by Unknown
Although Hester Jane Howard was born in Texas and Isaac Mordecai Howard first entered the state in the 1880s, the two exemplified these contrasting attitudes. Isaac displayed the adventurous, speculative, forward-looking spirit typical of the original Texicans; while Hester showed the nostalgic yearning for a lost gentility characteristic of immigrants, including her own parents, from the South after the Civil War.
In such a time of turmoil, the legend of the "good" outlaw nourishes. This mythical character is supposed, like Robin Hood, to oppose the "bad" establishment. The concept of the good outlaw, part of the messianic fantasies of adolescence, is especially seductive to a young person confused about the social system he wants to reform. The myth was rife in post-Civil War Texas, when Sam Bass and his gang were riding and robbing. Bass had many sympathizers among the settlers, who willingly furnished the gang with food for the men and their horses and warned them of the whereabouts of the Rangers.39
In periods of cultural conflict and change, with popular morality in a state of flux, the line between the lawful and the lawless is faint. Man} crossed it, switching roles from robber to peace officer and back, mucli as Conan alternates soldiering with pillage and piracy. Thus Hardin onc« served as a sheriff's deputy. But few achieved the versatility of Henr) Plummer, who in Montana in 1863-64 served simultaneously as sherif and leader of a band of robbers.
The extension of railroads into Texas ended the need for the lonj northward cattle drives. Shipping the cattle to market became easier With the advent of barbed wire and the laws that supported it, the drives already dwindling, disappeared entirely. By the early 1890s, the days o: the Cattle Kingdom were drawing to a close; but even the breakup of thi ranges did not take place without a struggle. !
Until the invention of barbed wire, the fencing of large properties was almost unheard-of and, in a treeless country, practically impossible, But the "bob wire" fence made it practical to enclose vast areas. Home steaders—the small farmers who followed the railroads westward anc took up plots of free government land—were enemies of the open range They enclosed their small plots to protect themselves from large-seal* cattle drives. Yet those among them who were also cattlemen counted 01 government-owned lands to support their small herds, and they felt fre< to cut any fences that included these public lands. This practice led t< so much controversy that in 1884, after a heated debate, the legislature passed a law making fence-cutting a felony. To spare the cattlemen! however, the law forbade the fencing of public lands, public roads, an< the lands of other landowners without their permission. Each fence ha< to have a gate every three miles.
So bitterly were the fence wars fought that, for a time, Texa Rangers were stationed in Brown and Callahan counties, where th damage was especially severe. Memories of this bitterness lingerec providing Robert Howard with additional tales of violence. He describe the cowboys driving their longhorns north, while squatters and home steaders stole stray cattle. Big ranchers retaliated by stringing rustle* to the nearest tree, but they themselves augmented their herds by bram ing mavericks. ;
Ranchers cut homesteaders' fences, burned their farmhouses, an sometimes wiped out whole families as ruthlessly as any Comanche. Th homesteaders in turn fouled the ranchers' springs and dammed their streams; they lay in wait for cowboys and shot them out of the saddle. In the long run, the homesteaders won by weight of numbers, persistence, and legislation. Soon the land was fenced, save for some government-owned tracts kept open for the use of cattlemen. Howard sympathized with the cattlemen, who seemed closer to his beloved barbarian warriors than the farmers who wrested the land from them and tamed it.
Texas was catapulted into the twentieth century with the discovery of oil. There had been a small oil boom in Corsicana in 1896, but its production was a trickle compared to Captain Anthony B. Lucas's gusher of 1901, which erupted on a marshy hillock called Spindletop, near Beaumont in the southeast corner of the state. Refineries, largely owned by Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, sprang up. The furnaces of ships and locomotives were converted from coal-burning to oil-burning. The sale of fake oil stock, centering in Fort Worth, became a major industry; 2,700 corporations sold an estimated $250,000,000 worth of worthless stock certificates.40
Eastern capital came into the state, starting a long-term conflict between those who claimed to stand for "the people" and those whom they accused of alliance with "the outside interests." Oil companies became politically powerful. The increasing use of automobiles around the time of the First World War made the petroleum business more profitable and the hunt for oil fields more frantic than ever.
