Texas by James A. Michener
When Mrs. Allerkamp came to the door to ask in heavily broken English: ‘Is it that you would like maybe some drink?’ he blushed painfully and allowed as how he wouldn’t.
On the way home he rode in great perplexity, for if he had shied away from Betsy Belle Ascot because she was so distressingly much older than he, all of five years, he was now ashamed of himself for being interested so achingly in a child who was obviously years younger than himself. Desperately he had wanted to accept Mrs. Allerkamp’s invitation and to sit in the kitchen, perhaps with the daughter, whose name he did not even know, but he had been afraid. However, when Ernst joined Captain Garner for the scout, Otto did contrive a tortuous way of discovering his sister’s name.
‘Franziska,’ Ernst said, and there the conversation ended.
At the Nueces they did not find Benito Garza, and for a reason that would have astonished them. Now thirty-nine years old and, like Otto, still unmarried, Garza was far south of the Rio Grande astride a stolen horse and leading two others acquired in the same way. He wore a big, drooping mustache, which had become his trademark: no waxed points, no fanciness, just an ominous growth of hair which gave his face its sinister look.
He rode in bitterness, a man whose world had fallen apart. It galled him to think that because he fought to retain the Nueces Strip for Mexico, he was characterized a bandit and that notices were plastered along the Nueces River:
$300 DEAD OR ALIVE
THE NOTORIOUS BANDIT
BENITO GARCIA
‘They can’t even get my name right,’ he grumbled as he continued down the dusty road. He thought of himself as a patriot, never a bandit. When he raided in the Nueces Strip, using ugly tactics in doing so, he saw himself, and justifiably so, as a defender of his land, land which his family had occupied long before even the first dozen anglo families had filtered in to Tejas. In recent months he had even revived his vanished dream of becoming Gobernador de la Provincia de Tejas, and he knew that to achieve it he must, as before, depend upon Santa Anna.
When he came in sight of Mexico City his heart quickened, for here he was to meet his hero, the general, and learn from him when the reconquest and punishment of Tejas was to begin.
But when he entered the capital and reported to military headquarters he learned that Santa Anna, now dictator with powers unprecedented, had as so often before left the government in the hands of others while he loafed on his beloved ranch near Xalapa, and Garza showed his disappointment. ‘Damnit,’ he complained to headquarters, ‘I’ve ridden all the way from Tejas to learn how my volunteers can serve when the new war begins, and I find the commander in chief idling on his ranch.’
A very young colonel, Ignacio Bustamante, related in some way to the politician who served as nominal president in Santa Anna’s absence, took him in charge: ‘Never speak badly of our president. He has ten thousand ears.’
‘I fought for him. I revere him.’
‘That’s good, because he wants to see you … at his hacienda.’
As the two officers rode east past the great volcanoes, Bustamante brought Garza up to date on the doings of their general: ‘I suppose you know that a long time ago some high-spirited young Mexican officers stole a few pastries from the shop of a French baker, and when the French ambassador was unable to collect damages for his countryman, France imposed a blockade. Yes, a real war with ships bombarding Vera Cruz.
‘Well, you know Santa Anna. Let an enemy touch his beloved Vera Cruz, and he’s off like a lion. As the French landed, he leaped on his white horse and dashed into town to defend it. As usual, he behaved heroically and had the great good luck to be hit by a French cannonball, which so damaged his left leg that it had to be amputated. Yes, our noble warrior now has only one leg.’
‘How does he get about?’ Benito asked, and the colonel explained: ‘He has four wooden legs that he carries with him in a leather case, one for dress, one for everyday wear, one for battle, and I’ve been told what the fourth is for but I forget. Each different, each made of different materials. The one for evening wear is very light, made of cork.’
‘You said he was lucky to have been hit by the French cannonball? I don’t think losing a leg is luck, even if you have four replacements.’
