Michener, James A. (83 page)
Read Michener, James A. Online
Authors: Texas
Her husband, now a serious student of English law, hoped that Great Britain would take control, and quickly: 'We would fit in so
perfectly with English ways of justice, law and government.' He was, as a Southerner, so convinced that entry into the United States was unlikely that he actively sought union with Britain and propagandized any who would listen, especially Otto: 'Can't you c see? In states like Virginia and Pennsylvania and Carolina, we were; English. It would be proper for us to reunite.' He assured Otto that Texas rights would be protected and even extended in such a reunion.
Quimper's interest centered on Mexico, which was threatening to resume the war. No peace treaty between Mexico and her former colony had ever been promulgated, so that renewal of the war was a real possibility: 'What we ought to do is let those: damned Mexicans make a move against us, and then march right down to Mexico City and take over the whole country. They'll never be able to govern it by themselves.' Of course, when Mexico did invade Texas and capture San Antonio, which happened twice, Quimper could not believe that his Texians had allowed this to \ happen, and became terrified lest Santa Anna come storming back to burn once again the Quimper inn and fern'.
Young Otto, listening to these debates, kept quiet, as usual, but his ideas on foreign affairs were beginning slowly to solidify, and had he been asked for his opinion, he would have said: i had enough of foreigners with those Baltimore Germans. I don't want France or England, either one. And I hate the Mexicans for what they did at the Alamo and Goliad.' What did he advocate? He told no one, but he had firm beliefs: We shouldn't march to Mexico City, like Yancey says, although we could do it easy. We should go clear to Panama, and then maybe take Canada, too. He could see no reason why all of North America should not be Texian, except that the eastern seaboard, which was already American, could stay that way. Then, if the United States should some day wish to join Texas, it would be welcome.
The internal affairs of the nation were also maturing, but not always in the direction intended. All observers agreed that Texas could never become a first-class nation unless it developed both a harbor on the Gulf for ocean-going vessels, and steamboats for transit up the three principal rivers, Trinity, Brazos, Colorado. Unfortunately, immense sandbars, tenacious and drifting, blockaded all available harbors, especially Galveston's, so that sometimes two ships out of five would not make the wharves, with lives and cargo alike being lost.
River traffic was even less successful, because here, too, forbidding sandbars menaced any ship that tried to enter from the Gulf,
and those that did succeed immediately encountered snags, sunken logs and smaller sandbars, and such twists in the course that boats could negotiate the worst corners only with the help of ropes dragged along the shore by sweating passengers who debarked to do the hauling.
Occasionally, some daring vessel would make it as far upriver as Quimper's Ferry, but two that did were trapped by falling water and spent the summer there. Yet it was an unbroken act of faith, all along the rivers, that 'one of these days we'll see scheduled boats landing at that dock.' In the meantime, the loss of shipping was disastrous: Ocean sunk at Brazoria, Clematis sunk trying to get to Brazoria, Mustang sunk at Jones Landing, Lady Byron sunk near Richmond; Creole Queen and seven others sunk trying to get into the Brazos.
But when this doleful litany was recited at Quimper's inn, Yancey insisted, with most of the men supporting him: 'When a Texian starts to do something, he does it. We'll have steamboats up here yet.' The same prediction was made along both the Trinity and the Colorado, where losses paralleled those on the Brazos.
Education was also a function of society about which something was going to be done . . . one of these days. The nation could not afford to spend what little money it could accumulate on free schools, so there were none, but it did allocate liberal portions of the only currency it did have, land, to schools. Xavier County, for example, was awarded 17,712 of its choicest acres, but no way was found to turn this into cash, so no school was founded.
