Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘You seem reluctant to state your fee, Mr. Poteet.’

  ‘I am, ma’am, because some owners, especially the ladies, always think it’s too high. But there is much work to do, much responsibility.’

  ‘It’s because you’re known for reliability that I came.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’d be obliged if you’d get these figures in your head. You owe me one dollar for every animal. I owe you five dollars for every one of your cattle I lose on the way, so I don’t intend to lose any. If you want to ride with me to Dodge City to sell your beasts, do so, and I get nothing but my dollar a head. If I act as your agent, and I’m willing, you must rely upon me completely. I’ll do my best for you …’

  ‘They say so, Mr. Poteet.’

  ‘Reputations aren’t earned on one drive.’ He coughed, then completed his terms: ‘If I arrange for the selling, and sometimes it takes three minutes, sometimes three weeks, I get five percent. Some will do it for less, but frankly, I don’t recommend them.’

  At the noon hour they joined the cowboys at the chuck wagon, that amazing monument to American ingenuity, that contraption on four wheels from which hung all kinds of utilitarian devices: can openers, bone saws, frying pans, crocks with wire handles for sugar, pie plates with holes in their edges so they could be strung on a nail, clotheslines, folding tables, an awning to protect the Mexican cook from the sun, a bin for charcoal, and two dozen other imaginative additions, including drawers of every dimension.

  ‘I took my first chuck wagon from Jacksborough across the Llano in 18 and 68,’ Poteet said. ‘Through Horsehead Crossing, all the way to Colorado.’

  ‘The Estacado!’ Emma said with awe. ‘Even the Comanche stayed clear of that. What did you do for water?’

  ‘We suffered. Next year, all the way to Montana. The chuck wagons in those days were simpler affairs. Everything you see on this wagon is in answer to some strong need. It’s an invention of sheer intellectual brilliance, you could say.’

  ‘Will your men run into trouble on the way to Dodge?’

  ‘Now there’s a misconception, ma’am. We do our very best to stay out of trouble. If Indians are runnin’ wild, we head the other way. If a storm threatens, we try to lay low till it passes. Each of my men is armed, save the boy, but in the last five trips, not a shot fired in anger.’

  ‘Why do you keep trailing, Mr. Poteet?’

  Before he could respond, one of his cowboys interrupted: ‘You know, ma’am, that some time ago Mr. Poteet started a college in South Texas?’

  ‘I can believe it.’

  ‘He makes so much and he pays us so little he had to do somethin’ with his money.’ The cowboy grinned.

  Poteet made a pistol with his right forefinger and shot the cowboy dead, then turned suddenly to Emma: ‘Ma’am, it’s bold of me, and maybe it’s wrong of me, but these are young men tryin’ to learn about Texas. Would you have the courage to show them?’ And the forthrightness with which he spoke—indeed, the dignity with which he conducted all his affairs—gave Emma the courage.

  Raising her two hands to the sides of her face, she pushed back her hair to reveal the dreadfully scarred ears, and she could hear the cowboys gasp. Then, with her hands still in place, she unloosed the two white strands which controlled her wooden nose, and when it dropped, one of the men cried: ‘Oh Jesus!’

  ‘Texas wasn’t won easy,’ Poteet said.

  ‘I’ll have the longhorns gathered and counted this afternoon,’ she said, but Poteet interrupted: ‘We do the countin’ together, ma’am.’

  Earnshaw Rusk had always vowed to resist politics, for he had witnessed its lack of principle and its ruthlessness where personal interest was involved. Looking at what politics had done to him in the Indian Territory and to a fine man like General Grierson in Texas, he had concluded: Only a blind man or one whose moral sensibilities were numbed would dabble in it. But when he studied the situation dispassionately, he realized that the goal he sought to attain—the civilization of the West—could be achieved only if Texas had strong representatives in Washington, and as he interrogated various interested persons about whom the Texas legislature might send to the national Senate, the name of Somerset Cobb, the respected gentleman from Jefferson, kept surfacing. And when Cobb felt obligated to run for the U. S. Senate in order to represent the decent parts of the culture of the Old South, Rusk felt obligated to support him, actively.