‘Oh! You miss the meaning! You’ll not listen to our general speak four sentences in a public oration, and he makes them constantly, without hearing an account of how he lost his leg in the service of his nation. He has fifteen clever ways of casually referring to it. Heroic: “I galloped into the very mouth of the French cannon and lost my leg in doing so.” Self-pity, with tears: “In a moment of great danger I surrendered my leg to the glory of my country.” Challenging: “Do you think that a man who has lost his leg defending his country is afraid of a threat like that?” His missing leg is his passport to glory.’
When they rode past the grim prison at Perote, where various Texian adventurers still languished in dark cells, Colonel Bustamante began pointing at choice fields and saying repeatedly: ‘Santa Anna has acquired this ranch’ or ‘Santa Anna had this owner shot as a traitor and now the ranch is his.’ The dictator owned nearly half a million acres on which roamed more than forty thousand cattle, all obtained at no cost, and Garza, proud of his hero’s accomplishments, failed to realize that Santa Anna’s stealing of land from peasants was precisely the same as the anglos’ stealing land from mexicanos in the Nueces Strip. Nor could he know that the total corruption made popular by Santa Anna was going to become a way of life in Mexico, contaminating government for the next century and a half.
Garza was astonished when he met his hero, for Santa Anna was extremely thin, his face poetically gaunt, his heavy head of hair beginning to show gray. He limped pitifully as he came forward to greet his Alamo lieutenant: ‘I lost a leg, you know, defending our nation at Vera Cruz.’ He was wearing his country-landowner leg, and before Garza could reply, he reached out, clasped him by the shoulder, and said with unfeigned enthusiasm: ‘In honor of the great days, my Gobernador de Tejas, let us see the cocks fight,’ and he led the way, now springing along, with no perceptible difficulty, to the small circular building in which he conducted his famous cockfights.
He had invited some sportsmen up from Vera Cruz, each with three or four champion birds, and for three loud and dusty hours the great dictator indulged himself with one of the things in life he prized most, the slash-and-flash of the cockfight when two noble birds, trained to the last degree and fitted with three-inch scimitar blades, fought to the death.
Next morning Santa Anna revealed why he had asked Garza to make the long ride to Manga de Clavo, and to Benito’s surprise, it did not concern the invasion of Tejas or even the guerrilla warfare there; it was an imperial concern which no visitor could have anticipated: ‘My dear and trusted friend, I seek a guard of honor for a deed of honor. In response to demands from the people of Mexico, and also its religious leaders, I have consented with some reluctance, for I am essentially a modest man, to have my left leg disinterred, borne to the capital, and buried in a pantheon reserved for heroes.’
‘Your leg?’ Benito asked.
‘Why not?’ Santa Anna snapped. ‘It gave itself in service to our nation, did it not? What leg has ever meant so much to a nation? Does it not deserve the treatment we give other heroes?’
‘It certainly does,’ Benito said hurriedly, and he was present when the leg was dug up, placed upon an ornate catafalque, and started on its triumphal journey to the capital.
He and seven other lieutenants, men who had proved their worth in battle, were issued special green-and-gold uniforms and horses with silver-encrusted saddles, and they led the procession, clearing the way through villages where entire populations turned out to honor the great man’s leg as it made its way slowly past Perote prison, into Puebla, and beneath the noble volcanoes.
Garza and Bustamante rode ahead into the capital, to alert the city that the leg was coming and to ensure that multitudes lined the avenues when it arrived. Thous
Two days later, with Santa Anna himself in attendance, entire regiments of cavalry in resplendent uniform, young cadets from the military academy at Chapultepec, a solemn procession of priests and religious dignitaries, the entire civilian cabinet and most of the diplomatic corps marched to the beat of seven military bands, leaving the center of the city and progressing to the historic cemetery of Santa Paula, where a cenotaph had been erected to the dictator’s leg.
Prayers were said. Chants were sung. Rifles fired. Santa Anna wept. The multitudes cheered. And soldiers such as Benito Garza stood stiffly at attention while flags were draped over the coffin and the leg was lowered into its new and stately grave.
