Texas

by James A. Michener

  I remembered well the Buckhorn Saloon, that relic of the Old West, with its fantastic guns and cattle horns. I sneaked my first beer there, my mother watching from a distance, then teasing when I spat it out. Later, when I returned from Europe to find the Buckhorn moved, I felt as if my youth had officially ended.

  San Antonio! Conservative, always lagging behind more daring towns like Houston and Dallas, it had long been the largest city in Texas but had now given way to those two giants. Recently it had stunned the state by electing as mayor a man of Spanish heritage, and in decades to come it might once more become a leading city because of the spectacular development of its Spanish-speaking population.

  For our April meeting there our staff had enlisted a Franciscan friar who served in one of the city’s famous missions, Friar Clarence Cummings, born in Albany, New York. He was respected as an expert on the five surviving missions that line the river like a string of jewels on a necklace, but even before he appeared he caused animosity in our Task Force.

  Rusk complained: ‘I didn’t join this committee to get a course in Catholic theology,’ and Quimper chimed in: ‘If this keeps up, next meeting will be a public baptism.’

  This was too much for Professor Garza, a wise and prudent Catholic: ‘What makes you think the friar will try to proselytize you?’ and Rusk growled: ‘He better not try!’

  In two minutes Friar Clarence won the skeptics over, or at least neutralized them. He was a tall, good-looking, robust fellow in his late thirties, clad in a brown robe, bare feet in rugged leather sandals. After the briefest introduction he said in no-nonsense style: ‘I hope you’ll join me in a cell we use as a projection room, because it’s important that you see the slides I’ve prepared,’ and when we were seated with our staff in the cell in the Misión San José, he surprised us with the title of his talk: ‘Form and Legacy.’

  ‘Now, what does that mean?’ Quimper asked, and he replied: ‘That’s what I’ve come to explain.’

  With carefully organized notes accompanying a set of excellent colored slides he had prepared from his own drawings and photographs, he began his talk with a promise: ‘I propose to concentrate on two subjects only, the physical form of the Spanish mission in its heyday and its legacy for us today. No theology, no moralizing. We begin with this simple question, which must have preoccupied those in charge at the time: “If your mission is to fulfill its purpose, what form should it take?” ’

  At that he darkened the cell, and with the heavy stone walls enclosing us, we had little difficulty in imagining ourselves back in 1720: ‘This drawing—I studied architecture at Cornell before joining the Franciscans at a rather advanced age—shows the landscape you will have to work with. The wandering river. The loop where the horses pasture. The flat land where your mission will ultimately stand.’

  With seven choice slides he showed us the terrain of San Antonio as it must have been in 1717, with no mission visible: ‘Since you are Spaniards imbued with the traditions of your homeland, you will insist upon centralization, with civilian settlers and their activities clustered closely together. A main difference between Catholic Spain and Protestant America, I’ve always thought, is that Spain likes to collect its citizens in villages dominated by the church. There they find mutual protection during the night. During the day, when conditions are safer, they can march out to their distant fields. Americans, fed up with clerical control both in Europe and New England, want their homes and farms as far apart as possible. I grew up in rural New York, with the nearest farm half a mile away, and you cannot imagine my amazement when I first saw the crowded little villages of Spain and Italy, one house abutting the other. How do they breathe? I thought. And how do they get to their distant fields each morning?’

  He warned us not to attribute this spatial difference to social factors: ‘The attacks of Apache and Comanche in Texas were just as severe as the attacks of marauding armies in Europe, but the Americans refused to cluster for protection, while the Spaniards did. In San Antonio your civilians will cluster.’

  Under his guidance we did imagine ourselves about to build a mission in 1719, and while we were in this frame of mind he flashed onto the screen a majestic slide of the Alamo, that sacred mission, heavily rebuilt, around which the soul of Texas rallies. This time it had been photographed at dusk, with an ominous cloud to the east, and after it had been on the screen for a few moments, Miss Cobb wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, and I noticed that the staff, then even Quimper, and finally Rusk, followed with similar reactions. Here was a photograph that would affect the heart of any Texan who saw it unexpectedly. Within those walls brave men had died defending a principle in which they believed; on those parapets my ancestor, illiterate Moses Barlow, had given his life for a cause with which he had been associated for less than two weeks.

