Waterman L. Ormsby, the first Butterfield through passenger, at first did not believe he had entered a desert when they made the ascent up the great caliche caprock that marks the high plains, because so many living things were present to his view: high grass, Spanish daggers, cactus, prairie dogs in their labyrinthine subterranean cities. The breeze, he said, was delightful. But the evidence, to his eye, was soon unmistakable, though perhaps slightly exaggerated in the telling, because “far as the eye could reach along the plain—decayed and decaying animals, the bones of cattle and sometimes of men (the hide drying on the skin in the arid atmosphere), all told a fearful story of anguish and terrific death from the pangs of thirst. For miles and miles these bones strew the plain—the silent witnesses of the eternal laws of nature, which, in the hope of gain, man hesitates not to brave. They are silent but speaking monuments of undeviating fate.”
Wind farming on the Llano Estacado
Butterfield wasn’t the first mail carrier, and there were other routes that were popular with westering emigrants and argonauts. Henry Skillman held the first contract to carry mail from San Antonio to El Paso and San Diego, from 1851 to 1854. Known as the Jackass Mail, for Skillman’s use of donkeys, this route went directly west from San Antonio to Fort Inge and the Devils River along a military track that like most of the other western wagon roads was an Indian highway of great antiquity. There was also the upper road, from Fredericksburg, that was forty miles shorter, but it was used somewhat less frequently in those early years because water was scarce.
The road up the Devils River was pioneered by the Hays-Highsmith expedition in 1848. John Coffee Hays, the celebrated Texas Ranger, and Samuel Highsmith led a group of thirty-five rangers west from San Antonio. It was a speculative affair; merchants and traders in San Antonio were eager for a new route to Chihuahua, and important San Antonio citizens were investors, including Samuel Maverick, the prominent Texas personage whose name has entered the English language as a type. Maverick went along for the ride and kept a daily journal. The expedition, celebrated in all the local newspapers, was not a complete success.
After getting some directions from friendly Indians at Las Moras Creek, the rangers found their way to a trail up the river that Spaniards had named Río San Pedro. Castaño de Sosa called it the River of Rocks. According to Hays, he was so irritated by the meandering course of the river, which they were compelled to cross again and again, not to mention the beastly canyon at its mouth that opened into the Rio Grande, that he named it the Devils River. Hard as the Devils country was, it was better than what lay ahead in the Trans-Pecos. Soon provisions ran low. Horses and mules were eaten, as was a mountain lion. By the time the expedition staggered into the adobe compound at Fort Leaton in the Big Bend, Hays and his men had been without food for twelve days. Some had attempted to eat bear grass.
After their difficult passage, this band of hardy Texas Rangers was just too worn-out to continue up the old easygoing Camino Real from La Junta to El Paso, so they rested at Fort Leaton for ten days and then went back to San Antonio, defeated. They followed a different route home.
It wasn’t long before the U.S. Army sent other, more competent expeditions west from San Antonio to El Paso, including one led by Lieutenant William H. C. Whiting. On his return, Whiting descended the Devils River, noting “a still and beautiful lagoon of clear blue water,” probably Beaver Lake, with remnants of Indian lodges around it. Whiting avoided the deeper canyons at the confluence of the Rio Grande and rediscovered a ford, already known to Spaniards and Mexicans, that came to be known as First Crossing. Nearby was Painted Cave, a rock shelter filled with ancient pictographs. Both First Crossing and Painted Cave are under the waters of Amistad Reservoir today. Whiting also skirted the canyons and high mountains of the Big Bend, striking a more direct path from the Pecos to El Paso. Despite the constant danger of Indian attack, the road up the Devils River provided ample water and forage for animals, so it came into common use. Two years later, Skillman’s Jackass Mail began using the Devils River road, and so did countless emigrant trains and cattle drives. Fort Clark was established at Las Moras Creek, and Camp Hudson on the Devils. A mail station was built near Beaver Lake. Given Perry’s and Thomas’s later movements along the Devils River, it seems most likely that the young family passed through those narrow canyons on their way out west.
