Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘What the hell are you doin’, son?’ Quimper asked during one vacation. ‘Hopscotchin’ about like a giddy girl?’

  ‘I’m trying to learn the borderlands of Texas. When I’ve learned something, I’ll hit you for a job at Austin.’

  ‘I’ll be your blockin’ back,’ Quimper assured him, and it was this remarkable scholar that Rusk and Quimper had invited to address us at Abilene.

  Braden’s thesis was simple and provocative: ‘I have worked in Old Mexico, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana, trying to identify the factors which those areas share with Texas, and I must confess that I find very few. Texas is unique beyond what even the most ardent Lone Star patriot realizes, and the difference lies in the marvelous challenge of our land. New Mexico has primarily an arid, beautiful wasteland, but so does Texas. The difference is that we have five or six other terrains to augment our wastelands. Oklahoma has striking plains, and so does Texas, but we also have a wild variation to supplement them. Louisiana has a charming Old South terrain, but so does Confederate Texas in the Jefferson area, plus so much more.

  ‘If a settler didn’t cotton to one type of Texas land, he could move to some other that suited him better, and his options were almost unlimited. That’s fundamental to an understanding of the Texas mind. The land was worthy of being loved. And both Texas women and Texas men grew to love it.’

  At this point in his talk he quit his posture of lecturer and sat on the edge of a desk, legs dangling, cowboy boots showing: ‘I think your committee is aware that any Texas man who makes it big in anything, first thing he wants is a ranch. If he’s an oilman from Houston, he finds his ranch in the hill country back of Austin. If he’s from Dallas, he finds it out toward Abilene. And if he’s from Abilene, he wants his out toward the Pecos River. And when he finds his Shangri-La, he tends it as lovingly as if it were his mistress.’

  Abruptly he pointed at Quimper: ‘How many ranches do you have?’ and Quimper said quietly but with obvious pride: ‘Nine.’ He then asked Rusk, who answered: ‘Seven.’ He was about to continue his interpretation of Texas geography when Miss Cobb said almost petulantly: ‘Ask me,’ and when he did, she said: ‘Three.’ Again he was about to proceed, when Professor Garza asked: ‘And how about my family? Originally some forty thousand acres along the Rio Grande, and I still have a very small ranch down there, like you say.’ Now Braden smiled at Quimper and confessed: ‘I have my own little ranch. Near Hardwork, the old German settlement. Mr. Quimper made me buy it with my first savings.’

  I felt naked. I was the only one in that room without a ranch, but when they teased me about this, as if I were somehow disloyal, I defended myself: ‘I’ve been working outside the state for some years, and I’m not a millionaire.’ This did not satisfy Quimper and Rusk, who said that if I was really a Texan at heart, I’d own some small piece of the countryside, no matter where in the world I worked.

  Without further interruption, Diamond Jim shot generalizations at us, which our staff recorded as follows: ‘Basic to an understanding of how a Texan feels about his land is the fact that for a ten-year period, 1836 to 1845, the Texians had been in command of a free, sovereign republic, and this generated such deep-rooted characteristics that all who subsequently came to live within the boundaries were subtly modified. To be a Texian implied something quite different from what was indicated when a man said “I’m a New Yorker” or “I’m a Georgian.”

  ‘Intensely varied, cruelly harsh, the land of Texas formed a little continent of its own, won by bloody courage, subdued by stubbornness, and maintained by an almost vicious protection of ownership. Men felt about the land of Texas differently from the way men of Massachusetts felt about their land; Texians devised new laws to protect their holdings, harsh customs to ensure that each family’s land remained its own. I suppose you know that the homestead of a Texas man cannot be stolen from him in a bankruptcy proceeding brought by some bank.

  ‘Newcomers from states where hunting is popular, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, experience shock when they move to Texas. It comes on the opening day of deer season, for in their home states they are accustomed to hunting pretty much where they wish, and vast areas of state-owned forest are open to them, but in all of Texas there is no acre of land on which an uninvited hunter can trespass in order to shoot a deer. Land privately owned is sacrosanct. Indeed, in Texas the verb to trespass is identical with the verb to commit suicide, for it is tacitly understood that any red-blooded Texan is entitled to shoot the trespasser.

