by Texas
In January 1838, Otto would be sixteen, so he lied and said: i'll be eighteen in January.'
'Come back in January,' the lanky man said, and then he instructed the others as to the rules of the new organization: 'Provide your own good horse, a change of clothes, a rifle, a pistol and a Bowie knife.'
'What kind of clothes?'
'Whatever you have. No insignia.'
'Same with the boots?'
'Whatever you have, but they should come mostly to the knee because we'll be hitting mesquite and rattlesnakes.' Believing that he had covered everything, he started to go inside the shed that served as an office; then he stopped. 'We think you should wear a big hat. Keeps the sun out of your eyes in summer, your head warm in winter.' And studying Otto carefully, he added: 'It would make you look taller, too.'
On 2 January 1838 Otto bade the Ascots farewell, placed his two rifles across his saddle and headed south, his big hat bobbing in time with the horse's gait. Before nightfall he was sworn in, smallest man in his unit, a taut little fighting machine with no uniform and no stated commission, eager to help tame the frontiers of Texas.
During the second week in January word reached the capital that the bandit Benito Garza had invaded Texas and raided a ranch north of the Nueces River, killing two Texians. This was precisely the kind of outrage the ranging companies had been organized to punish, so the informal Xavier County unit was assembled by Captain Sam Garner, twenty-six years old, six feet two, a hundred and fifty-eight pounds, flowing mustaches, icicle-straight and icicle-cool, and a very good man at firing his rifle at full gallop. His first assistant was Otto Macnab, the young fellow of indeterminate age. He claimed he was eighteen, but looked twelve because of his beardless chin, his almost-white baby-fine hair, and his slim, muscular body. 'This Macnab,' Garner told his
superiors, 'impresses me as a chilly hombre. When those blue eyes fix on you, beware!'
The company assembled in the town of Campbell, fifty-two men on their own horses and with their own guns and knives who would ride casually south 'to knock some sense into the Mexicans.' When they neared Victoria, their first important stop, Otto surprised his captain by saying: i want to break away. My mother lives on the Guadalupe west of town.'
'We'll all head that way,' Garner said, for he was in no hurry; he had learned that fighting could be depended upon to find him out at the appointed time, no matter where he went or what he did. So the other volunteers followed Otto as he headed for the Garza dog-runs, and all were astonished when Macnab presented to them the two widows, his stepmother Josefina and his adopted mother Maria, for the women were obviously Mexican.
The men appreciated the hospitality the two women extended and were favorably impressed by their well-kept homes, but what won them over completely was the discovery that Maria had been married to Xavier Campbell, the hero of the Alamo, after whom their county and their town had been named.
'What was he like?' they wanted to know. 'Where was the tree they hanged him from?' One man, about twenty, just sat munching tortillas and staring at Maria: 'Were you really married to Campbell?'
i was,' she said as her plump body moved about the kitchen.
Macnab gave his mother a farewell embrace and then kissed Maria affectionately. 'That one's a good Mexican,' the staring fellow said, but when they were once more on the road south he asked Captain Garner and Macnab: 'Say, 1 just thought of something. Isn't this troublemaker Benito Garza—the one we're supposed to catch—isn't he from Victoria somewheres?'
'He's Maria's brother,' Otto said with no embarrassment.
'What will you do if we catch him?'
'Arrest him.'
'Is he really as clever as they say?'
'He can ride better than you ... or me. He can shoot better than you ... or me. And he probably can think better than you ... or me.'
'Why is he raising so much hell?'
'He's a Mexican,' Otto said. 'He fought with Santa Anna.'
'Didn't we capture him at San Jacinto?'
'We did.'
'Why didn't we shoot him?'
'We don't shoot prisoners.'
At first hearing, this might seem a naive thing for a member of a ranging company to say, because these troops had already acquired a reputation among the Mexicans of Texas as ruthless killers —los tejanos sangrientes, the bloody Texians. But upon reflection it wasn't so absurd, because as Captain Garner himself explained to one newcomer: 'We rarely take prisoners,' which meant, of course, that after a fight, there were few left to take alive.
