Texas

by James A. Michener

But on subsequent visits he began talking about her problems with the eight hundred and forty acres with which she found herself: ‘Today they’re worth nothing, maybe a dollar an acre. But in the future, Rachel …’ He now addressed her only as Rachel and always saw to it that one of her children was at his side as he spoke. He dwelt upon the difficulties an unmarried woman would face if she endeavored to manage so much property. He stressed the fact that the land lay half within the town, half out in the country, a division which trebled the complications.

  On an April day in 1850, at the time the Cobbs were excavating their lake, he suddenly took Mrs. Garner’s hands, her children being absent, and gazed at her as if overcome by a totally unexpected passion: ‘Rachel, you cannot take care of a farm and two lovely children alone. Allow me to help.’

  Everything he had been saying for the past months had made sense, indeed the only common sense she had heard for a long time. A preacher for whom she had little respect had mumbled: ‘God always looks after the orphaned child,’ but General Quimper had outlined practical courses of action which did not depend upon God’s uncertain support, and she was now disposed to listen seriously to his next recommendations.

  Having uttered the critical words, he retreated from her kitchen as if overcome with embarrassment and stayed away for two days, but on the third day he returned filled with apologies for his intemperate behavior during his last visit, and with great relief he heard Mrs. Garner say: ‘No apologies are necessary. You were seized by an honest emotion, and I respect you for it.’

  When the proposed marriage was announced, Rachel Garner was visited by an unexpected member of her community, a tall, shaggy, rough individual known unfavorably as Panther Komax, whom her dead husband had once described: ‘An animal. Good with a gun, but an animal.’

  Panther’s message was blunt: ‘Don’t marry him, Mrs. Garner.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘He does nothin’ withouten a plan.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He plans to grab your land. He plans to grab ever’ thin’.’

  ‘My children need a father.’

  ‘They don’t need him.’ In the silence that followed, Panther studied the neat kitchen, then said: ‘You’re doin’ all right as it is. Captain Garner would be proud of you.’

  At the mention of her husband’s name, Rachel frowned, as if Komax had been unfair in bringing into the discussion that fine man, that unquestioned hero, but since Sam had been brought into the room, she said, as if for him to hear: ‘Sam would want his children to have a father. He would understand.’ Then almost aggressively, she turned on Panther and demanded: ‘What has General Quimper ever done to you?’ Komax, not wishing to compound a mistake which he now realized he had made, replied: ‘Nothin’. I was only comparin’ him and your husband. And when I do I get sick to my stomach.’

  Actually, Quimper had been doing a great deal to Panther, and as soon as the marriage to Rachel Garner had been safely solemnized, with her children in attendance, the general directed his attention to a business matter which had been concerning him for some time.

  Like the rest of Xavier County, he had watched in disbelief when Komax returned from Mexico in 1848 leading a chubby Mexican bootmaker named Juan Hernández, who proceeded to make the best boots the men of the county had ever seen. They were pliable, yet so sturdy that mesquite thorns could not penetrate them, and when three different users reported that rattlesnakes, ‘and damned big ones, too, thick as your leg,’ had struck the boots without forcing the fangs through the hide, Komax Boots began to be discussed favorably wherever men appreciated good leather.

  In fact, Juan’s boots became so popular that Panther could not supply all the men who sought them, even when he raised his price to four dollars a pair. Therefore, in December 1849, when hordes of prospectors were pouring through Texas to reach the California gold rush via the overland route through El Paso, Komax was embarrassed by the number of gold-seekers who offered him up to forty dollars for a pair of Juan’s boots.

  But embarrassment soon gave way to enthusiasm, and Komax told his bootmaker: ‘Go down to Matamoros or Monterrey. Find five or six good cobblers. Bring ’em here, and we’ll make a fortune if these California men keep comin’.’ But before Juan set out, Lomax gripped him by the wrist: ‘You promise to come back?’ and the Mexican replied in Spanish: ‘Amigo, I never lived so well. You are a man to trust.’