  If any proof was needed to show that this lanky Quaker was a man of principle, this action provided it, because on the surface Cobb represented everything Rusk opposed. Cobb had owned large numbers of slaves in both South Carolina and Texas; Rusk had risked his life to oppose slavery in North Carolina and Virginia. Cobb was a Democrat; Rusk, like most Philadelphia Quakers, was a Republican. Cobb had served in the Confederate army, rising to high rank; Rusk was a pacifist.

  What was worse, Cobb had vigorously opposed Northern interference in Texas affairs, calling Reconstruction ‘that bastard child of a vengeful legislature.’ It was, he had preached, ‘infamous in conception, cruel in execution, and in its final days a thing of scorn’; Rusk had believed that the South, especially Texas, required stern discipline before it could be allowed free exercise of its powers within the Union.

  Finally, Rusk knew that Cobb was a Southerner who refused to apologize for his service to the Confederacy, and had committed treason against the United States. Yet here he was, brazenly offering himself to the Texas legislature as a candidate for the U. S. Senate. Rusk had every reason to reject this man, or even work against him, but when it seemed that Cobb’s opponent, also a military hero, might win the seat, Earnshaw knew that he must support the one-armed Cobb, so he left his ranch and harangued any members of the legislature he could encounter in the northern areas around Dallas.

  Why did he do this quixotic thing? Why did this retiring and painfully bashful man plunge into the center of a political brawl? Because of what his wife had told him about Cobb’s opponent, General Yancey Quimper: ‘I was helping Mrs. Reed in the big house when General Quimper arrived to inspect what he called his fort. I was in the kitchen, of course …’ She vaguely indicated her wooden nose. ‘But I heard the three women talking.’

  ‘What three?’

  ‘Mrs. Reed. Mrs. Wetzel. Mrs. Quimper.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘That General Quimper had not been a hero at San Jacinto, that he’d been a coward mainly. That he had never dueled Sam Houston or shot wide to spare Houston’s life. That he had never been at Monterrey or been anywhere near the Bishop’s Palace. That he had not defended the Texas lunette at Vicksburg. And that he was not entitled to the rank of general, because he simply gave himself that title.’

  When Earnshaw heard this litany of deceit, he reacted as a Philadelphia Quaker and not as a Texan inured to such colorful imposture; he deemed it his duty to expose the lifelong fraud practiced by Quimper, and to this end he began pestering the Democratic leaders in Dallas. At first they laughed at him: ‘You disqualify liars and frauds, you wouldn’t have ten men in the United States Senate, nor six in the Texas.’

  But he persisted in his crusade, and by chance he encountered one Texas state senator who was eager to listen. He was Ernst Allerkamp, who represented the German districts around Fredericksburg, and when Rusk approached him regarding General Quimper, he listened: ‘Are you sure what you say is true?’

  ‘I’ve made the most careful inquiries.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear about the Nueces River affair?’ When Rusk said no, the German sat him down on a tavern bench—Earnshaw had lemonade—and recounted the wretched affair in which General Quimper and his roving force had slain the escaping Germans: ‘My father, my brother Emil, so many more. Singing in the night as they left for Mexico. Then they were murdered.’

  Rusk was horrified by the brutality this onslaught represented, but he was numbed by what Senator Allerkamp revealed about the infamous hangings at the Red River: ‘With no evidence or little, with no justification e
xcept supposed patriotism run wild …’ He told of the first hangings, the revulsion, the next surge, the final excesses, and when he was through, Rusk said: ‘We must drive this man out of public life.’

  Since Rusk had never met Quimper, Allerkamp warned him: ‘When you do, you’ll like him. Most of the men in the legislature want to send him to the Senate. They say: “He’s a real Texan.” ’

  Enraged, Rusk accompanied Allerkamp to Austin, where he continued his politicking among the other state legislators who alone had the right to elect men to serve in the national Senate. He revived so much old rumor detrimental to Quimper that a meeting was arranged with Rusk, Allerkamp, nine of their supporters and General Quimper himself. He appeared in a fine suit, white hair flowing, expensive boots and a big, warm smile that embraced even his, enemies. ‘Goodness,’ Earnshaw whispered to Allerkamp when he first saw the general, ‘he looks like a senator!’