The lethal efficiency of the ranging company was multiplied by a factor of five by a fortunate incident which occurred as the riders were approaching the Nueces River. A supply officer from the Texas army overtook them to distribute the first official issue of weapons the men would receive, and from the first moment the rangers inspected this small piece of armament they sensed that it was going to remake Texas and the West.
It was a revolver, .34 caliber, with a short octagonal barrel of blue-gray steel and a grip that nestled in the hand. It had a revolving cylinder that enabled the user to fire five times without reloading, and was, in every respect, a masterful piece of workmanship. It was made by Sam Colt in some small town in Connecticut, and a salient feature was that any one part of a given revolver could be used interchangeably in any other gun. And for some curious reason never explained, the first users, all Texians, referred to this superlative revolver as 'a Colts'—no apostrophe, just a Colts, as in the sentence i whipped out my Colts and drilled him between the eyes.'
Understandably, the Colts became the preferred weapon of the ranging companies, and armed with these revolvers, Captain Garner and his men crossed the Nueces confident that they now had a real chance of cleansing the Strip of Mexicans. But when they rode to the crest of a rise so slight it would have gone unnoticed elsewhere, Otto's mind was attracted to other matters, for as he reined in his horse he stared in wonder at the vast expanse of emptiness that stretched before him—an empire off by itself, brown, sere, populated by rattlesnakes and coyotes. It was his first glimpse of the Strip, and it awed him.
It's like no other part of Texas, he said to himself. And look at that sky. Then he shook his head: I'll bet the traveler who gets lost in there stays lost . . . till the buzzards find him.
As he studied the tremendous land he observed various interesting aspects: Flat as that new billiard table Yancey Quimper put in at the Ferry. Brushland with scrub oak, no tall trees. But I'd hate to ride through that thicket without protection for my legs. Cut to shreds. In these decades the land seemed almost without vegetation, for the ubiquitous mesquite had not yet taken over, but when
Otto looked closer he saw the real miracle of the semi-desert as it prepared for spring: Are those flowers?
They were, a multitude of the most gorgeous tiny beauties— gold, red, blue, yellow, purple—forming a dense, matted carpet covering a million acres. It was an incredible display of nature's profligate use of color, so luxuriant and beautiful that although Otto had seen the flowers of Texas before, some of the most varied in the world, he felt he had never beheld anything like the minute blossoms of this exploding garden.
Captain Garner, seeing that his young assistant lagged, rode back and said: 'Immense, eh?' and Otto replied: 'One of those flowers would be beautiful. But a million million of them!' Garner said: 'They stretch two hundred miles,' and Otto said: 'I thought I knew Texas . . .'
'Let's get moving,' Garner said, and as they overtook the others he observed: 'Some say we should let Garza and his local Mexicans have this wilderness. Folks tell me they have a reasonable claim, but I say no. With Texas, you can never predict what value land is going to have. You bring water in here, you got yourself a gold mine.'
'And how do you bring water?'
'That's for somebody else to solve. Our problem is*that bastard Garza.'
Wherever the company came upon Texian cattlemen searching for cattle in the Strip, Garner's men heard constant compl
aint: This damned Benito Garza has been raidin' and runnin' off our cattle.' And as the men rode farther south they began to come upon the ruins of isolated settlements that had been razed, leaving not a shack or a longhom. The missing owners had been either kidnapped into Mexico or shot, and after the company had seen more such scarred remains, its members became decidedly vengeful.
'God help the Mexican I meet,' one of the men said.
One afternoon the company apprehended eight Mexican vaque-ros struggling to herd a large number of unbranded cattle toward the Rio Grande, and without asking questions, the Texians initiated a gun battle in which they killed five of the Mexicans. Captain Garner, by merely looking at the bodies, declared them to have been rustlers stealing Texian cattle, but when the interrogation of the three survivors made it clear that the cattle had legally belonged to the Mexicans, who had traditionally used this range, he had to concede that his enthusiastic riders might have shot the wrong men
'What shall we do with the others?' Otto asked, and Garner
weighed this problem for some minutes. 'If we keep them prisoner, a lot of questions will be asked. If we let them go, they'll get other Mexicans excited in Matamoros.'
