Texas by James A. Michener
Then Quimper asked: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be working in Texas than in Carolina?’ and again she said: ‘Of course.’
‘Then what’s this beef against chivalry? I’m proud of the way I treat women,’ and she said: ‘Chivalry is a man’s determination of how he should treat women. It’s his definition, not hers. I would like to see a somewhat juster determination of the relationship.’
‘You ain’t gonna like it when you get it,’ Quimper warned. ‘I got me a dear little daughter, comin’ on sixteen. I would like nothin’ better for her than to build a good life here in Texas. Maybe a cheerleader at the university. Find herself a good man, maybe a rancher or an oilman out on the firin’ line. Ma’am, that’s true chivalry. That’s Texas.’
‘I’m willing to grant that,’ the speaker said, ‘but I’m trying to make two points. One, the values you’ve just defended are essentially Southern. Two, it’s easier to maintain them, Mr. Quimper, if you have nine ranches and nineteen oil wells.’
Il Magnifico startled our visitor by swinging the conversation around to where we had started the night before: ‘Did you know, Dr. Frobisher, that our boy here, Travis Barlow, is bein’ denied a major job up North because he’s Texas? Because he ain’t from Harvard or Chicago?’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘It’s true. It’s what we Texans have to fight against. And much of the stigma comes from the fact that like you said, we adopted all those Southern rules and customs.’
‘I suppose that’s right,’ she said. ‘I sometimes see the next fifty years as a protracted effort by the South to reestablish its leadership of the nation. We Carolinians and Virginians aren’t powerful enough to do it by ourselves. So we’re going to use Texas as our stalking horse. With your strength, your duplicity, we have a chance of winning.’
‘Ma’am,’ Quimper said, ‘you’ve made a heap of sense this mornin’. You did us great honor in comin’ here to share your views with us.’ He was growing more Southern by the minute.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said to all of us as she gathered her papers. ‘I stay here at TCU because I love Texas. I’ve been invited back to four different schools in Carolina and Georgia. Sometimes I long for that easier life, that civilized custom, but I stay here for one good reason. I want to be where the action is. I love the skyline of Fort Worth … the noise, the vitality, the wheeling and dealing, the expensive shops, the good restaurants.’
Rusk interrupted this song of praise with a blunt question which any of us might have asked: ‘Are you classifying Texas as a Southern state?’
‘Definitely not. It has none of the basic characteristics of Mississippi or Virginia.’
‘It’s Southwestern?’
‘No. It lacks the qualities of Arizona and New Mexico.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘Unique.’ Jamming her papers into her briefcase, she smiled: ‘When you reach the age of forty-seven, if you have any brains, you awaken to the fact that the race is going to be over much sooner than you thought. So if I have only one life to live, only one dent to make, I want to make it where it counts, in Texas.’
WHEN ULYSSES GRANT, ONE OF THE BLOODIEST GENERALS in United States history, assumed the presidency in 1869, his fellow officers serving in the West were jubilant: ‘Now we can settle with the Indians once and for all!’ and they made preparations to do so.
To their astonishment, Grant initiated a thoughtful, humane and revolutionary Peace Policy, which he believed would lure the warring Indians into some kind of harmonious relationship with the white settlers who were increasingly invading their plains. His proposal had several major aspects: instead of allowing the army to govern Indian affairs, the churches of America would be invited to nominate from their congregations men of good will who would move west to the reservations, where they would be in control. Their task would be to win Indian allegiance by kindness, by distributing free food and by setting an example of Christian brotherhood. Funds would be provided from the national treasury to support the new plans. In return, all Indians would be expected to live peacefully on reservations, where they would be taught agriculture and where their children would attend schools that would Christianize them and teach them to wear respectable clothes instead of deerskin and feathers.
When Captain Hermann Wetzel, a veteran of both the Prussian army and the Civil War, and now serving with the 14th Infantry on occupation duty in Texas, read the new orders he threw them on the table: ‘The General Grant I knew never signed such garbage,’ an opinion shared by most of the army, which saw its freedom to act diminished and its prerogatives shaved. Like Wetzel, many officers were determined to sabotage what they considered General Grant’s misguided order.
The religious group most eager to supply civilian personnel for the new system was the one whose principles were most antithetical to army methods, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, one of whose major tenets was pacifism; in this Indian challenge they saw an opportunity to prove that friendly persuasion produced better results than military force. Indeed, they called themselves Friends and their church the Society of Friends. They were a small group, concentrated mainly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but they had gained notoriety throughout the South for their vigorous opposition to slavery. Loyal Texans like Reuben Cobb and Yancey Quimper had characterized the Quakers as ‘damned fools and troublemakers,’ a view generally held throughout the state, for those who had fought against the Indians, especially against the Apache and Comanche, could not imagine how the peace-loving Quakers intended handling them: ‘It’s gonna be a shambles when Comanche like Chief Matark go up against them Bible pushers.’