The lower road stretched 673 miles, more than 500 miles without a settlement. There were ephemeral military camps, exposed, with insufficient supplies and ammunition, soldiers sometimes barefoot, clad in rags. “Scarcely a mile of it,” wrote one soldier, “but has its story of Indian murder and plunder; in fact, from El Paso to San Antonio is but one long battleground.”
Frederick Law Olmsted traveled a segment of the lower road in 1856–57 with his brother, on assignment for the New-York Daily Times. Olmsted was not yet the great landscape architect he would become; he was a restless young man who had been given the gift of an assignment to write about the South. Dispatches from his first trip were collected and published in a fascinating if slightly tedious book, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Texas required a separate trip, one that resulted in a masterpiece of travel writing and cultural polemic, A Journey Through Texas; or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. His descriptions of traveling through Texas in the mid-1850s are unrivaled, and he is by far the most eloquent of Perry’s and Welmett’s historical fellow travelers. Through his eyes we can see not only Texas as it then existed but also the Texas that would come to be after its passage through the horrors of civil war.
Olmsted entered Texas from the east, by river, after a long and picturesque journey by train and steamer from his home on Staten Island, filled with marvelous observations about southerners and the Great West: a Virginia gentleman’s effortless ability to spit across a train compartment and out a narrow window; a white baby suckling a black nursemaid; “black and yellow boys, shy of baggage, but on the alert for any bit of a lark with one another; the buxom, saucy, slipshod girls within, bursting with fat and fun from their dresses, unable to contain themselves”; the “unstudied equality of black and white” that reigned within the open kitchen; “loafing nobles of poor whites, hanging about in search of enjoyment or a stray glass of whisky or an emotion.”
From his vantage on the deck of a steamship, Olmsted’s pitiless eye roved the landscape, constantly assessing the view and grading it accordingly. The forest primeval soon grows boring: “rocks, forests, and streams, alone, for hours, meet the eye. The only stoppages are for wood and water, and the only way-passengers, laborers upon the road. The conquered solitude becomes monotonous. It is a pleasure to get through and see again the old monotony of cultivation.” Towns along the Ohio are “repulsively ugly and out of keeping with the tone of mind inspired by the river. Each has had its hopes, not yet quite abandoned, of becoming the great mart of the valley, and has built in accordant style its one or two tall brick city blocks, standing shabby-sided alone on the mud-slope to the bank, supported by a tavern, an old storehouse, and a few shanties. These mushroom cities mark only a night’s camping-place of civilization.” We pass the great forgotten vineyards of Ohio, which grow along the river above Cincinnati “as on the Rhine,” and he offers a prayer that “honest wine and oil shall take the place of our barbarous whisky and hog-fat.” Alas, it was not to be, and Olmsted would soon grow to hate the taste of hog even more. When he reaches Kentucky, the corn bread and bacon begin. Unused to such fare, he enjoys the novelty at first, having no idea that he will eat little else for six months.
Here, in Kentucky, Olmsted makes the first of many penetrating observations of the slaveholding class, planters addicted to hunting who see any form of physical labor as a degradation. All such work must be performed by black muscle. The details and character sketches pick up a theme elaborated in a lengthy prolegomenon, sensibly printed at the back of modern editions, titled “A Letter to a Southern Friend.” There Olmsted presents the argument directly, bolstered w
ith statistics, that Texas will never develop civilized amenities or an advanced economy so long as slavery endures. Slavery prolongs and even perpetuates the evils of the frontier, where no one would reasonably expect to find a gristmill or a baker, a printing office or a bookseller. A settler in Texas, needing to improve his land, takes his profits and invests in slaves, sending his capital to Houston or New Orleans. Now he has nothing left over, and the slaves add little or nothing to the local economy. When he does come in to a windfall, he buys more land and more slaves, and so the cycle continues. Now a planter, as opposed to a dirt farmer, the Texas pioneer gets by without wheat bread or sweet butter or even glass windows. Such luxuries—Olmsted hears this refrain a dozen times if he hears it once—are “not worth the trouble.” Cattle require little care, and hogs run wild in the thickets. Slaves tend to the corn. The planter occupies himself with hunting, and when he wants fresh meat and has no venison, he simply saddles up, takes his dogs, and runs down a hog. By contrast, a settler in a free territory such as frontier Iowa needing extra help simply places an advertisement for skilled workers, who gladly travel west to earn better wages than they might earn at home back east. They offer their labor as a loan and receive a good return, which they invest locally with merchants and farmers, bakers and butchers and shopkeepers. Over time, other “small capitalists of labor” appear on the scene to provide for the growing population of paid workers. And so the local economy flourishes, the frontier retreats, and civilization with all its commodious benefits takes hold.
