Lone Star
Page 88
All through the blasted South people were ready to hear this call. Old memories stirred. Every family knew someone who had gone to Texas and made it rich—either in truth or legend. Everyone knew the rails were pushing west, and that the Indians had been exterminated or driven off. Thousands upon thousands of Southern poor whites, seeing the hopeless landscape around them, determined to move to Texas.
This was to be the last major immigration into the Texas heartland. Significantly, almost all of it came from old American stock, primarily from Georgia and Tennessee. However, every Southern state sent people, and sizable numbers arrived from Kentucky, Iowa, and even Illinois. European immigration renewed, but this was small, and also, unlike in the North, it was rural. The groups who arrived from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Austrian Empire took up farms instead of flocking to the towns.
More than 10,000 persons, bound for Texas, passed through Memphis in 1870–71. Some 100,000 newcomers arrived in 1872, and because of the depression the next year, more came in 1873. The cost of living in Texas was less; land terms were better; and many families abandoned old debts.
The immediate effect of this influx was a flush of prosperity in Texas, reflected in public revenues. Large areas of the state that had been very thinly settled were filled up. From 818,175 inhabitants in 1870, of which some 51 percent were native-born and of which some 250,000 were black, the population almost doubled in ten years, and climbed to 2,235,527 by 1890. The Negro proportion rapidly fell, since the new arrivals brought no slaves. Cotton production jumped from about a half million bales in 1874 to 1,514,000 in 1886. Railroad mileage in the same period more than tripled. Property on the tax rolls increased enormously. All this, although the vast majority of Texans were very poor, gave the state a new impetus and activity different from the ruined economic and social scene of the rest of the old Confederacy.
The immigration generally separated into two broad streams. One filled up the vacant or unused lands in east Texas, replacing the old plantations with hordes of tenant farmers. Now, the freedmen had competition indeed, as they were forced back on the land. Many of the newcomers were forced to take up sharecropping, since they lacked all capital; virtually free lands were available in many areas of the state, but families needed seed money and something to get them through the winter. The other stream spread into the western counties, filling up the sections along and around the old frontier of 1850, and pushing even further west, eventually to the 100th meridian. These families were freeholders, but they also needed money, and almost all of them were forced in some manner to go in debt. Some borrowed money; more took advantage of credit at the general store.
Here, in this hopeful immigration, the seeds of much human tragedy were laid.
Both the cattle and the farming frontiers had been static for a generation until 1876. In five years the cattle kingdom exploded to the very limits of the Texas line; it filled the Panhandle in the high northwest, pushed past the Pecos and preempted the vast Big Bend country. Now, hundreds of miles separated the cattle and farming frontiers, but the hoemen were not far behind. The farm line punched out westward. Generally, it followed the rails into the west.
In this settlement, the rails played a new and controversial role. As in the eastern United States, the first rail lines merely connected already settled points. They served an obvious purpose and enormously increased commerce and industry. But west of about the 98th meridian, the tracks were moving into virtual desert, and deserted lands. The cattle kingdom would not support them; for many years the cattlemen consciously avoided the nearest railheads, because a trail drive was far cheaper than shipping cattle as freight. Texas cattle still went to Abilene and Dodge; also, it had been discovered that cattle pastured on the northern range put on weight.
The tracklaying in the west was more an exercise of ideology than a commercial enterprise. In retrospect, the arid regions of Texas, and other parts of the American West, did not possess sufficient economic potential at the time to justify the expense of railroad building. It was clearly seen at the time the rail companies required subsidies. They got these, from both the federal and Texas governments. In the great, gaudy era of corruption and rail expansion in Texas, the state alone gave assorted railroad companies 32,150,000 acres of public lands. This was a total acreage equivalent to the state of Alabama. Historians have shown that the total cost of rail-laying in the West amounted to a tax of $28 on every American citizen between 1865 and 1873. Even then, most railroad companies were undercapitalized, their lands were sold for a few cents per acre, and most ended up in receivership. It is fully understandable that C. P. Huntington, Jay Gould, and General Grenville Dodge, who built rails across Texas, pushed the tracks with a conviction amounting to élan. What is not so understandable is that they pulled legislatures and the general population along behind, not by corruption alone, but by that magic Anglo-American word, progress.
