Texas

by James A. Michener

  Going to the fence, he positioned himself halfway between two posts, and with three rapid snips of his cutters, he threw down the fence, and through the opening thus provided, Mean Moses and the hungry Longhorns piled, eager to reach the hay.

  ‘How much will it cost to fence in six thousand acres?’ Rusk asked, and Betz replied: ‘Show me your configuration,’ and when Rusk did, the salesman made a quick calculation: ‘Six thousand acres is nine point thirty-eight square miles. If perfectly square, you would need about twelve miles. In your configuration, more like fifteen miles. I can sell you barbed wire and posts for a hundred and fifty dollars a mile, so to do it all, which I would not recommend, would cost you two thousand two hundred and fifty.’

  The figure staggered the Rusks. It was quite beyond their reach, but they could see that the future of ranching was going to be determined by valuable cattle enclosed in relatively small pastures protected by barbed-wire fencing. ‘What could we do?’ Earnshaw asked, and Betz, eager to get a demonstration ranch started in an area which he felt was bound to prosper, said with great enthusiasm: ‘My company, D. K. Rampart Wire and Steel of Eureka, Illinois, we want to establish a chain of ranches exhibiting our product. So everyone can see its application. We can fence in about three thousand of your acres for a special price of one thousand and fifty dollars, and we’d be honored at the opportunity to do so.’

  It was agreed. Rusk, Yeager and Betz mounted horses, and accompanied by the two black cavalrymen, surveyed the Larkin lands, and all quickly concluded that they should enclose all fields abutting on Bear Creek and place additional fencing around the tank so that access to this steady supply of water could be controlled: ‘This way you protect your water. You protect your valuable bulls. You keep everything neat.’ At the end of the ride, even Yeager had to acknowledge that a new day had dawned on the Texas plains, and he began to study the pamphlets that would make him an expert on the handling of barbed wire. But before the deal could be concluded there was the question of money, the perennial problem of the frontier.

  The growth of any village into a town was a subtle procedure. First came the store, for without it there could be no orderly society, and Fort Garner now had a good one run by the former sutler. Next came the school, and third, there had to be a good saloon to serve as social center for the cowhands and such adventurous young women as might want to try their luck in the settlement. Earnshaw, as a good Christian, did not wish to sell one of his barracks buildings to a soldier who had once been stationed at the fort and who proposed to open such an establishment, but he was also a Pennsylvania Quaker, and a cannier lot of businessmen had never been brought across the ocean to America, so a deal was struck, not with Earn- shaw, who refused to touch liquor, but with Emma, who said: ‘A town needs a little excitement.’ The Barracks, as it was named, provided it.

  The fourth requisite was a bank, which would lend money, provide stability, and serve as the industrial focus of the surrounding area. Certainly, Fort Garner needed a bank, but it was doubtful that any would regard such a meager economy as a sound basis for taking risks. Where would a bank look for its business? A few stock sales? An exchange of real estate now and then? Money mailed in from stabler societies back east to sons and daughters trying to subdue the plains? It might be decades before a place like Fort Garner could justify a bank, but just as the need became greatest, a man with tremendous vision and steel nerves moved into town, bought one of the better stone houses, imported a big iron safe, and announced himself as the First National Bank of Fort Garner, Texas.

  Clyde Weatherby came from Indiana, home of America’s shrewdest horse traders, and although he brought with him only limited capital borrowed from his former father-in-law, who wanted to see him, as he said, ‘get the hell out of Indiana and stay out,’ he did bring a rnarvelously clear vision of the future, which he confided to no one: Land is the secret. Things have got to happen out here—what, I don’t know. Give me some land that touches water, and I’m in business. He had various intricate plans for getting hold of land and using it creatively.

  Outstanding because of his well-tailored suits and string ties, he became favorably known as Banker Weatherby, generous in lending, severe in collecting, and when Rusk and young Betz appeared before him to seek a loan for payment on the barbed wire, he was enthusiastic.

