‘The black man deserved to die, but no man ever deserved to die in such a manner. It was made possible only because legend said that the black was not really human.
‘It would serve no useful purpose for us to continue to explore the hideous record, for my point is made. Relations between white and black in Texas have been contaminated by legend. I am not asking that you attack the legend, or even make a great fuss about it. But do not prolong it. Don’t give it added vitality. Let it die. Speak of your Texas blacks as human beings, no better, no worse than the Czechs, the Poles and the Irish who have helped build this great state.’
When Professor Jaxifer finished, Lorenzo Quimper said: ‘Do you expect us to forget how your colored people behaved during Reconstruction? I remember well hearing my father tell how his grandfather, General Yancey Quimper, was accosted by a colored who wanted a pair of boots, free. This colored, six months from chopping cotton, had been elected to the legislature, and he told my grandfather—I can hear my father’s words as he told me. This colored, he said: “General, I’m a legislator now and I’m entitle to free boots.” And my grandfather said: “Freemont, you are entitle to a swift kick in the ass.” And you know what? That colored had my grandfather arrested.’
‘Does this old family legend have any relevance?’ the professor asked, and I could see Quimper flush, and he said with roiling bitterness: ‘A man in my town, big oilman worth millions, was ridin’ home the other day in his Cadillac. He sees this poor old colored in a broken-down Ford, mendin’ a tire by the side of the road while three strappin’ young blacks is sittin’ by the side of the road laughin’ at the old man’s efforts. My friend stops his Cadillac, gets out in that hot dusty road, and helps the old man change the tire while the three young bucks sit there laughin’ at the both of them. Now what do you think of that?’
‘Commissioner Quimper, that story’s been circulating through Texas ever since we’ve had automobiles. Do you really believe it happened … this year … to your friend?’
‘Let me tell you …’
‘Don’t you see, Commissioner? It’s today’s legend—1911 version updated.’
We had the makings of a serious confrontation, for Professor Jaxifer showed no signs of backing down; however, Miss Cobb intervened: ‘The story you told, Professor, about my grandfather,’ and she accented the my heavily, ‘is true. He grieved over the loss of Trajan Cobb so painfully that he had a monument erected to him at Lammermoor; TO A TRUSTED FRIEND.’
Ransom Rusk delivered a judicious opinion, which I allowed to stand as the judgment of our group: ‘Professor, you’ve honored us with a thoughtful paper. You must be aware, surely, that we cannot revise all of Texas history and correct all imbalances. The best we can do is project an honest course for the future.’
‘You could not have stated the case more eloquently,’ Professor Jaxifer conceded. ‘All we blacks ask is that the legends not be embellished with new additions. The old ones we can never change … at least not in this century.’
IT WAS PARADOXICAL. AFTER THE UNITED STATES ARMY ABANDONED Fort Garner, the real battle for this area began, the contest between the primeval frontier and the settled town. The struggle had a significance greater even than the one between white man and Indian. Its adversaries were marvelously varied: the wild long-horned cattle of the plains versus the ingeniously perfected beef cattle of England; the lone horseman galloping in from the western horizon versus the railroad chugging in from the east; the flash of a vengeful pistol versus the establishment of a courthouse dispensing rational law; the handful of Mexican coins hidden in a sock versus the fledgling bank with its iron safe; the free-ranging cattle drover versus the salesman of barbed wire; and in the bosom of Fort Garner, the nomadic wanderings that Emma Larkin had known with the Comanche versus the steady path toward an ordered life that her husband, Earnshaw Rusk, strove to establish.
In all parts of the American West this Homeric battle of conflicting values was fought, but nowhere in more dramatic style than in West Texas. At Fort Garner, in the quarter of a century between 1875 and 1900, it was conducted with particular intensity, and from the struggle emerged many of the lasting characteristics of Texas.
