Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Bands of Quahadis tried to find refuge in the Rocky Mountains; some retreated down the Pecos River into the arid wastes of the Big Bend country. They could not venture on the bison range because of Mackenzie's operations.

  The roots of their culture, the buffalo and the horse, were gone. Despite warriors' boasts, their women and children could not eat dung. Quanah's, and the other bands, lived through a hideous winter.

  Sergeant Charlton sought them out through some of the reservation Indians. He gave the government's terms: the Indian Territory reservations, or extermination. Mackenzie would wage war to the knife if he had to hunt them down.

  In June 1875, Quanah Parker led all of the Comanche remnants to Fort Sill. He was the last Comanche, and the last of the southern Plains Indians, to surrender. Quanah was not treated harshly, although Lone Wolf, Woman's Heart, and many of the Kiowas were imprisoned, or exiled for a time to Florida.

  The Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches were promised 3,000,000 acres between the Washita and the Red at Medicine Lodge. A few years after surrender, this reservation was much reduced. Despite vigorous Indian protests, the reservation lands were apportioned to individuals, 160 prairie acres each, and the surplus opened to white settlement. The Indian was to be forced to live according to the Anglo-American way; his reduction was complete.

  Quanah served his people more ably in humiliation, perhaps, than in war. He and his descendants became valued citizens in both worlds. Quanah had won something of the whites' respect, and certainly this helped his tribe. He was able to lease Comanche reserves favorably to cattlemen; he traveled to Washington, and met Presidents. Somewhere, he secured a picture of his dead mother and baby sister, which he kept with him at all times. He was no longer a warrior, but hardly less a man, until the end of his days.

  Many years later, the government of the United States made Quanah Parker's reservation into a nuclear artillery range. But before that, he was buried beside the bodies of Cynthia Ann Parker and Prairie Flower, who were brought up from Texas. Over his grave was placed a monument, which read:

  Resting here until day breaks and darkness disappears

  is Quanah Parker, the last Chief of the Comanches.

  Died Feb. 21, 1911, Age 64 Years.

  Chapter 31

  THE LAST FRONTIER

  As I walked out one morning for pleasure,

  I spied a cow-puncher all riding alone;

  His hat was throwed back and his spurs were a-jingling,

  As he approached me a-singin' this song:

  Whoopee ti yi yo, git along, little dogies,

  It's your misfortune and none of my own.

  Whoopee ti yi yo, git along, little dogies,

  For you know Wyoming will be your new home.

  Your mother she was raised way down in Texas,

  Where the Jimson weed and sand burrs grow;

  Now we'll fill you up on prickly pear and cholla

  Till you are ready for the trail to Idaho . . .

  Oh, a ten-dollar hoss and a forty-dollar saddle,

  And I'm goin' to punchin' Texas cattle . . .

  I'm on my best horse, and I'm goin' at a run,

  I'm the quickest shootin' cowboy that ever pulled a gun . . .

  I'll sell my outfit just as soon as I can,

  I won't punch cattle for no damned man.

  O bury me not on the lone prairie,

  Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me,

  In a narrow grave just six by three,

  O bury me not on the lone prairie . . .

  They say that heaven is a free range land,

  Goodbye, goodbye, O fare you well;

  But it's barbed wire for the devil's hat band;

  And barbed wire blankets down in hell.

  The trail's a lane, the trail's a lane,

  Dead is the branding fire.

  The prairies wild are tame and mild,

  All close corralled with wire

  FOLK SONGS OF THE CATTLE KINGDOM

  IN 1875 a line could be drawn through the state of Texas, beginning on the Red River at the Cooke County limits, south through the trading center of Fort Worth to about the town of Bandera, a few miles northwest of San Antonio, and from there curving sharply to the east along the Medina and Nueces rivers to the Gulf at Corpus Christi. This was the farmers' frontier, and it had not moved forward for twenty-five years. Beyond this stubborn line of scratched-out cornfields and dog-run huts lay another thin filter of Anglo settlement, running from the Red along the 98th meridian to Junction, and from there stretching away to the Rio Grande. In the north this filter extended only some thirty miles westward of the farm line; in the south-southwest it reached out 150 miles, from the Nueces to the Mexican border. Through these steppes, lapping at the Plains grass seas, the white population varied between one person per square mile in the east, and 100 per 1,000 square miles of prairie to the west. This was the cattlemen's frontier.

