Michener, James A. (105 page)

cobb: 'It's true. Santa Anna passes through our lines tomorrow at eight.'

komax. 'Let's shoot him.'

cobb: 'None of that! He has a safe-conduct from General Scott.'

komax: 'Santy Anny is a butcher. Let's give him a taste of butcherin'.'

cobb: 'Macnab, can you reason with this wild man?'

komax: 'You ain't never drawed a bean outen a clay pot. You ain't never seen your father speared down in cold blood, while he was a honorable prisoner'

cobb: 'Gentlemen of Texas, we've been through a great deal together...'

komax: 'You had me given "The Rogue's March."

cobb: 'And I'd do it again tomorrow, but here in the south I've learned what a heroic group of men you are. I have never served with better.

I would ride anywhere on earth, up to the face of any cannon ..." (At this point his voice broke and for almost a minute he stared at the ground.) 'Men, do not sully a splendid reputation. If you assault your defeated enemy . ' (His voice broke again and, angry at himself, he spoke rapidly.) 'Hell, he's your prisoner. He's unarmed. Do you want to be regarded by all the civilized world as lacking in honor? What are you, anyway, a bunch of miserable bastards? Do you really want to befoul the fair name of Texas? Do you want to stand in shame before the world 7 '

komax: 'We'll think about that.'

Unable to extract a promise, Cobb drew himself to full height, saluted, and left his men for what 1 believe was the last time. His final words to Macnab and Komax which I heard as he passed me were: 'Don't be a pair of Texas sons-a-bitches.' He left us, head high, eyes straight ahead, his beautiful uniform without one misplaced seam.

It was a bright morning when General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna prepared to ride through the gauntlet of American soldiers.

In the open carriage, pulled by four horses and managed by two drivers fore and two uniformed outriders standing aft, the newly wedded general and his child bride would ride, accompanied by Benito Garza and Lucha Lopez. As Garza stepped into the carriage he blurted out: 'Excellency, the heart of Mexico goes with you into exile.'

Hands clasped about his bejeweled sword to mask their trembling, Santa Anna gave the order 'Forward!'—then stared straight ahead. Silently he passed between the double file of Rangers standing less than five feet from him on each side. He glanced at none of them, because he knew that they had sworn to kill him and he could not guess at what signal they would strike.

Each Ranger looked hard at him, each conveyed the bitterness of this extraordinary moment, but none looked with more strangled emotions than their liaison-colonel, Persifer Cobb: God, let this moment pass. Let them keep their big mouths shut.

Otto Macnab stared at Santa Anna as if to engrave the Mexican's features on his memory, then, turning his head, stiffened with shock when he saw who was sitting opposite the general. It was Benito Garza, and for a long moment the two old friends, the two perpetual adversaries, looked into each other's eyes—Garza's ebony-black, Macnab's cerulean-blue—and the respect, the hatred and the confusion glowed. Neither man made a gesture of recognition. For some reason the carriage hesitated, and the moment of meeting was agonizingly prolonged.

Then the carriage moved forward again. Each man kept his

head turned toward the other until dust intervened. The war had ended.

It was a perplexing war, which few had welcomed except President Polk and the expansionists, and its significance is revealed only when viewed from three aspects.

First, it was an inescapable prolongation of the 1836 Texas revolution. Since Mexican leadership had never accepted the loss of territory resulting from that struggle, and since Mexico had as many superpatriots as Texas, it was inevitable that continued attempts would be made to recapture the lost province. Arrival of United States power put a stop to such plotting.

Second, the war was an application of the new slogan of Manifest Destiny. American patriots had looked at the map and proclaimed almost automatically: 'We must control this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific' Texas dreamers could cry: 'We must have everything down to the Isthmus of Panama,' and frenzied New Englanders could and did shout for the annexation of Canada, even launching abortive military campaigns to achieve that worthy purpose. The successful outcome of the Mexican War meant that the Pacific coast was secured, and a good thing, in terms of geography at least, was accomplished.

Third, the war had a powerful psychological effect on the new state of Texas. It was exerted not on Texas itself, for the war really had only a limited influence internally: it was fought primarily by men and officers from the twenty-seven other states in the Union and it served as a training ground for the greater War Between the States of 1861-1865, which lurched ever closer. The names of the younger officers who had fought under Taylor and Scott sound like a roll call to military greatness: Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Braxton Bragg, George Gordon Meade, Albert Sidney Johnston, Jubal Early, William Tecumseh Sherman, P.G.T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, George B. McClellan, and the two popular heroes Stonewall Jackson and Fighting Joe Hooker.

