Dark Valley Destiny (18 page)

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On the range, as on the trail, the cattle grazed on open, vacant land, so that food for the animals presented no problem or cost. During a long drive, a certain number of mavericks were rounded up. A maverick was originally an unbranded calf, usually born during a cattle drive, on which was placed, as soon as practical, the brand borne by its dam, assuming this to be the brand of the owner. But there were always other unbranded calves—strays that had wandered off or been left behind. These were branded in the name of the outfit that found them, without trying to discover the animal's true ownership.

"Mavericking" thus easily evolved from branding unbranded calves with their owner's brand to branding strays with one's own brand, and thence to changing brands. Cowboys permitted to brand indiscriminately for their employers soon found they could just as easily steal cattle and brand them for themselves. Many
Would
-be planters, who had come to West Texas to farm, became cattlemen instead by capitalizing on this loose habit of branding mavericks. Texas is still rife with rumors of big cattle outfits whose initial capital was nothing more than the price of a branding iron, and the line between rancher and rustler is not clearly drawn even today.
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By 1890 these Western cowpunchers, now legendary heroes, had managed to move ten million head of cattle and one million horses over trails that are still sung about; yet the period that produced the heroic cowboy lasted less than two decades. Transformations of cultures in such brief periods are characteristic of the Texas frontier; they account for much of the violence of the time. Without the guidance of established social systems and a body of codified law, the law west of the Pecos became very elastic indeed.
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The years from 1865 to 1885 witnessed the extermination of the buffalo, the Mason County war, the Horrell-Higgins feud, and the Sutton-Taylor feud. Cattle rustling across the Rio Grande in both directions reached its peak: Mexican rustlers stole Texan cattle, and Texan rustlers stole Mexican cattle, with much informal Mexican-American border warfare. The period spanned the careers of Sam Bass and his robbers and of "Billy the Kid" (Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney), John Wesley Hardin, and other noted gunmen who blazed a bloody trail across the state. It was the great age, romanticized in countless stories, movies, and television shows, of the cowboy and the gunman. Robert Howard was especially fascinated by the violent men of that violent time.

According to the celebrated "Code of the West," one might with impunity kill any armed man, provided that one approached him from the front and challenged him by crying: "Draw!" In practice, gunmen got around these restrictions either by suddenly shouting "Draw!" and shooting before the victim could react, or more practically by ambushing him and shooting him in the back with a rifle or a shotgun.

Robert Howard especially admired John Wesley Hardin, considered writing a novel about him, and, we suspect, modeled some of his heroes —notably Conan—on him. He wrote of Hardin's steel-trap quickness of nerve and muscle and of his mind, one of the finest on the continent.
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Howard apparently took at face value the self-serving autobiography that Hardin composed while serving nineteen years of a twenty-five-year sentence for murder. When he was jailed, at the age of twenty-six, Hardin had killed at least forty-four men. Howard claimed that every one of Hardin's victims merely got what was coming to him.
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Since the victims did not survive to tell their side of the story, there was nobody to contradict Hardin or his admirer.

Hardin was certainly intelligent—he became a lawyer by study in jail—and a dead shot with marvelous reflexes and coordination. He also had a hair-trigger temper and gave not the smallest damn for human life. As nearly as one can judge, he supported himself mainly by gambling. Since the laws of probability are no respecters of persons, one can make a steady income from gambling only by cheating. Although some card games, like bridge and poker, involve skill as well as luck, even in these a run of bad luck can wipe out the most skillful player.
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It would seem, therefore, that Hardin's main career was that of cardsharp. He got away with it so long because, whenever someone caught him dealing off the bottom of the deck, he instantly killed his accuser. Although his autobiography was meant to justify all his homicides, he did let slip that he had killed one man just for fun.
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Forgetting his statement that Hardin's victims had merely received their just reward, Howard narrated the incident with relish and amusement. Hardin, he said, was coming out of a saloon drunk, with a friend. The friend pointed to a man lounging on a barrel down the street and bet Hardin that he could not shoot the man off his barrel in his present state. So Hardin whipped out his .44 and shot the man through the head.
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When he got out of jail, Hardin practiced law for a while but proved "unequal to the task of becoming a useful citizen."
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He drifted back to gambling. In El Paso, he threatened a policeman for arresting his girl friend when she got drunk and walked down the street shooting a pistol at random. So the policeman's father came up behind Hardin in a saloon and shot him through the head.