  Here, in Texas, that abortive culture, that region of the map and mind that most Americans would call the Old West, began. It germinated as the planter culture of East Texas reached apogee. It was to have small effect on the institutions of the state, and even less effect on its lasting politics. Its impact was to be upon the Texan, and the American, heart and mind. In this thin strip of territory, something evolved that burned its image like a smoking cattle brand into the consciousness not only of North America but the whole world. A handful of border Texans, adapting to the realities of their time and place, began what was always essentially a small business, but they conducted it with a barbaric magnificence equaled nowhere. They exploded not a business, but a new way of life, across the entire North American West. They made a culture, with their business, that ran with the free wind and the bawling herds from Brownsville to Calgary, and from the Midwestern wheatfields to the Pacific slopes. They stamped a memory into America, and the world, that refused to die.

  Say Texas anywhere, and people answer cowboy.

  The cattle kingdom was the American approach to the Great Plains. It was based on the four corners of the Plains world: men, horses, wild cattle, and the sea of grass. Two things gave it birth: the transmission of the Spanish-Mexican cattle culture across the Rio Bravo; the attachment of Texas to the burgeoning industrial complex of the northern United States.

  The seeds were plainly planted when Spain brought its tough, longhorned cattle across the Sonoran steppes. By 1774, at least 25,000 Spanish cattle dotted the Nueces Valley. The extension of Spanish latifundia, the Mexican ranchos, across the Rio Grande was no accident. This was a process, and a way of life, that Spain had worked out over generations in arid northern Mexico.

  No country, and no animals, were ever better suited for each other than the Spanish strains and the grassy savannahs along the living Nueces. Here, in oak-studded natural parks, where it rarely snowed and some grass was always green, cattle could run wild and thrive. They multiplied without care. Rancheros who counted their lands not in hectares but in leagues had no concern for fences. They burned their property with their mark, counting each spring's increase, and in New Spain the brand was sacred. Their servants, vaqueros, or cowmen, did their work on horseback. They sold a few hides, lived frugally but magnificently, lords of all the land they could ride. All observers agreed that the cattle kingdom—not the American industry of stock-raising—began in the Texas triangle below Béxar, between Laredo, Corpus Christi, and Brownsville on the Rio Grande.

  In this pocket the Indian problem was remote; the Comanche trail to Mexico passed northwest of Laredo. The pueblos of northern Mexico were hard hit, while the lands between the Nueces and the Bravo went unscathed. The wild cattle—lean, tough, dangerous, some with horns that spread eight feet from tip to tip—bred phenomenally. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, when the Mexicans abandoned this land in 1842. To the Anglo farmers who breached this country, these animals were at first a pest. One farmer observed in 1849 that cattle were beginning to overrun the f
ields, and that out on the prairie lay rusting branding-irons "unrecognized by the people living there."

  The bulk of the Anglo-Americans halted at the line where the water and wood ran out, which was where the Mexican cattle empires began. The prairies that would not grow corn year by year were covered with layers of rich, thick grass. Mexicans lived in this land by raising goats, sheep, and cows, on open range; this was a way of life Anglo-Americans knew nothing about. But in the 1840s and 1850s, some men moved across the line. Kinney, Kenedy, and King, all starting as traders on the coast, acquired land, and with the land vacas and vaqueros. Kinney, operating out of a trading post at Corpus Christi, began hiring men, both Mexican and Anglo, to work cattle and fight. He became, in Richardson's words, "a veritable lord of the marches." Richard King, the Pennsylvanian who cannily, carefully began putting together the million-acre Santa Gertrudis, was to become a king indeed. These men built empires, both of the earth and spirit, which gripped men's minds. They did not really create something new; they took over and built, with a few modifications, on a structure that had been erected in the century before.