Garza was still in the capital when a vast revulsion against the pomposity of Santa Anna surfaced, and he watched in horror as a mob tore down a gilded statue of the dictator in the center of the city, rampaged through the streets, and cheered when a crazy-eyed leader shouted: ‘Let’s get that goddamned leg!’ From a safe distance Garza followed the frenzied rabble as it broke down the gates of Santa Paula, destroyed the cenotaph honoring the leg, dug up the bones, and dragged them ignominiously through the very streets where they had a short time before been paraded with such majesty. He was aghast when the bones were separated, some going to one part of the city, some to another, and all of them ending in rubbish piles.
Through back streets he made his way to the palace from which the dictator had ruled with such unchallenged authority, and there he found him packing his wooden legs in their case as he prepared for flight. When Garza informed him of events at the cemetery, the great man sat heavily upon a trunk packed with silver objects and sniffled: ‘My leg! The symbol of my honor! They dragged it through the streets!’ Then, pulling himself up, he hobbled off to what appeared to be a lifelong exile.
As he disappeared in the dusk, Garza swore an oath: I shall drive every norteamericano out of the Strip. I shall ride and burn and kill, because that land is Mexico’s, and I shall hold it until General Santa Anna marches back with a great army to reconquer it. He had to realize, of course, that his one-legged hero was nine parts charlatan, but this deficiency was offset by the fact that it was only Santa Anna who stood any chance of defeating the Texians, and he dreamed of the day when fighting would resume.
By the spring of 1845 the varied assignments given the self-taught surveyor, Ludwig Allerkamp, had enabled him to know more of Texas than most of its other citizens, and since he had an innate curiosity and a love of nature acquired from his ramblings in the woodlands of Germany, he perceived relationships which others did not. He saw, for example, that this central part of Texas consisted of five clearly defined strips, each a minor nation of its own.
Along the Gulf, where his son Theo and his wife now had their store, Texas was a swampy flatland inhabited by mosquitoes of enormous size and birds of great beauty. Summers were intolerably hot and damp, but the remainder of the year could be dazzling in its movement of wildlife and the brilliance of its long sunsets. People brave enough to live here tended to love the loneliness, the vast expanses of marshland and the interplay of sea and shore.
Inland came the treeless flats, enormous stretches of prairie populated by wild horses and unbranded cattle. Low shrubs dominated the sandy soil and a thousand acres represented a small field, indistinguishable from a hundred others reaching farther than the eye could see. This was going to be excellent land, Ludwig believed, for the raising of cattle, and whenever he surveyed a segment he assured the new owners: ‘Your land will be of great value one day.’
He appreciated most the third strip, the one in which he lived, that mysterious area in which the land began to form small hillocks, the streams wandered easily down twisting valleys and, most precious of all, trees began to appear, cedars, cypresses and four different kinds of oaks, including a small-leafed variety covered with some dead-looking substance of crepuscular character. When he asked about the sickness which attacked these small-leafed trees, he was told: ‘Those are live oaks, and that’s Spanish moss.’ Very quickly the family came to revere the live oak as one of the great boons in Texas.
When the new capital at Austin had to be surveyed, Allerkamp had an opportunity to see at close hand the fourth strip, one of the marvels of Texas, a sudden uprising of cliffs and rocky prominences called the Balcones, which stretched north to south for over a hundred miles, delineating the end of the prairies and the beginning of the hill country. Here trees began to show in great variety, flat plains disappeared, and rivers ran through gorges. The Balcones had no great depth; east to west they were rarely more than half a mile wide, but they formed a remarkable feature which could not be missed. As Ludwig told his family when he returned from his assignment: ‘It’s as if nature wanted to give a signal: “Here begins a new world!” And she laid down this barrier of great rocks and hills.’ He told them: ‘Austin will become the most beautiful city in Texas because it lies right on the Balcones, land goes up and down, up and down.’
