Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘Why aren’t you in Texas?’

  ‘Because it’s a wilderness. Not a decent place to eat in the whole damned province. And besides, it’s a Mexican wilderness, and who wants to live in a country that can’t govern itself?’

  ‘Some Americans seem to like it.’

  ‘Right! Right! And if I was that kind of American, I might like it too.’

  ‘What kind of American are you speaking of?’

  ‘An American like you. Energy, courage, stars in your eyes … and willingness to live alone. Because, man, Texas is empty. Just wild cattle and untamed horses.’

  As he said this, the young man who had brought the mustangs to New Orleans appeared in the corral, and as soon as Otto saw him, he was captivated, for the herdsman was the first Mexican he had met. He was in his mid-twenties, whip-thin, dark-skinned, and clad in the distinctive uniform of the range: tight blue pants marked by a tiny white stripe, bandanna, big hat, boots and spurs. To Otto he looked the way a Texan should.

  ‘Show them how you ride,’ Ferry ordered, and with just a slight flare of resentment at being spoken to as if he were a peasant, the young man flicked the brim of his hat almost insolently, but then smiled warmly at Otto: ‘Is the young man good with the horse?’

  ‘I can ride,’ Otto said, and the young Mexican whistled to one of his assistants: ‘Manuel, tráenos dos caballos buenos!’

  From a hitching rail near the corral, Manuel untied two horses already saddled, and deftly the young man lifted himself onto the larger one, indicating that Otto should mount his, which the boy did rather clumsily.

  The Mexican then began to canter about the stable area, shouting to Otto: ‘Follow me!’ and a delightful comedy ensued, for the Mexican rode with skill, swinging and swaying with the motion of his horse like a practiced professional, while the boy tried energetically to keep up, slipping and sliding and nearly falling from his mount. But he did hold on, grabbing his horse’s mane when necessary.

  Ferry, Finlay and Campbell applauded the exhibition, whereupon the Mexican rider broke loose from Otto’s comical trailing to perform a series of beautiful feats, ending with a full gallop at Campbell, bringing his steed to a halt a few inches from the Kaintuck’s toes.

  ‘The boy could learn to ride,’ he said as he dismounted, and when Otto came up awkwardly, the Mexican helped him dismount and asked: ‘Son, you want to ride back to Texas with me? And help me bring another remuda up for Don Louis?’

  ‘Oh!’ Otto cried with enthusiasm. ‘That would be wonderful!’

  ‘Who is this young horseman?’ the senior Macnab asked, and as the rider continued talking with Otto, Ferry said: ‘Young Mexican from Victoria. South Texas. Absolutely trustworthy. What he says he’ll do he does.’

  ‘He brought you all these animals?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Where did he get them?’

  ‘In this business you never ask.’

  ‘What’s your name, young fellow?’ Macnab asked.

  ‘Garza,’ the rider said, smiling. ‘Benito Garza.’ He pronounced each syllable carefully, drawing it out in the Mexican way: ‘Beh-nee- to Gar-tsah,’ with exaggerated accent on the nee and Gar. Having introduced himself verbally, he did so symbolically with another flick of his finger against the brim of his big hat, and with that, he disappeared into the stables.

  At the inn where they were staying prior to arranging passage to their new lands, the Macnabs and Campbell met two authentic residents of Texas, well-educated plantation owners who had come to New Orleans to arrange for the sale of their products on a regular basis. After they had reached an understanding with Louis Ferry, whom they lauded as the best man in the business, they chatted about aspects of their new home:

  ‘We have great men in Texas, equal of any in Massachusetts or Virginia. We plan to erect a notable state with all the advantages of South Carolina or Georgia. There’s a spaciousness to our view. We can see clear to the Pacific Ocean. And a nobility to our minds, because we’re determined to build a new society …

  ‘Everything is of a vast dimension and we need men with vast potential to help us achieve what we’ve planned. Weaklings will be erased, by the climate and the distance if by nothing else, but the strong will find themselves growing even stronger. Any young man of promise who doesn’t catch the first boat to Texas is an idiot …’

  When Finlay raised several questions about things that disturbed him, the two men laughed them off: ‘The Frenchman said the food was inedible? He’s right. Abominable. But it can only get better. The Arkansas woman fled because of loneliness? She was surely right. My nearest neighbor is forty miles away, and I don’t want him any closer because then he’d be on my land.’