  ‘On his piece of land the early Texian demanded freedom. He wanted no regular army to dictate his behavior; he called his Rangers to arms only infrequently, and even then for brief and limited periods; he was never overawed by judges; and he allowed no central bank which might dictate economic policies. He was willing to act in concert with neighbors if an enemy threatened, but as soon as the danger abated he insisted upon returning to civilian life so that he could resume fighting with his neighbors. Of all the groups which would constitute the final United States, none would surpass the Texan in his devotion to freedom.’

  Before sharing with us his next thesis he smiled, for he realized that he was treading where mythology and custom meet, and he wanted to exaggerate to score a point: ‘The Texan sanctified his freedom behind a score of unique traditions. Any man whose wife’s affections had been tampered with was free to shoot the other man, to the applause of the jury, impounded not to try him but to proclaim his innocence. And of course, any good-looking woman was free to shoot any man at any time if only her lawyer could prove that love and honor were tangentially involved. Intrusion by the federal, state or county government into a family’s basic freedoms was intolerable.

  ‘Of course, this absolute freedom did not apply to blacks, Indians or Mexicans. Unlike the other Southern states, Texas did not provide a cadre of philosophers who agonized over this basic contradiction of freedom for everyone like me, slavery or extermination for anyone different. It was a way of life approved by ninety-seven percent at least of the anglo population, and as such, it would be preserved and augmented. In time labor unions, liberal newspaper editors and free-speaking college professors would be as outlawed as the Cherokee, the Mexican, the black slave imported from Alabama or the Comanche.

  ‘Texas has been from the start and will always remain a frontier. It was a distant frontier for the kings of Spain ruling from Madrid; it was a shadowy frontier for Napoleon ruling from Paris; and it was always a most remote frontier for Mexican presidents and dictators attempting to rule from Mexico City. When Mirabeau Lamar had the courage to establish the national capital in Austin, it was on the frontier. When Sam Houston first came to Nacogdoches, the wild frontier lay only a few miles to the west; thirty-nine fortieths of future Texas was then a forbidden wilderness. During most of Texas history a wild frontier was always at hand, and not until 1905 or thereabouts could even half the state be classified as “settled.” As late as the 1970s it would sometimes seem as if the frontier ran down the middle of Main Street in Dallas or Houston, and if you want to see the frontier still in existence in the 1980s, go to the little Rio Grande town of Polk in West Texas, where it glares across the river at the lawless Mexican town of Carlota.

  ‘This frontier spirit engrained in Texas a spirit of adventure, a willingness to face whatever challenge came along. It encouraged the young people of Texas to be insolent, daring, self-assured and competent. It led to the imaginative utilization of natural resources and the speedy building of free-wheeling communities of unique and robust charm. The meanest family, the poorest boy in school could persuade himself that life was still dominated by the frontier, and that the qualities which had ensured success there were still honored. Texas was the permanent last frontier.

  The penalty for the perpetuation of this legend was a general lawlessness. Fistfights, duels, murders and countywide insurrections became shockingly common, and when the lynching of black men had begun to fade elsewhere, it still flourished as a form of com
munity entertainment in Texas. Texas cities became murder capitals of the nation and therefore the world, but no one complained excessively and anyone misguided enough to preach that guns should be controlled could never hope to become an elected official. Texas would always remain one of the most violent of the American states and would violently defend its right to behave pretty much as it damn well wished.

  ‘Texans will always be inordinately proud of their history, cognizant of the ways in which it differed from the history of the rest of the states, passionately devoted to the stories of the Alamo and San Jacinto while endeavoring to forget how they had messed up Goliad and the Santa Fe expedition.’