  ‘It could prove the making of the West,’ he pontificated, and the men agreed. He then asked directly: ‘Mr. Rusk, what’s the total bill to be?’ and when Earnshaw explained, he smiled at Betz and said: ‘Not excessive. Your price is lower than your competitors’,’ and Betz said: ‘It better be.’

  ‘Now, Mr. Rusk, how much of the thousand and fifty dollars can you provide?’ When Rusk said: ‘Emma and I have five hundred and fifty in cash,’ he smiled warmly and said: ‘Excellent. So what you wish from me is a mere five hundred dollars.’ Both Rusk and Betz were surprised that he should refer to this sum as mere; to them it was a fortune.

  ‘How could we arrange this?’ Rusk asked, and Weatherby said: ‘Simplicity itself! You give me a mortgage, extend it for as many years as it will take you to pay off, and pay only three and three-quarters percent interest each year, no mind to the balance.’

  ‘How much would that be?’

  ‘Less than nineteen dollars a year.’

  ‘That would be easy,’ Rusk said, whereupon Weatherby added: ‘There is the provision, you know, that if conditions change at the bank, we could demand payment in full, but that never happens.’

  ‘And if I couldn’t pay … in full, I mean?’

  ‘It’s known as “calling the loan,” but it never happens.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  Very carefully Mr. Weatherby explained the legal situation: ‘Our Texas Constitution of 18 and 76 forbids me from taking your homestead in fulfillment of an ordinary debt. And it forbids me from issuing you a mortgage simply to acquire funds for idle indulgence. But it does allow me to give you a mortgage on your homestead for its improvement, and that’s what we’re doing here.’

  ‘So my entire ranch is mortgaged?’

  ‘In this case, yes. If you fail to pay us back our money, we take your ranch, and sell it at auction to get our money, and give you what’s left over.’

  In one respect, this was not an indecent deal, for the original Larkins had acquired their six thousand acres at an average cost of only four cents an acre, so that its base value was not more than $240, less than half the amount of the loan the bank was making; but in a practical sense the conditions being offered were appalling. The Rusks could pay interest for ten years, and reduce the outstanding balance to $100, but if they ever had a bad year in which they could not come up with the interest to keep the mortgage alive—or if the bank at that bad moment chose to demand payment in full—the Rusks could lose not only their land but also the improvements, which might be extremely valuable. It was one of the crudest systems ever devised for the conduct of business, but it was sanctified by every court; through this device bankers would gain control of vast reaches of Western land, especially in Texas. When Earnshaw Rusk signed his mortgage for $500 he unwittingly placed his future in jeopardy, but as Banker Weatherby assured him: ‘We never foreclose.’

  So the deal was made: the Rusks gave Alonzo Betz $300 of their $550 as a down payment; the barbed wire was shipped from Eureka, Illinois; Frank Yeager and his men began building fences; and Banker Weatherby had in his big iron safe a mortgage on the entire Larkin Ranch.

  Bob wahr they called it throughout Texas, and when Yeager and his men finished driving their posts and stringing their strands they sounded the death knell of the open range, for they had removed the choicest acres and the best water holes once used by the itinerant cattlemen. With timing that was diabolically unfortunate, they had everything in place just as that year’s big cattle drives from the south began, and just as one of the most severe droughts in history started to bake the Texas range.

  Emma, watching these restrictive procedures
, was not surprised when they caused trouble, for as she had warned: ‘Earnshaw, you’re chopping this great open land into mean little squares, and the people won’t tolerate it.’ She wanted to add: ‘And my Longhorns won’t, either.’

  The first rumbles of trouble came when school began after Easter vacation, and they were so trivial that neither Rusk nor Yeager could later recall their beginning. Jaxifer had come to Rusk with a curious protest. The two cavalrymen had met an Indian squaw, a Waco from the eastern regions, and had taken her into their stone house, ostensibly as cook-helper. None of the white families could be sure to whom she belonged, but in due time she had produced a pretty little girl baby, half black, half Indian, and because the former cavalrymen had witnessed the advantages children enjoyed if they could read and write—which they themselves could not—they wanted the girl, whosever daughter she was, to get an education: ‘The fence we’ve put up, Mr. Rusk, it makes the teacher walk the long way round instead of across the field, as before.’