  He talked like one, too, offering bland reassurances that he understood, and understood fully and generously, why certain men might want to oppose him for this august seat. But Rusk cut him short: ‘Quimper, if thee continues to solicit votes for the United States Senate, I shall have to publish this memorandum … in Texas … then carry it to the United States Senate itself. Sir, if this document is circulated, thy life will be ruined.’

  And before General Quimper could defend himself, Earnshaw Rusk, Standing tall and thin and rumpled, read off the terrible indictment: a lie here, misrepresentation there, an assumed title, a borrowed military record, a claim that he had served at Vicksburg, where real Texas heroes had died at the lunette, the charge up a Mexican hill he had never seen and, most damaging of all, ‘a fraudulent claim that thee had dueled with Sam Houston. Sam Houston? He would have despised thee.’

  General Quimper, having insulated himself through the years with a record he had almost convinced himself was his, was not easily goaded into surrendering it and the public accolades to which he felt entitled: ‘You blackguard, sir. Publish one word of such blackmail, you die.’

  ‘And what would that accomplish?’ Rusk asked. Pointing to Senator Allerkamp, he said: ‘Thee must shoot him too, as thee did his father and his brother.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘At the Nueces River. At dawn. That day of infinite shame.’

  As Quimper looked at this circle of unrelenting faces, he had to acknowledge that his charade was over. If he persisted in his pursuit of the Senate seat, his spurious past was going to be assembled and dragged in the mud. He would be excoriated both in Texas and in Washington, and if his anti-Union behavior at the Nueces River, where the pro-Union Germans were slain, and at the Red River, where other Union loyalists were hanged, were dredged up, demagogic Northern senators would bar him from membership in their body, even if the Texas legislature did elect him. How terribly unfair to be destroyed at this late date by a Quaker from Pennsylvania, a man who wasn’t even a Texan, and by a German immigrant who had no right being in the state at all.

  But in the depths of his tragedy he saw a ray of light: ‘If I do withdraw, that paper …?’

  ‘It becomes thy paper,’ Rusk said, and the others nodded.

  ‘You won’t …?’

  ‘This meeting dies here,’ Allerkamp promised. ‘All we said, all we wrote.’

  ‘You swear?’

  Each man gave his word, and as the vows were uttered Yancey Quimper, hero of San Jacinto, Monterrey and Vicksburg, could feel life returning, could visualize himself climbing out of this dreadful pit which had so suddenly entrapped him. He could still be General Quimper. He would still be remembered for his great feats at San Jacinto. He would retain his profitable boot factory, his wife and sons, the high regard of those other politicians who had supported him in his contest for the Senate. He was only sixty-four, with many good years ahead, and he judged that it would be better to spend them holding on to the reputation he had built for himself than to attempt to be a United States senator and run the risk of losing it.

  Rising from the chair in which he had slumped, he braced himself, looked at these pitiful little men who had defeated him, and said: ‘It’s amazin’ what some men will do to win an election.’ And with that, he stalked from the room, still a general, still a hero, still one of the most impressive Texans of his age.

  When Earnshaw Rusk returned to his ranch at Fort Garner he told Emma: ‘As thee knows, I’ve never seen Somerset Cobb. Let’s pray he’ll prove worthy of our effort.’

  Texans could not be sure whether one-armed Colonel Cobb would prove worthy of the high position to which they promoted him in a special election, but they had no doubt about his spry little wife Petty Prue. When the Cobbs reached Washington they found resentment, for Somerset was not only an unreconstructed Southerner, he was also a military hero of the Confederacy, and his claim to be sworn in as a member of the Senate was a slap in the face for all loyal Union veterans who had fought against him.

  Grudgingly he was seated, President Grant encouraging it as a prudent measure to keep Texas and other Southern states in line for the presidential election that would take place in the fall, but certain unrelenting Northern senators prevented him from obtaining any important committee assignments, so for some time the junior senator from Texas remained in outer darkness, and it looked as if he might stay there for the duration of his term.

  It was then that Petty Prue swung into action. Fifty-three years old, five feet one, just over a hundred pounds, she began making her persuasive rounds of Washington, starting with the President himself. When she entered his office she stopped, drew back, and said in her lovely drawl: ‘I do declare, General Grant, if you’d been twins, the war would’ve ended two years sooner.’ And with her petite hands she indicated one Union army swooping down the Mississippi while the other attacked Richmond.