One of the first men to be considered for this challenging task was a young farmer from the tiny village of Buckingham in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His place of residence reminded people of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, who had had powerful associations with Buckinghamshire in England. ‘Earnshaw’s a fine Quaker,’ they said of him, so when the letter from President Grant arrived, asking the local Quakers to nominate men qualified for this critical new assignment, the elders naturally thought of Earnshaw Rusk, twenty-seven years old and unmarried: ‘It’s as if he were designated by God to carry on the good works of our founder, the saintly Fox.’ Without alerting Rusk, they sent his name forward.
Rusk gave the impression of being saintly, for he was tall, very thin, diffident in manner and rumpled in appearance, with the detached behavior of some minor Old Testament holy man. Even as a young boy he had seemed gawky and apart, his trousers ending eight inches above his shoe-tops, his sleeves, seven inches from his wrists. His piety evidenced itself before he was nineteen, when in Meeting he was constrained to lecture his elders about what was proper in human behavior; and at twenty he ventured behind Confederate lines in Virginia and North Carolina, seeking to arouse the slaves in those states to demand their freedom. His innocence had protected him, for he had bumbled into three or four really perilous situations, only to find miraculous rescue. Once, south of Richmond, a black family whose members thought him quite irresponsible had hidden him in a cotton gin when a posse came searching for him, and in North Carolina a woman who owned slaves lied to the searchers about to arrest him, then told him when they were gone: ‘Go home, young man. You’re making a fool of yourself.’
But in the summer of 1865, when everything he had preached had come to pass, he returned to those slaves who had saved his life and to the good woman in Carolina, bringing them food and money contributed by the Philadelphia Quakers, and he had prayed with both the blacks and the whites, assuring them that God had ordained that they save him in 1862 so that he could return now to help them get started in a better life. The Carolina woman, whose farm had been burned by Sherman’s rioting men, warned him once more that he was making a fool of himself, but after he had stayed with her for three weeks, helping to clear away the ruins and make space for a new home, she concluded: ‘Rusk, you’re a living saint, but you’re not long for this
The officials appointed by President Grant to receive nominations for the new posts were delighted to hear of a man who seemed to fill every requirement: ‘He’s vigorous. He has no wife to cause complications and expense. And he will love the Indians as he loved the slaves.’
There was a dissenting vote, for an older man who had made his living in Philadelphia commerce, a harsh testing ground, feared that anyone as naïve as the recommendations showed Earnshaw Rusk to be was bound to have trouble translating his piety into positive action: ‘I’m afraid that if we throw this young fellow into a place like Texas, they’ll eat him alive.’
‘He won’t be going to Texas,’ a member of the committee explained. ‘He’s ticketed for a location in the Indian Territory,’ but the other man warned: ‘That’s pretty close to Texas.’
The committee, eager to announce its first appointment, overrode the businessman’s objection and informed President Grant that ‘Earnshaw Rusk, well-respected Quaker farmer of Buckingham, Pennsylvania, unmarried and in good health, is recommended for the position of United States Indian Agent at Camp Hope on the north bank of the Red River in the Indian Territory.’ Grant, also quite eager to get his program started, accepted the recommendation: ‘We’ve found the perfect man to tame the Comanche.’
Earnshaw was plowing his fields when a local newspaperman came running to him: ‘Rusk! President Grant has appointed you to a major position in the government!’ Unprepared for such news, Earnshaw asked to see verification, then stood, with the telegram in his left hand, reins in his right, and looked to heaven: ‘Thee has chosen me for a noble task. Help me to discharge it according to Thy will.’ But the reporter broke in: ‘Says in the telegram that General Grant did the choosing.’
When confirmation reached Buckingham, Rusk felt inspired to address his final First Day Meeting:
‘I must demonstrate to the army and to the nation as a whole that our policy of peace and understanding brotherhood is God’s elected way for bringing the savage Indian into productive partnership. I deem it my duty to work among the Indians as I worked among the slaves, and I am satisfied the results will be the same.
‘If William Penn could bring peace to his Indians, I feel certain I can do the same with the Apache and the Comanche. I seek your prayers.’
A cynical Quaker businessman who had traveled in Texas whispered to the man next to him: ‘William Penn would have lasted ten minutes with the Comanche.’
As Rusk spoke his hopeful words in eastern Pennsylvania, the rambling family of Joshua Larkin was preparing to establish rude quarters on a site Larkin had scouted about sixty miles west of the newly established town of Jacksborough, Texas. Army officials stationed at nearby Fort Richardson warned the Larkins as they arrived that they ran serious risks if they ventured so far west, and Captain George Reed, a gloomy man, was downright rude: ‘Damnit, Larkin, if you stick your neck way out there, how can we protect you?’
‘Six times in Texas we’ve moved west, always to better land. And six times we heard the same warning. The Waco will get you. The Kiowa will get you. And now you’re sayin’ “The Comanche’ll get you.” ’ Larkin, whose lined face seemed a map of the frontier lands he had conquered, poked Reed in the arm: ‘We ain’t never been as afraid as the army.’
‘And you ain’t never battled the Indians, the way the army has,’ Reed snapped, imitating Larkin’s raspy whine.