  Rapidly, in a series of beautiful slides, the friar now gave us a swift review of the four other surviving missions, those heavy structures with such delicate names: San José y San Miguel, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Francisco de la Espada and, the one I preferred, San Juan Capistrano.

  He showed them in storm, in sunlight, at evening with birds nesting, and at the break of day with a golden sun exploding over their walls. He showed us architectural fragments, and stretches of reconstructed walls, and windows glowing with majesty, and fonts where the friars washed their feet, and after a while we became so much a part of those missions that we were prepared to listen to what he had to say about us.

  ‘Our five San Antonio missions cannot compare in raw beauty with the handsomely preserved and reconstructed missions of California. We have no one superb example of architecture like Santa Barbara, no outstanding summary of mission life like Fray Junípero Serra’s San Carlos Borromeo, and the reason is simple. Since the Spanish missionaries in California were not required to face extremely hostile Indians, they did not have to fortify their buildings. They could enjoy the luxury of graceful architecture and widely spaced structures. But our poor friars in Tejas had to build both a church and a fortress to protect it. Most experts agree that if you want to understand mission life, you must come to San Antonio, because our rude buildings, constructed without guile, represent what the mission experience was all about, and now, at the halfway point in my talk, we’re going to leave this cell and move out to see the structures themselves.’

  To visit the five missions of San Antonio was like walking slowly and with deep passion into the beginnings of Texas history. Each was different. The Alamo had been massively added to; it was really a museum as well as a sacred gathering place, always cluttered with visitors. San José had also been rebuilt, most faithfully, and best represented what mission life had been like within its spacious walls and its little cubicles for Indians. But the mission that clutched at my heart from the time I first saw it as a boy, giving me insight into those early days, was Capistrano, with its simpler lines, its lovely three-part bell tower and especially that long severe wall with the five cemented archways. It spoke to me with such force that even now I fell silent when I saw it.

  The Alamo had awed me; San José had delighted me; but Capistrano, when I stood before its simplicity, invited me to become a member of its congregation, concerned about its canal and the gathering of its crops.

  As we gazed at this noble relic, Friar Clarence altered the tenor of his talk: ‘So much for the past. You’ve seen what form these missions took, and a very good one it was. But what concerns us now is the legacy of these missions in the life of modern Texas. So as we stand here I want you to focus on the acequia, the little canal that brought water to the mission. It ran over there, we think, and today when Texas needs water so badly that it dreams up all kinds of tricks to find and save it, it’s interesting to remember that our first irrigation ditches were dug by the friars of these San Antonio missions. An unusual Franciscan worked here in the 1720s, Fray Damián de Saldaña, born in Spain, who had great skill in laying out irrigation systems. He could be called the Father
of Texan Water Conservation, and the work he did back then is as functional as anything we attempt today. I’ve often thought that the farmers and ranchers and citrus growers who lead water onto their lands should contribute a mite of their profit for a statue to that far-seeing friar.’

  ‘Was he that important?’ Rusk asked, and Quimper jumped in: ‘Any man who can show Texas how to use its water is a certified Lone Star hero.’

  When we returned to the projection room we were eager to hear how Friar Clarence would link the missions to modern Texas: ‘If Spain had given us nothing but these five missions, the legacy would have been monumental. Because they had a fine solid form, they stand today as treasures of the first order. So even though they do reach us in damaged or altered state, we can still thank the prudence of our predecessors that they exist at all, because in such buildings the spiritual history of Texas is preserved.’