However, the county did eventually offer some education, for after the children of Xavier had gone some years without schooling, the Reverend Joel job Harrison, tall and fiery and with a wife who could cook, appeared with handbills announcing his intention to open a school: 'First course: reading, writing, spelling, multiplication tables, $1.50 per month. Second course: arithmetic, grammar, oratory, astronomy, $2.00 a month. Third course: Latin, Greek, algebra, geography, the copperplate, $3.00 a month. Mrs. Harrison will accept a few girls and boys in her home, good table, Christian discourse.' To inquiring parents, Reverend Harrison gave these assurances: 'I am an ordained minister, Methodist faith but courteous to all. I am proficient in the subjects offered. And I can promise firm discipline, for I will brook no insolence or insubordination, since I believe I can whip all but the very biggest boys in fistfighting.' He called his one-room school, a reasonably good one, the University of Xavier.
The citizens of Texas sometimes acquired a peculiar insight into how their nation functioned. When General Felix Huston, no
relation to the president, was to be replaced as commander in chiei of the Texian forces by Albert Sidney Johnston, the former, refus ing to cede office to the latter, warned Johnston that if he wan tec the command, he would have to duel Huston for it, and when the duel took place, Huston shot Johnston in the behind and held or. to his command. Said the enlisted men who witnessed the duel. 'It was a fair fight. If a man wants to lead the Texian army, he better be prepared to fight for the job.'
But always the limiting factor was this strangling lack of currency, and when the distressed nation, swamped in debt, tried tc salvage itself by printing two million dollars' worth of 'red-back bills' supported by no collateral except the government's word and faith, citizens evaluated the issue realistically. On the first day it was issued, a dollar bill was worth fifty cents, a few days later, thirty cents, then ten cents and four cents, until it bottomed out at an appalling two cents.
Shocked by this experience, the government sought another solution: 'We'll encourage private firms with good reputations to issue their own currency.'
'Backed by what?' cynics asked, and the government said: 'Their goods. Their mills.'
The experiment was tried, and a relieved Texas watched as this private money system stabilized at about eighty cents on the dollar. One firm whose notes ranked even higher announced that it was backing them with 'every item of our merchandise, our steamer Claribel, eighteen nigger slaves and our sawmill.'
In Xavier County, Yancey Quimper planned to print five thousand dollars' worth of bills 'redeemable at the Ferry,' but since he could not specify redeemable in what, the government ordered him to desist, so Xavier continued to suffer.
However, Yancey did find a way to profit from the emergency, for he let it be known that he stood ready to exchange what little cash he had for any land certificates in the possession of San Jacinto veterans, and Otto watched as a shattered chain of young men wandered in with certificates that they sold for two and three cents an acre, and glad they were to receive even those small amounts.
When Otto learned what Yancey was doing with these papers, he was amazed. One day a European gentleman, neither French nor German but something else, stopped by the inn, behaving as if he had been there before, and he gave Yancey real money for a stack of the certificates. When he was gone, Otto asked: 'W ; hat's he do with them?' and Yancey said: 'Peddles them through Europe. Everybody wants to come to Texas.'
'Even when we have no money?' and Yancey said: 'To people who know, Texas is still heaven.'
He was right in this assessment, for despite continuous setbacks, the dogged Texians strove to forge a nation based upon distinct characteristics, and none was more basic than the Texian's ability to absorb temporary setbacks. An impartial observer from either London or Boston, evaluating the new nation during this tempestuous decade, would have predicted failure, for nothing seemed to work, but he would have underestimated the capacity of the Tex-ian to take enormous risks, sustained by the conviction that 'sooner or later, things will work out.'
Thus the Allen brothers could speculate in Houston real estate, hoping that land which they bought at twenty cents an acre would soon be worth two hundred dollars; Reverend Joel Job Harrison could call his cabin-school a university in the honest belief that it would some day become one; and Yancey Quimper could spend his last penny on land certificates, trusting that dreamers in Europe would grab them at inflated prices. Everywhere this faith in the future prevailed.
In the midst of Otto's confusion as to his future, the Texas government circulated through the counties a document which would lead to the creation of one of the cherished symbols of Texas life. It called for volunteers to man a unique corps whose nature could best be explained by stating what it was not.
