Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘That would be a lot of fighting,’ Ascot said, and the farmer replied: ‘Us Texians can do a lot.’

  The town of Houston was a revelation: first houses built in late 1836, a bustling town of 1,200 by the spring of 1837, capital of the nation in May 1837. When the Ascot party rode in, they found movement everywhere—new stores being built at a frantic rate and eight principal streets, each eight inches deep in mud. Betsy Belle, trying to alight from her horse, felt her left foot sinking into a quagmire, and remounted.

  There were no hotels yet, but local citizens, inordinately proud of their metropolis, directed the visitors to a remarkable substitute, and when they were comfortably fitted into the private home of Augustus Allen they heard an extraordinary yarn from Allen himself: ‘Yep, my brother and I came down from Syracuse, New York, a few dollars in our pockets, dreams in our hearts. We bought, one way or another,’ and here he shrugged his shoulders to indicate the chicaneries he and his brother had engaged in. Losing his train of thought, he asked Martin: ‘Do you know how much a hundred Mexican leagues of land is?’ Before Ascot could reply, he said: ‘That’s nearly half a million acres, and that’s what we acquired.’

  ‘You have to shoot anybody?’ Betsy Belle asked, and he chuckled.

  ‘Well, we set aside the best of our land, here beside Buffalo Bayou, with entrance forty miles out there to the Gulf, and we decided to make this the capital of Texas. Yep, we give the government all the land they needed, free. We give churches all they asked for, schools if you wanted to start one. We give away so much damned land you wouldn’t believe it, and why do you suppose we done that?’

  They learned from Allen’s wife that her husband had been a child prodigy in mathematics and a college professor at seventeen, ‘the wizard of upper New York, they called him.’ And he made no apologies for what he and his brother had done in founding Houston: ‘We did it to make money. We give away lots to attract attention, then sell what’s left at a good profit. There’s no hotel for distinguished visitors like you, so I open my house to all who come, free.’ To close the gap between his prodigious learning and the local customers’ lack of it, he had adopted Texas speech and sounded sometimes like an illiterate, but on their third night in Houston, the Ascots were invited to attend a session of the Philosophical Society of Texas, held of course in the parlor of Allen’s house, for he was the treasurer and motivating force.

  As an afterthought, Allen had said when extending the invitation: ‘Bring the boy, if you wish,’ and Otto found himself among the founders and philosophers of his nation. Congress was meeting in Houston that week, so many of the legislators participated in the discussion, and Otto quickly realized that these men were much like his father: serious, sometimes robust in their humor and obviously committed to finding a constructive life. After a satisfying meal cooked by Mrs. Allen, she and Betsy modestly retired, as if incapable of understanding the august subjects about to be discussed, while the men listened attentively to two essays: The Federalist Papers, Key to the American Democracy, and Fielding’s Tom Jones: A Threat to Public Morals?

  Otto could not fathom either the concepts involved in these discussions or the vigor with which they were pursued, but he was proud when Martin Ascot entered the debate with such forceful comment that in the midst of the proceedings Mirabeau Lamar, president of the society and vice-president of the nation, proposed: ‘Gentlemen, our young lawyer from Xavier County has spoken much sense here tonight. I recommend that he be made our corresponding member from Xavier.’ The proposal was approved by acclamation, after which Lamar reported: ‘At the conclusion of our last meeting several members, including Anson Jones, Thomas Rusk and James Collinsworth, suggested that the topic then debated with such illumination be continued into this meeting, should time permit. Well, time does permit, and I would like our esteemed secretary, David Burnet, to state the question.’

  Burnet, an older man who had served briefly as president of the fledgling nation during its formative period, rose, coughed, and read the title of the debate which had so exercised the members: ‘Women: Why Have We Had No Female Painters or Musicians?’ and when the pros and cons of this question were discussed, often with great heat, even Otto could understand the proceedings. It was conceded by both sides—anti-women, eighty-eight percent; pro-women, twelve percent—that females were flighty, inconsistent, unable to pursue a goal over any extended period and apt at any moment to fly off the handle, and that these weaknesses disqualified them for any sustained intellectual or creative work such as the composition of a Mozart symphony or the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, two examples of art with which most of the members seemed to be familiar.