'Hang 'em,' a rider from Austin County suggested, and it was agreed that this was the most prudent solution, so without further discussion of the legality or propriety of such action, the three trespassers were hanged.
Their leader, before he was strung up, protested vehemently: 'But we were on Mexican soil.'
it ain't Mexican no longer,' the rope man growled as he kicked at the horse on which the doomed man sat, hands tied behind him. With a startled leap the horse sped off, leaving the Mexican suspended.
Otto did not protest this arbitrary denial of justice, for although he was as firmly as ever dedicated to the preservation of law, he, like the rest of his company, refused to concede that the law was also intended to protect Mexicans.
In succeeding days, the ranging company similarly disciplined sixteen other Mexicans, but uncovered no trace of Benito Garza, who was known to be leading this attempt to control what he and others honestly believed to be Mexican territory. One fiery-minded Mexican shouted: 'Garza will teach you, you bastards!' That hanging did not take place because an infuriated Texian shot the man, even though his hands and legs were tied.
At the end of the tour, Captain Garner spoke encouragingly to his youngest trooper: 'Otto, how many did you get in the battles?' and the boy replied, with some pride, for he had not blazed away indiscriminately like some: 'Four.' Otto Macnab had found his occupation.
When the ranging company disbanded in Xavier, for any assignment was temporary, its members found their nation involved in a presidential election unlike any other that had ever occurred in the Americas. General Sam Houston, forbidden by the constitution from serving two terms in a row, had to relinquish the presidency in December 1838, but members of his Pro-Houston party, as it was called, were determined to elect as his successor some compliant person who would merely hold the office until Sam could reclaim it.
Party choice centered upon a distinguished fifty-year-old lawyer from Kentucky, Peter Grayson, who had served the new nation in such crucial posts as attorney general and as negotiator with the United States government in Washington. Grayson's candidacy
delighted Martin Ascot, who as a fellow lawyer spoke vigorously in his behalf among the settlers.
Houston's opponents saw Grayson as a colorless functionary totally unfitted for high office, an assessment which anti-Houston partisans were not slow to point out: 'A nincompoop, as bad for Texas as Houston has been. The only man worthy to be our president is Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, a proven hero, a man of great intellectual brilliance, and a general who'll know how to handle Indians and Mexicans.'
The campaign had become quite heated, and because of the brilliance and roughhouse vigor with which Houston defended his tenure, his supporters assumed that his man would win.
Otto, as in the days when he had not known with whom he wished to live, was confused by the haranguing, and he confided to Betsy Belle, who was not supposed to have any opinion about the choice of who would lead her nation: 'Betsy, when I listen to Martin, I'm all for Grayson, because Sam Houston saved this nation and I like his ideas. But when I hear Yancey and those others at the inn, I'm for Lamar. I think he has the right approach to Indians and Mexicans.'
'What approach?'
'Shoot them all. No place in this nation for Indians or Mexicans.'
It seemed certain, in early July, that Grayson would win, but on 9 July 1838 the Pro-Houston party received a bitter jolt. Because Grayson was so drab, so without charm on the hustings, so miserable a speaker and so without any reputation for heroics during the great battles of the revolution—which he had side-stepped by one clever trick after another—the Houston people had thought it prudent to keep him out of the country during the critical days of the campaign. As loudmouth Yancey Quimper shouted: 'They're afeerd to let us see how dumb he is. They let Sam Houston do his dirty work for him.'
But even so, Grayson might have won had he not, while hiding out at Bean's Station in Tennessee, fallen into one of the depressions to which he was subject and shot himself through the head.
This stroke of bad luck appalled Ascot and his pro-Houston cohorts, and some wanted to thrash Yancey Quimper when the big fellow chortled throughout Xavier County: 'God's will. He wants no more of Houston or his cronies.'
