Texas

by James A. Michener

  He was conducting a secret meeting for elders at the Quimpers’ inn late one afternoon, with some twenty farmers surrounding him, when a watcher, posted to detect any approach of Mexican soldiers, ran in: ‘Father Clooney comin on his mule.’ And when the conspirators peered out they saw the familiar figure of the Irish priest, older now and thinner, riding up to the porch.

  They had no opportunity to disperse before he dismounted, brushed the dust from his black vestments, and entered. One glance at the unusual number of guests and the tall minister who commanded them satisfied him as to what was happening, but he affected not to know. Greeting Reverend Harrison warmly, as if he were no more than some farmer he had met on the Trinity, he smiled at the others he had known before and said to the strangers: ‘I don’t believe I know you. Father Clooney, of Ballyclooney, County Clare in Ireland, appointed by the Mexican government to be vicar of this parish.’

  Having put the conspirators at ease, he then offended their leaders by asking Mattie Quimper: ‘Could a perishing pilgrim have a wee nip?’ and when she provided one, Reverend Harrison glared at the disgraceful cup as if he wished to turn its contents into vitriol.

  Father Clooney was filled with news acquired at the assembly of the Catholic clergy recently convened in San Antonio, and although his personal recollections of that meeting were not altogether pleasant, he was eager to share the substantial news which came from it. His unhappiness stemmed from the way he had been treated—as an interloping Irishman who spoke abominable Spanish—by the more austere Spanish priests who had been trained in Spain and the older Mexican fathers with their education in Mexico City and Querétaro. They had scorned him as a village nothing, a cactus-priest of the bayous, not really one of them and not to be trusted. They had heard of his excessive drinking and of his casual approach to conversion, and many suspected that he was a secret agent sent by the American government to prepare the way for a Yankee takeover. But since none of them would have dreamed of moving one step north from San Antonio or of serving in wilderness areas like the banks of the Trinity, they were content to let this renegade Irishman do their pastoral work for them. His latest experience with these arrogant superiors had not been pleasant but it had been instructive, and now he gushed forth the resounding news:

  ‘As you’ve surely heard, there was a wonderful revolution in Mexico last year. Emperor Iturbide was overthrown by a group of sterling patriots, and the old viciousness has been cleansed away. A new Mexico, a new life for all of us.

  The hero of the change is a most splendid man, devout, loyal, brave. General Antonio López de Santa Anna. You’ll hear much of him in the glorious days ahead, for he brings freedom and distinction to the word patriot.

  ‘But the excelling news is that Santa Anna and his associates have given us a new constitution, and I promise you that in Mexican history the date 1824 will become as famous as 1776 is in your America. Because the Constitution of 1824 is a noble document, assuring us the freedoms we’ve sought. It gives Coahuila-y-Tejas its own state government. It protects us. It guarantees a permanent republic. And it erases all memories of Emperor Iturbide and his follies. What a glorious day for Mexico!’

  His listeners soon caught the infection of his enthusiasm, for if what he said about the new constitution was true, most frictions with the central government would be eliminated, and Tejas, under its own regional government, would have a chance to forge ahead. But Reverend Harrison had a pertinent question: ‘What does the new rule say about religion?’ and Father Clooney answered forthrightly: ‘It says that the official religion of Mexico must forever be Roman Catholicism.’

  ‘And will the official church be supported by our tax money?’ Harrison asked, and again the round-faced priest gave a straight answer: ‘The church will be supported, as before, by the public treasury.’

  ‘If that is so, men who love freedom must oppose your new constitution.’

  It was now dusk, and in the crowded dog-run two men of radically opposing views faced each other: Reverend Harrison, tall, austere, dreaming always of a greater Texas, and touched by God but unable because of the law to stand forth as the minister he was; and Father Clooney, the sometimes wavering Roman Catholic priest who was not wholly accepted by his own church but who stumbled along, fortified by his love of Jesus Christ and his compassion for souls wandering in the Tejas wilderness.