  But granted these deficiencies, was the female physique such that it automatically precluded greatness in the arts? The majority decided that it was. Just what these limitations were, Otto could not decipher, for when they orated on this fascinating subject, the members inclined to talk in a code that he could not penetrate. However, several speakers referred with great emotion to ‘the sublime work of art which women are capable of, the birth of those children on whom the future of any society must and does rest.’ Such statements were always greeted with cheers, but toward the end of the evening Martin Ascot rose and said: ‘I have heard much comment about the inability of women to sustain any effort through an extended period. Anyone like me who has lived on the far frontier and seen what a wife can accomplish is astounded by her energy.’

  From his seat in front, ex-President Burnet grumbled: ‘Ascot, you’re so young.’ And the meeting ended.

  Its effect on Otto was magical. Even he could see that these earnest men, stuck away on a frontier so different from either Baltimore or Cincinnati, were striving to maintain their interest in the entire world, and especially in those wellsprings of human behavior from which goodness came. He liked these men and their pompous oratory. He was proud of how a younger man like Martin fitted in. And he saw with remarkable clarity that he was intended to be a man like them, and not a man like Yancey Quimper. When he returned to Xavier County he would tell Yancey that he did not want the job at the Ferry. But what he did want, and where he would make his home, he did not know.

  If Otto was confused as to where he would find his home, Texas faced an equal quandary. Shortly after the establishment of its government, a plebiscite had been taken, and the citizens produced an irrefutable plurality in favor of joining the United States immediately, and upon any reasonable terms offered, but to their chagrin, the nation to the north rejected the offer. ‘We ought to march to Washington!’ customers at Quimper’s Ferry bellowed, and Yancey predicted: ‘We’ll see the day when Washington comes beggin’ for us. And what will we do then?’

  ‘Spit in her eye!’ the belligerents cried, but in his kitchen Martin Ascot provided a more cautious analysis: ‘This dreadful panic makes everyone afraid of making bold moves.’

  ‘I think what people are really afraid of is another war with Mexico,’ Betsy Belle said, but her husband struck the deeper chord: ‘It’s slavery. Those damned Northerners will never let us come in as another slave state.’ And he was right, because year after year the Northern senators excoriated Texas as a nest of backwardness and slavery, and annexation seemed impossible.

  Now the contest for the allegiance of Texas became an international affair, with three nations involved, and with debate in the Ascot kitchen divided three ways. Betsy Belle, who had learned French from a Louisiana slave who had reared her, hoped that France would assume the control she had tried to exercise back in the 1680s when Texas was theoretically French, and from time to time this seemed possible and even likely: ‘I should love to see this vast area civilized. We have great affinity with the French.’

  Her husband, now a serious student of English law, hoped that Great Britain would take control, and quickly: ‘We would fit in so perfectly with English ways of justice, law and government.’ He was, as a Southerner, so convinced that entry into the United States was unlikely that he actively
sought union with Britain and propagandized any who would listen, especially Otto: ‘Can’t you see? In states like Virginia and Pennsylvania and Carolina, we were English. It would be proper for us to reunite.’ He assured Otto that Texas rights would be protected and even extended in such a reunion.

  Quimper’s interest centered on Mexico, which was threatening to resume the war. No peace treaty between Mexico and her former colony had ever been promulgated, so that renewal of the war was a real possibility: ‘What we ought to do is let those damned Mexicans make a move against us, and then march right down to Mexico City and take over the whole country. They’ll never be able to govern it by themselves.’ Of course, when Mexico did invade Texas and capture San Antonio, which happened twice, Quimper could not believe that his Texians had allowed this to happen, and became terrified lest Santa Anna come storming back to burn once again the Quimper inn and ferry.