  The great change was the adaptation to the Mexican cattle culture by the Americans who filtered into the borderlands. Anglos had brought cattle to Texas; above the Colorado the predominant breed was the "Texas," or American round-barreled stock. But these came as farm animals, handled as men had handled livestock for generations in the British Isles. They were herded on foot in the timbers and brakes, and grazed on small meadows; this was lowly work, left to children or even Negro slaves. Americans did not brand their cattle but kept them within fences; above all, they did not ride.

  The Mexican horse complex was transmitted first. Hays's Rangers, without quite understanding it, began to think like Mexicans and Indians about man and horse. The horse was not mere transportation, but the most valuable possession the border Texan had. As the old joke went, the Texan's second most treasured object was his wife. Jack Hays and his boys could live without women; their hours were numbered without a fleet horse. But with a fast horse and a six-shooter, the emerging Texas borderer was monarch of all he surveyed. To learn to work cattle from horseback, in the Mexican fashion, was but a simple step.

  The complex was transmitted entire: open range and cowboys, brands and language. The workaday words, lariat, hackamore, ranch, cavayard, and corral never derived from the British Isles. Even the spirit came through—the essential feudality of unreasoning fealty to owner and brand, the feeling of superiority of the menial on horseback to the free farmer with the hoe, the exhilaration of open vistas and the bedrock democracy of an armed society, that the gun made a fraternity of peers—here, in the years before the Civil War, something new was emerging, almost unseen.

  The fringes of the Plains were fit only for cattle, but for some years, as the Americans adopted cattle ranching, the cattle themselves were of small use. Texas was remote and far from markets. In the 1830s, a few cattle were rounded up for beef. In the 1840s, some were driven to New Orleans; in 1846, about 1,000 head were delivered in Ohio. Texas cattle are recorded to have reached Chicago before the war. But the markets were uncertain, either in Cuba, the coastal cities, or Chicago; distances were too great and transportation means too poor. The few enterprises that tried to ship beef from the Texas coast by steamer failed.

  Still, the cattle culture slowly spread. By 1860, estimates of the number of cattle in Texas range from 3,000,000 to 4,000,000. The savannahs below San Antonio were swarming. The laws of the Republic of Texas made unbranded stock public property; it was relatively simple for farsighted or otherwise unemployed Texans to build a herd. From the still-Mexican ranches along the Bravo to the emerging Anglo-Mexican spreads around the Nueces, the kingdom slowly filtered up the borderlands. The men who moved out to the San Saba country, in Menard County, were ranchers; so were those who grimly defended Young County on the upper Brazos beyond Fort Worth. A few miles beyond the farmer, from north to south, the cattleman held a precarious sway. The business was restricted because the markets were few—the Army, the Indian reserves, a few settlement towns. Above all, however, the Plains Indians stopped the spread of this frontier. The cattleman went armed and defended himself and his herds as best he could. But, as Webb and several Texas writers have tried to make clear, the cowboy never thought of himself as hero. He did not destroy the Indians; he avoided them whenever and wherever he could. The Rangers were samurai, so much so that in later years the concept of the Western hero immediately and emotionally gripped the consciousness of Japan; the plots of American "Western stories" and samurai tales could be transposed. But the cowboy was a worker, a man trying to make a living in a harsh and still uncharted land. The Comanches were a summer pestilence, comparable to winter blizzards along Elm Creek. The cowman endured them, and begged the authorities back in comfortable civilization to do something about them. He carried a gun, for protection against Indians and his own wild beasts; a charging Texas bull could be the most formidable of foes. The cowboy was brave, like the vaquero, because he had to be. But he was a warrior by necessity, rather than choice. There will always be an argument in Texas whether the Army, the Rangers, or the hide hunters did most to exterminate the Indians. The cowboy fought battles, but he did not push the Indians back. In Texas, the cattle frontier did not materially expand until the Indians were removed.