  At this point Braden stepped down from the desk and went back to his podium: ‘I studied Texas history in Grade Three, again in Grade Seven, took a special course in high school, an advanced course in college, and a regional course in graduate school. I can’t tell you much about unimportant countries like Greece, France and ancient Persia, but I sure as hell can tell you about McLennan County, Texas.’

  He told us that Texans revered their ancestors as only the citizens of Virginia and South Carolina could, but Texans did it with a fierceness that would have caused the other two states to be considered pusillanimous. Perhaps it was this constant living within the living past that made Texans different; certainly it made them more patriotic, so that no one could imagine a citizen of Iowa feeling about his state the way a loyal Texan felt about his.

  ‘Despite their appalling record against Mexican armies—five losses, one win—the Texan citizen still believes he is invincible and that one good Texan can whip ten Mexicans, five Japanese, four Indians or three Germans, and they have never been loath to put this theory to the test. In later years it seemed as if Texans were running the entire American military machine, and rarely to its disadvantage. Texans boasted, but they also produced.

  ‘Out of this heady mélange of patriotism, chauvinism and love of land evolved a way of life that Texans cherished and defended, but it produced constant contradictions. Women would spend vast amounts of money to dress better than those of Boston or Philadelphia, but their men would prefer the rough yet independent dress of the frontier. Sam Houston—congressman, governor, senator, president—established the pattern: boots, rough Mexican-style trousers, a wildly colored and embroidered shirt, a Napoleonic jacket, an immense flopping hat, all topped by a huge Mexican serape. Today the wealthy give mammoth parties at which a whole steer is barbecued, and in the early days solitary wanderers into the wilderness, which seemed always to be two miles to the west, knew that they could halt at the meanest shack and be offered bread and maybe some cheese. Titles and prerogatives meant little; courage and robust fellowship, everything.

  ‘Very quickly Texas became a bastion of free economic activity. Speculate on the land. Risk driving seven hundred head of cattle to New Orleans or to the new railhead in Kansas. Take a chance on a wagon convoy of goods across the desert to Chihuahua. Drive the iron spikes of your railroad three hundred miles across the empty plains to El Paso. Fight the bankers. Fight the government, whether in Austin or Washington. Keep out the agitators and the labor leaders and the radicals. Protest like hell against any kind of taxation at all. And any frontier town of six hundred that did not have two or three millionaires wasn’t really trying.

  ‘In the arts the new state was unlucky. Because in its first stages it had been of Spanish heritage, it did not have among its original settlers a cadre of men and women accustomed to writing freely; it could not therefore duplicate settlements like Boston, Philadelphia, Williamsburg and Charleston, in which a predominantly English population already trained in a free English culture produced newspapers, books, impressive schools and thriving colleges. Also, Texans were so busy trying to tame their frontier that they had little time for culture, and their refusal to support education vigorously, as states like Massachusetts and Ohio did, meant that they lacked a constant infusion of fresh intellectual ideas.

  ‘So, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when indigenous forms of Texas culture should have been emerging, as such forms did in the rest of America, both the foundation and the desire were lacking, and a notable Texan culture composed of songs and paintings and plays and operas and epic poetry and delightful stories did not come forth.

  ‘But the impulses for great art, if they are legitimate, never die, and in those fallow years Texas was accumulating a legend which will surely explode into expressive statement later on. I’m confident that we’ll enjoy a vigorous renaissance about 1995, because legendary storytellers like Esteban the Moor, Yancey Quimper and Panther Komax keep the legends, the icons and the images burnished until the dreaming artists of a later day mature and take them in hand.

  ‘Texans of the republic found it easy to transfer their loyalties to the United States, which was no surprise, seeing that the vast majority of them had lived much longer in states like Tennessee and Alabama than in Texas. Later, Texans never forgot that they had once operated a free nation of their own, and a surprising number felt that if ever things went wrong in the United States as a whole, they could secede and revert to their own nationhood. In fact, one of the permanent weaknesses of Texas has been one which has not been acknowledged until recently: Texans, even today, look back to the decade of 1836 to 1845 when their ancestors enjoyed national status as “the great old days.” As Americans, they feel that they are the elite among nations; as Texans, they know they are the elite among Americans.