  But when Finlay voiced serious doubts about the instability of the Mexican government, he noticed that the men became evasive, and he was about to find out whether they favored the ultimate incorporation of Texas into the American Union when the men changed the subject dramatically. The leader, spreading his hands on the table, asked energetically: ‘And where do you propose settling?’ ‘I was about to ask your advice.’

  ‘Nacogdoches up here. Victoria down here. Both places wonderful for an energetic man, which I take you to be. But any reasonable place in between is just as good.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m down here at the mouth of the Brazos River. My brother-in-law, he’s up here at Nacogdoches.’

  ‘Where should I go?’

  ‘Wherever the ship deposits you. Landing in Texas is not easy. Sometimes the ship can make one spot, sometimes another. How much land you taking up?’

  ‘I’ve bought myself twenty thousand acres.’

  One of the men whistled: ‘That’s a mighty spread. How’d you hook it?’

  Proudly Macnab opened his papers, showing the men his authority for the occupation of twenty thousand acres, as approved by the Mexican government, in any likely area. The men studied the papers, then looked at each other and said nothing. Pushing the documents back to Macnab, they changed the subject to shipping.

  ‘What you must do is catch a steamboat that goes to the mouth of the Mississippi. A sailing ship will be waiting there to carry you to Texas.’

  ‘Why don’t the steamboats go all the way?’

  ‘They’ve tried it. Too many wrecks. It’s never easy to enter Texas.’

  ‘Where should I head for?’

  ‘We told you. Wherever the ship lands you. It’s all good.’

  When Finlay was back in his room he pondered the suspicious manner in which the men had reacted to his papers, and he began to worry that his documents might be faulty, so well after midnight he ascertained where the men were sleeping and went to their room, knocking loudly until one of the men opened the door. ‘I apologize, but this is terribly important to me. Is something wrong with my papers?’

  ‘No, no! They’re in good shape.’ The man tried to close the door, but Finlay kept it open.

  ‘They’re not, and I saw it clearly in your eyes when you looked at them. You must tell me.’

  There was no light in the room, but the man propped open the door and invited Macnab to sit on his bed while he sat on the bed of his brother-in-law. Painfully, hesitantly they told Macnab the truth: ‘Your papers are a fraud. We see it all the time.’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘No standing at all in Mexico. Land isn’t given out that way. That traveler in the next room without a single sheet of paper has as good a chance as you of getting land in Texas.’

  ‘How can such a thing be allowed?’

  ‘Two different countries. Your fake company is in the United States. The land is in Mexico.’

  ‘My God! A thousand dollars!’ In anguish Macnab leaped from the bed.

  ‘Completely lost,’ the man said. But when Macnab groaned, the men both spoke in rushes of encouraging words. ‘I didn’t mean that everything is lost.’

  ‘You can still get land, excellent land, but never twenty thousand acres.’
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  ‘You get it free … absolutely free.’

  After this burst of warm reassurance, one of the men pressed Finlay to sit back down, then patiently helped as his brother-in-law explained the situation:

  ‘You land in Texas wherever the ship drops you, and you establish contact with the Mexican officials. Being Scotch, I suppose you’re Protestant, so you volunteer to convert to Catholicism. We’re both Catholics, legally, but we’re really Baptists. Conversion entitles you to one thousand acres of land, maybe a little more because of your son. The big fellow with you, he can get the same.

  ‘If you’re lucky enough to be unmarried and can find a Mexican girl to marry, you could very well get yourself a league-and-a-labor, and that’s a lot of land. Or you could buy land from someone like the two of us who already has his league-and-labor … I have three, he has two. We have none for sale, but it goes for about twenty cents an acre and it can be very good land. Maybe fifty cents for bottomland along the river, and I’d advise you to get some of that. Or you can apply to one of the great empresarios who already have legal title to enormous reaches of land, and you can get that for almost nothing, and sometimes for nothing at all, because they want settlers.