First, it was not a police force with uniforms, specified duties and restricted terrains of operation. Particularly, it would not be subject to supervision by county authorities.
Second, it was not a branch of the army with highly organized structure and national obligations. The new force would have no distinguishing uniforms, no government-issued arms, no epaulet distinctions, no medals, no drill. Rarely would it perform in battle formation and never would it parade.
Finally, it was not a secret detective agency, working under the command of any district attorney, for even though it would often perform detective functions, its allegiance was to the national government, which insulated it from petty local pressures.
What would this potentially powerful new arm of government be called? During one discussion at the ramshackle capital a proponent had finished making the point that 'the men will not be tied down to any one locality, they will range all over,' and someone suggested. 'Let's call them ranging companies.' And thus were born the famous ranging units—no set duties: 'Just range the countryside and keep order.'
The unit to be enrolled from the counties centering on Xavier would be commanded by Captain Sam Garner, distinguished veteran of San Jacinto, twenty-four years old and as tall and thin as an unclothed scarecrow. His general responsibility would be along the north shore of the Nueces River, and as soon as this was known, the toughest men flocked to his temporary headquarters in Campbell, because to serve along what was called the Nueces Strip was to serve in the wildest, most dangerous and challenging part of the new nation.
The word Strip was misleading, for this was not some narrow stretch of land between two settled areas. At its greatest east-to-west reach, it extended some two hundred miles; at its widest north-south, a hundred and sixty. It was best visualized as a healthy wedge of pie, the arc of crust running along the Gulf, the point far to the west along the Rio Grande. It was much larger than many European nations—Belgium, the Netherlands or Switzerland, for example—and also considerably larger than substantial American states like New Hampshire, Vermont or Maryland.
Except for a few meager towns along the north bank of the Rio Grande, it was largely unsettled insofar as permanent ranches were concerned, but it was not unoccupied. For more than a century Mexican herdsmen living south of the river had run their cattle on the Strip, and now cattlemen from the Victoria area in Texas were doing the same. An interesting rule developed: if a Mexican crossed the Rio Grande to work his cattle and picked up a few strays belonging to a Texian, he was a bandit, but any Texian who led a foraging party into Mexico to increase his herd by lifting a few hundred cattle was considered a prudent citizen.
When Texas gained its independence, delineation of the border between the two countries was imprecise, with Texas claiming that its southern border lay along the Rio Grande, and Mexico arguing that the border followed the Nueces River far to the north, which under Spanish rule certainly had formed the southern border of their Tejas. A bleak, forbidding, unpopulated no man's land existed between the two rivers, and from within it undeclared warfare developed. Mexicans prowling in the Strip would strike north across the Nueces and desolate ranches in the Victoria area; Texians would organize furtive excursions across the Rio Grande.
The Texas government, ignoring the depredations of its own citizens, deplored the behavior of the outlaw Mexicans. As a senator described the situation during an impassioned debate in Houston: 'In organizing furtive thrusts into our territory north of' the Nueces, the Mexicans are without shame or honor. A secret crossing of our river, a wild dash to some unprotected Texian
hacienda, gunfire, a flaming dog-run, a murdered family, and cattle stampeding as they head south become common, after which the invaders scurry to sanctuary in the Strip, from where they laugh at us derisively.' It was this kind of sortie that Captain Garner's ranging company was expected to halt. Among the first group of volunteers was Otto Macnab, age fifteen but more a man than many who stepped forward. Garner, certain the boy was grossly underage, but not knowing by exactly how much, asked: 'Son, how old are you?'
In January 1838, Otto would be sixteen, so he lied and said: i'll be eighteen in January.'
'Come back in January,' the lanky man said, and then he instructed the others as to the rules of the new organization: 'Provide your own good horse, a change of clothes, a rifle, a pistol and a Bowie knife.'
'What kind of clothes?'