Now the government assigned him the task of inspecting the fifth and most noble strip, those marvelous, quiet lands which lay to the west of the Balcones. With his two sons, Ernst, home from his service with the Rangers, and Emil, he set out to explore the very best part of Texas, the hill country.
As soon as the three Allerkamps left the capital city they found themselves surrounded by low, wooded hills of the most enchanting variety, graced by exquisite valleys hiding streamlets. The scene changed constantly as they moved westward, now opening out into vistas, now closing in so that they could see only short distances ahead. ‘These aren’t even what they’d call hills in Switzerland,’ Ludwig told his sons. ‘Around Munich they’d not be dignified with names, but after the flatlands they seem like mountains. In years to come, I’m sure that people who live back there in the flatlands will rush to these hills for the summer breezes,’ and the boys could see a score of places they wished the Allerkamps owned for just such relief when the hot winds arrived in July.
Such speculation about possible homesites was not idle, for the Allerkamps still owned four certificates authorizing them to claim free land. The catch, of course, was that it had to be legally surveyed, but since Ludwig was now an authorized surveyor, he could pretty much select exactly what he wanted in this fairyland so rich in hills and tumbling streams.
It was in this frame of mind that the Allerkamp men came one afternoon upon the Pedernales River, which Ludwig had discovered the year before. In those days he had deemed the river remote, but now it seemed to run only a short distance from the capital, and he and his sons began to speculate on its virtues, and after they had surveyed it for about thirty miles, they stopped at a point where a nameless little creek wandered in to join the Pedernales from the north, and without any discussion they agreed that this was the land they had been seeking since fleeing Germany.
Very quietly Ludwig told his sons: ‘Let’s lay out an area of ten thousand acres.’
‘Our scrip allows only two thousand.’
‘We’ll pay for the extra.’
‘How?’
Ludwig stood silent for a moment, his face in the wind. ‘I’ve been saving,’ he said, and in the deep lines of his face his sons could see the endless labor and the deprivation he had suffered to earn his family their land.
‘Start stacking rocks at our corners,’ he said, and when their new farm was delineated the three men stood in the center, fired their guns, threw rocks and twigs into the air, jumped up and down as custom required, and then yelled at the top of their voices: ‘It’s ours! It’s ours!’
Back in Hardwork, Ludwig reported to his women: ‘Our farm will have the big Pedernales running along the south for about six miles, and halfway along comes this beautiful little creek
‘Is it like Germany?’ Thekla asked, and her husband replied: ‘Well, almost. The trees are farther apart. The land is rougher. The banks of the river are cluttered with debris from floods. And it might be difficult to build only with stone. You could never claim it was Germany, but it will be very congenial.’
‘Will there be fields for us to grow crops?’ practical-minded Thekla asked, and when the men assured her that with minimum effort large meadows could be cleared for crops, she said: ‘It doesn’t sound like Germany, but I’m ready.’
This finicky evaluation of their new home distressed Emil: ‘I saw deer and rabbits and skunks and so many different birds, I lost count. We have turkeys in the woods and fish in the river, and I’m sure the soil can grow pears and peaches. Father has claimed a paradise for us, and as soon as the papers are cleared in Austin we ought to sell this place and move immediately.’ He caught his mother by the hands and danced with her: ‘For the hills are beautiful, Mother! They are beautiful.’
When they contacted Yancey Quimper at the county seat they found him most eager to buy their property in Hardwork, and he also offered, in an embarrassing confrontation with the two Allerkamp seniors, to take their daughter Franziska off their hands. The Allerkamp men, who had begun to worry about the future of their unmarried girl, considered his proposal seriously, for as Ludwig pointed out: ‘He is well-to-do. He’s respected by Xavier County as the Hero of San Jacinto, and he’s certainly no coward, for he forced General Houston to back down from a duel. Of course, he’s not a German, but …’