  She exacted from Grant a promise that he would put in a good word with the Republican leaders of the Senate, after which he reminded her: ‘You know, Miz Cobb, I carry little weight in that body,’ and she assured him: ‘General, you carry the weight of the nation on your broad shoulders. Have no fear.’

  She did not hesitate to assault the headquarters of the enemy, barging into the offices of Sherman of Ohio and John A. Logan of Illinois. She told the former: ‘Just as your brother, William Tecumseh, did his honorable best for the North, so my husband, Senatuh Cobb, did his honorable best for the South, and it’s high time all men of honor be reprieved for whatever they did, either at the burnin’ of Atlanta or elsewhere. I’m ready to forgive, and I sincerely trust you are too.’

  In the evenings she held small dinner parties, flattering her guests with a flow of Southern charm, never mentioning her past in Georgia. She was now a Texas woman, had been since that November day in 1849 when she pulled up stakes in Social Circle and headed west. She was one of the most attractive and clever women Texas had produced, for this state had a saucy trick of borrowing able women from Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi and making them just a little better than they would otherwise have been.

  At the end of four months, every senator knew Mrs. Cobb; after five months, Cobb found himself on three major committees, in obedience to the principle stated so often by his wife in her arguments with his colleagues: ‘You’re goin’ to have to admit us Southrons sooner or later. Why not give the good ones like my husband a head start?’

  On the night before summer recess started, the Cobbs gave a small dinner to which the President and Senators Sherman and Logan were invited. When cigars were passed, Petty Prue excused herself shyly: ‘I know you gentlemen have affairs to discuss which I’d not be able to follow,’ and off she traipsed, but not before smiling at each of the national leaders as she passed his chair. When she was gone, Grant said: ‘The South could not have sent to Washington a better representative than your wife, Cobb,’ and dour Sherman observed: ‘Damn shame she didn’t bring a Republican with her.’ Grant laughed and took Somerset by the arm and said: ‘He’s even better than a Republican. He’s a
n American.’ And in this way the wounds of that fratricidal war between the sections were finally healed.

  Sometimes in the early morning when Emma Rusk looked across the plains she loved, she could not escape feeling that the West she had known was dying: Every move Earnshaw makes to improve his village condemns my wilderness. She had been sorely perplexed during these past weeks when a Mr. Simpson, who had served as sutler to the army when it occupied the fort, came to her husband and said: ‘Mr. Rusk, I’d like to have that company barracks. Can’t pay you anything now, but if the store I plan to open makes money, and I’m sure it will …’

  Mr. Simpson had taken the building, put in a row of shelves and filled them with goods purchased in Jacksborough. He proved to be a congenial man who understood both groceries and housewives, and before that first week was out he had begun to collect customers from a distance, and by the end of the third week he was reordering supplies. Fort Garner had its first store.

  But an event which moved Emma most deeply began on 21 June 1879, the longest day, and it caused her abiding grief. At about nine in the morning John Jaxifer galloped in: ‘Comanche attacking from the north!’

  Since Jaxifer had served in the 10th Cavalry, Emma and Earnshaw had to think that he knew what he was saying, and when they ran out to look, they saw that the warriors were once more on the warpath. In profound consternation Emma cried: ‘Have they come for me?’

  Rusk, who hated guns and had never learned to use one, felt that he must protect his community, so he ran to the kitchen, grabbed an old washbasin, and started beating it to attract his neighbors. Within a few minutes Frank Yeager arrived, with his wife appearing a few minutes later laden with three rifles. The other black cavalryman had been working on foot, and he ran in with his gun. If the Indians proposed to attack Fort Garner, they were going to face gunfire.

  They did not seek war, and when they approached making signs of peace and calling out words of assurance, the Rusks, who knew their language, shouted: ‘No firing.’ In the pause the Fort Garner people saw that this war party consisted of one old chief attended by fourteen braves, not one of them as much as fourteen years old. Three could not yet be six. The old chief was Wading Bird, named seventy years before for an avocet who visited a pond near his mother’s tepee, and when Emma recognized him she whispered his name to instruct her husband.