  Young Otto, listening to these debates, kept quiet, as usual, but his ideas on foreign affairs were beginning slowly to solidify, and had he been asked for his opinion, he would have said: ‘I had enough of foreigners with those Baltimore Germans. I don’t want France or England, either one. And I hate the Mexicans for what they did at the Alamo and Goliad.’ What did he advocate? He told no one, but he had firm beliefs: We shouldn’t march to Mexico City, like Yancey says, although we could do it easy. We should go clear to Panama, and then maybe take Canada, too. He could see no reason why all of North America should not be Texian, except that the eastern seaboard, which was already American, could stay that way. Then, if the United States should some day wish to join Texas, it would be welcome.

  The internal affairs of the nation were also maturing, but not always in the direction intended. All observers agreed that Texas could never become a first-class nation unless it developed both a harbor on the Gulf for ocean-going vessels, and steamboats for transit up the three principal rivers, Trinity, Brazos, Colorado. Unfortunately, immense sandbars, tenacious and drifting, blockaded all available harbors, especially Galveston’s, so that sometimes two ships out of five would not make the wharves, with lives and cargo alike being lost.

  River traffic was even less successful, because here, too, forbidding sandbars menaced any ship that tried to enter from the Gulf, and those that did succeed immediately encountered snags, sunken logs and smaller sandbars, and such twists in the course that boats could negotiate the worst corners only with the help of ropes dragged along the shore by sweating passengers who debarked to do the hauling.

  Occasionally, some daring vessel would make it as far upriver as Quimper’s Ferry, but two that did were trapped by falling water and spent the summer there. Yet it was an unbroken act of faith, all along the rivers, that ‘one of these days we’ll see scheduled boats landing at that dock.’ In the meantime, the loss of shipping was disastrous: Ocean sunk at Brazoria; Clematis sunk trying to get to Brazoria; Mustang sunk at Jones Landing; Lady Byron sunk near Richmond; Creole Queen and seven others sunk trying to get into the Brazos.

  But when this doleful litany was recited at Quimper’s inn, Yancey insisted, with most of the men supporting him: ‘When a Texian starts to do something, he does it. We’ll have steamboats up here yet.’ The same prediction was made along both the Trinity and the Colorado, where losses paralleled those on the Brazos.

  Education was also a function of society about which something was going to be done … one of these days. The nation could not afford to spend what little money it could accumulate on free schools, so there were none, but it did allocate liberal portions of the only currency it did have, land, to schools. Xavier County, for example, was awarded 17,712 of its choicest acres, but no way was found to turn this into cash, so no school was founded.

  However, the county did eventually offer some education, for after the children of Xavier had gone some years without schooling, the Reverend Joel Job Harrison, tall and fiery and with a wife who could cook, appeared with handbills announcing his intention to open a school: ‘First course: reading, writing, spelling, multiplication tables, $1.50 per month. Second course: arithmetic, grammar, oratory, astronomy, $2.00 a month. Third course: Latin, Greek, algebra, geography, the copperplate, $3.00 a month. Mrs. Harrison will accept a few girls and boys in her home, good table, Christian discourse.’ To inquiring parents, Reverend Harrison gave these assurances: ‘I am an ordained minister, Methodist faith but courteous to all. I am proficient in the subjects offered. And I can promise firm discipline, for I will brook no insolence or insubordination, since I believe I can whip all but the very biggest boys in fistfighting.’ He called his one-room school, a reasonably good one, the University of Xavier.

  The citizens of Texas sometimes acquired a peculiar insight into how their nation functioned. When General Felix Huston, no relation to the president, was to be replaced as commander in chief of the Texian forces by Albert Sidney Johnston, the former, refusing to cede office to the latter, warned Johnston that if he wanted the command, he would have to duel Huston for it, and when the duel took place, Huston shot Johnston in the behind and held on to his command. Said the enlisted men who witnessed the duel: ‘It was a fair fight. If a man wants to lead the Texian army, he better be prepared to fight for the job.’