‘That’s because we’re smarter’n the Indians, and you ain’t.’
‘You’re from Alabama, aren’t you?’
‘Sure am.’
‘I learned twenty years ago, you can never teach an Alabama man anything.’
‘That’s why we conquered the world.’
‘Up to a point,’ Reed said, indicating his blue military sleeve.
‘You had the big factories, the railroads,’ Larkin said without rancor as he prepared his wagons for the final push. ‘Any time we start even, we’ll whip you Yankees easy.’
‘Why you so eager to move west?’ an older officer asked, and Joshua replied: ‘There’s two kinds of Americans in this world. Them as looks east and them as looks west.’
‘Meaning?’
‘East men look for stores and banks and railroads. They have dollars in their eyes. Us west men look for untamed rivers, deep woods, open prairies. In our eyes we have the sunset. And we’ll keep goin’ till we stand with our feet in the Pacific, lookin’ at that sunset.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of Indians?’ the officer asked, and Joshua replied: ‘We Larkins been fightin’ redskins fifty years. No reason to stop now.’ But as soon as he had uttered this boast, he added: ‘As for me, I never killed an Indian, never propose to.’
Next morning the sixteen pioneers departed: Joshua; his two married brothers; the three wives; an unmarried brother, Absalom; and nine children of all ages. ‘There they go!’ a soldier shouted as the wheels began to turn. ‘Israelites pouring into the Land of Canaan.’
They would head slightly northwest along almost unbroken trails until they intersected the Brazos River, the aorta of Texas, coming at them from the left. ‘And when we go along it a bit we come to Bear Creek, joinin’ from the north. Prettiest little creek you ever saw, and where they touch, that’s where we’ll call home.’
It was a sixty-mile journey, and since experience enabled them to make fifteen miles a day, they planned to reach their new home at the end of the fourth day. Joshua kept his brother Absalom riding ahead as scout, and repeatedly the latter galloped back to assure the wagons that on the next rise they would see wonders, and they did, the great opening plains of West Texas, those endless, rimless horizons of waving grass and sky. Rarely did they see a tree, not too often a real hill, and never growing things on which to subsist.
Through various devices the Larkins had obtained title to about six thousand acres of this vast expanse, at a cost of four cents an acre, and they realized that it was no bargain, but it did have, as Joshua had reported after his scout, four advantages: ‘Cattle unlimited, wild horses for the ropin’, constant water, an open range for as far as a man can throw his eye.’
There was excitement when Absalom rode back to inform his relatives: ‘Brazos River ahead! One more day’s travel.’ He was correct in his guess, and when the Larkins started their trip along its northern bank they felt as if they were once more safe. When they reached the confluence with Bear Creek they stopped on a small rise and surveyed their promised land: ‘Ain’t nothin’ here but what we’re goin’ to build. All ours.’
They had brought with them a few domesticated cattle, a string of good horses and six wagons containing a bewildering mixture of whatever goods they had been able to amass: cloth and medicines, nails and hammers plus the lumber on which to use them, spare axles and wheels, a few pots, a few forks and two Bibles.
The Larkins were Baptists, Democrats, veterans of the Confederate army, excellent shots and afraid of nothing. The three wives came from three different religions, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, but all knew ‘The Sacred Harp,’ that twangy religious music of the South, and now as they prepared to pitch their tents for the first time at their new home, they united in song. Their nine children joined in, and when the lilting hymn ended, Joshua cried: ‘Lord, we made it. The rest is in your hands.’
To the three sod houses they were about to build they brought an arsenal of firearms: Sharps, Colts, Enfields, Hawkens, Springfields, and each child above the age of five was trained in their use. They did not anticipate trouble, since, as Joshua had boasted to Reed, they had edged their way five previous times into lands recently held by Indians and had invariably found ways to neutralize the savages, principally by trading with them, giving them a fair exchange. Of course, when Texas Indian policy had become expulsion or extermination, their bold forebears had helped in the former and applauded the latter. But this generation, probing into a more dangerous section of the state and up against a more dangerous type of Indian, hoped for peace.
They
It was miserable work, and as the buffalo began to withdraw westward, travel to the killing grounds became more onerous, but always Joshua spurred his brothers: ‘Get horses. Get cattle. Kill the buffalo.’
His strategy was not accidental, for if the Larkins could assemble horses and cattle, they would possess the basis for a prosperous ranch, and if they could exterminate the buffalo, they would make the plains uninhabitable for the Indians. The Larkin brothers did not want to kill off the Comanche; they wanted to ease them onto reservations north of the Red River, leaving Texas as it was intended to be, freed of Indians.
‘Give us three years of peace,’ Joshua said at the end of one vigorous stretch, ‘and bring soldiers fifty miles west to a new chain of forts, we’ll have this land pacified.’ He never said that Bear Creek would be their permanent home, for he and one of his brothers had already scouted more than two hundred miles west to where green canyons dug deep in the earth, with plenty of water and even some trees. Given time and persistence, the Larkins were going to own those canyons.