Texas

by James A. Michener

  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 mesquitc 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 María, 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 María 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 María: ‘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 María 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, I 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 María’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 naïve 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 som
e 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 longhorn. 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 vaqueros 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.’

  After a few days of sad confusion, the Pro-Houston party came forward with a much better candidate than the late Grayson. James Collinsworth, an able lawyer from Tennessee, had served Houston in many capacities, currently as the respected chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He was a handsome man, a gifted speaker and an able defender of Houston’s policies, for he advocated conciliation with Mexico and peace with the Cherokee. After his first successful speaking engagements, Ascot and his friends agreed: ‘We got ourselves a better man. Collinsworth will be our new president.’

  The chief justice had only two drawbacks. First, he was thirty-two years old, three years shy of the constitutional requirement for president. No one in the Houston camp had bothered to check, and when troublemakers like Quimper bellowed: ‘Even if he wins, he cain’t serve,’ the Houston men replied confidently: ‘We’ll take care of that when we get to it.’ One enthusiast told Otto: ‘You see, Collinsworth is already chief justice, so when the question comes before him, he can rule in his own favor.’ Otto felt instinctively that there was something wrong with this strategy, and in quest of enlightenment he consulted Ascot.

  ‘In the English-American system,’ Martin said, ‘any judge must excuse himself from a case in which his own interests are involved. We call that recusation.’ He spoke with such clarity and with such obvious devotion to the law that Otto returned night after night to talk with him, and Ascot’s little sermons formed Otto’s basic attitudes toward law and order: ‘Law is one of the noblest of all human preoccupations, for it establishes agreed-upon rules and states them clearly. It protects you and me from the excesses of the mob.’ He always spoke to Otto as if the boy were an audience of fifty elders, and this was admirable, since the truths he enunciated were so advanced that they stretched the boy’s mind. It was then that Otto developed his conviction that the law ought to defend the weak, erect protective barriers against the mighty, and clarify obscurities and conflicts. As a man who had ridden with the local ranging company and who wanted to ride again, he saw clearly that it would be his obligation to enforce just laws and dispense honest justice, and he vowed to do so. Therefore, he noted a contradiction in what Ascot was saying.