  Soon Hernandez was back in Xavier with five Mexican bootmakers, who, under his and Panther’s tutelage, began to turn out boots of such remarkable quality that even when the California gold rush petered out, the demand from Texas men continued to snap up all that Panther could supply.

  The price was now fixed at eleven dollars a pair, twelve if Hernández himself decorated the upper part with the Mexican designs he liked. He favored the symbol of his nation, the valiant eagle battling the rattlesnake, but most Texans rejected this: ‘Damned vulture eatin’ a worm,’ they called it, and they asked instead for the Lone Star with crossed pistols. Juan could do either.

  But the main advantage of a Komax boot was that it fitted properly, and in this respect it was unique. Up to this time, in both Mexico and Texas, shoemakers had been accustomed to make simply a boot: big, square, solid, but with the same outline for left foot and right. Such boots were so uncomfortable that a buyer sometimes had to wear them for six months before they adjusted to his feet, or vice versa. Juan Hernandez changed this by drawing on a piece of paper the exact outlines of a customer’s feet, properly differentiated as to right and left, and then shaping boots to fit. Men were apt to sigh when they first put on such boots: ‘They fit!’

  The lucrative trade which Komax had developed by his simple device of having befriended a weeping bootmaker about to have his neck slit attracted the attention of many Xavier men, who wondered why they had not thought of importing shoemakers from Matamoros, but no one paid closer heed than General Quimper, who said, one afternoon as a new rush of California-bound men clamored for boots: ‘This dumb ox has a gold mine.’

  It offended Quimper, offended him deeply, to think that a reprehensible man like Komax had stumbled upon such a bonanza, and he felt it his duty to see that the manufacturing operation, as he called it, was brought under honest control. He could think of no one better qualified to exercise such control than himself, for he spoke Spanish, knew men of property who could afford to buy the boots, and obviously was reliable, for he had both land and money.

  To accomplish this transfer, General Quimper needed the cooperation of either a judge or a sheriff, and in frontier Texas both were available to a gentleman of good standing, especially if he came from Tennessee or Alabama and had some gold coins in his pocket. Yancey decided upon a three-pronged assault, so one morning Judge Kemper summoned Komax to his chambers: ‘Panther, you could go to jail for bringing in those Mexicans.’ There was no law forbidding this, for law-abiding Mexicans had always been free to cross the Rio Grande, but the judge’s manner was ominous, and it was substantiated by a visit from Sheriff Bodger, who said: ‘Us sheriffs in these parts got our eye on you, Panther, and your illegal operations.’ The convincing blow, however, fell when six gunmen appeared at the workshop, threatening to shoot everyone in sight if they didn’t get the hell out of Texas.

  Quimper himself, terrified of a brute like Komax, did not make an appearance till the threats had softened up the wild man. Then he appeared, unctuous and reassuring, to deliver the good news that he could protect Panther and square things with the law by taking the offending Mexicans off his, Panther’s, hands. By this simple but effective strategy, General Quimper obtained control of the bootmaking operation, and it must be conceded that once he got it he knew what to do with it. Advertising in both Houston and Austin, he visited the many United States Army forts, peddling his excellent boots to the eager officers, and he established the designation ‘General Quimper Boots’ as effectively as Samuel Colt had made his name synonymous with good revolvers, or
as John B. Stetson would make his with hats. In the great war that was about to erupt, generals and colonels fighting for both the North or the South were apt to wear the heavily ornamented Quimpers, as they were called; but very few enlisted men would have them unless they stole them from the bodies of dead officers. Yancey did not find it comfortable selling to enlisted men.

  The Cobbs now had eleven thousand acres, Reuben having acquired eight hundred more of relatively useless river-bottom swamp, and to run it they had ninety-eight slaves, not all field hands. Since from long experience the owners had learned that one strong field hand could effectively tend only ten acres of cotton and six of corn, this meant that much of their land had to lie idle, and this was just what Reuben had intended: Today those bottom acres look like nothin’, but time’s comin’ when they’ll be priceless.’ When someone asked why, he smiled, for what he had in mind was to dike them in, play farmer’s roulette, and make enormous crops when the great floods stayed away, lose everything when they came. ‘But even when floods do hit,’ he told his cousin, ‘we win because they bring down fresh silt from somebody else’s place to enrich ours.’