During the First World War, Texans showed themselves second to none in patriotic zeal and warlike virtues, and Robert Howard's boyhood games reflected the martial preoccupation of the times. Besides the European conflict, this period saw a great resurgence of Mexican banditry. After the fall of the Mexican president-dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911, Mexico suffered a decade of revolution and civil war. The bandidos raided into Texas, often with the connivance of Mexican officials; the Anglo-Texans retaliated, often on more or less innocent Hispano-Americans, who were killed on general principles.
The twenties brought convulsive changes to the United States as a whole —Prohibition and bootlegging, women's suffrage, the revolution in women's dress and work habits, the Jazz Age, the Florida boom and bust, and so on—but nowhere did these changes strike with a heavier impact than in Texas. Oil booms exploded in several parts of the state, especially along a line that was for a time called the Oil Belt. This tract extended from West-Central Texas, where Robert Howard lived, north along the Panhandle into Oklahoma. Cotton-growing by irrigation spread in West Texas, while the subtropical lower Rio Grande Valley developed a flourishing fruit industry. The increasing mechanization of agriculture would eventually force out many tenant farmers.
Improved roads, motion pictures, and radios began to homogenize the whole American population, so that the differences between Texans and other Americans dwindled. The contrast between countryman and city dweller also blurred, until eventually small-town Texans began to play golf and give cocktail parties, like other middle-class Americans. In 1920 they would scarcely have dreamed of doing such exotic things.
The rapidity of these social and economic changes was in itself a kind of violence. Robert Howard's Texas was at the point of impact of a head-on collision between an industrial and an agrarian society, each viewing the world in a quite different way. With such divergent sets of expectations, time-honored social controls are inadequate. It is not surprising that Howard experienced a complete crisis in values. Although many shared experiences were made possible through improved communications and the expansion of mass media, the meaning of these experiences and their interpretation differed widely between the two cultures. Often the differences between these separate life-styles were more profound than the differences between the generations.
When Texans were not busy defending themselves from each other, they were defending themselves against the elements. Fire, flood, and drouth stalked the plains. Fire, erupting apparently from nowhere, would sweep over the prairie, threatening the farmer's crops and driving all living creatures before it. Prairie fires were not only a financial disaster but also an immediate threat to the men who fought them. Firefighters had to be alert for snakes and other animals, which, threatened by the blaze, would strike out blindly.
The winds that blew constantly over the prairie sometimes eddied into little whirlwinds, which picked up sparks and cinders from one blaze and deposited them hundreds of yards away, thus starting new fires. These could trap the firefighters between two blazes, threatening them with incineration, anoxia, and lung damage from breathing hot gases. Men learned to stay away from the cedar brakes that dotted hillocks and pastures. When these were ignited, they went up with a roar that consumed the whole stand, often in a matter of seconds.
A prairie fire marshaled the resources of the whole community, the men fighting the fire in shifts a
nd the women furnishing food and drink and, when necessary, nursing care. If the fire was near a town, hoses, pumps, and even bucket brigades were manned to wet down the area and divert the blaze from the houses.
The battle might go on for days. When the immediate danger had passed, one might see a sooty man resting against an outcrop, and a few yards away a jackrabbit, peering at him from under singed ears; or a coyote, dragging a blackened tail, limping along on burned pads and ignoring both man and rabbit—natural enemies bound in a truce of exhaustion.