  But whenever he approached such religious matters, he remembered his promise: ‘But we’re talking about form and function, not theology, and I would like to close with a reminder of how creatively the mission discharged its obligations in the early 1700s and how, its job done, it made itself obsolete by the end of the century. San Juan Capistrano, which seems to have affected our chairman so deeply, is a case in point. Founded near Nacogdoches in 1716, it died there and its functions were moved to a spot near Austin. Dying again, it was brought to San Antonio, where it enjoyed some success. As many as two hundred and fifty Indian residents. Five thousand head of cattle. Its own cotton fields and woolen manufacturing. But by 1793, when it had to be secularized, only a dozen Christianized Indians, less than twenty cattle, and the looms in disrepair.’

  ‘What does secularize mean?’ Rusk asked, and I was impressed by the manner in which this extremely capable man was always willing to reveal his ignorance when an unusual word was introduced whose exact meaning he wished to learn.

  Instead of replying in words, Friar Clarence flashed onto the wall a series of photographs showing the five missions as they had existed at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before restoration began. We were shocked at their pitiful condition: walls down, garbage piled high, roofs fallen in, and ruin in each little church. ‘Strictly speaking,’ Friar Clarence explained, ‘to secularize means to convert from religious ownership and use to civil. Like today when an urban congregation finds that its members have moved to the suburbs and it sells the church building to some little-theater group. In Texas the word carries a special meaning, for when the missions finished trying to tame the frontier and Christianize the Indians, in both of which they had limited success, the system had no further utility. So the church turned the missions back to the civil government. Hungry fingers grabbed for the valuable land, but nobody could see any use for the buildings, so they were allowed to fall into ruin or removed for other construction.’ On that mournful note the slides concluded.

  When the lights came up I saw that he kept his head bowed, and for some moments he remained that way. Then he smiled and said softly: ‘How beautiful a concept! And how suddenly it was outmoded.’

  ‘Why?’ Miss Cobb asked, and he turned to her: ‘I believe that many meritorious ideas are allowed a life span of about thirty years. Liberalism in France flourished briefly before World War II, made its contribution and vanished. Dr. Spock’s theories of child rearing set a generation free, then collapsed in excess. The Erie Canal in my home state. And the mission concept as applied to Texas. All made great contributions, then perished.’

  ‘Railroads outmoded your Erie Canal after its allotted life,’ Miss Cobb said. ‘And airplanes killed many railroads and almost all the ocean liners. What killed your missions?’

  He reflected on this, then chuckled: ‘Texas.’

  ‘Now, what does that mean?’ Miss Cobb pursued.

  ‘From its start, any Texas mission was destined for a short life. Distances were so great. The Indians were so intractable. So often, when its work failed in one place, it moved on to some other challenge.’

  ‘If that’s true, why do I see five stone buildings?’

  ‘Ah!’ he cried, a light burning in his eyes. ‘You can never convince a man like the Fray Damián of whom I spoke that what he’s doing is temporary. Once he positions that first adobe, he begins to build for eternity.’

  ‘But you say his mission has disappeared?’

  ‘Others killed it, not he. Damián succeeded beyond imagination. His form vanished. Completely destroyed. But the legacy survives.’

  As he said this his face assumed a radiance which warmed us: ‘I promised you at the beginning: no theology, no moralizing; just form and legacy. But you must have deduced from what I’ve said that the Texas missions would provide us with only a limited legacy if they were mere architecture. Their grandeur is twofold: art plus the spiritual force which evoked that art. The friars could not have survived in this wilderness without some guiding principle, and it was Christianity. There were drunkards among the friars, and some who chased after Indian girls, and others who had never known vocation, but there were also men of supreme devotion, and upon their efforts the future city of San Antonio and the state of Texas were founded. That is their legacy.’

  His words had an astonishing result. ‘Friar Clarence,’ Rusk said in his deep and rumbling voice, ‘you ought to change your name. It doesn’t sound appropriate here in a nest of missions.’

  ‘What would you advise?’

  ‘Friar Ignacio. Friar Bernardo. Something Spanish.’