'Whatever you have. No insignia.'
'Same with the boots?'
'Whatever you have, but they should come mostly to the knee because we'll be hitting mesquite and rattlesnakes.' Believing that he had covered everything, he started to go inside the shed that served as an office; then he stopped. 'We think you should wear a big hat. Keeps the sun out of your eyes in summer, your head warm in winter.' And studying Otto carefully, he added: 'It would make you look taller, too.'
On 2 January 1838 Otto bade the Ascots farewell, placed his two rifles across his saddle and headed south, his big hat bobbing in time with the horse's gait. Before nightfall he was sworn in, smallest man in his unit, a taut little fighting machine with no uniform and no stated commission, eager to help tame the frontiers of Texas.
During the second week in January word reached the capital that the bandit Benito Garza had invaded Texas and raided a ranch north of the Nueces River, killing two Texians. This was precisely the kind of outrage the ranging companies had been organized to punish, so the informal Xavier County unit was assembled by Captain Sam Garner, twenty-six years old, six feet two, a hundred and fifty-eight pounds, flowing mustaches, icicle-straight and icicle-cool, and a very good man at firing his rifle at full gallop. His first assistant was Otto Macnab, the young fellow of indeterminate age. He claimed he was eighteen, but looked twelve because of his beardless chin, his almost-white baby-fine hair, and his slim, muscular body. 'This Macnab,' Garner told his
superiors, 'impresses me as a chilly hombre. When those blue eyes fix on you, beware!'
The company assembled in the town of Campbell, fifty-two men on their own horses and with their own guns and knives who would ride casually south 'to knock some sense into the Mexicans.' When they neared Victoria, their first important stop, Otto surprised his captain by saying: i want to break away. My mother lives on the Guadalupe west of town.'
'We'll all head that way,' Garner said, for he was in no hurry; he had learned that fighting could be depended upon to find him out at the appointed time, no matter where he went or what he did. So the other volunteers followed Otto as he headed for the Garza dog-runs, and all were astonished when Macnab presented to them the two widows, his stepmother Josefina and his adopted mother Maria, for the women were obviously Mexican.
The men appreciated the hospitality the two women extended and were favorably impressed by their well-kept homes, but what won them over completely was the discovery that Maria had been married to Xavier Campbell, the hero of the Alamo, after whom their county and their town had been named.
'What was he like?' they wanted to know. 'Where was the tree they hanged him from?' One man, about twenty, just sat munching tortillas and staring at Maria: 'Were you really married to Campbell?'
i was,' she said as her plump body moved about the kitchen.
Macnab gave his mother a farewell embrace and then kissed Maria affectionately. 'That one's a good Mexican,' the staring fellow said, but when they were once more on the road south he asked Captain Garner and Macnab: 'Say, 1 just thought of something. Isn't this troublemaker Benito Garza—the one we're supposed to catch—isn't he from Victoria somewheres?'
'He's Maria's brother,' Otto said with no embarrassment.
'What will you do if we catch him?'
'Arrest him.'
'Is he really as clever as they say?'
'He can ride better than you ... or me. He can shoot better than you ... or me. And he probably can think better than you ... or me.'
'Why is he raising so much hell?'
'He's a Mexican,' Otto said. 'He fought with Santa Anna.'
'Didn't we capture him at San Jacinto?'
'We did.'
'Why didn't we shoot him?'
'We don't shoot prisoners.'
At first hearing, this might seem a naive thing for a member of a ranging company to say, because these troops had already acquired a reputation among the Mexicans of Texas as ruthless killers —los tejanos sangrientes, the bloody Texians. But upon reflection it wasn't so absurd, because as Captain Garner himself explained to one newcomer: 'We rarely take prisoners,' which meant, of course, that after a fight, there were few left to take alive.