Even more pernicious than the direct economic effects of slavery on a community are the moral effects, the manner in which slavery cultivates the “natural lust of authority,” which renders obnoxious the idea of employing servants and workers who may refuse the demands of their employer. The man raised and educated under such a system will thus prefer smaller profits and endure greater inconveniences rather than submit to the degrading and undignified influence of free labor. Slavery, among such people, transcends economics. It is a matter of identity and status, self-respect. A social by-product of the slave system, of course, is the “miserable intermediate” class of what Olmsted calls “mean whites,” who hold no slaves and are forced by necessity to demean themselves with manual labor. Perversely, it is this class that would be aroused most violently in the great conflagration that was coming, that insisted with missionary fervor that civil war was better than free soil, and that for decades defended the shadows of slave power by fraud and violence.
Olmsted’s arguments were far from academic, of course. The annexation of Texas had upset the old compromises and, together with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed in the year Perry and Welmett left Missouri for Texas, set the nation on an inevitable course.
What’s fascinating about Olmsted’s observations about the southern character, for a reader today, is the extent to which they retain their cogency as an explanation for a particular set of personality traits that anyone who has spent time in Texas and the rest of the South can recognize instantly. It has not been so very long, in historical terms, since slavery was abolished. The cultural patterns it engendered have found new avenues of expression, as the 2016 presidential election so forcefully demonstrated.
(And yet even Olmsted himself, principled abolitionist that he was, cannot avoid the stain of slavery and racism, as in a passage in which he makes fun of three mulattoes, “exceedingly white,” whose conversation, when overheard, is “ludicrously black.” Or when he reveals sentiments such as this: “The general impression, from the Negroes we saw in both city and country, is one of a painfully clumsy, slovenly, almost hopeless race. Intercourse with them, and dependence on them, as compulsory as is that of a master, would be, to a man of northern habits, a despair.”)
Olmsted left New Orleans on a steamer bound for the Red River and Natchitoches, arriving in mid-December, where he and his party acquired horses, mules, rifles, Colt revolvers, and other supplies, then proceeded along a road that was not a road so much as “a way where people had passed along before.” A track then, loosely followed, through the piney woods, each man or horse or cow taking the path that spoke to his animal spirits, trying as far as possible to avoid sinking in the mud. Along the way they overtook emigrant trains, many of them, every day; several families traveling together, on some long road from a place that not so long ago was a frontier—Alabama, perhaps, or Georgia. The trains were heard long before they were seen, the cries of drovers urging on their jaded livestock. Dogs, stragglers, “fainting negroes, ragged and spiritless,” make their appearance, then old people holding hands with sickly children, “too old to ride and too young to keep up.” Wagons, wearing white covers, bounced and jerked, followed by more slaves, and slave children—“pickininnies,” he calls them—and the young white mothers and the babies. The master, “frequently ill-humored,” rides a horse or walks with his rifle. “As a scout ahead is a brother, or an intelligent slave, with the best gun, on the look-out for a deer or a turkey.”
The trains carry food, and they camp near water or else dip into their barrels. They are self-sufficient. Vagabond journalists and solitary travelers must depend on the hospitality of homesteaders, who are used to the imposition. Everyone thereabouts plays innkeeper, from the lowliest homesteader to the planter who makes six thousand dollars a year on his cotton. The womenfolk serve corn and bacon, and the boys, or the slaves, might see to the horses, giving them some corn if there is any corn to be had. Often the travelers were compelled to care for their own horses. Then, at bedtime, they will get a corner of an open cabin, sometimes in the same room with the host, or a guest bed if very fortunate. Sometimes they will sleep in a barn or in a lean-to. Breakfast will be the same as dinner: pork, corn bread, sweet potatoes. The host will charge a dollar and a quarter.