After a few days of sad confusion, the Pro-Houston party came forward with a much better candidate than the late Grayson. James Collinsworth, an able lawyer from Tennessee, had served Houston in many capacities, currently as the respected chief jus-
tice of the Texas Supreme Court. He was a handsome man, a gifted speaker and an able defender of Houston's policies, for he advocated conciliation with Mexico and peace with the Cherokee. After his first successful speaking engagements, Ascot and his friends agreed: 'We got ourselves a better man. Collinsworth will be our new president.'
The chief justice had only two drawbacks. First, he was thirty-two years old, three years shy of the constitutional requirement for president. No one in the Houston camp had bothered to check, and when troublemakers like Quimper bellowed: 'Even if he wins, he cain't serve,' the Houston men replied confidently: 'We'll take care of that when we get to it.' One enthusiast told Otto: 'You see, Collinsworth is already chief justice, so when the question comes before him, he can rule in his own favor.' Otto felt instinctively that there was something wrong with this strategy, and in quest of enlightenment he consulted Ascot.
'In the English-American system,' Martin said, 'any judge must excuse himself from a case in which his own interests are involved. We call that recusation.' He spoke with such clarity and with such obvious devotion to the law that Otto returned night after night to talk with him, and Ascot's little sermons formed Otto's basic attitudes toward law and order: 'Law is one of the noblest of all human preoccupations, for it establishes agreed-upon rules and states them clearly. It protects you and me from the excesses of the mob.' He always spoke to Otto as if the boy were an audience of fifty elders, and this was admirable, since the truths he enunciated were so advanced that they stretched the boy's mind. It was then that Otto developed his conviction that the law ought to defend the weak, erect protective barriers against the mighty, and clarify obscurities and conflicts. As a man who had ridden with the local ranging company and who wanted to ride again, he saw clearly that it would be his obligation to enforce just laws and dispense honest justice, and he vowed to do so. Therefore, he noted a contradiction in what Ascot was saying.
'But if Judge Collinsworth is too young, won't Lamar's people throw him out if we do elect him?' Otto asked, and now Ascot revealed to him the other side of the law: 'One of the beauties of practical law is that it enables men and women to do the things they want to, even if the printed law says otherwise.'
'What do you mean?'
'It's the law's responsibility to find a way.'
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'How?'
'To prove that things aren't always quite what they seem.'
'Could you defend Judge Collinsworth? And prove that he has a right to be president, even if he is three years shy?'
'I think I could find a way/ and Otto marveled as the young lawyer began to shift ideas this way and that. 'Yes, I'm sure I could come up with a solution.'
Judge Collinsworth's second impediment was a hilarious one: he was inclined to be drunk four days each week, so drunk that he could not even dress himself, and Yancey's unrelenting gang made a great deal of this, but the Pro-Houston forces had an ingenious defense. They did not try to deny the charge; too many citizens had seen Judge Collinsworth stumbling into a tree or falling into a ditch to claim that the Anti-Houston forces were defaming him. They did point out, however, that since Texas had prospered rather well under General Houston, who was drunk every morning, it was reasonable to suppose that it would do even better under Collinsworth, who would be drunk all day. As one orator shouted: 'You don't want a president who sticks his nose into everything, every day,' and this argument was so persuasive that it began to look as if the all-day-drunk Collinsworth would succeed the half-day-drunk Houston.
But one day in late July, Judge Collinsworth, while crossing Galveston Bay on a steamer, jumped from the aft end, thus becoming the second opponent of Lamar to escape an election fight by-suicide.
Yancey Quimper and his associates were now convinced that God was participating in the election, since He obviously wanted Lamar to put into operation his announced platform against Indians and Mexicans, and they ridiculed the Pro-Houston party's third nominee, a roustabout boat captain from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Robert Wilson did not have a history; he had a dossier which summarized scandalous behavior in at least seven different states. In Texas he had been a little of everything—land promoter, gambler, sawmill operator, soldier in the 1835 capture of Bexar, senator—but his behavior in the last-named job was so malodorous that he had to be expelled. Promptly reelected by a district that wanted to be represented by just this kind of man, he told his supporters: 'You have reinstalled me as a great man in spite of myself.' He offered himself to the public as 'Honest Bob Wilson, a man who is always as honest as the circumstances of a particular case and the public conditions of the country at the time allow.'