  ‘I am sorry about that.’

  ‘And we wondered if there was some way to cut a hole …’

  ‘Where the road runs, we’ve already put in gates. But cut a fence merely to continue an old footpath? Never. That fence cannot be touched.’

  ‘But the teacher …’

  When other parents began to protest the inconvenience to their teacher, Rusk and Yeager went out to study the problem, and they saw immediately that this portion of their fence had been unwisely strung, for it did cut off access to the school, but the fence had been so costly and had required so much effort to construct that it had become a virtue in itself, something that had to be protected. ‘What we will do,’ Yeager promised, ‘is give the people lumber so they can build stiles, but cutting our fences except where roads run through, we cain’t allow that.’

  The next complaint was more serious. A family not connected with either the ranch or the village rode in to complain bitterly about-what the fence had done to them: ‘For a long time we’ve used the road which runs south from the tank where the soldier and his girl killed theirselves. Now your fence cuts it off, and we—’

  ‘The fence is on our land,’ Yeager interrupted sternly.

  ‘Yes, but it cuts a public road.’

  ‘The only public road is the one that runs east-west from Three Cairns. And we’ve put in gates to service that.’

  ‘But we’ve always used this road.’

  ‘Not any longer. We’ve fenced our land, and that’s that.’

  ‘But if the county seat is going to be at Fort Garner, how can we get there?’

  ‘You’ll have to go around and catch the Three Cairns road.’

  ‘Go around! Surely you could add one more gate.’

  ‘The fence stands,’ Yeager said, terminating that conversation.

  Less than a week later, one of the ranch hands rode in with sickening news: ‘Come see what they done.’ And when Rusk and Yeager rode out to where their new fence blocked the disputed road, they found that someone had cut it and knocked down the posts.

  ‘I’ll shoot the son-of-a-bitch who did this!’ Yeager threatened, but Rusk restrained him: ‘There’ll be no shooting.’

  But there was. When Jaxifer and another hand rode out to rebuild the fence across the road, someone shot at them, and they quickly retreated. Frank Yeager himself went out, well armed, to repair the fence, and when someone fired at him, he coolly waited, watched, fired back, and killed the man.

  Thus began one of the ugliest episodes of Texas history, the Great Range War, in which one group of cattlemen who had been utilizing the open range suddenly found that another group with a little more money had fenced off traditional routes and, much worse, traditional water holes. One of the most severe losses of water occurred at the Larkin Ranch, where the Rusks had fenced in their tank north of town, and not with one line of fence, but three, because the outer ring delineated the perimeter of the ranch, while the double strand, with its guarded gate, protected the water from pressures by either the Rusk cattle or strays that might crowd in.

  With the first big drive of the summer it became obvious that there would be conflict, because cattle had to have water prior to the long trail up to the Red River. But for some curious reason, Earnshaw Rusk, this peaceable Quaker, refused to see that his action in closing off the water hole was arbitrary, unjustified, and opposed to the public welfare. His recent years of dealing with Texans had indoctrinated him with their fundamental law: ‘Private property is sacrosanct, mine in particular.’ So he continued to keep other cattle away from his water; he continued to maintain his fences, even if they did cut people off from their accustomed routes. He was neither irrational nor obdurate; he had become a Texan.

  Almost daily, now, one of the hands reported at dawn: ‘They cut more fence,’ for if Alonzo Betz had been a genius in selling bob wahr, other salesmen had been equally ingenious in selling long-handled cutters that could lay that wire flat within seconds, so daily Rusk and Yeager were forced to ride out and repair the fences.

  The war was not an unequal one, for the cutters, those men who loved freedom and the open range, could in one dark night destroy an immense reach of fence; sometimes every strand for two miles would be cut between each pair of posts, at grievous expense to the rancher. The rancher, on the other hand, could post his trigger-happy ranch hands in dark hiding places among the dips and swerves of his land, and then gunfire exploded, with the newfangled wire-cutters left dangling on the fence beside the corpses.