The moment Earnshaw Rusk established his home in the abandoned stone house at Fort Garner, he initiated his fight to bring the civilization he had known in rural Pennsylvania to this untamed frontier. As a pacifistic Quaker he wanted to erase memories of the military post and tried to rename the place in honor of his wife’s martyred family; he wanted it to become the village of Larkin. To his dismay, the United States Post Office Department continued to call it Fort Garner, but Rusk corrected people in his high-pitched voice: ‘It’s really Larkin, you know.’
He was equally adamant about longhorn cattle: ‘I want none of those fearful beasts on our land. I’m afraid of them. With those long, savage horns, they seem to come from the devil. And the human beings they attract are a dissolute, ungodly lot.’ When his wife asked: ‘If you don’t want cattle on our land, how will we eat?’ he replied: ‘I’ll think of something,’ but it was she who took action. For with the riding skills she had mastered with the Comanche she sped across the plains, driving wild mustangs into corrals and then taming them for sale to the various army posts in Texas and the Indian Territory. She demonstrated exceptional talent in converting them into fine saddle horses, for where others whipped the mustangs and broke them with punishment, she reasoned with them in a soft plains language they seemed to understand: ‘Now, my little roan, we change our life for the better. We’ll get to know this rope, perhaps to love it. We’ll walk about this post, day after day, until it becomes our home.’ During the first two weeks, not with force but through the gentleness of her heart, she spoke invariably to the wild horse as we, as if she along with the animal were learning a new way, but when the animal’s terror had fled, she addressed it always as you. ‘Now you have the secret!’ she would cry joyously as the animal began to respond spontaneously to her commands, and because of her uncanny ability to think like an animal, she would teach the mustang to work with her until human and animal formed a cooperative pair.
Officers began to come from distant forts to buy a Rusk Roamer, as Emma’s trainees were called. The mustangs brought good prices, and were treasured for their curious mixture of gentleness and proud spirit, but it soon became obvious that even with Earnshaw’s awkward help she could not, in her advancing pregnancy, catch enough or tame them quickly enough to depend upon this for the limited income they needed.
When Emma raised the question as to how they might earn a living, Earnshaw forestalled her with a problem of his own: ‘Emma, we must find people to occupy these houses.’
‘I don’t want a lot of people …’
‘It’s shameful to own good houses like these and see them stand empty. One of the foot soldiers who used to serve here … his wife worked on Suds Row … they tell me he’s rotting in Jacksborough. They want to come back.’
‘How would they earn a living?’
‘That’s the other thing, Emma,’ and with his quiet perception of the years ahead and of how this area along the Brazos must develop, he reasoned with her: ‘We’ll soon be bringing a baby into our empty home. We must bring people into our empty houses.’
‘Who has money for such extravagances?’
‘People make money, Emma,’ and with the friendly persuasion he had used in trying to bring a vision of peace to the Comanche, he now tried to reveal to his wife the bright future he saw: ‘We have thy six thousand acres which no plow could break. We have a wonderful stone village which no storm can attack. And we have ourselves, with only thy savings and no prospects of more. This empty land, these empty houses, we shall use them as our money.’
Emma stayed silent, for she could feel the wonder of her plains slipping away; she could feel the press of people invading her lonely acres, her silent houses. She feared change to a different way of life, but she also trusted her husband, who had given such courageo
us proof of his love. If he had a vision of a new world, she must listen, and when she did she heard the voice of the future: ‘Thy empty land, Emma, must produce something. Thy empty houses were made to protect families. A man rode by this morning when thee was out with the mustangs and I told him he was welcome to move into one of thy houses.’
When she started to protest this invasion, he said quietly: ‘Emma, if the fort is ever to be a town, we must have people.’
In this unstudied way Frank Yeager, his illiterate Alabama wife and their scrawny son Paul, aged three, moved into the house north of the commander’s, and from the moment of their arrival Emma knew the Rusks were going to have trouble, for Yeager was a profane man and his wife a committed Baptist who felt it her duty to bring everyone she met under the moral protection of her church. One evening, after she argued loudly that Quakers were headed for hell because of their unorthodox beliefs, Earnshaw asked his wife: ‘She’s dead set on converting me, showing me the true way, yet she can’t even discipline her own husband?’
