Texas by James A. Michener
‘Wading Bird!’ Earnshaw cried in Comanche. ‘What news?’
‘To see Great Chief Rusk.’ Earnshaw had instructed his Indians not to call him by this title, explaining to them that the true Great Chief was in Washington, but they had persisted in calling him so, because it reassured them that he could grant their petitions.
‘What does thee seek?’ Rusk asked, repeating the phrase he had used so often in his contacts with them, and as he said the familiar words a kind of joy possessed him: he was again the eager young man in command at Camp Hope and these were the wise chiefs and promising young braves he had been certain he could pacify; it was June again and there was hope both in the camp of that name and in his heart; but when he looked away from the old chief he saw that his wife was trembling, and the day returned to the present.
‘What does thee seek?’ he asked again, this time as a wary trader, not as a poet.
‘A buffalo, Great Chief Rusk.’
‘We have no buffalo.’
‘Yes. Up where the stream ends,’ and the old man pointed north toward the tank.
‘Have we any buffalo?’ Rusk asked, and Yeager said: ‘An old one comes wandering in, now and then.’
‘He’s up there,’ Wading Bird said.
‘What does thee want with him?’ Rusk asked, and the old man gave an anguished explanation which left both Earnshaw and his wife close to tears:
‘Not many days are left, not many buffalo roam the plains. All is forgotten. You and I grow older, Great Chief Rusk, and death creeps ever closer to us.
‘The young ones of few summers, they have never known our old ways. The hunt. The chase. The look of the buffalo when you are close upon him. The pounding of the hoofs. The cries. The ecstasy. The hot blood on the hands.
‘Great Chief Rusk, you have the buffalo. I have the young men who need to remember. Grant us permission to hunt your buffalo as we used to hunt. At Camp Hope you always tried to understand us. Understand us now.’
Rusk looked at the fourteen boys and asked them in Comanche: ‘How many have seen a buffalo?’ and less than half indicated that they had. He then consulted with Frank Yeager, who grudgingly conceded that with most of the ranch longhorns in the southern reaches, little trouble could ensue if the Indians hunted a buffalo up by the tank, so permission was granted, and the people in the stone houses watched as Chief Wading Bird arranged his braves for the chase.
He placed his two oldest boys in the lead, and he took position at the rear with the three youngest children, who bestrode their ponies with skill. When the formation was ready, he cried exhortations in Comanche, waved his arms, and pointed north toward the tank. With high-pitched cries the young braves set forth.
The two Rusks, Yeager and Jaxifer followed at a respectable distance, and after about an hour the cavalryman cried: ‘They see it!’ And there, at a lonely spot where the range tailed off toward the Red River, the Comanche came upon their ancient prey.
With a cry they had learned but had never before used, two boys in the lead urged their companions on, and the chase was joined. Earnshaw, watching this strange performance, had the fleeting thought that perhaps the lone buffalo understood his role in this ancient ritual, understood that this was his last chase, too, for he darted this way and that, over lands which had once contained millions of his fellows, throwing the unskilled riders into gullies from which their old chief had difficulty extricating them.
But at last their persistent nagging at his heels wore him down, and the great head lowered as if he were preparing to fight off the wolves he had resisted in his earlier days, and his feet grew heavy, and his breath came in painful gasps.
In these climactic moments of the last hunt, Emma felt a wild urge to spur her horse forward and drive the Indian boys away from the old monarch of her plains. ‘Let him live!’ she shouted to the wind, but no one heard, and she watched with pain as the little lads on their little ponies encircled the buffalo while the old man shouted encouragement from his post of guidance, and at midafternoon on that hot June day the young Comanche killed the last buffalo in the vicinity of Fort Garner. They did it ceremoniously, as in the old days when no rations were issued at the Indian post, those old days when the Comanche lived and died with the buffalo, prospering when it prospered, starving when it retreated beyond their grasp.