It also strengthened the American propensity for electing military heroes to the presidency, four of the American officers in this war attaining that high office—Taylor, Grant, Jefferson Davis, Franklin Pierce—with three others, Scott, Fremont and McClellan, trying. Three Mexican officers also attained the presidency of their nation, including the ineffable Santa Anna, who would be summoned back from exile to lead his country once more.

If the war had little effect in Texas in tangible terms, how was' its significance for the state manifested? Thanks to the newspa-

per stories of reporters like Harry Saxon and the brilliantly colored lithographs of Currier and Ives, the rest of the nation acquired a romantic and often favorable view of their new state. The Texas Ranger became a legendary figure, composed partly of Panther Komax and his undisciplined ways, partly of Otto Mac-nab and his merciless efficiency. A deluge of lurid penny-thrillers recounted the adventures of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and the Texas Rangers. Tall stories were told about life in Texas decades before most people had heard the word cowboy or ever a steer was driven north.

Of course, not every soldier who served in Texas returned home singing its praises. One Pennsylvania volunteer said: 'If I was ordered back to Texas, I'd cut my throat." A general said later: if I owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.' Perhaps Colonel Persifer Cobb of Edisto Island, South Carolina, said it with deepest feeling: i am often haunted by nightmares. I'm back in Texas trying to discipline thirty-six Rangers.'

The war left one indelible heritage: it intensified the animosity that already existed between Texans and Mexicans. The savage behavior of the Rangers in both the Monterrey area and Mexico City established them nationally as los tejanos sangrientes, and along the Rio Grande as los Rinches.

War often produces unexpected transformations of social life, and this one gave America and Texas each an unusual boon. During negotiations with Santa Anna, that wily gentleman told a group of American businessmen: 'When I was on duty in Yucatan, I came upon a product which I am sure will make one of you rich. It was called chicle.' And thus chewing gum was introduced into the States. Texas received a gift almost as far-reaching, for in one of Harry Saxon's finest daguerreotypes, he caught the birth of a legend. Panther Komax, hairy as ever, is shown with a barefoot Mexican peon kneeling at his feet. The accompanying story read:

I must confess that I posed this picture the morning after the event occurred. When Colonel Cobb and I went out on the night of the great killings in Mexico City we were so late that we discovered nothing, so we retired to quarters, but shortly thereafter I returned to the streets, suspecting that something of moment was occurring, and I came upon the tail end of the slaughter. Komax and his partner Otto Macnab had been shooting anyone in sight, but they ran out of ammunition. Seeing this disreputable peon who looked as if he might have been one of the murderers of Allsens, Macnab was preparing to cut the man's throat when the latter broke loose, fell to the ground, and began grabbing at Komax's boot.

From prolonged use, the boot was in sad repair, and this the groveling man indicated, tugging at it and informing us in some way that he, the peon, was a bootmaker, and that given the proper tools, he could mend that boot. Macnab, who spoke excellent Spanish, put away his knife and interrogated the man. Yes, he carried the universal name Juan Hernandez. Yes, he was a bootmaker and a good one. Yes, he could either mend Komax's boot or make him one much better.

Komax, catching the drift, raised the man to his feet and asked, through Macnab: 'Can you make a boot as good as this?' and Hernandez broke into nervous laughter: 'If I made a boot that bad, my mother would beat me.' In this way, on a night of carnage and at the very point of death, my company of Texas Rangers acquired a bootmaker who now marches with us, tending our shoes.

When the Rangers left their transport at Indianola, that thriving harbor on Matagorda Bay, Otto stayed three days with his brother-in-law, Theo Allerkamp; then, on a horse provided by Theo, he started on the long ride to Fredericksburg.

His spirits rose as he neared Austin, where he spent two days verifying title to his acreage at Fredericksburg. With reassuring documents in his pocket he started westward, and for the first time in his life took time to appreciate the miracle of a luxuriant Texas spring, not the ordinary blossoming of trees at Victoria, or the sparse flowers along the Brazos, or that wilderness of minute flowerlets in the Nueces desert, but the unbelievable expanse of two distinct flowers, one a rich blue, the other a reddish gold. Sometimes they covered entire fields: And not little fields, either. Look at them! How many acres?