The lethal efficiency of the ranging company was multiplied by a factor of five by a fortunate incident which occurred as the riders were approaching the Nueces River. A supply officer from the Texas army overtook them to distribute the first official issue of weapons the men would receive, and from the first moment the rangers inspected this small piece of armament they sensed that it was going to remake Texas and the West.
It was a revolver, .34 caliber, with a short octagonal barrel of blue-gray steel and a grip that nestled in the hand. It had a revolving cylinder that enabled the user to fire five times without reloading, and was, in every respect, a masterful piece of workmanship. It was made by Sam Colt in some small town in Connecticut, and a salient feature was that any one part of a given revolver could be used interchangeably in any other gun. And for some curious reason never explained, the first users, all Texians, referred to this superlative revolver as 'a Colts'—no apostrophe, just a Colts, as in the sentence i whipped out my Colts and drilled him between the eyes.'
Understandably, the Colts became the preferred weapon of the ranging companies, and armed with these revolvers, Captain Garner and his men crossed the Nueces confident that they now had a real chance of cleansing the Strip of Mexicans. But when they rode to the crest of a rise so slight it would have gone unnoticed elsewhere, Otto's mind was attracted to other matters, for as he reined in his horse he stared in wonder at the vast expanse of emptiness that stretched before him—an empire off by itself, brown, sere, populated by rattlesnakes and coyotes. It was his first glimpse of the Strip, and it awed him.
It's like no other part of Texas, he said to himself. And look at that sky. Then he shook his head: I'll bet the traveler who gets lost in there stays lost . . . till the buzzards find him.
As he studied the tremendous land he observed various interesting aspects: Flat as that new billiard table Yancey Quimper put in at the Ferry. Brushland with scrub oak, no tall trees. But I'd hate to ride through that thicket without protection for my legs. Cut to shreds. In these decades the land seemed almost without vegetation, for the ubiquitous mesquite had not yet taken over, but when
Otto looked closer he saw the real miracle of the semi-desert as it prepared for spring: Are those flowers?
They were, a multitude of the most gorgeous tiny beauties— gold, red, blue, yellow, purple—forming a dense, matted carpet covering a million acres. It was an incredible display of nature's profligate use of color, so luxuriant and beautiful that although Otto had seen the flowers of Texas before, some of the most varied in the world, he felt he had never beheld anything like the minute blossoms of this exploding garden.
Captain Garner, seeing that his young assistant lagged, rode back and said: 'Immense, eh?' and Otto replied: 'One of those flowers would be beautiful. But a million million of them!' Garner said: 'They stretch two hundred miles,' and Otto said: 'I thought I knew Texas . . .'
'Let's get moving,' Garner said, and as they overtook the others he observed: 'Some say we should let Garza and his local Mexicans have this wilderness. Folks tell me they have a reasonable claim, but I say no. With Texas, you can never predict what value land is going to have. You bring water in here, you got yourself a gold mine.'
'And how do you bring water?'
'That's for somebody else to solve. Our problem is*that bastard Garza.'
Wherever the company came upon Texian cattlemen searching for cattle in the Strip, Garner's men heard constant complaint: This damned Benito Garza has been raidin' and runnin' off our cattle.' And as the men rode farther south they began to come upon the ruins of isolated settlements that had been razed, leaving not a shack or a longhom. The missing owners had been either kidnapped into Mexico or shot, and after the company had seen more such scarred remains, its members became decidedly vengeful.
'God help the Mexican I meet,' one of the men said.
One afternoon the company apprehended eight Mexican vaque-ros struggling to herd a large number of unbranded cattle toward the Rio Grande, and without asking questions, the Texians initiated a gun battle in which they killed five of the Mexicans. Captain Garner, by merely looking at the bodies, declared them to have been rustlers stealing Texian cattle, but when the interrogation of the three survivors made it clear that the cattle had legally belonged to the Mexicans, who had traditionally used this range, he had to concede that his enthusiastic riders might have shot the wrong men
'What shall we do with the others?' Otto asked, and Garner
weighed this problem for some minutes. 'If we keep them prisoner, a lot of questions will be asked. If we let them go, they'll get other Mexicans excited in Matamoros.'