Rails connecting cities made sense. The rails reached San Antonio in the 1870s, and pushed on to Laredo by 1881. El Paso was reached by 1883. At Laredo, the rails connected with the commerce of Mexico, and both El Paso and Laredo, then tiny hamlets, began a rapid growth. Significantly, Brownsville, which had been the queen city of the Rio Grande, was now bypassed. Harassed also by a yellow fever epidemic and the silting of the pass at Brazos de Santiago in 1882, Brownsville stagnated. Its Northern capitalists went elsewhere; the lower river valley retreated into a stunted cattle culture that did not end until the rails came at last in the next century.
But while rails joined El Paso and San Antonio, Fort Worth and Denver, and El Paso and Fort Worth, this laying of track across the dry Plains was disastrous. There was nothing for the rail lines to feed on in between. They ran into money troubles. The failure of Cooke's Northern Pacific in 1873 is credited with causing the national financial panic of that year. Built at enormous cost, these rails did not really serve their purpose; as studies at the University of Chicago later revealed, they increased the gross national product by only 4 percent.
The rails held great power in the West, because they could focalize settlement or commerce, what little there was, along their routes. But they lacked one necessary power to develop the country: beyond the 98th meridian they could not make it rain.
So strong was the philosophy that increased population meant progress—and rapidly increasing population was necessary to a credit economy, which Texas always was—that Rupert Richardson, noting the anguish and controversy caused in Texas by the railroad subsidies, wrote that the question was moot. He insisted "the railroads promoted rapid settlement and development of the country, the goal of every Anglo-American commonwealth." The railroads were indeed forced to promote settlement once they had laid track into the desert; they did their best to induce farmers to go where no 19th-century farmer should have gone. Not the rails but development of widespread irrigation techniques in the 20th century allowed cultivation west of the 100th meridian. By this time, new methods of transport had developed; and the automotive engine eventually caused a great retraction in Texas railroad mileage.
The rails cannot be blamed for bringing the people to the arid West; they would have come in any case. If they promoted thousands of individual and collective tragedies, the people were eager to be promoted. The problem was twofold: the optimism of the Anglo-American that he could conquer any country, and the fact that there was almost a conspiracy to conceal the fact that in the West there was little water and rain. Texas papers rarely commented on the dryness anywhere. Official pressure even caused regions where rainfall was fifteen inches annually to be described as "less humid" in reports and geography books. The term "arid" was angrily avoided. This is understandable psychologically, when it is realized that climatically speaking, the arid, semiarid, and subhumid regions of Texas comprise exactly one-half the entire state. These were conditions with which the Anglo-American had no experience. The cattle culture, borrowing heavily from Indians and Mexico, had adapted to the dry Plains. The swarm of later
immigrants did not intend to adapt to the country but to adapt the country to their use.
They considered themselves the harbingers of civilization; they thought that all former occupants had put the land to small, and thus, immoral, use. They came filled with moral and personal courage, but with no money, to do battle with the "cattle barons" and the not-really-believed eternal drouth.
Water was and still remains in the West the last unconquered frontier. It was so little understood because in those years it was not yet an American problem; the entire East had so much water it was contemptuous of it, and was busily polluting and ruining a plenteous supply. But west of the 98th meridian there was never enough rainfall for farming. Irrigation, so-called scientific dry farming, and the use of well water were no real solutions. Subsurface water did not exist everywhere; and before the development of powerful pumps it could not be extracted anywhere in adequate supply.