By no means did that final hunt of 1879 end in solemn ritual, for after the great beast had been slain and his liver cut out for the lads to eat, Chief Wading Bird rode back to the fort, ostensibly to thank his former protector. But when he appeared, Emma suspected that his visit involved not Earnshaw but her, and she was right, because when the boys had tethered their horses he bade them run off, leaving him to talk alone with the Rusks.
‘Great Chief, Little Woman who used to live with us, I seek words, important words.’
‘Sit with us,’ Rusk said, unaware that his wife was trembling.
She had cause, for when the three were seated on the porch of the house which had once been the Wetzels’, Wading Bird said: ‘I have brought your son.’
At first Earnshaw did not comprehend, but when Wading Bird repeated the words, pointing directly at Emma, he realized that the true purpose of this foray south was not only to hunt buffalo in the old manner, but also to deliver the son of Little Woman to his mother. His impulsive response, the one he could not have stifled had he wished, was one of generous acceptance: ‘Wading Bird! He will be welcomed in our home. And he will have a little brother, who now sleeps inside.’
But Emma spoke otherwise: ‘I do not want him. Those days are lost. It is all no more.’
The two men stared at her, a mother rejecting her own son. To Wading Bird the experiences which Emma had suffered were an expected part of life, the treatment accorded all prisoners. He could think of a dozen captured women from his warrior days—Mexicans, Apache, many whites—and when, after initial punishments, they had borne children, they had loved them as mothers should and helped them to become honorable braves. It was the Comanche way of life, and now Little Woman was being offered her son, and she was refusing him. It passed comprehension.
Nor could her husband understand. He had seen her joy when she was pregnant with their son and daily witnessed her extraordinary love for young Floyd. Because of her own tormented childhood, she had lavished unusual care on Floyd and would presumably continue to do so. As for her Indian son, Earnshaw had often speculated on where the boy was and what he might be doing. Now he learned that the boy was here, at Fort Garner, on a horse, his lips rich with buffalo liver as in the old days, and he believed that if Emma could see him, she would want to keep him.
‘Fetch the lad,’ he told Wading Bird, but at this suggestion Emma gave a loud wail: ‘No!’
Still believing that sight of the boy would melt her heart, he dispatched the eager chief, who summoned Emma’s son. Blue Cloud was eight years old, a fine-looking fellow, somewhat tall for his age, eager, bright-eyed. ‘Does he look like his father?’ Earnshaw asked with the Quaker simplicity which stunned those around him.
Coldly, staring right at the boy, she said: ‘His father could have been one of twenty.’ Then she repeated: ‘Those days are lost. Take him away.’
‘Emma! For the love of God, this child is thy son.’
‘It is ended,’ she said.
When the two men tried to dissuade her, she pulled the hair away from her ears and ripped off her wooden nose. Thrusting her face close to her son’s, she cried: ‘Remember me as your people made me.’ And she held her face close to his until he turned away.
Wading Bird took the boy by the hand and led him back to his companions. Sadly he mounted his horse, sadly he waved to the Rusks. Earnshaw, standing at the edge of the parade ground, nodded as the Comanche departed, the last he would ever see. With their broken promises they had broken his heart, and brought him to disgrace because of the love he held for them. He had hoped, during the interview with the boy, that this lad might be the agency through which he could rega
• • •
Earnshaw’s struggle to establish Fort Garner as a viable community still hinged upon that problem which assailed all the little Western settlements: ‘How can we earn enough income to support a thousand people?’ Normal farming was impossible; land even fifty yards back from a stream would be so arid that it could not be tilled. Lumbering was not feasible, for the grassland provided no trees. There were no minerals, and the village could not focus upon transportation, for there was none except for the rickety stage that ran spasmodically to Jacksborough. For the time being it seemed that only the ranging longhorns would provide any cash.
With some humility, Earnshaw confessed: ‘It may be thy longhorns, Emma, which will save Larkin,’ and once he conceded this, he began to take professional interest in the scientific breeding of his wife’s ranch stock, even going so far as to purchase from England two good bulls of a different breed.