  ‘I got mine in three different ways. Mexican government gave me some. I bought some. And Stephen Austin, as fine a man as you’ll ever meet, he was so anxious to get settlers on his properties that he gave me a large plot. Originally one bit here, one bit up here and one bit way down there. But I traded even till I had them side by side, and now I have fifteen thousand acres for a little over two thousand dollars. You can do the same.’

  The man on the bed asked in the darkness: ‘Are you married, Macnab?’ and after the slightest hesitation Finlay replied: ‘No.’ They were pleased at this information, for it meant that if all else failed, he could marry a Mexican woman and get a quadruple portion.

  ‘Why do they make it so complicated?’ he asked.

  ‘With Mexicans, nothing is ever allowed to be simple.’

  A rickety old steamboat carried thirty American adults, nine children and twenty-two slaves down the tortuously winding Mississippi south of New Orleans. Passengers marveled as they crept past beautiful moss-hung plantations of the lesser sort, for as a deckhand explained: ‘If’n they got money, they has a plantation above New Orleans, not below.’ Here the air hung heavy and insects droned in the heat as travelers prayed for some vagrant breeze to slip in from the Gulf of Mexico. Entire sections of land became swamps inhabited only by birds and alligators, swamps interminable, until at last the steamboat reached the strangest termination of any of the world’s major rivers: a bewildering morass of passes seeking the Gulf, of blind alleys leading only to more swampland. Often it was impossible to determine whether the area ahead was fresh-water river, or salt-water Gulf, or firm land, or simply more weed-grown swamp.

  ‘How can he tell his way?’ Otto asked one of the deckhands.

  ‘By smell.’

  The answer was not entirely frivolous, for as the great river died, the smell of the vast, free Gulf intruded, and soon Otto himself could detect the larger body of water.

  As soon as the vessel waiting in the Gulf became aware of the approaching steamer, its captain fired a small cannon to signify that all was in readiness, and Otto, seeing for the first time an ocean-going craft, shouted: ‘There she is!’ These last days had been a journey through a primeval wonderland, more challenging by far than that along the river to the north of New Orleans, and to see the sloop Carthaginian waiting motionless at the end of the passage was like seeing a light in the forest.

  As they threw ropes to the steamer, sailors shouted the good news: ‘We sail for Galveston!’ and travelers who had hoped to make that important landing cheered. Fare to Texas would be twenty-one dollars total, five paid to the steamboat, sixteen to the sail-borne sloop. But no transfer from one craft to another was ever made easily, no matter how gentle the sea, and now when the steamboat dipped slightly, the sloop lifted, and contrariwise. Shins were barked and baggage imperiled, but finally the adults were safe aboard the vessel, the children could be handed across, and the slaves were able to follow. The returning steamboat, having picked up passengers for New Orleans, blew its whistle three times in farewell. The emigrants cheered. And the trip across the Gulf was begun, with the passengers having only the slightest comprehension of their destination.

  ‘We’re making for Galveston,’ an officer explained, ‘but if the weather’s bad, we may have to put in at Matagorda Bay.’

  Galveston was some four hundred miles, almost due west, and since there was a sharp breeze from the southeast, the ship could make four knots, or about one hundred and ten land miles a day. ‘The trip won’t require more than four days,’ the officer assured the passengers, ‘and I doubt that it will be rough.’

  Otto loved the swaying of the ship, and whereas some of the passengers experienced a slight seasickness, he roamed everywhere and ate large quantities of everything. It was a holiday for him, but some of the travelers were agitated by the uncertainty of destination: ‘We hoped to put in at Matagorda. Our people are there.’

  ‘You can walk from Galveston to Matagorda,’ a sailor said easily, as if the trip were a matter of hours.

  ‘Why can’t we go direct to Matagorda?’

  ‘Because on this passage we never know. I don’t even know if’n we’ll be able to land in Galveston.’

  ‘What kind of ship is this?’ one man growled.