As the frontiersman stood under the big sky of the prairies, it never occurred to him that he could have anything to do with the weather. Neither did it occur to Howard, who felt himself a pawn of fate. Mountains of cumulus clouds might pile up without blotting out the sun; anvil-topped thunderheads might hurl thunder and lightning. "Here," a contemporary writer puts it, "the age-old litany of the wind . . . blows impartially on the just and the unjust. Here the single eye of the sun, blazing indifferently on good and evil, is rarely out of sight. Under such a sky, time itself seems eternal."41
The sky seemed immutable, its nature remaining unchanged even when tornadoes swept out of it. Howard knew about storms and "cyclones." One of his earliest childhood recollections was that of crouching in a storm cellar, dank, dark, and perhaps reptile-haunted, while a storm raged without. Thunder rattled the cellar door shielding him from the downpour. Through the cracks between the boards he could see vicious blue flashes of lightning, which, like a stroboscope, fixed blown leaves and branches in a tableau of destruction.42
Howard describes another storm with the authenticity of experience. A tornado roared through Cross Plains in the middle of the afternoon, in July of 1935. The storm struck just as Robert was lowering the east window of his room. The doors and windows were still open when the wind hit, or the low pressure in the center of the twister might have caused them to burst outwards. Robert had the impression that the house expanded as the wind roared in; but then Robert, and probably most other Texans as well, failed to grasp the principles of the physics of; tornadoes.43 j
Several homes were damaged and many windows broken—"blown out," Robert said. This storm, which swooped down upon Cross Plains without thunder and lightning or even threatening clouds, brought a ; spatter of rain, which turned to hail, followed by the scream of the twister. It was over so quickly that Robert had no time for fear—onl a confused bewilderment and a curious exhilaration.
As Howard explained to Lovecraft, Callahan County lies in th "cyclone belt," which includes most of West Texas and all the Great Plains.44 Terrible storms sweep down the Callahan Divide; occasional tornadoes swirl over the land like avenging angels. Howard railed against the helplessness of man before such a storm. He must cravenly crawl into cellars while all he has built is destroyed.
In Robert's bleak view of the world, the earth and its creatures are locked in an endless war of extermination among individuals, races, : species, climates, and terrains. A man must either fight or flee, be master I or slave. If the universe is a matter of blind accident, thought Howard,, a mindless contraption in which man is trapped, then man's only major ; goal is to win freedom from it.
The sky, however, is not so immutable as it seemed to Robert. It was built by life acting on life; for the very air is the product of organic metabolism. As Lewis Thomas wrote: "[The sky] is a vast permanent bubble of air breathed out by chloroplasts, tough enough at its outer membrane to glance away and ignite all the meterorites that have made ■ gray rubble of our neighboring undeveloped, underprivileged planets. "It is our planet's unique possession, the sky, and we made it all by . ourselves."45 That we could also destroy the sky all by ourselves became^ clear with the arrival of the dust storms of the 1930s. Unlike the earlier ; sandstorms, the dust storms were man-made. This difference troubled Howard.
Sandstorms are typical of West Texas, especially in February and. March. Northers, howling down from the Arctic Circle, drive sand beforej
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them, assaulting the bare legs of children, abrading faces, filling mouths with grit, and irritating eyes. These conditions obtain whenever the wind is high on the prairie, as before a thunderstorm, or when a hurricane sweeps inland from the Gulf, passing over a sandy area with a wind velocity high enough to carry the sand aloft. But these sandstorms are short-lived, either blowing themselves out in a few hours or being wet down by the rain that follows the wind.
In contrast, the 1930s saw thousands of tons of soil rise up and invade the stratosphere. Boiling black clouds thundered away, but the squalls that followed showered dust instead of rain. Dust storms assumed many shapes; some rolled in like thunderheads, darkening the sky until the chickens went to roost. Some soared into the upper atmosphere, occluding the sun with a reddish haze and sifting down silt over everything.46
Although the windows were closed, all furnishings would be covered with silt as fine as talcum powder. Dust clung to curtains and walls and rippled across plates laid for dinner. Beds, toothbrushes, clothes in the closet, and even food in the refrigerator were filmed with dust. There was no way to keep it out.
On the Great Plains, the dust drifted into dunes. Animals died, and there were reports of migrating birds falling out of the air, suffocated by flying dust particles. In Nebraska in 1933, a "blood rain" fell, composed of gypsum, volcanic ash, and silt particles that had lain for a quarter of a billion years in the red Permian beds, which stretched from Kansas to Texas.