  Held between the cornfields to the east and the brooding expanses of Comanchería on the west, the cattle kingdom sideslipped the High Plains and spread along the slopes of the Rockies before the Civil War. Texas herds reached California in these years. Some famous Texas cowmen, such as John Chisum and Charles Goodnight, went from the northwest frontier of Texas to New Mexico, leaving the rich bison plains between. They were businessmen, not warriors waging holy war.

  The explosion came after the War Between the States. Walter Prescott Webb, the historian of the Plains, wrote: "Then the cattle swarmed, passed out of the valley along the timber line, on the natural highway of the prairie, by San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth, on and on, taking meat to the giants of the North—the first tie to rebind the North and South after the Civil War."

  Suddenly, giant cities had arisen in the North, hungry for meat. The wild Texas cattle were not modern pasture steers; they could walk to market, over thousands of miles, across rivers and sands, through blazing droughts and Indian raids. They made their own roads, along the fringelands on the open plains. The rails, in an outpouring of American enterprise, came to meet them in Kansas; and their flesh, tough and stringy as it was, was too good to be fed to reservation Indians but good enough for the Northern laboring hordes, as the Texans said.

  The story of how a few daring men blazed the northern trails, through Indian territory and even more dangerous and avaricious whites, has been told a thousand times. It was a business: in 1865 cattle in war-ravished Texas sold for $4 a head, but brought $30 to $40 in the booming North. In fifteen years, Texas drove 5,000,000 head north, while the herds at home increased. This was a business, which brought thousands of pouches of gold to ragged Texas. It fed hungry families, and made a few cow-millionaires overnight. But it was a business that was colorful and dangerous beyond all others; it was something new, and it left its imprint forever on the American heart.

  From the first disastrous trials to move cattle through Missouri, only to be met with warrants, floggings, robbery, and armed mobs, to the alliance with the Northern buyers and railroaders that led to the building of Abilene, far to the west, as the shipping point, this story has been too well told to be repeated here. The cattlemen learned they had to pass beyond the farmers' frontier. They put together vast herds, sometimes numbering 5,000, with slender crews. Ten men could drive 2,000 head. It was cheaper to drive than ship by rail, even after the railheads reached Texas. The best route was the famous Chisholm Trail, blazed by Jesse Chisholm, a Cherokee, which ran along the 98th meridian from deep in Texas to Caldwell, Kansas, then branched out to Wichita, Abilene, Newton, and other towns. Abilene wa
s displaced by Ellsworth and Wichita by 1871, and these by Dodge City in 1876, as the rails extended west. In these towns, weary and battered men who had begun the trail at Brownsville, or San Antonio, or a hundred other Texas points, rammed their milling herds into loading chutes, received their pay, and created a thousand legends on the Plains. The months of grinding, eighteen-hour days in the saddle, the misery of rainstorms and endless dust clouds, the fright of Indian or cattle rustler attack, the sheer terror of a night stampede when lightning sparkled across the Plains, were dissipated in a few wild days, as gunslung Texans descended on the trail towns. "Abilene!" Webb wrote:

  Abilene was more than a point. It was a symbol. It stands for all that happened when two civilizations met for conflict, for disorder, for the clashing of great currents which carry on their crest the turbulent and disorderly elements of both civilizations—in this case the rough characters of the plain and the forest. On the surface, Abilene was corruption personified. Life was hectic, raw, lurid, awful. But the dance hall, the saloon, and the red light, the dissonance of immoral revelry punctuated by pistol shots, were but superficialities which hid from view the deeper forces that were working themselves out round the new town. If Abilene excelled all later cow towns in wickedness, it also excelled them in service—the service of bartering the beef of the South for the money of the North.

  Here Texas cowboys tried to refight the Civil War with careful, deadly Northern killer-marshals, whom the town business interests sensibly hired.