Then, it tended to be exhausted rapidly. There was not sufficient stream water anywhere for widespread use. Storage was impractical because of a horrific evaporation rate; in any event, the distances were too great for impounded waters to be used except in limited areas.
Between the 98th and 100th meridian some places, some years, had rain. Here there existed another phenomenon not experienced by Anglo water and woodlanders: the Pleistocene-like, cyclical climate. This actually extended far to the east beyond the 98th meridian; rainfall was not even, but came in irregular cycles. There might be seven good years, but inevitably, despite protests and prayers, good years were followed by the dry and lean. People pushed into these expanses of rolling plateaus and high plains; they found them covered with buffalo grass, or saw them beautiful with red and yellow wildflowers in the ephemeral spring. They did not realize that the grass was a cover of eons, or understand the full horror of the brassy sun of summer, sucking moisture from plowed earth, or the wild winds that warred from north to south and soon began to carry aloft tons of dirt.
These were boom psychology years. All Texas history is connected in some fashion to a land rush, and the psychology of development and profits ran deep. What was later called "boosterism" was already fully born, and in Texas, despite a massive battering, this feeling never really died. This was a basic American affliction, not invented in Texas, but nowhere was it to emerge stronger. Just as local papers ignored the evidence of the fever coast, they avoided mention of storms, drouths, hard water, or the lack of any water at all. The grim "water jokes" of this frontier gave more real information than all the propaganda and comfortable reports of bounteous crops.
"I seen snow once," a sixteen-year-old told an immigrant in one joke. "Yeah," his ten-year-old brother chimed in: "And it rained once, too." Only later, much later, did Texans universally see humor, and take a grim sardonic pride, in such jokes.
The early 1880s began a series of wet years, with greater than average rainfall. "The country is becoming more seasonable," sensible men reported, believing what they wanted to believe. They had not been on the 98th meridian long enough to know that the weather cycles were often long. The records of old ranches, such as the McAllen ranch in deep south Texas, and the information available from government geographers was deliberately ignored. The government in fact gave warnings, to no avail. Government never stopped Anglo-Americans from doing what they wanted to do. A stream of immigrant settlers went west, spreading across the "less humid" lands until they reached the edge of the High Plains.
Here began a war, between Nature and man. As Webb, other historians, and countless novelists have tried to explain, it was fought with grim determination against cattlemen and Nature. The cattlemen were largely brought to heel, but in the end Nature won.
Even before the immigrants arrived in large numbers, the cowmen had already begun to fence. Glidden's barbed wire was perfected in Illinois in 1873, and a few years later it was already enclosing the frontier. This wire was perhaps the single most important factor in the final development of west Texas. With the concurrent arrival of the iron windmill and the rails, which transported both easily and cheaply into the West, it spelled the death of open range. Formerly, neither cowman nor farmer could fence lands in the West, because there was no suitable material, and hedges failed to grow. To import rock or wooden rails cost more than the cost of the land. In fact, until the continuing Industrial Revolution gave an answer, fencing had become a major American agrarian problem. Farm fences cost more than all the stock in the United States, and more than the rails themselves. The annual amount spent on fence repair came to more than all the taxes collected in Texas. The long, flat, Glidden's patent wire, and its dozens of imitators, performed a technological revolution. The wire was foolproof; stock could not cross it or tear it down. In fact, wire killed much stock, by screw-worm-infected scratches, until cattle and horses acquired an ancestral, instinctive awareness to avoid it. A rampaging bull could butt down a rail, but no bull could cross barbed wire. The farmers' fields were made safe as they could not have been in cattle country; and the cowmen themselves, aided by windmills tooling up water, could create pastures and begin painfully to improve their runty range stock. An expensive English or French bull was not a folly, but an investment, when cows were protected by the cruel wire from the combative and usually victorious native stock.