If numbers alone determined which facts in history would become legendary, the relatively few Texas cowboys who herded their cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, or up the Great Western to Dodge City, or along the Goodnight-Loving to Colorado, would not qualify. For if you totaled all the cattle these men tended in a decade, you would find that they had accounted for not much more than twenty or twenty-five percent of the cattle produced in America; the vast bulk was bred and marketed east of the Mississippi. But what Texas lacked in quantity it made up for in the dramatic quality of its longhorns and in men like R. J. Poteet who herded them.
Stay-at-homes like Earnshaw Rusk, who never rode a cattle trail, also shared responsibility for the Texas legend, because they saw that if Texas beef was to be competitive with the better beef being produced in the East, a more rewarding breed than the longhorn must be developed. But when these far-seeing men tried to introduce improved bulls onto their ranches, they were greeted with scorn. Even a rational man like Poteet warned: ‘The only cattle that can stand those long drives north are Texas cattle, and that will always mean the longhorn.’
Rusk argued: ‘If they have railroads in Kansas, won’t we have them soon in Texas? Then our cattle won’t have to trail hundreds of miles. They’ll ride straight through to Chicago.’
Poteet laughed: ‘You ever followed the history of railroads in Texas? “Give us five thousand dollars and we’ll have a train at your town in seven months.” Fifty railroads have been organized that way, and not one of them has seen an engine on its tracks, and most of them haven’t seen the tracks.’ He studied the bleak land that encompassed Fort Garner and said sardonically: ‘You may get trains here about 19 and 81, if then.’ And he warned Rusk not to experiment with strange bulls: ‘You’ll produce an animal that can’t trail to market, and I won’t try to drove such weaklings north.’
Rusk’s own foreman, Frank Yeager, was displeased when Rusk, ignoring all advice, purchased two Hereford bulls from a breeder in Missouri, who told him: ‘Great idea, Rusk! Your Longhorn from Texas is an authentic breed, just like my Hereford from England. Your strong cows and my fat bulls will produce a majestic animal,’ and when Earnshaw received the bill of sale he noticed that it showed the name of his cattle with a capital L, just as if they had been Black Angus. But when the bulls arrived at Fort Garner, Yeager almost refused to unload them when they arrived by wagon from Jacksborough, but Earnshaw enlisted support from his wife: ‘Emma, thy bulls are here and Frank is proving difficult.’
‘I didn’t order them,’ she pointed out, but he pleaded: ‘They’re thine now. Please help.’ So she relented and persuaded Yeager to unload the beasts, but when he saw how fat they were, how listless compared to the rangy Longhorn bull that he preferred, Mean Moses, he refused to deal with them and left that job to the two black cavalrymen and the white infantryman.
But now a problem in ranch management arose, one that was beginning to perplex the entire frontier. Because the imported bulls were so valuable, they had to be grazed in a pasture from which they could not stray. This would have been a simple problem in Missouri, where there were ample oak trees for fence posts and soft soil in which to place them. But in this part of Texas there were almost no trees stout enough to yield wooden posts and split rails, and when they were imported, at prohibitive cost, it was almost impossible to dig post holes in the hard-baked, rocky earth. After many disappointments, Yeager growled: ‘If you want to fence in those precious bulls of yours, you’ve got to buy posts from East Texas.’ So a few cartloads were imported at a cost that frightened Earnshaw.
The pastures in which they kept the two bulls were so small that the animals grew fatter and fatter for lack of exercise, and it was Yeager’s opinion that if he put half a dozen strong Longhorn cows in with each bull, ‘them Longhorn ladies’ll chew them dumplin’s up.’ In this he was wrong; Hereford bull and Longhorn cow mated well, and began to produce stout, reddish-colored calves of great attractiveness and commercial promise, but this merely aggravated the problem, for now more fences were required to keep the more valuable offspring protected. Every time one of the imported bulls produced another calf—and there were now hundreds of such potent sires on the Western ranches—the Texas frontier was threatened a little more, for when a Longhorn worth only five dollars was replaced by an imported beast worth forty, procedures had to change, and Rusk was continually saying: ‘We must have more fences.’