  But always the limiting factor was this strangling lack of currency, and when the distressed nation, swamped in debt, tried to salvage itself by printing two million dollars’ worth of ‘red-back bills’ supported by no collateral except the government’s word and faith, citizens evaluated the issue realistically. On the first day it was issued, a dollar bill was worth fifty cents, a few days later, thirty cents, then ten cents and four cents, until it bottomed out at an appalling two cents.

  Shocked by this experience, the government sought another solution: ‘We’ll encourage private firms with good reputations to issue their own currency.’

  ‘Backed by what?’ cynics asked, and the government said: ‘Their goods. Their mills.’

  The experiment was tried, and a relieved Texas watched as this private money system stabilized at about eighty cents on the dollar. One firm whose notes ranked even higher announced that it was backing them with ‘every item of our merchandise, our steamer Claribel, eighteen nigger slaves and our sawmill.’

  In Xavier County, Yancey Quimper planned to print five thousand dollars’ worth of bills ‘redeemable at the Ferry,’ but since he could not specify redeemable in what, the government ordered him to desist, so Xavier continued to suffer.

  However, Yancey did find a way to profit from the emergency, for he let it be known that he stood ready to exchange what little cash he had for any land certificates in the possession of San Jacinto veterans, and Otto watched as a shattered chain of young men wandered in with certificates that they sold for two and three cents an acre, and glad they were to receive even those small amounts.

  When Otto learned what Yancey was doing with these papers, he was amazed. One day a European gentleman, neither French nor German but something else, stopped by the inn, behaving as if he had been there before, and he gave Yancey real money for a stack of the certificates. When he was gone, Otto asked: ‘What’s he do with them?’ and Yancey said: ‘Peddles them through Europe. Everybody wants to come to Texas.’

  ‘Even when we have no money?’ and Yancey said: ‘To people who know, Texas is still heaven.’

  He was right in this assessment, for despite continuous setbacks, the dogged Texians strove to forge a nation based upon distinct characteristics, and none was more basic than the Texian’s ability to absorb temporary setbacks. An impartial observer from either London or Boston, evaluating the new nation during this tempestuous decade, would have predicted failure, for nothing seemed to work, but he would have underestimated the capacity of the Texian to take enormous risks, sustained by the conviction that ‘sooner or later, things will work out.’

  Thus the Allen brothers could speculate in Houston real estate, hoping that land which they bought at twenty cents an acre would soon be worth two hu
ndred dollars; Reverend Joel Job Harrison could call his cabin-school a university in the honest belief that it would some day become one; and Yancey Quimper could spend his last penny on land certificates, trusting that dreamers in Europe would grab them at inflated prices. Everywhere this faith in the future prevailed.

  In the midst of Otto’s confusion as to his future, the Texas government circulated through the counties a document which would lead to the creation of one of the cherished symbols of Texas life. It called for volunteers to man a unique corps whose nature could best be explained by stating what it was not.

  First, it was not a police force with uniforms, specified duties and restricted terrains of operation. Particularly, it would not be subject to supervision by county authorities.

  Second, it was not a branch of the army with highly organized structure and national obligations. The new force would have no distinguishing uniforms, no government-issued arms, no epaulet distinctions, no medals, no drill. Rarely would it perform in battle formation and never would it parade.

  Finally, it was not a secret detective agency, working under the command of any district attorney, for even though it would often perform detective functions, its allegiance was to the national government, which insulated it from petty local pressures.

  What would this potentially powerful new arm of government be called? During one discussion at the ramshackle capital a proponent had finished making the point that ‘the men will not be tied down to any one locality, they will range all over,’ and someone suggested: ‘Let’s call them ranging companies.’ And thus were born the famous ranging units—no set duties: ‘Just range the countryside and keep order.’

  The unit to be enrolled from the counties centering on Xavier would be commanded by Captain Sam Garner, distinguished veteran of San Jacinto, twenty-four years old and as tall and thin as an unclothed scarecrow. His general responsibility would be along the north shore of the Nueces River, and as soon as this was known, the toughest men flocked to his temporary headquarters in Campbell, because to serve along what was called the Nueces Strip was to serve in the wildest, most dangerous and challenging part of the new nation.