  ‘It ain’t the ship. It’s Texas,’ and the sailor outlined the problem:

  ‘Texas is a great land, I’m sure. It’s got ever’thin’ a man might want —free land, free cattle, beautiful rivers, and mountains too, I hear, in the west. But one thing it ain’t got is a safe harbor. None.’

  ‘It has fine big bays, best in the world. Galveston, Matagorda, Corpus, Laguna Madre. I been in ’em all, and they ain’t none better. Only one thing wrong with ’em. No way you can get into ’em. God made Hisse’f these perfect bays, then guarded them with strings of sandbars, half-assed islands, marshes, and ever’ other kind of impediment you could imagine.

  ‘This is maybe the most dangerous coastline in the whole damned world. Look at the wrecks we’ll see when we try to get into one of them bays. Wrecks everywhere. First steamboat tried it, wrecked. Next steamboat, went aground, and you’ll see it rottin’ there if’n we’re driven to Matagorda. The coast of Texas is hell in salt water.’

  The weather remained good, the sloop did make for Galveston, and the same sailor came back with one bit of comforting news: ‘Maybe I overdone it. This is a mighty tough coast, as you’ll see, but one worry we don’t have. They ain’t no beetlin’ rocks stacked ashore. And they ain’t none hidin’ submerged to rip out your bottom. Anythin’ you hit is soft sand.’ But he returned a few minutes later with a correction: ‘Of course, most of the wrecks you’ll see did just that. They hit soft sand, held fast, and then turned over.’ Otto noticed that he never said what happened to the passengers.

  But as the Carthaginian neared Galveston toward the close of the fourth day, a strong northerly wind blew out from shore, creating such large waves that as the sun sank, the captain had to announce: ‘Waves get that high, takes them days to subside.’

  ‘Can’t we push through?’ asked a man whose home ashore was almost visible.

  ‘Look at the last ship that tried,’ the captain replied, and off to starboard, rocking back and forth in the grasping sands, a sailing ship of some size was slowly being broken to pieces. On her stern Otto read: SKYLARK NEW ORLEANS.

  ‘It’ll have to be Matagorda Bay,’ the captain said, and only a few daring souls whose hearts had been set on Galveston demurred, for the others realized that any attempt to land there would be suicidal.

  That night, as the ship made its way southwest through calmer seas to the alternate landing, Otto remained topside, running with his dog along the deserted decks, while his father and Zave Campbell remained below at their evening meal. When
they were finished, the two men pushed back their plates and lingered in a corner of the cabin, piecing together a rough assessment of their fellow passengers: ‘Twenty-three families, but only seven wives. What happened to the other sixteen? Did they all die?’

  Not at all. The twenty-three men represented a true cross section of those coming into Texas at this time. Seven were married and with their wives along; four were legitimate widowers eager to launch new lives; three had never been married and looked forward to finding women in Texas, American or Mexican no matter. The nine wandering men like Macnab had left wives either abandoned permanently or clinging to some vague promise: ‘If things work out well, I’ll send for you and the kids.’ Few were likely to do so.

  Curiously, four of these iron-souled wife-deserters had, like Macnab, brought their sons along—one man from Kentucky with two—but none had brought daughters, and few would ever see them again. These were powerful stubborn men, cutting themselves loose from society.

  ‘On one thing I seem to have been dead wrong,’ Macnab confided. ‘I wrote to Austin asking if most of the newcomers were criminals escaping jail back east. From what I can judge, there isn’t a criminal in the lot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust my money with that tall fellow from Tennessee,’ Campbell said.

  Macnab was correct in his guess, Campbell wrong in his. Among these men there was not one criminal, not one who had had to leave Connecticut or Kentucky under even a minor cloud. They may have been men who had failed emotionally with their wives and families, but they had not otherwise failed as citizens. The popular canard that everyone who headed for the wild freedom of Texas did so because the sheriff was in pursuit was disproved, at least by this sampling.

  In fact, among the twenty-three, there were not even any who had suffered a major financial loss that might have propelled them outward from their society. Most of them had actually prospered back home, and this had enabled them to leave their abandoned wives in rather gratifying security: ‘You can have the store and the fields, Emma. I’ll not be needin’ them.’