  They were ill-matched. Harrison had more vigor and a much deeper conviction that what he was doing represented the drift of history and the will of Jesus Christ; Father Clooney was older, wiser, better educated, and fortified by a church that had existed for eighteen hundred years. One important characteristic was shared in common: both clerics aspired to do what was best for Texas, which they saw as one of the brightest hopes in North America or in the world.

  Very carefully the priest asked Harrison: ‘You say you cannot accept this excellent new law?’

  ‘Not if it makes me pay for the support of a religion I cannot trust.’

  Clooney did not flinch at this harsh dismissal: ‘Reverend Harrison? Yes, I’ve known since the day you started holding these secret meetings who you were and what your interests were. Have I tried to interrupt your preaching? Have I put the soldiers to arresting you, which by law I should have done? Have you and I not survived amiably, and are we not friends this evening? If we trusted each other under that bad old constitution, surely we can do so under this good new one.’

  Harrison and some of his people were stunned by the fact that Father Clooney had knowledge of their affairs, for they realized that they were subject to arrest, and one man asked: ‘What are you going to do, now that you know?’ and Clooney replied: ‘Nothing. I would much rather have in Catholic Tejas people who were good Methodists than rascals who were poor Catholics and poor everything else. Friends’—and here his voice broke—‘we are striving to build in Tejas a new society, a strong one, a decent one. We cannot accomplish this if we are at each other’s throat. And you cannot find the security you yearn for if you reject this new constitution.’

  His urgent words struck a deep chord in Jubal Quimper’s heart: ‘If the new law gives us everything we want except religious freedom, I say let’s accept it, because in the long run the press of people moving into Tejas will make it Protestant.’ Unwisely he looked at Father Clooney, expecting the priest to confirm this probability, but this the old man could not do: ‘The new law says that Mexico is a Catholic nation. Up here, at the edge of government, it doesn’t seem that way. But from San Antonio south, you will travel many days before you find a Protestant. Of course Mexico is Catholic, and of course it must remain so. But the good Catholics of that nation will continue to govern Texas much as they do now. You will enjoy respect and the ordinary freedoms.’

  ‘I do not believe it,’ Reverend Harrison snapped. ‘Mark my words, we shall see Mexican troops along this river, coming here to enforce Catholicism and to put down Christianity.’

  ‘What a terrible error in words!’ Father Clooney said instantly. ‘No religion monopolizes Christianity.’

  ‘Catholicism tries to,’ Harrison snapped, and the meeting ended. Many participants, in later years when some of the issues thus raised had been settled, wrote accounts of this famous confrontation, and one almost illiterate farmer summarized it best:

  We had met at Queemper’s Ferry to pray and bad luck trayled us, for Father Cloony the Papist found us out and threttened to arrest us for our unlawful prayrs. Rev. Harison debated with him and we went home hopeful for the days ahed becaws the new laws of Mexico sounded good, but feerful of the yeers ahed becaws we beleeved that Rev. Harison was right and that Texas would soon have to fite for her verry existance.

  Promulgation of the reassuring Constitution of 1824 had a curious aftermath. Hopeful newcomers like Jubal Quimper were now encouraged to think of themselves as Mexicans, citizens of a liberal democracy not unlike that in the United States, and then began to refer to themselves as Texicans, a fortunate verbal invention. ‘Stands
to reason,’ Jubal told Mattie, ‘if they’re Mexicans south of the Rio Grande, we ought to be Texicans north of it.’ And it was by this strong, musical name that’ they knew themselves.

  Bathed in euphoria, the Texicans forgot Reverend Harrison’s prediction that they would soon be fighting for their existence, but in 1825 that prophecy came true. The enemy, however, was not Mexico. The remaining Karankawa decided they had no chance of living as they had in the past unless they exterminated the white men who had intruded upon their historic territory. Intent upon defending themselves, they launched a series of raids so savage, so cruel in their extermination of lonely cabins and unprotected women that the settlers had no alternative but to fight back. ‘Kill them now, or perish later!’ was the mood at San Felipe as the settlers prepared for what they prayed would be the final battle.