In the early 1880s one of the most revolutionary forces in American history appeared in West Texas, a brash young man of such explosive enthusiasm that ten minutes’ talk with him was bound to produce visions. He was Alonzo Betz, thirty-two years old, out of a place called Eureka, Illinois. He wore a bizarre mixture of clothing, half dude-Chicago, half rural-Texas, and he chattered like a Gatling gun: ‘Folks, I bring a solution to your problems. I come like Aaron leading you to the promised land.’ None of his listeners could figure out how Aaron got into the picture, but Alonzo gave them scant time for such reflection.
He talked with his hands, drawing vast imaginary pictures, and as he warmed to his subject, he liked to pull his purple tie loose as if its tightness had impeded his words: ‘Folks, right there is the answer to your worries. I bring you the future.’
What he brought was one of those inventions like the cotton gin which modify history, and as soon as he revealed it on the former parade ground at Fort Garner, Earnshaw Rusk appreciated its applications: ‘This here we call the barbed-wire fence, because at intervals along it, as you can see, our patented machine twists in a very sharp, pointed barb. We also provide you with a post which even this child could hammer into the sod, and when you’ve strung three strands of this around your fields, your … cattle … are … penned … in.’
Frank Yeager scoffed: ‘My Longhorns’ll knock that fence down in one minute.’
Alonzo Betz jumped on the threat. He literally jumped two feet forward, grasped Yeager by the arm, and cried loudly: ‘You’re right to think that. Everybody does at first. From Illinois to Arkansas, I’ve been told “My bulls would knock that fence down in one minute,” just like you said. So let’s get your bulls and you and me build a little pasture right here wired in with my barbed wire, and we’ll put a load of fresh hay out here …’
He engaged the entire population of Fort Garner, eleven families now, in the erection of a corral, and all were amazed at how easily the thin steel posts could be driven into the hard earth and how deftly the wires could be strung. Several men and one woman scratched their hands on the sharp wire, at which Betz chortled: ‘If my wire stops you good people, it’ll sure stop your stock.’
When the little area was fenced, he shouted for Yeager to bring in some Longhorns, and he shouted—he never just spoke
‘It works!’ Earnshaw cried, and Emma, too, was pleased, but Yeager would not surrender: ‘If we’d of had Mean Moses in there, down goes that fence.’
Once more Alonzo Betz jumped at the challenge: ‘Let’s fetch this Mean Moses and leave him with the others overnight,’ and when this was agreed upon he said: ‘I’ll stand guard, because one thing I’ve learned. No honest man from Illinois can match a man from Texas when it comes to sheer deviltry. I don’t want you goadin’ your animals on with no pitchfork.’
So the test was run, with Betz and Yeager enforcing its honesty, and through the long night the two men talked, with Betz proclaiming the glories of the future when every field would be fenced, and Yeager longing for the past when the range from Fort Worth to California remained free. At intervals people from the houses came to watch Mean Moses destroy the fence, but instead they saw the hungry bull start time and again for the succulent hay, only to be turned back by the barbed wire, and when dawn broke over the treeless plains and everyone saw the fence still standing with Moses docile inside, the future of barbed wire in this part of Texas was assured.
But Alonzo Betz was still a showman, one of the best, and when day had well broken he said: ‘Now I want to prove to you good people that your Longhorns were really hungry during their vigil. Watch this.’ And he produced an instrument they had not seen before, a pair of very long-handled wire cutters. ‘The handles have to be long,’ he explained, ‘so as to apply leverage to these very short, sharp blades. Look what this means, how easy it is to handle barbed wire.’