow. The bright-red bandana knotted around his neck as a protection against sunburn identified him from afar. It filtered out the dust, provided a towel, napkin, or kerchief as needed, and in a pinch could be used to blindfold a calf or bandage a wound.

The cowboy's shirt, as bright as his bandana, was tucked into tight-fitting blue jeans, which were held up by the wide belt that supported his Colt .45. In brush country he wore chaps (from the Spanish
chaparajos)
over his legs to protect him from thorns and brambles. Boots, spurs, and gauntlets completed the outfit.

The cowboy's dearest possessions were his boots and saddle. Custom-made, hand-tooled boots at $25 or $30 a pair might represent two months' pay, where a reasonable wage was $15 to $20 a month; but the pointed toes, soft soles, and high heels were designed for the cow-puncher's job and helped him to perform it better.

The cowpuncher's horse was his best friend and confidant. Man and horse taught each other. Between them they worked out the psychology of the cow, knowledge that they exploited daily. Every cowboy owned at least one fine horse, and he lavished affection on it by providing it with the finest saddle and accouterments he could afford. Often the tooled leather and silver mounting were works of art; but the saddle and bridle, silver-mounted though they might be, never sacrificed utility to appearance.

On the trail the cowboy carried his wardrobe on his back. He rarely

bathed or shaved, and he saw no reason to change clothes. Astride his horse, with his lariat coiled and tied to the right side of his saddle, his scabbard and short rifle secured on the left, and his rations, coffee pot, and skillet rolled in his blanket and fastened to the cantle, the cowboy was ready for whatever the trail might bring.

As the size of the herds to be moved increased into the thousands, the chuck wagon came to be the center of social solidarity. It hauled the men's equipment, including their bedrolls and their food, and was driven by the camp cook, who barbered, mended, doctored, and consoled the men. Around the chuck wagon in the light of the campfire, the men met at the end of the day, gossiped, traded tall tales, recounted legends, and sang the songs that have made this period famous. These hours of camaraderie melded the disparate personalities of the range into an outfit.

The cowboy and the outlaws with whom they were continually at war shared certain traits. Living on the frontier, separated from organized society and codified law, they formulated laws of their own and enforced them if necessary at the muzzle of a six-shooter. Some of these rules reflected the moral and ethical systems of the society in which they grew up, but more often the rules merely reflected the ornery mood of the cowboy at the time. Often the line between cowboy and outlaw was thin, and some cowboys crossed it. J

The cowpuncher's basic loyalty was to his fellow cowboys and to i his outfit. Such personal quarrels or disputes as arose during roundup ! or on a drive remained unsettled until the men were released from their "j duties. Then they settled their differences man to man without interfer- I ence. A shoot-out that ended in death was not considered murder but merely the combatants' private affair. Sheriffs and marshalls found it hard to arrest a man on the range, since the other cowpunchers always helped the culprit to escape. I

The average cowboy was an indifferent shot; first, because he could ! not afford to spend cartridges by the score in daily target practice; and j second, because the mass-produced Colt revolver was not a precision firearm. It became even less accurate after the cowboy used it to drive i nails in fence posts and to pound his coffee beans to powder. Many j cowboys did not even carry pistols, figuring that they were thus less ;j likely to be challenged and killed by some gunman looking for trouble. A cowpuncher took more pride in his riding than in his shooting.
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