  One group of volunteers assembled at Quimper’s Ferry, then marched south, where it would join men gathering along the coast. Since boys above the age of ten were expected to join the expedition with their own guns, Yancey, now aged thirteen, reported, and as the avengers approached the coast he felt his excitement mounting, for he was eager to perform well. But when they had sneaked close to one Karankawa settlement—a cluster of movable ba-acks, or tepees—and the time came for battle action, he froze as he had when confronted by the rattlesnake, and while those about him decimated this first contingent of Indians with a surprise volley, then exterminated them in the wild follow-up, he stood transfixed at the bloody killing.

  ‘We wiped them out!’ the volunteers shouted as scouts advised them where to head in order to trap the next group of Kronks. Two men who had seen Yancey’s craven behavior walked with him, offering advice: ‘When the firin’ starts, don’t listen to the noise and never look at the Indians as human bein’s. You’re shootin’ squirrels, that’s all. You’ve shot squirrels, ain’t you?’ When Yancey said he had not, the men said: ‘Well, you’re goin’ to shoot somethin’ much better than squirrels tomorrow. You keep with us. We’ll show you.’

  That night the Quimper’s Ferry people were overtaken by a late contingent from the Trinity, and foremost in that group was Reverend Harrison, who conducted services in the darkness, assuring the avengers that they were doing God’s work in removing the Indian menace from this part of Texas: ‘We shall always face an Indian enemy, wherever we move in Texas. And we shall enjoy no peace till we exterminate him.’ When two men from the ferry region who had not known the minister before asked: ‘You think the battle against them will go on forever?’ he replied: ‘The fight for goodness never ceases. Our grandchildren will be fighting Indians.’

  On the next day, at about noon, the last great battle against the Karankawa took place, and these proud Indians, for centuries the lords of the three rivers and the scourge of those lesser tribes who tried to infiltrate, realized that their sunset was upon them, and they fought with terrible valor, one brave driving alone at the heart of the white army, coming on and on until he arrived at the mouth of the guns with only a broken stave in his hand.

  ‘Urrk! Arrgh!’ he shouted in meaningless syllables, trying to grasp with his bare hand the rifle barrels whose fiery discharges tore him apart.

  In terrible struggle the mighty Karankawa died. Braves … old men … women … little girls … boys defying the rifles. A notable tribe endeavored to protect its homeland, and failed. Toward evening a pitiful remnant fighting on the far edge of the encounter rallied under the leadership of two heroic warriors to break through the encircling ranks of white men. Signaling to other survivors, women and children alike, these few started a long retreat south toward refuge across the Rio Grande, and after harrowing days without food or water they vanished, except for a few stragglers, from the soil of Texas, to be known no more except in fabled stories about ‘them Kronks who ate people.’

  They went in sorrow and defeat, the first of more than four-score Indian tribes who would be banished from Texas until the triumphant whites could boast: ‘We ain’t got no Indians in Texas. We couldn’t abide ’em.’ Sister American states would devise ways whereby the Indian and the white man could live together—not wholesome ways, nor sensible—but the citizens of Texas could not. The antipathies were too strong.

  Yancey did not distinguish himself in this final battle, for, as before, the sound of gunfire immobilized him, and he could only watch as the struggle evolved. At one point in the battle a Karankawa dashed right past him, not fifteen feet away, and one of Yancey’s counselors bellowed: ‘Fire, goddamnit, fire!’ But Yancey was unable to do so.

  However, on the way home, when he marched with other men, he began to talk about his heroics among the Karankawa, so that by the time he reached the ferry he had convinced himself that he had behaved with more than average bravery, and when he was close to the family dog-run he told his companions: ‘You know, there’s a Kronk who moves about here, now and then,’ and this so excited the victorious Texicans that when they suddenly saw before them The Kronk, they unhesitatingly slew him, the last Karankawa the Brazos would ever see.