The stage was set for these storms when the first settlers broke up the thick grass-root systems that shielded the prairie from the winds. The technological advances of the twenties replaced the plow horse by the tractor to pull plows through the heavy sod. Soon the mechanized combine displaced the hired hand, as the tractor had the horse, and the "wheat kings" of the twenties came into being. They plowed and sowed and reaped an ever-growing area, breaking more and more sod until finally only the rainfall held the soil in place. And they prospered until 1930, when Nemesis struck.
In the summer of 1930, according to the Weather Bureau, the longest recorded drouth began. It receded in 1931 and worsened in 1932. In 1934 no end was yet in sight. No moisture held the topsoil to the land. A wind not strong enough to create a sandstorm could easily
DARK VALLEY DBIT1NY
«coop up the powdery soil that lay naked to the sky, no longer glued together by a film of moisture.
The first major dust storm to reach the East Coast was borne on a gale that originated in Canada, swept through the Midwest, and turned New York's sky yellow, making dusk of its afternoon. Another dust storm, which spun out of the Midwest, covered 1,350,000 square miles, towered three miles into the sky, and simultaneously eclipsed the sun in six states.
During the 1930s, some states reported from one to three hundred dust storms a year. Each "black blizzard" further diminished the arable land. Snows in New England were yellowed by New Mexico's soil. Three hundred miles out in the Atlantic, liners were powdered with Midwestern silt.
By 1935 droves of people fled what had come to be called the Dust Bowl. Among those who stayed, a gallows humor developed into the typical Texan tall tale, lost, ran an ad in a weekly paper, in last week's sandstorm, a small 160 acre farm. anyone knowing anything of its whereabouts please contact the owner. Next week the reply appeared:
found, one acre of the lost farm in my vacuum cleaner. owner can claim it by presenting himself. . . .
Callahan County suffered the same drouth and was battered by many dust storms; but the county, already arid, lay on the southern edge of the eroded area and so was spared some of the devastation. Furthermore, the discovery of oil had turned people's attention away from farming. Since the natural contours of the land were not suited to the plowing of vast fields of grain, less land was laid open to wind erosion. But the people did not escape an erosion of the spirit as the heat bore in and the dryness permeated their very bones.
Howard wrote dramatically of the dust storms. He told of a scorc
hing sun in a cloudless sky; then the rising gusts of wind; then the appearance of a long black bar across the northwestern horizon. The bar rose like a vast black cloud and swept on like a sable curtain miles wide and hundreds of feet high. Before it, whirling black dots resolved themselves into buzzards and other birds fleeing the storm. Then with a roar it was upon one, turning reddish-brown and filling the victim's hair, eyes, and ears with sand, sometimes continuing for days on end. After the wind fell, dust veiled the sky for a day or two, tinting the sun yellow and giving the landscape an ensorcelled appearance.47
Thus the terrain of Texas, awesome in its immensity, variety, and cataclysmic climate, nourished Robert Howard's view of the world. The violence he saw around him in the natural world was reenforced by vividly-remembered tales of violence; for Texans were great storytellers who enjoyed talking about their heritage. Each had a different tale to tell of conflicts between pioneers and Indians, cowboys and gunmen, Rangers and outlaws, cattlemen and rustlers, Texas and Mexicans, as well as the grass wars, the fence wars, and the railroaders' stand against train robbers.
The very society in which he lived, moreover, underwent rapid and violent change with the coming of the oil boom, with its fortune seekers, roustabouts, and dance-hall girls. The onslaught of Northeastern industrial ideas and mores on Western agrarian culture was itself cataclysmic. Together these elements nurtured the violent phantasies of a youthful writer who never learned to cope with reality.
VII. BARBARIAN IN A BOOM TOWN
And so his boyhood wandered into youth, And still the hazes thickened round his head, And red, lascivious nightmares shared his bed And fantasies with greedy claw and tooth. . . .l
Sometime in 1933 Robert Howard decided that tackling the story of frontier Texas was too much for him. He told August Derleth that, if he wrote any chronicle, he would deal only with Callahan County in the years following his arrival in Cross Plains. While a history of the county might lack the general appeal of the story of frontier days in the whole state, Howard observed, the oil boom was vibrant with color, violence, and sudden change.2