  ‘In the summer of 1846 a New Orleans newspaperman, endeavoring to evaluate the characteristics of the new state which now abutted Louisiana’s western border, wrote:

  ‘Louisiana and Texas are sisters, and have always been. At many times their heritage was identical, and far more of the supplies that Texas relied upon reached her via New Orleans than through Galveston. Today, the two states should be identical in the manner of Alabama and Mississippi.

  ‘But Louisiana and Texas are not alike and never shall be. An immense gulf has been dug at the Sabine River, separating Texas not only from Louisiana but from all the other states of the Southern Tier, and it can never be bridged. What does the gulf consist of? The great Spanish missions, for one thing. Texas had them. We didn’t. The Alamo and San Jacinto separate us, too, because Texas went through those dramatic experiences and we didn’t.

  ‘But at its widest extent, and deepest, the chasm consists of something much simpler. For the last ten years Texas has been a free nation. Louisiana never was. And the experience of such freedom, once enjoyed, seeps into a people’s soul, never to be eradicated.’

  IT WAS AN INTERLUDE, A TRAGICOMIC INTERRUPTION WHICH FEW in Texas sought but which most later accepted as a turning point in their history. At a time when the newly approved state should have been paying attention to the building of governmental process and the sorting out of priorities, it found itself enmeshed in the Mexican War of 1846–1848, a minor affair militarily, a major event diplomatically.

  Internally the effect on Texas was minimal; two battles and a disastrous cavalry encounter were fought on its soil, and its men invaded a foreign country, where they gained attention because of their bravery and lack of discipline. More important, men from the other twenty-eight states—Iowa becoming the twenty-ninth in 1846—served in Texas and sent home harrowing stories of ‘bleak empty spaces, drought, Mexicans and rattlesnakes.’ Of maximum importance, national newspapers sent to the war reporters, sketchers and a remarkable man named Harry Saxon, who brought with him an unprecedented amount of gear to report upon Texas and the war. Their stories and pictures circulated around the world to launch the legend of Texas.

  The American army was not in Texas by accident, nor was it there in response to any specific threat by the Mexican government. Instead, there had been a gradual worsening of relations between the two countries and some curious actions on the part of each. President-elect Polk, having been a prime force in bringing Texas into the Union, was determi
ned to add New Mexico and upper California, so as to round out the continental reach of the United States, and since Mexico was either uninterested in developing these areas, or incapable of doing so, he supposed that the Mexicans might be willing to sell them for a decent price in order to be shed of responsibility. He was aware, of course, that the sudden acquisition of so much new land would force the American government to decide once and for all whether the resulting new states should be slave or free, and that would ignite dormant antipathies between South and North, but on that thorny question he was willing to postpone decision.

  Even before Polk had been inaugurated in 1845, the kettle of war was bubbling. The United States Congress authorized annexation; Mexico, feeling insulted, terminated diplomatic relations; and the new President initiated a pair of daring moves. First he ordered a sizable army unit to Corpus Christi on the northern border of the Nueces Strip, and warned its commander to be prepared to strike if events required. Next he dispatched a personal emissary, John Slidell, to Mexico with an offer to buy New Mexico for $5,000,000, California for $25,000,000, and to pay up to $40,000,000 for a more complete package. When the Mexicans rebuffed Slidell for having offended their national honor, Polk saw that the two nations were on what he believed to be an unavoidable collision course. Forthwith he began to prepare for the war which he knew, and even hoped, must come.

  In command of the eager troops at Corpus Christi was a crusty general, known for his courage, his stubbornness and his lack of education, who had been sent into Texas with orders to protect the American frontier but not to invade Mexico unless hostile action made this inescapable. Zachary Taylor was an almost perfect choice for the job; his frontier manner made him congenial to the Texans and his dogged, no-frills approach to battle made him an effective opponent to the flamboyant Mexicans. He did, however, face a difficult diplomatic problem: Where was the Texas frontier he was supposed to protect?