Frank Yeager was a violent, difficult man, given to drunkenness and poker, when he could find partners. When his new landlord said austerely: ‘I don’t gamble,’ Yeager said: ‘You stay around me long enough, you’ll learn.’
The Yeagers had been in residence only a short time when Frank captured Emma’s full support: ‘A woman as gone pregnant as you ought to stop foolin’ around with them wild mustangs. Let’s round up all the stray longhorns for fifty miles. Build us a real herd and drive it north to them new railheads in Kansas. Let’s earn some real money.’ Emma, who loved all animals and especially the wild cattle of the plains, replied with real excitement: ‘We’ll get the first batch this afternoon.’ Two days later Earnshaw rode in to Jacksborough to invite the former soldier and his laundress wife to move into another of the houses at the fort, and the newcomers eagerly helped Yeager at the roundups, the woman riding as well as the men, and the Rusk herd grew.
The presence of an extra woman was helpful when Emma had her baby, a chubby boy with a voracious appetite, because Earnshaw was useless both at the birth and during the first difficult days. In fact, he was so much in the way that the former laundress snapped: ‘Mr. Rusk, this would be a good time for you to ride in to Jacksborough and register your son with the authorities.’
During this trip Earnshaw learned of two Buffalo Soldiers from the 10th Cavalry who were approaching forced retirement, and when he found that one of them was the well-regarded John Jaxifer, he returned to Jacksborough and offered the two men a free house; so as Emma’s herd of cattle increased, so did the population of Earnshaw’s village.
Fort Garner now consisted of Emma Rusk and her longhorns, Earnshaw and his vision of a community, their son, Floyd, who grew daily, the Yeagers, who could do almost anything, the white soldier and his rough-and-ready wife, the two Negro cavalrymen, and lots of guns. Rusk hated guns; Emma respected their utility on a frontier. The other six were all practiced in arms; make that seven, because the Yeagers were already teaching their three-year-old how to handle a toy revolver. When Earnshaw protested, Yeager said: ‘A Texan who can’t handle a gun ain’t fit to be a Texan.’
When Emma’s longhorns were first rounded up at Fort Garner, Earnshaw was contemptuous of them, but when he awakened to the fact that they might provide the economic base not only for his family but also for the community he hoped to establish, he became more attentive. And when he seriously studied those lean Texas beasts with their excessive horns, his Quaker instincts began to operate and he longed to improve them. Very early he conceded that whereas they were admirably adapted to life on the open range, they were never going to produce much salable meat until they were crossed with the heavier, fatter cattle imported from England. When he proposed to Yeager that they purchase either the Angus or Hereford bulls which agricultural experts were recommending, the lanky herdsman, himself a human longhorn, with all muscle and no fat, protested.
‘The longhorn is Texas,’ he grumbled. ‘Change him, you kill his spirit.’
‘Those horns. They’re horrible.’ When Earnshaw said this he was looking at one of the bulls with horns so wide they were ridiculous, more than six feet tip to tip. ‘Look at him. All horns and legs. No meat.’
By ill fortune he was denigrating the longhorn in which Frank Yeager took greatest pride: ‘You’re speakin’ of the best bull we got.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘This is Mean Moses. He leads the others to the promised land.’ And he explained how this big, ugly creature had nominated himself to be king of this part of the Texas frontier: ‘In spring he breeds the cows so they can produce calves big and tough like him. Those horns? He needs ’em to fend off the wolves. Those long legs? He needs ’em to cover the trail north to market without tirin’. Mr. Rusk …’
‘We Quakers don’t like titles. I’m Earnshaw.’
‘Mr. Rusk, a longhorn bull is one of God’s perfect engineerin’ feats. You replace him with one of them fancy English breeds …’ He spat. ‘Mr. Rusk, long ago this frontier was occupied by three powerful things. The Comanche. The buffalo. The longhorn. Only the cattle is left. You replace ’em with fat and blubber, what in hell is Texas goin’ to be?’