He was staring at a spread of flowers along the banks of the Colorado River, so many and in such dazzling array that they almost blinded him. Here rose the wonderful bluebonnets of Texas, each stem ending in a sturdy pyramid of delightful blue flowers. Intermixed with them was the only other flower that could make the blue stand out, the Indian paintbrush in burnt orange. Blue and red-orange, what a surprising combination, made even more vibrant by the fact that both flowers bore at their apex a fleck of white, so that the field pulsated with beauty. So vast it was in extent that Otto could scarcely believe that so many flowers, each its own masterpiece, could combine to create a picture of such harmony. 'Red, white and blue,' he murmured. 'What a flag.'

But then he reached the spot where the Pedernales River joined the Colorado, and now he knew he was approaching his destination, and as he climbed a slight rise he was confronted by a field not of forty acres or of eighty, but of limitless extent, and it was solid bluebonnet and paintbrush, a benediction of nature so prodi-

gal that he could only halt and gaze. Then slowly he turned his horse and rode toward home.

Benito Garza also went home, but to a tormented scene. Exhausted from long days of guerrilla warfare, he left Vera Cruz with his wife and three commandeered horses as weary of battle as their riders. Painfully the couple made their way through the jungle and up to the altiplano, where they witnessed the desolation of Avila and the other ruins wrought by the war.

They felt a bleeding sorrow for their country, for wherever they looked they saw the costs of defeat: the punished villages in which they had sometimes hidden; the horribly wounded men striving to master new crutches; children with distended bellies; the ugly penalties paid by those who had obeyed the rash decrees of Santa Anna.

During the first eighteen days of this bleak pilgrimage Benito refused to place the blame upon his hero: 'No! Don't say that, Lucha. Santa Anna had a fine plan, but it fell astray.'

'His plans always fell astray.'

'He'll come back, I promise you. He'll land at Vera Cruz, just as before, except that this time . . .'

At the start of the third week, when the Garzas learned from friends in Mexico City how tremendous the loss of territory was to be—more than half the country turned over to the norteamericanos—he began to admit that his hero had made fearful errors: 'He could have engineered it better. Lose Tejas, yes. But never should he have given up so much more.'

When they reached San Luis Potosi they heard a constant wail of grief, and now the recriminations against Santa Anna became vociferous, for this region contained many who had fought at Buena Vista, and who knew that Santa Anna had fled the battlefield when victory was at hand. As Lucha said: 'That last night Maria and I crept out on scout while you were meeting with Santa Anna. Secretly, along the shoulder of the hill, we could see that the yanquis were retreating in disarray. But when we returned we were not allowed to report. Women were not welcomed in that tent.'

How tragic the defeat was! The litany of lost lands carried its own sorrow, never to be erased from the mexicano soul: 'Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, Arizona, California, que lastima, que dolor!' The names formed a rosary of despair, the heart of Mexico torn away and bleeding.

As the Garzas approached the Rio Grande before turning east toward Matamoros, they paused to look across the river into the still-contested Nueces Strip, and resting in their saddles, they

reached brutal conclusions: 'Santa Anna failed us. In the present leadership there is no hope. Mexico will never know peace, and there is no chance of turning back the norteamericanos.' But in the depth of their despair they saw a chance for personal salvation, and Benito, his mustaches dark in the blazing sunlight, phrased their oath: The yanquis who try to steal that Strip from us, they'll never know a night of security. Their cattle will never graze in peace. By God, Lucha, they'll pay a terrible price for their arrogance. Promise me you'll never surrender.' 'I promise.'

. . . TASK FORCE

I believe that all of us, older members and youthful staff alike, looked forward with greater eagerness to our April meeting than to any before. It was to be held in Alpine, an authentic frontier town of some six thousand population situated in the heart of rugged ranch country in West Texas. To the south, along the Rio Grande, lies remote Big Bend National Park with its peaks and canyons, an overgrazed semi-desert in 1944, when it was taken into the park system, but now a miraculously recovered primitive wilderness. To the north, rising as if to protect it, are the Guadalupes, tallest mountains in Texas, and Fort Davis, best restored of the old Texas battle stations.