  The Cobb cotton fields were like no other in the area, for they were hardly fields at all, merely open spaces between tall trees, so that in early March a slave with a plow could never follow a furrow for very long before being stopped by one of the trees, and when in late March the plants showed their pale-green heads, they did not appear like proper cotton at all but rather like patches of green thrown helter-skelter. However, if the fields lacked neatness, they did carry signs that three years from now they were going to be masterpieces, because each tree which now prevented proper cultivation had been girdled and was dying; in two years it would wither, and in three it could be pushed down and the stump drawn.

  Reuben did not propose to be girdled, not by nature, which he battled, nor by Northern abolitionists, who threatened his prosperity and his way of life, and he was more afraid of the latter than the former: ‘Nature you can control. If the great flood comes, you hunker down and let it come, then use it later to your advantage.’ At Lakeview there were three bottomlands: the low-bottoms, which were underwater much of the time; the middle-bottoms, which presented a reasonable gamble; and what might be called the upper-bottoms, which had been underwater centuries ago when the streams were powerful but which now were relatively secure against flooding. In these rich upper fields the Cobbs had planted their first crops and on them built their homes. Reuben was not worried about the ultimate worth of any of his fields, and since he had reassured himself about the permanence of the Great Raft he was satisfied that his water supply was guaranteed also.

  It was his slaves about which he worried, for in a distant land like Texas, where replenishment was not easy, they were of considerable value, and if he should be deprived by Northern guile, he would lose not only his investment in them but also his capacity to work his plantation. The worth of an average adult male slave in Jefferson had increased to $900, a female, to $750, and since he and Sett had brought with them only the best, their investment, forgetting the children, stood at something better than $60,000. Since the value of a good slave seemed to rise steadily, he could anticipate that with natural increase by birth, which he figured at 2.15 percent per year, and the judicious purchase of new slaves from farmers going out of business, by 1860 he and Sett ought to have no less than a hundred and fifty slaves worth more than $1,000 each. This was property worth protecting.

  He was therefore most attentive when a Northern newspaper writer named Elmer Carmody arrived in Jefferson. Carmody told everyone quite frankly what he was up to: ‘I’m writing a series of essays on the New South—Alabama, Mississippi, Texas … We already know about the Old South. But Texas is of powerful concern to Northerners.’

  He talked with anyone who would pause, and showed an intelligent interest in all details of plantation life, taking careful note of financial and husbandry details. As he went about in the small town he heard repeatedly of the Cobb brothers, as they were called, for the size and ambition of their plantation excited admiration: ‘Mister, they have the best mill in the whole South, Old or New.’ Several Jeffersonians volunteered to drive Carmody out to Lakeview, but he preferred to take things easy, and on the fifth day of his stay, Reuben Cobb did indeed drop by to see him.

  ‘We hear you’re writin’ about us.’

  ‘I propose to.’

  ‘Unfavorable, I suspect?’

  Carmody extended his right hand palm down, and rotated it, up and down, to indicate strict impartiality: ‘I write as the facts fall, Mr. Cobb. And the facts I’ve been hearing tell me that you and your brother …’

  ‘Cousin. He’s from Carolina. I’m from Georgia.’

  ‘Would I be presuming …?’

  ‘To my mind, you’re presumin’ by even bein’ in this town. But if you want to see a plantation at its best, I’d be proud to have you ride back with me.’

  Reuben was on horseback, and he naturally assumed that Carmody had a mount, and when the newspaperman confessed that he didn’t, Cobb hastily arranged to borrow one from a grocer with whom he did business, and soon the pair were heading out to Lakeview.

  ‘I hear that you have more than ten thousand acres. Why were you so willing …?’

  Carmody rarely had to finish a question, for Cobb had such an acute interest in everything, he could anticipate what data an intelligent man might seek. ‘We believe in Texas,’ he said, turning sideways. ‘We’re willing to invest all our savings.’

  ‘What did the land cost you, on the average?’

