by Unknown
These canyons and broad grasslands are scourged by violent weather—high winds, blistering heat and freezing cold, cloudbursts and drouth, tornadoes and floods, sandstorms and blizzards. In the big skies, magnificent clouds cast shadows on the plains and explode each evening into sunsets unimaginably vivid. Night falls dramatically as a curtain of darkness. On a moonless night the Milky Way, wide and clear, tracks across the zenith of a sky that, in the clean Texas air, is smudged with stars. Pennants of flame herald the dawn as the red ball of the sun pauses briefly on the rim of the horizon before leaping into the sky. Violent thunderstorms scour the prairie; hail batters the ground. Then rainbows, often two and sometimes three, arch across the sky from horizon to horizon.
Sunsets, prairie fires, cloudbursts, northers, tornadoes (in Texas called "cyclones"), plagues—everything that happens in that part of Texas happens in a big way. West Texas is always hyperbole, like Howard's passions, which were expressed in the rampages of the seasons.
Dark Valley, Howard's first home, lies on the edge of the first of the escarpments that rise toward Cap Rock. The valley took its name from the deep shadows of its western bluffs, which in late afternoon lie like dark pools over the sunlit terrain below. If this play of shadow and sunshine reflected Howard's moods, the history of the region, and of the whole state for that matter, supplied the suppressed violence of his nature with adequate metaphors. Howard remarked that history dripped with blood, till it seemed miraculous that, despite wars, famines, massacres, and pestilences, enough children lived to grow up to carry on the race.3 But grow up Texas children did, while up and down the giant stairway, sped by ceaseless winds, from time out of mind men passed— violent men presaging violent events.
Before the coming of Europeans, the Indians swept down the steps from the west, driving the buffalo4 before them into the canyons and chasing them over the wide plains. Prior to Columbus, most of the natives in the area that was to become the United States were Neolithic farmers, who supplemented their diet of maize, beans, and other vegetables by hunting and fishing. The indigenes of Texas were in a state of culture that can properly be called "barbarism"—that is, the style of life that follows the discovery of agriculture but precedes the rise of cities and writing. Some tribes were still in the preagricultural, hunting-gathering stage; the primitive Coahuilans, living in the inhospitable lower Rio Grande Valley, stayed alive by means of such unusual foods as spiders and deer droppings.5
In most Amerindian tribes, hunting was the main occupation of the men, while the women farmed. With the coming of the horse in the sixteenth century, hunting, especially buffalo hunting, became much more profitable than before. Many Plains tribes gave up farming altogether to pursue the wandering herds. This return to nomadic life made agriculture almost impossible, so the tribes fell into the habit of raiding one another as well as the whites to supply their needs.
The Indians quickly adopted the white man's gun; but, knowing next to nothing about making guns, gunpowder, and shot, they lacked the technology to support the weapon. They took poor care of their guns and were mostly indifferent marksmen, save for a few like Captain Jack's Modocs and Chief Joseph's Nez Perces. General George H. Crook, captor of Geronimo, once said: "If the Indian had ever realized what the rear sight was for, we would never have conquered the West."6
Of all the Indians in Texas, the Comanches7 were the most formidable. They impartially raided and plundered sedentary Texas Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Anglo-Texans.
Robert Howard got most of his ideas of barbarian life and character from the Comanches. He had little or no interest in the more civilized, settled, or peaceful tribes, like the Caddo and the Pueblo Indians,8 who were raided by the Comanches, forced into Catholic missions— practically slave-labor camps—by the Spaniards, evicted or killed off by the Anglo-Americans, and depleted by Old World diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Not surprisingly their descendants are few.
The Comanches had been one of the most primitive tribes on the continent. They were "savages" in the anthropological sense—that is, men who had not yet learned farming or stock-raising but depended for their entire subsistence on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild edible plants. Promoted from savage to barbarian by the advent of the horse, they were not about to sit down and master the techniques of dry farming when murder and robbery were so much more fun.