The Civil War had a double-edged impact on Texas. The settled Texans —pioneers and the children of pioneers—had always tended to be forward-looking, and the reality of the war accentuated this tendency. On the other hand, the wave of immigrants who arrived after the war, having fled Reconstruction, brought with them the influence of the antebellum South. These refugees came with a view of the world and a set of expectations different from those held by the already established Texans.

The Southern immigrants' dream of the future was always tinged with nostalgia. Unlike the adventurous men who had come earlier and accommodated themselves to the land, the white Southerners were the dispossessed. Having seen better days, many expected to reestablish these former times of glory in this raw new land. Thus the white settlement was split into two factions: one group reaching for the future, the other striving to restore the past.

Although Hester Jane Howard was born in Texas and Isaac Mordecai Howard first entered the state in the 1880s, the two exemplified these contrasting attitudes. Isaac displayed the adventurous, speculative, forward-looking spirit typical of the original Texicans; while Hester showed the nostalgic yearning for a lost gentility characteristic of immigrants, including her own parents, from the South after the Civil War.

In such a time of turmoil, the legend of the "good" outlaw nourishes. This mythical character is supposed, like Robin Hood, to oppose the "bad" establishment. The concept of the good outlaw, part of the messianic fantasies of adolescence, is especially seductive to a young person confused about the social system he wants to reform. The myth was rife in post-Civil War Texas, when Sam Bass and his gang were riding and robbing. Bass had many sympathizers among the settlers, who willingly furnished the gang with food for the men and their horses and warned them of the whereabouts of the Rangers.
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In periods of cultural conflict and change, with popular morality in a state of flux, the line between the lawful and the lawless is faint. Man} crossed it, switching roles from robber to peace officer and back, mucli as Conan alternates soldiering with pillage and piracy. Thus Hardin onc« served as a sheriff's deputy. But few achieved the versatility of Henr) Plummer, who in Montana in 1863-64 served simultaneously as sherif and leader of a band of robbers.

The extension of railroads into Texas ended the need for the lonj northward cattle drives. Shipping the cattle to market became easier With the advent of barbed wire and the laws that supported it, the drives already dwindling, disappeared entirely. By the early 1890s, the days o: the Cattle Kingdom were drawing to a close; but even the breakup of thi ranges did not take place without a struggle. !

Until the invention of barbed wire, the fencing of large properties was almost unheard-of and, in a treeless country, practically impossible, But the "bob wire" fence made it practical to enclose vast areas. Home steaders—the small farmers who followed the railroads westward anc took up plots of free government land—were enemies of the open range They enclosed their small plots to protect themselves from large-seal* cattle drives. Yet those among them who were also cattlemen counted 01 government-owned lands to support their small herds, and they felt fre< to cut any fences that included these public lands. This practice led t< so much controversy that in 1884, after a heated debate, the legislature passed a law making fence-cutting a felony. To spare the cattlemen! however, the law forbade the fencing of public lands, public roads, an< the lands of other landowners without their permission. Each fence ha< to have a gate every three miles.

So bitterly were the fence wars fought that, for a time, Texa Rangers were stationed in Brown and Callahan counties, where th damage was especially severe. Memories of this bitterness lingerec providing Robert Howard with additional tales of violence. He describe the cowboys driving their longhorns north, while squatters and home steaders stole stray cattle. Big ranchers retaliated by stringing rustle* to the nearest tree, but they themselves augmented their herds by bram ing mavericks. ;

Ranchers cut homesteaders' fences, burned their farmhouses, an sometimes wiped out whole families as ruthlessly as any Comanche. Th homesteaders in turn fouled the ranchers' springs and dammed their streams; they lay in wait for cowboys and shot them out of the saddle. In the long run, the homesteaders won by weight of numbers, persistence, and legislation. Soon the land was fenced, save for some government-owned tracts kept open for the use of cattlemen. Howard sympathized with the cattlemen, who seemed closer to his beloved barbarian warriors than the farmers who wrested the land from them and tamed it.