  ‘I suppose we’re all stuck with the names we were given. Rusk seems totally inappropriate for a man of your power.’

  ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘Midas. Croesus. Maybe Carnegie.’

  ‘You gave us a terrific explanation, Friar Clarence. Now tell me, how much would it cost to print your lecture in a book? To be given free to all the schools in Texas?’

  I was surprised that a Texas billionaire would concern himself with pennies, but he addressed the problem scientifically, as if it involved great sums: ‘Barlow, call a printing house and find out.’ When I reported: ‘They say that they can give you a black-and-white edition for about sixty cents a copy,’ he gave one of his rare smiles, and said: ‘That seems reasonable. Friar Clarence, I’d like to print such a book. Give young people the real story of the missions, just as you gave it to us. You’re a very solid young man and your ideas merit circulation.’

  Friar Clarence said tentatively that he would be honored, but I could see from his hesitation that he expected some catch, and Rusk revealed it: ‘Of course, I’d want to eliminate that last part on the religious bit.’

  Instantly the young scholar said: ‘Then I wouldn’t be interested, because obviously you’ve missed the whole point of my talk. Form and function were the outer manifestations of the mission. The heart and core was the religious conviction, and don’t you forget it. Publish a book about missions and ignore their religious base? Oh, no!’

  But Rusk was a clever man, and he said something now which absolutely stunned me in its simplicity and moral deviousness: ‘I mean a booklet with illustrations—your excellent drawings, your photographs in color.’ You could see that Friar Clarence was startled by this new dimension, but you could also see the poison of vanity working in him; Ransom Rusk was the serpent in paradise, tempting not Eve with an apple but a Franciscan friar with an image of a fine book in which his words would be distributed to Texas schools.

  Very slowly he said: ‘I would like to see that done, Mr. Rusk,’ and Rusk rose and clapped him on the shoulder, whereupon Friar Clarence added: ‘But I would insist upon that last section, for it would be the soul of my book.’ And in that simple statement the book became his and not Rusk’s.

  Now Rusk had to think. He certainly did not want to subsidize Catholic propaganda, and he temporized by asking our staff: ‘How much would the cost be elevated if we used color? Maybe sixteen full pages of his best photos and drawings?’ The young people consulted on this, r
ecalling projects of a similar nature on which they had been engaged, and they suggested: ‘Total cost, about two and a half dollars a copy, but only if you print in large batches.’

  ‘That would be possible. Now, Friar Clarence, here’s what I propose. That you and I will agree that Miss Cobb here, a good Protestant, and Professor Garza, an equally good Catholic, will study those last remarks to see if they’re acceptable. I mean, not rank proselytizing. Agreed?’

  The young friar considered this for some moments, then extended his hand, but as Rusk reached to grasp it, Friar Clarence said to Garza: ‘I’ll depend on you to see that the vital material stays in,’ and Rusk responded as he accepted the hand: ‘I’ll depend on you, Miss Lorena, to see that the truth of The Black Legend is not completely whitewashed.’

  DON RAMÓN DE SALDAÑA, ELDEST SON OF COMMANDANT ALVARO and Benita, was sixty-six years of age and sprightly in mind and limb. Often he reflected upon the three great joys in his life and the two inconsolable tragedies.

  He was sole owner of the vast Rancho El Codo, twenty-five thousand acres named after an elbow of the Medina, that river which marked the boundary between the two provinces of Coahuila and Tejas. It was a rich and varied parcel, well watered, and stocked with thousands of cattle, sheep and goats. Most important, it bordered a segment of Los Caminos Reales, that system of royal highways which reached out like spokes from Mexico City, the hub of New Spain. This portion reached from Vera Cruz through Mexico City to San Antonio de Béjar, as the town was now called, to the former capital of Tejas at Los Adaes, and its presence along the ranch meant that Don Ramón could sell provisions to the royal troops that patrolled the vital route; Rancho El Codo was an inheritance of which he was justly proud.