The cowmen themselves turned the open range of the High Plains into the big pasture country. Wire cost from $150 to $200 per mile of fence, and the largest outfits generally commenced enclosing first. By 1883 most of the huge latifundia in south Texas were fenced and patrolled. In the northwest, the movement began along the farm line—farmers protecting their fields—but rapidly spread among the larger cow outfits on the High Panhandle Plains; above all, among those ranches owned or financed by Eastern or British interests. These Easterners saw the future more clearly; they had never been exposed to the abortive culture of the Plains. They were managing businesses, not acting out manhood roles between sun and sky, awed by the immensity of the earth. The water and best lands were fenced off first. The big interests also generally had title to their lands, which the average cowman did not.
In 1876, Texas still held 61,258,461 acres of unappropriated public domain, mostly in the west. It had another 20,000,000 acres in the state school lands. The state was eager to dispose of both. Although the state continually favored farmers over cattlemen in its sales policies, for years writing homestead codes that made no sense in the grass country, it also sold off much land in huge chunks.
The largest, and most famous, deal was the sale of 3,050,000 acres on the High Plains, which became the XIT Ranch, to finance the erection of a new state capitol at Austin in 1879. The new granite building was imposing; so was the enormous ranch. Other cattle syndicates, drawn west by the cattle boom of the 1870s and early 1880s, had multimillion-dollar investments: the Matador Land and Cattle Company, the Hansford Company, the Espuela, or Spur, and others. These companies had the capital to fence, and they did so. Quickly, they transformed cattle raising from a wild and woolly career into a stable business. The terrible blizzard of 1886, and the drouths of 1886–87, which killed thousands of cattle and forced other thousands on the market, also destroyed many hip-pocket cowmen.
Early fencing was done with arrogance; rivers were fenced off that other men's cows had used for years; the Eastern lawyers never heard of range rights. No such thing existed under the law. Public trails and roads were also fenced. The small cowman, who had never bothered to ride to Austin and secure his lands, was fenced out. He fought, as did cowboys forced out of work and rustlers whose work was now made more difficult. By 1883, fence cutting was an epidemic in west Texas; it was worst along the farm line, but essentially it was a war between large cattlemen and small. This destruction of private property had much sentimental support throughout the state, not to preserve the romance of open range, but because sale of public lands and fencing was "creating principalities, pashalics, and baronates among a few capitalists and arousing a spirit of agrarianism among the poore
r classes," as one newspaper printed. In a few counties things became so bad that something like civil war ensued, and the Rangers were called in. In 1884, fence cutting was made a felony at law, even the concealment of cutters in saddlebags was a crime. But at the same time the law required gates to be opened at every three miles along a fence, and made fencing land not owned or leased illegal also. The fence wars gradually sputtered out, and in the end, virtually all west Texas was fenced.
Everyone, large or small, had to fence in self-protection. The range baron turned into a peaceful stockman, whether he owned hundreds of acres, or millions. A long era of ranch consolidation began with fencing. Cattlemen bought up land from the state, the railroads, school lands, generally at from twenty-five cents to one dollar per acre. Ranchers were limited in their purchase of school lands, since the state officials favored farmers. This policy brought "nesters" into cow country in the 1880s, and also forced cattlemen to buy through agents and in other illegal or extralegal ways. It took many years for the big ranches to consolidate and prove title. Despite Land Commissioner Terrell's famous statement, that ". . . a few good homes are worth more than many ranches, one good home for one child is worth more to a country than many ranches with a thousand cows upon every hill and in every valley; the cry of one child is more "civilizing" than the bleat of ten thousand calves. . . ." in Texas, west of the 100th line, the ranchers won. They could not beat the law, but the lawmakers could not legislate the climate. The wholesale misrepresentation, fraud, and perjury resorted to by cattlemen, as well as occasional force, are almost universally excused by Texan historians on the grounds that the government was dominated by men who tried to impose upon the West a social pattern unsuited to its needs. The farmer prejudice lingered, however, in song and story, long after the passing of the wars.