'Hang 'em,' a rider from Austin County suggested, and it was agreed that this was the most prudent solution, so without further discussion of the legality or propriety of such action, the three trespassers were hanged.
Their leader, before he was strung up, protested vehemently: 'But we were on Mexican soil.'
it ain't Mexican no longer,' the rope man growled as he kicked at the horse on which the doomed man sat, hands tied behind him. With a startled leap the horse sped off, leaving the Mexican suspended.
Otto did not protest this arbitrary denial of justice, for although he was as firmly as ever dedicated to the preservation of law, he, like the rest of his company, refused to concede that the law was also intended to protect Mexicans.
In succeeding days, the ranging company similarly disciplined sixteen other Mexicans, but uncovered no trace of Benito Garza, who was known to be leading this attempt to control what he and others honestly believed to be Mexican territory. One fiery-minded Mexican shouted: 'Garza will teach you, you bastards!' That hanging did not take place because an infuriated Texian shot the man, even though his hands and legs were tied.
At the end of the tour, Captain Garner spoke encouragingly to his youngest trooper: 'Otto, how many did you get in the battles?' and the boy replied, with some pride, for he had not blazed away indiscriminately like some: 'Four.' Otto Macnab had found his occupation.
When the ranging company disbanded in Xavier, for any assignment was temporary, its members found their nation involved in a presidential election unlike any other that had ever occurred in the Americas. General Sam Houston, forbidden by the constitution from serving two terms in a row, had to relinquish the presidency in December 1838, but members of his Pro-Houston party, as it was called, were determined to elect as his successor some compliant person who would merely hold the office until Sam could reclaim it.
Party choice centered upon a distinguished fifty-year-old lawyer from Kentucky, Peter Grayson, who had served the new nation in such crucial posts as attorney general and as negotiator with the United States government in Washington. Grayson's candidacy
delighted Martin Ascot, who as a fellow lawyer spoke vigorously in his behalf among the settlers.
Houston's opponents saw Grayson as a colorless functionary totally unfitted for high office, an assessment which anti-Houston partisans were not slow to point out: 'A nincompoop, as bad for Texas as Houston has been. The only man worthy to be our president is Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, a proven hero, a man of great intellectual brilliance, and a general who'll know how to handle Indians and Mexicans.'
The campaign had become quite heated, and because of the brilliance and roughhouse vigor with which Houston defended his tenure, his supporters assumed that his man would win.
Otto, as in the days when he had not known with whom he wished to live, was confused by the haranguing, and he confided to Betsy Belle, who was not supposed to have any opinion about the choice of who would lead her nation: 'Betsy, when I listen to Martin, I'm all for Grayson, because Sam Houston saved this nation and I like his ideas. But when I hear Yancey and those others at the inn, I'm for Lamar. I think he has the right approach to Indians and Mexicans.'
'What approach?'
'Shoot them all. No place in this nation for Indians or Mexicans.'
It seemed certain, in early July, that Grayson would win, but on 9 July 1838 the Pro-Houston party received a bitter jolt. Because Grayson was so drab, so without charm on the hustings, so miserable a speaker and so without any reputation for heroics during the great battles of the revolution—which he had side-stepped by one clever trick after another—the Houston people had thought it prudent to keep him out of the country during the critical days of the campaign. As loudmouth Yancey Quimper shouted: 'They're afeerd to let us see how dumb he is. They let Sam Houston do his dirty work for him.'
But even so, Grayson might have won had he not, while hiding out at Bean's Station in Tennessee, fallen into one of the depressions to which he was subject and shot himself through the head.
This stroke of bad luck appalled Ascot and his pro-Houston cohorts, and some wanted to thrash Yancey Quimper when the big fellow chortled throughout Xavier County: 'God's will. He wants no more of Houston or his cronies.'