Earnshaw’s desire to build a profitable ranching business received a bad jolt when he tried to sell off a few longhorns: ‘I can’t find buyers, not even at four dollars a head. That’s less than it costs us to tend them.’ But Yeager had a solution: ‘If we can deliver them to the railhead at Dodge City, I know they’ll bring forty dollars a head. Eastern markets are so hungry for beef, they’ll take even longhorns.’
‘How will we get them there?’
‘Me and the boys will drove them.’
To this suggestion Rusk responded instantly: ‘We’ll not have our people making that trek to Kansas,’ and when Yeager protested that it could be done easily, Rusk said firmly: ‘I’ve heard about the Chisholm Trail into Abilene, Kansas, and the debauchery that goes with it. No hands from here will ever drove into Kansas.’
He was so adamant about this that Yeager surrendered: ‘Tell you the truth, Mr. Rusk, it would be better to keep the hands here on the ranch, tendin’ to things. We’ll find us a reliable cattleman headin’ north.’
Upon investigation, Rusk learned that the new cattle trail, called the Great Western, started down near the Rio Grande, swung northwest past San Antonio and Fredericksburg, then across empty land to Fort Griffin, passing not far to the west of Fort Garner. From there it lay due north to the Indian settlement at Camp Hope, then to remote Fort Supply in Indian Territory, followed by a relatively short stint into Dodge City, to which the Eastern railroads had recently penetrated. ‘What goes on there,’ he told his wife, ‘I do not choose to know or dwell upon.’
It was Emma who first heard about R. J. Poteet, from a Mexican trail cook: ‘The best. First day he told us: “No gambling in my crew. No fighting.” And he meant it.’
The more she heard about R. J. Poteet the more she liked him, and when in June the Mexican rode up to her door with the news: ‘Mr. Poteet, he’s watering at our tank tomorrow,’ she saddled up and rode to the northern end of her land to meet him.
She found him in charge of more than two thousand head of longhorns accumulated from various owners during the long trail north. He had with him nine cowboys and a Mexican cook, plus a thirteen-year-old boy to herd the spare horses in the remuda. It was an orderly camp, supervised by an orderly man just turned fifty, tall, thin as a cypress and as dark, with a close-cropped mustache and a wide-brimmed hat. His boots were so pointed at the toe and so elevated at the heel that he walked much like a woman, but he was so rarely away from his horse that this was seldom noticeable. He had a deep, resonant voice, a strong Southern accent, and an elaborate courtesy where women or young boys were concerned. From the manner in which his men went about their duties it was clear that he needed to give few orders, for he respected the men’s abilities, including those of two black crew members. He
allowed no alcohol in camp except what he himself carried, and that he used only as medicine for others in times of crisis.
‘R. J. Poteet, ma’am,’ he said when Emma rode up. ‘I’ve heard of your exploits with the Comanche, and I’m deeply respectful of your courage.’
‘My husband and I have some two hundred good animals. Well fed.’
‘These grasslands should see to that.’
‘And the care we give them.’
‘Longhorns tend to care for themselves. Look at the condition of mine. Five hundred miles on the trail, some of them.’
‘I’ve been told you give your animals extra care.’
‘I try to, ma’am.’ He spoke with an appealing directness, which encouraged her to trust him.
‘Would you be able …’ She hesitated. ‘I mean, would you be interested? Looks like you’re able to do pretty much as you wish.’
‘I’ve been trail-drivin’ north for some years, ma’am. And I judge you want me to carry your cattle to Dodge City?’
‘Would you?’
‘That’s my job,’ and before she was out of her saddle she was listening to his clearly defined terms: ‘This is the tail end of the journey, ma’am, but the crucial part. I’ve got to get your cattle across the Red River, through the Indian lands, across the Canadian River and the Cimarron, and into Dodge. Find a buyer for them, make the proper deal, and bring you back your money. That’s worth a fee, ma’am.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘I like ten percent now, earnest money, the balance when I sell.’
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