In towns such as St. Augustine and Nacogdoches, Olmsted looked in vain for refined sugar or wheat flour.
Frequently, the company would set up their tents out of doors, and immediately the camp would be invaded by hogs. Once a hog carried off a roasting chicken. Often the most determined hogs would resist “even a clubbing, eating and squealing on through the blows.” The acquisition of a good dog became necessary.
Hoecakes were purchased from a family slave, a man who had been away all night visiting his wife on another farm. He arrived home at 4:00 a.m. to grind the corn for breakfast, because the white woman did no housework. “Life there was certainly cheap,” Olmsted observes. “This one negro, supposing them to be squatters, was the only investment, except a few days’ work once in a lifetime, in cutting and piling together the logs that composed their residence. A little corn and bacon, sold now and then to travelers, furnished the necessary coffee and tobacco; nature and the negro did all the rest.”
At one plantation in East Texas, where two little slave girls spent all day hauling water for the family from a creek about a quarter mile away, Olmsted witnessed an eight-year-old boy, already addicted to chewing tobacco, whipping his puppy. “I’ve got an account to settle with you,” he swore as he beat his pet. “I’ve let you go about long enough; I’ll teach you who’s your master.”
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East Texas is boggy and the roads, to Olmsted’s despair, were often “pretty wet.” Once, near Beaumont, trying to traverse the Neches bottoms, the companions and their horses were put off a ferryboat on a slip of mud about ten feet wide and given directions to look for a big tree and bear right. Muddy water, as far as they could see, extended over a broad flat, with trees and rotten logs protruding intermittently. Spurring their horses forward, they descended into the soft, sucking mire, horses plunging and wild, struggling against roots and loose poles. A mule bogged down, a mare panicked, everyone was wet, muddy, frantic. “Fanny,” the mare, “delirious, believes all her legs broken and strewn about her, and falls, with a whining snort, upon her side. With incessant struggles she makes herself a mud bath, in which, with blood-shot eyes, she furiously rotates, striking, now and then, some stump, against which she rises
only to fall upon the other side, or upon her back, until her powers are exhausted, and her head sinks beneath the surface.” Thinking of all their notebooks, money, and other belongings, and feeling “uppermost sympathy” with the drowning horse, which has served so well, they plunge in and haul her nose above the surface. They tie a rope around her neck and cut her saddle free and, in the end, succeed in dragging the poor horse out of the horrid porridge of quicksand. After a ridiculous struggle back to the muddy “bank,” the ferryman receives their payment for a second time “with a dry nod.”
Life improves as Olmsted moves westward out of the piney woods, and so do the vistas. The descriptions match the scenery. One day, after he forded a stream and crested a hill, it was “as if a curtain had risen, upon a broad prairie, reaching, in swells like the ocean after a great storm, to the horizon before us; a thick screen of wood edging it in the distance on the left, and an open grove of low, branching oaks breaking irregularly upon it, with spurs and scattered single trees, to the right.” Olmsted and his companions ride along the broken edge of the woods, “crossing capes and islands of the grove, and bays of the prairie.” They observe deer and gray horses and red cattle as the “waving surface” of the prairie rises and subsides “like the swell of the ocean after the subsidence of a gale which has blown long from the same direction. Very grand in vastness and simplicity were these waves.” Here and there, in the evening gloaming, he marked the red glow of distant fires.
Amid this rolling oceanic prairie, during a blue norther, Olmsted encounters a grazier, a cattleman of old Texas stock, whose father settled in during the long decade of Mexican rule and managed to weather the “trouble times” of the revolution. The patriarch came with nothing but horses and a wagon but was now a cotton planter, raising some fifty bales of cotton (“equivalent to informing us that he owned twenty or thirty negroes, and his income was from two to three thousand dollars a year”). The son described himself as a “regular Texan.” He had no interest in tending a plantation and slaving himself “looking after niggers.” Any honest Texan, he said, “could live as well as he wanted to, without working more than one month in the year.” During that month, in the spring, he worked his cattle hard, marking calves. All his neighbors helped one another during the gathering. He raised some corn. He had little need of money. If he wanted to buy something, he could always sell some cattle. “It did not take much to supply them with all they wanted.”
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