Texas was catapulted into the twentieth century with the discovery of oil. There had been a small oil boom in Corsicana in 1896, but its production was a trickle compared to Captain Anthony B. Lucas's gusher of 1901, which erupted on a marshy hillock called Spindletop, near Beaumont in the southeast corner of the state. Refineries, largely owned by Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, sprang up. The furnaces of ships and locomotives were converted from coal-burning to oil-burning. The sale of fake oil stock, centering in Fort Worth, became a major industry; 2,700 corporations sold an estimated $250,000,000 worth of worthless stock certificates.
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Eastern capital came into the state, starting a long-term conflict between those who claimed to stand for "the people" and those whom they accused of alliance with "the outside interests." Oil companies became politically powerful. The increasing use of automobiles around the time of the First World War made the petroleum business more profitable and the hunt for oil fields more frantic than ever.

During the First World War, Texans showed themselves second to none in patriotic zeal and warlike virtues, and Robert Howard's boyhood games reflected the martial preoccupation of the times. Besides the European conflict, this period saw a great resurgence of Mexican banditry. After the fall of the Mexican president-dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911, Mexico suffered a decade of revolution and civil war. The
bandidos
raided into Texas, often with the connivance of Mexican officials; the Anglo-Texans retaliated, often on more or less innocent Hispano-Americans, who were killed on general principles.

The twenties brought convulsive changes to the United States as a whole —Prohibition and bootlegging, women's suffrage, the revolution in women's dress and work habits, the Jazz Age, the Florida boom and bust, and so on—but nowhere did these changes strike with a heavier impact than in Texas. Oil booms exploded in several parts of the state, especially along a line that was for a time called the Oil Belt. This tract extended from West-Central Texas, where Robert Howard lived, north along the Panhandle into Oklahoma. Cotton-growing by irrigation spread in West Texas, while the subtropical lower Rio Grande Valley developed a flourishing fruit industry. The increasing mechanization of agriculture would eventually force out many tenant farmers.

Improved roads, motion pictures, and radios began to homogenize the whole American population, so that the differences between Texans and other Americans dwindled. The contrast between countryman and city dweller also blurred, until eventually small-town Texans began to play golf and give cocktail parties, like other middle-class Americans. In 1920 they would scarcely have dreamed of doing such exotic things.

The rapidity of these social and economic changes was in itself a kind of violence. Robert Howard's Texas was at the point of impact of a head-on collision between an industrial and an agrarian society, each viewing the world in a quite different way. With such divergent sets of expectations, time-honored social controls are inadequate. It is not surprising that Howard experienced a complete crisis in values. Although many shared experiences were made possible through improved communications and the expansion of mass media, the meaning of these experiences and their interpretation differed widely between the two cultures. Often the differences between these separate life-styles were more profound than the differences between the generations.

When Texans were not busy defending themselves from each other, they were defending themselves against the elements. Fire, flood, and drouth stalked the plains. Fire, erupting apparently from nowhere, would sweep over the prairie, threatening the farmer's crops and driving all living creatures before it. Prairie fires were not only a financial disaster but also an immediate threat to the men who fought them. Firefighters had to be alert for snakes and other animals, which, threatened by the blaze, would strike out blindly.

The winds that blew constantly over the prairie sometimes eddied into little whirlwinds, which picked up sparks and cinders from one blaze and deposited them hundreds of yards away, thus starting new fires. These could trap the firefighters between two blazes, threatening them with incineration, anoxia, and lung damage from breathing hot gases. Men learned to stay away from the cedar brakes that dotted hillocks and pastures. When these were ignited, they went up with a roar that consumed the whole stand, often in a matter of seconds.