The Comanche social organization and patterns of behavior were decentralized, simple, and informal. A Comanche man of fighting age was expected to be
. . . vigorous, self-reliant, and pushing. Most of his social relationships were phrased in terms of competition. He took what he could get and held what he had without regard to any abstract rights of those weaker than himself. Any willingness to arbitrate differences or to ignore slights was a sign of weakness resulting in loss of prestige. . . . Warriors did not prepare for old age, thinking it a better fate to be killed in action.... loot was the main source of wealth.9
With this outlook the Comanches became one of the most belligerent peoples on earth, regarding war as the only decent, manly occupation. Like Wordsworth's Scottish clansmen, they operated on
. . . the good old rule . . . the simple plan, That they should take, who have the power, And they should keep who can.10
A warrior so unfortunate as to survive to old age was expected—miraculously—to turn into a wise and gentle peacemaker, taking care of the band's material needs and adjudicating disputes among the younger men before they escalated to homicide.
For the white settlements in Texas, the Comanches were a real and ever-present danger. Howard's imagination was fired by stories of their bloody depredations and of the white man's heroic stand against them, stories of which the old settlers told him. Robert's mother, who had no liking for Indians, repeated the tales heard in her childhood along with accounts of her actual experiences. This mixture of legend and history provided Howard, an enthusiastic if superficial historian, with a means of objectifying his own feelings.
One oft-told tale of frontier hardships was the story of Cynthia Ann Parker. Cynthia Ann was nine years old when she was captured on a May morning in 1836 during an Indian raid on Parker's Fort in Limestone County, in East Texas. Her father, Silas M. Parker, and her grandfather, Elder John Parker, were killed; and her grandmother was left for dead. Cynthia Ann and her brother John were carried off by the Comanches and brought up in the tribe.11 From time to time efforts were made to redeem Cynthia Ann, but all ransoms were rejected. Cynthia Ann had become the squaw of a young chief, Peta Nocona, and borne him children.
Over the years Cynthia Ann's situation was all but forgotten, until the Texas Rangers in 1860 surprised a Comanche camp. Cynthia Ann's Indian husband and one of their children were killed in the pursuit. Cynthia Ann was captured; and once she was identified, her uncle, Colonel Isaac Parker, was summoned. Howard wrote:
And so Cynthia Ann Parker came again into the lands of her people. . . . She lived with her people, her brother, Colonel Parker, a member of the Legislature, but she was never happy, always mourning for her red mate and children, always seeking to escape back to that wilder life from which she had been brutally torn. In 1864 both she and her baby went into the long dark.12
How different are the facts from Howard's treatment of them! Howard ignores Cynthia Ann's capture in East Texas and connects her instead with Parker County, Howard's own birthplace, halfway across the state from Parker's Fort. In Howard's version Colonel Parker, for whom Parker County was named, becomes Cynthia Ann's father, instead of Silas M. Parker, her actual father. Rather than dying in defense of his daughter, Cynthia Ann's dead father is resurrected by Howard, who dramatically casts him as a grief-stricken parent wandering the Brazos pathways, searching for his lost child.13
Howard wrote of the heart-rending pathos of the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the memory of which haunted the mind like a pitiful ghost wailing in the night. Although in later years Howard, by then better informed, gave a more accurate account o
f Cynthia Ann,14 it is his first, garbled version that is arresting. All through his life, the people and events of interest to Robert Howard were those in which he could see similarities to his own situation and feelings or in which he could find symbols of man's—and his own—quest for selfhood. The girl who was brutally torn from those she had come to love and the grief-stricken wanderer who spent his life in a fruitless search—both reflected the inner despair and sense of helplessness of the young man who could not find himself, who could not integrate his personality, who could not, if you will, win his personal struggle between phantasy and reality.
In 1936 Texas celebrated its Centennial Year, thus awakening an interest in Texas history all over the state. For two years preceding the celebration, almost every publication in Texas featured articles on some aspect of the state's history. At Lovecraft's urging, Howard, long interested in history, wrote increasingly detailed accounts of the state's development.