  Mattie was appalled by this gratuitous slaughter, but when she confronted the killers, they said honestly: ‘Yance never told us he was tame,’ and she deduced the criminal part her son had played in this assassination. She did not chastise him for this terrible act, but on succeeding days as she sat on her porch at dusk, exhausted by the multiple tasks she was required to perform while Jubal was out hunting meat or searching for honey trees, she realized how severe her loss was in the death of The Kronk. He had been a member of the family, their custodian, their watchman, the one who stepped forward when there was work to do, the one with whom she talked when the men were away and she faced long days of work. Painfully, this savage Indian had made the transition to civilization, and in the end that civilization had destroyed him for no reason except that he was an Indian.

  On the third evening, when she appreciated most clearly the dreadful loss she had sustained, and the reasons for it, she began to weep, not for The Kronk, whose days of confusion were over, but for all those who ventured into a strange land or encountered strange responsibilities, and the sorrow of civilization was almost more than she could bear. She wanted no more of war, no more of argument between Catholic and Protestant, no more confrontation between Mexico and the American states. She wanted only to operate her ferry, run her inn, feed the traveler, and save enough money to buy a new dress at the store in San Felipe or perhaps some extra forks and spoons.

  But most of all, she prayed in her desolation that her son would somehow or other grow into manhood, with the capacity to meet a man’s obligations.

  No American settlers since the Revolution of 1776 had faced the nagging moral problems encountered by those citizens of the republic who moved into Texas in the period of 1820–1835. And none faced the confusions with more vacillating reactions than Jubal Quimper.

  Even those later settlers who would cross an entire continent to build new homes in California or Oregon would have the reassurance that in moving from one part of the United States to another, they would carry their religion, their language and their customary law with them. But when people like the Quimpers emigrated to Texas they surrendered such assurances, placing themselves under the constraints of a new religion, a new language and a much different system of law.

  Facing these complexities, Mattie and Jubal followed one simple rule: ‘Whatever Stephen F. Austin decides is probably right.’ Like many others, they revered the strange little man, forgiving him his arbitrary manner. Mattie especially realized that there was a good deal wrong with Austin: Why has he never married? Is he afraid of women? And why does he stare at you with those fixed eyes, like a hawk? All he can think of is his colony.

  But despite his faults, and they were many, she saw him as the reliable guide, and whenever he stopped at her inn during his travels throughout the colony, she nodded approval to what he told the visitors who dropped by to talk politics with him: ‘Gentlemen, Tejas will not only live under th
is new Mexican Constitution of 1824; it will prosper.’

  ‘Aren’t there weaknesses in it?’ a farmer asked, and Austin snapped: ‘There are weaknesses in every document drawn by the human mind. Our new law has certain peculiarities reflecting Mexican custom, but they will not impinge upon our freedom. Tejas is to be a Catholic state, but we’ve seen how easily we live under that constraint. And, yes, priests and soldiers will be tried in courts manned only by their own people, but that’s always been the case and we haven’t suffered.’

  ‘Are you satisfied,’ a settler from Alabama asked bluntly, ‘to live under Mexican law for the rest of your life?’ and Austin answered: ‘I am.’

  Jubal Quimper, usually agreeing with whoever spoke to him last, grasped Austin’s hands and said: ‘Mr. Austin, I’ll stand beside you as a Mexican citizen … permanent.’

  But some days after Austin departed with this pledge of allegiance from the people at Quimper’s Ferry, a copy of the new constitution arrived and the man from Alabama who had interrogated Austin rushed to the inn, waving the paper in the air: ‘Good God! Listen to what this document says!’ And he asked Quimper to read the offending passage: ‘With the adoption of this constitution, slavery is forbidden throughout Tejas, and six months from this date, even the importation of slaves already on their way to Tejas will be outlawed.’

  Neighbors quickly gathered, and thus began one of the insoluble contradictions of Texas history: of a hundred families like the Quimpers, not more than fifteen owned slaves, which meant that the vast majority could have had no financial interest in preserving slavery, yet most of those without slaves defended the institution and seemed ready to battle Saltillo to preserve it.

  Jubal and Mattie were representative: ‘We never had no slaves in Tennessee and didn’t know many people who did. Lord knows, we don’t have any to share our work here in Texas. But it stands to reason, it says right in the Bible that the sons of Ham shall be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that’s the way it’s got to be.’