  Cobb was surprised; no Southerner would dream of asking such a question of a plantation owner. Forbidden were: ‘How many acres?’ ‘How many bales?’

  Next Carmody asked: ‘How many bales do you hope to ship?’ And before Cobb could answer, he asked: ‘Is it true you have your own wharf?’

  By the time they reached Lakeview, Reuben actually liked Carmody, for in his brash twenty-six-year-old way the young man asked probing questions without a shred of guile, doing so in such a rational progression that Reuben wanted to answer, and when the four adult Cobbs met with Carmody, who stayed with them three days, the conversation became extremely pointed, with Reuben asking at the beginning of the first session: ‘Are you an abolitionist?’ and with Carmody replying: ‘I’m nothing. I look, I listen, I report.’

  ‘And what are you goin’ to report about us? Here in Texas?’

  ‘That you are the last gasp of profitable slavery.’

  ‘You admit, then, that we do make profits?’

  ‘You do, but not for long. And at a terrible cost to your society.’

  Reuben flushed, and there might have been harsh words, for he was a voluble defender of the South and its peculiar traditions, but he also wanted to hear a logical explanation of the Northern point of view, so he restrained himself and asked: ‘Why do you say our obvious profits exact a terrible cost?’ and Carmody launched into a careful analysis:

  ‘Let us suppose two recent immigrants go, one, like you, to Texas, another, also like you, to Iowa—two states that joined the Union at about the same time. You each bring to your new location the same amount of cash, the same amount of intelligence and energy. I’m afraid that the man who goes to Iowa will in the long run have every advantage, and the cruel difference will be that he will not be encumbered by slaves and you will.

  ‘This difference will manifest itself in every aspect of life, but principally in two vital ways, manufacturing of goods and self-government. Let’s take manufacturing first. Because the Iowa man has no slaves, he can rely on no ready crop like cotton. He must work in many different fields, and when he does he builds skills. Pretty soon everything he needs to live on is available locally. If he wants a bricklayer, he can hire one. If he wants an engineer, he can ask about the neighborhood, and soon he has produced a diversified society capable of supporting itself by the exchange of money for services.

  ‘The man who comes to Tex
as with his slaves cannot do that, for he must apply all his own energies and that of his slaves to growing one cash crop, cotton. Now, the profits from cotton can be great. My studies satisfy me that even a poor farmer can produce his crop for seven cents a pound. But with good management you can bring it in for five and three-quarters cents, and then, even if you have to sell at seven, you prosper, and if you can get sixteen, you make a fortune. I know that in many years you do even better. But you must buy more slaves and more land. What happens when the land gives out? Your profits are not invested in the creation of a multiple society. Now and next year and for all the years to come, when you need something, you must send to Cincinnati to find it. You are not producing those useful things upon which a complex organization depends, and down the road a way you’re bound to pay a terrible price for this neglect.

  ‘Eight or nine times during my travels I’ve heard sensible men say: “We may have to go to war, some day, to protect ourselves from the Yankees … to protect our sacred way of life.” And the speakers have convinced me that they mean it and that their young men are the bravest in the world. But, Mr. Cobb, if the North has all the production, all the railroads, all the arsenals, all the shipbuilders, it must in the long run prevail, no matter how gallant your young men prove to be.

  ‘And before you argue me down, let me say that the gravest price you pay for your slave economy is the tardiness it encourages in the building up of government, of education and of the good agencies of society. You have no public schools because half your population, the Negro half, does not need them. Your friend in Iowa will soon have libraries and publishing houses, and you will not. He will have lively politics, divided between reasonable factions, and you will have only the party dedicated to the preservation of slavery. This is the terrible cost of your peculiar institution. You ought to abandon it tomorrow.’

  Each of the four Cobbs had a dozen points on which to debate Carmody’s thesis, and he proved responsive to all of them, listening sagely, nodding his head agreeably when they scored and shaking it when they indulged in fantasy, not fact. He really was seeking information, and they believed him when he assured them that he was not an abolitionist: ‘I truly have no preconceptions. I’ve studied Adam Smith and have learned from him that economy governs a great deal of human effort, and the more deeply I probe into the economy of the South …’