  In this warfare the advantage now began to swing to the fence-cutters, for the hardened men trailing their cattle north hired professional gunslingers to ride along, so that when a battle erupted, the firepower was apt to be on the side of the trail drivers. Frank Yeager learned these facts the hard way when one of his new hands was killed while trying to stop a wire-cutting. He retaliated with fiendish cleverness.

  Originally opposed to fencing, he was now its primary defender, for in the act of building a fence he identified with it, and any attack upon it was an attack on him. So when his man was killed he announced: ‘No more watching at night. We’ll find other ways.’ He did. Utilizing his imperfect knowledge of explosives, he devised a number of sensitive bombs which would be placed along the wires and activated if the tension on any wire was released by cutting. Each bomb contained so many fragmentations that the cutter did not have to be close when it went off; the shards would fly a long distance to kill or seriously maim.

  Now the hands at Fort Garner slept in their beds, rode out at dawn, and counted the corpses. The trail drivers in retaliation began shooting cattle inside the fences and setting fire to pastures, while settled citizens whose modes of travel had been disrupted by the fences began cutting them with hurtful frequency. So more deaths ensued. On all fronts it was now open warfare.

  One hateful aspect of the battle at Fort Garner was that Earnshaw Rusk, contrary to every principle of his upbringing, found himself acting as a kind of general defending his fort. Unwilling to handle a gun himself, he directed the strategies of those who did. Even worse, he also served as leader of those other ranchers in the area who had fenced their properties. He became General Rusk, defender of the bob-wahr fence.

  The Range War was resolved in a manner peculiar to this state. No police were sent into the area, no state militia, no army units. In August, when the prolonged drought increased the number of killings, a medium-sized man in his early thirties rode quietly into town, Texas Ranger Clyde Rossiter, slit-eyed and with his hands never far from his holsters. His assigned job was to terminate the Larkin County Range War. He moved soberly, made no arrests, no threats. He was out on the range a good deal, inspecting fences and intercepting herds as they moved north, and wherever he went he made it clear that the fence war was over.

  He was successful in halting the carnage, but as the people of the region watched in admiration while he took charge, it became obvious that he always sided with the big ranchers and opposed the little man no m
atter what the issue, so one night a group of citizens asked if they could meet with him to present what they held to be their just grievances. He refused to listen to their whining, telling them: ‘It’s my job to establish peace, not to correct old injustices.’

  He explained his basic attitude one night when taking supper with the Rusks: ‘From what I’ve seen of Texas, the good things in our society are always done by people with money, the bad things by people without. So I find it practical to work with people who own large ranches, because they know what’s best, and against those with nothing, because they never know anything.’

  ‘Do most of the Rangers feel that way?’ Earnshaw asked.

  ‘Our experience teaches us.’

  ‘Does thee own a ranch?’

  ‘I do, and I’d not want trespassers cutting my fences.’

  ‘What should I do about the people who protest about our cutting their road?’

  ‘It’s your land, isn’t it?’

  ‘But how should I respond?’

  ‘I’m not here to pass laws. I’m here to stop the shootin’, and I think it’s stopped.’ But he did, as a careful Ranger, want to inspect all angles of this war, so he left Fort Garner for several days to range the countryside between that town and Jacksborough, and was absent when R. J. Poteet came north with two thousand seven hundred head bound for Dodge City. When Poteet reached the area he found a distressing situation. Not only were the Brazos and Bear Creek bone-dry, but the permanent water hole on the Larkin Ranch had been fenced off. Methodically, but with minimum damage, he proceeded to cut the outer fence that his cattle must penetrate before they could approach the tank, whose double fences would also have to be cut if the cattle were to drink.

  Rusk’s watchmen were amazed at the boldness with which this determined stranger was cutting their fence, and when they rode back to inform Rusk, they could find only Yeager, who grabbed a rifle and rode breathlessly to the scene, only to discover that it was Poteet who was doing it.