The theme of the Centennial was "Texas Under Six Flags"; but the flag that interested Howard was the one that symbolized the early and often violent American adventures in the state, the flag of the Republic of Texas. Just as his interest in the Plains Indians did not extend to the more orderly, ritualistic cultures of the Pueblo Indians, so, too, Howard found the formal elegance of the Spanish era of little interest. Yet some of the best of Texas, especially of San Antonio—Howard's favorite city —reflects Spain's Old World charm.
Texans often classified themselves by the period in which they became a part of the history of the state. Members of the "impresario" Moses Austin's colony and other settlers who came to Texas before the revolution of 1836 called themselves "Texicans," as did the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas. "Texians" was the name applied to those who lived under the flag of the Confederacy, while just plain "Texans" have dwelt beneath the Stars and Stripes since 1865.
Howard told Lovecraft that he would rather have been a Texican than a "king of Europe."15 He was endlessly interested in all the details of Texican life. He contemplated writing a history of the Southwest and had not completely given up the idea at the time of his death, although at one point he admitted that Texas was just too big for him. Indeed it was, at least as a model for his own behavior. He had no way to reconcile his hero Stephen F. Austin, the intellectual leader and organizer, with his other hero, the gunfighter and card sharp John Wesley Hardin; or Nathan Bedford Forrest, the great Confederate general, with Sam Houston, deposed as governor in 1861 because of his stubborn loyalty to the Union. Any sustained identification with more than one of these men would have torn his personality asunder.
The history of Texas begins when, in 1727, the Spanish government organized the south-central part of North America, all of which was claimed as "New Spain," into the province of Texas, named for the Tejas16 (or Caddo) Indian Confederacy. Three invasions by bands of freebooting Anglo-Americans, inflamed with hopes of carving out their own empire, were undertaken between 1799 and 1821. All were defeated.
Starting in 1810, the Mexicans of New Spain set in motion a revolt against Spanish rule and eleven years later won their war of independence. Although the rebellion was in part inspired by the doctrines of the American and French revolutions, the conflict was mainly between two groups of the Spanish minority: the gachupines, or Spanish-born Spaniards, and the criollos, or Creoles, the Mexican-born Spaniards. The government, based in Spain, gave nearly all positions of power and pelf to the gachupines, and the criollos coveted those posts. The Indian-descended majority—mostly abysmally poor and ignorant peasantry— were mere pawns in the struggle.
In 1821 a massive immigration of Anglo-Americans into Texas began under Moses Austin and his son Stephen. At first the Mexican government welcomed this influx, hoping that the Anglo-Americans would form a barrier against the raids of the Apaches and the Comanches. The Mexicans could not cope with these fierce tribesmen because the Spanish monarchy, fearing rebellion and separatism, had long forbidden its subjects to bear firearms and had discouraged the formation of militias. Thus it had demilitarized its own people, somewhat as the later Roman emperors demilitarized the Italians.
Hostility soon arose between Anglo-Texans and Hispano-Texans. Aside from their profound cultural differences, the Anglo-Texans quickly raised themselves economically above the Hispanos. An idealistic Mexican general, Jose Manuel de Mier y Teran, investigated the Anglo-Texan settlers and reported back to his government. Mier y Teran had not before seen the Protestant work ethic in action, and the sight filled him with foreboding. He warned that Mexico stood to lose the province unless the government sent thither Hispanos who were more willing to work. While the Anglos were busily plowing their fields and building houses and schools, the outnumbered Hispanos, who had inherited the Spanish tradition equating the good life with unlimited leisure, were content to sit in the shade and play their guitars.
Slavery was another source of discord. Although the new Mexican constitution forbade slavery, many Anglo-Texans from the southern states had brought slaves with them and had no intention of losing them. The new landowners had been admitted to Texas under a compromise agreement whereby the slaves were to be freed in time; but the dispute continued, with the Anglos trying to keep their slaves and the slaves' children longer and the Mexican government trying to free them sooner.
Finally, the Mexican constitution continued the Spanish statute that gave the Catholic Church a monopoly on religion, and the Anglo-Texans agreed to become Catholics upon entering the area. However, holding to American concepts of religious freedom, the religious among the immigrants gave this law lip service only and continued to practice their "heresies."
In the 1830s the president-dictator of Mexico was a young adventurer-politician, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the self-styled "Napoleon of the Western world" but better termed "as malignant and conscienceless an opportunist as ever lived."17 Whether to compensate for all his other villainies or simply to annoy the Texans, Santa Anna announced I hat he meant to liberate the Texans' slaves forthwith.
To this combustible mixture, Santa Anna's arbitrary acts as dictator applied the match. In 1835 the Anglo-Texans revolted, and, despite the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, they defeated Santa Anna's armies and forced the captured generalissimo to concede their independence. The Mexican government disowned Santa Anna and for the next decade considered itself at war with the Republic of Texas, though only minor fighting ensued.
Around the Texas Revolution, the true Texas mystique developed. Of what someone has called the typical Texas triad—piety, patriotism, and politeness—patriotism looms large in Texan thinking, that is, loyalty to the Republic of Texas. Howard's defense of the Texicans' position sums up this feeling.
Revolution, he claimed, was the only way to solve the conflict of interests between Mexico and the Texicans. Whatever the expansionist ambitions of American politicians, the Texicans had no choice; failure to resist would have cost them home, property, and citizenship and condemned them to lives of poverty. The Texicans, when they came to Texas at a Mexican invitation, had burnt their bridges. The colonists, Howard wrote, with more enthusiasm than accuracy, had complied to the letter with the requirements of the Mexican government. They had defended the land against savage Indians while developing their territories. Before Mexican oppression the Texicans had even put down a revolt led by an American adventurer in Nacogdoches.
Only after Santa Anna had violated all governmental guarantees, rejected peaceable negotiations, and imposed tyrannical, cruel, and oppressive measures in retaliation had the colonists resorted to arms. While somewhat oversimplified, Howard's argument—which he earnestly put to Lovecraft—was compelling to Texans a century and a half ago and so remains to this day.18
For Texans everywhere, the Alamo and Goliad are still rallying cries. As far away as New York City, sophisticated expatriate Texans gather on San Jacinto Day and, half in jest, half in earnest, solemnly raise a glass to their great state, the former Republic of Texas.
/> In 1846, at the urging of the Texicans, the United States annexed Texas and presently stumbled into war with Mexico. In promoting the outbreak of this war, both parties showed a maximum of chauvinistic belligerence and a minimum of pacific reasonableness. Both governments were spoiling for a fight. The Mexicans, who had the larger army, thought they could win; but between the incompetence of their criollo officers and the miserable training and equipment of their largely indio enlisted men, they never had a chance.
The Americans won the Mexican War and thereupon annexed the whole northern half of the Mexican nation. To most of this area—the present states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada—Mexico held only a paper title. This title went back to the grandiose claims of sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese kings, who averred that they had divided the entire non-Christian world between them; the Pope, they said, had given them clear title to their respective hemispheres. Spain claimed all of North and South America except for the bulge of Brazil. Needless to say, neither the Americans nor the Mexicans, who still argue about who had a "right" to these vast lands, gave any consideration to the wishes of the people, mostly uncon-quered aboriginal tribesmen, who actually lived there.
In the end the United States paid a modest sum to Mexico, and the end of slavery in Texas was postponed for another twenty years. With the annexation of Texas, the English-speaking population rapidly increased. By 1852 these new Texicans, as they called themselves, had settled the land and coped with the problem of the warlike Comanches.
Violence continued unabated as the Comanches raided, robbed, raped, burned, and murdered, while the whites retaliated not only on the raiders but also on any peaceable Indians they encountered. At length the Comanches allowed themselves to be herded into reservations. One group settled on the Brazos Reservation to try out the white man's plan to transform them into farmers. Their efforts, however, were defeated by drouth, grasshoppers, and the harassments of neighboring whites, who were prevented only by the U.S. Army from invading the reservation to kill every living Indian.