Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘Floyd!’ his mother and father cried simultaneously, and the force of their words so startled him that he Caught his breath. Yet it was he who proposed the one solution which had any chance of saving this family: ‘Mr. Poteet’ll be coming along soon. Why not ride down to meet him?’

  As soon as the boy said this, his parents recognized the good sense of his suggestion, and before nightfall Earnshaw Rusk and Frank Yeager were headed south to intercept the cattle drive they knew would be coming north. There were no Comanche now to endanger them, and there was no risk of losing their way, for over the years the thousands of cattle heading north to Dodge City had beaten the plains into a wide, rutted path which a blind man could have followed, and in its dust they spurred their horses.

  On the first full day out they came upon one small herd headed for Dodge, and its riders said: ‘Poteet can’t be far behind. He never is.’

  On the third day they saw a huge cloud of dust, like something out of the Old Testament when the Israelites were moving across their desert with the help of God, and they galloped ahead with surging hopes that this might be Poteet. It was, and as soon as he heard of their plight he was interested.

  ‘It’s criminal for banks to take over so much land, and for the government to protect them in doing it.’ He sat astride his horse with only the left foot in the stirrup, as if he intended to dismount, but first he wanted to talk, and the three men kept moving their horses as he did: ‘You got yourself into this trouble, Rusk, through buying that fence. It was against reason and against nature. Now comes the dreadful penalty.’

  Rusk did not try to defend himself; he was concerned only with the loan he sought, and at this point he could not detect whether Poteet was going to lend him the money or not, but as the talk proceeded, it became clear that the drover sided with the Rusks and not with the bank: ‘Course I’ll lend you the money, how could I not?’ And before night fell, Earnshaw had the funds with which to save his ranch.

  ‘It’s not a loan,’ Poteet said when the two men tried to thank him. ‘It’s an appreciation for the business we’ve done.’ He paused to recall those rewarding years. Then: ‘You know, Rusk, you mustn’t think too harshly about Weatherby. He’s just a part of the system.’

  ‘What does thee mean?’ Earnshaw asked.

  ‘Life in Texas is like a giant crap game, a perpetual gamble. To succeed, you need grit, courage to take the big chance. Those who succeed, succeed big. A hundred men tried to drive cattle up this trail. They failed. Some of us, like Sanderson and Peters and me, we took great chances and we succeeded, big.’ He seemed to be right about Texas; everything was a colossal gamble: ‘Years back, Rusk, when I saw you gambling so heavy on that bob wahr, I disliked you for what you were doing to the range, but I had great admiration for what you were doing in your own interest.’

  ‘Why does thee say a money-grubber like Weatherby is necessary?’

  ‘Because he’s the agency that punishes us when our gambles turn sour. He’s the right hand of God, administering castigation. You escaped him this time, but don’t tempt him again, because if Texas is bountiful in rewarding gamblers, it’s remorseless in punishing those who stumble.’

  When Rusk and Yeager left Poteet next morning, they rode hurriedly back to Fort Garner, where they reported to Emma and Floyd: ‘We are, through the grace of God, saved.’ They then went to the bank, where with a certain bitterness they counted out the $135. And now a drama which was being enacted in many small Texas towns unfolded. Banker Weatherby, frustrated in his attempt to steal the Larkin Ranch by legal means, surrendered to the fact that the Rusks were going to be the leading citizens in the town. Knowing that he must in the future do business with them, he now displayed no disappointment or ill feelings. With what seemed unfeigned enthusiasm, he cried: ‘I’m so pleased you could scrape up your final payment. It’s always good to see a successful rancher make his land prosper.’ Then he made an offer which staggered the men: ‘Now, you don’t have to pay in full. If you wish to extend your mortgage, the bank would be most happy …’

  ‘We’ll pay,’ Rusk said.

  ‘Are you two men partners?’

  ‘Yes, in a manner of speaking. When a man serves me as well as Frank Yeager has, I give him part of my profits. He gets the two hundred acres north of the tank.’

  ‘You should enter that gift at the land office,’ Weatherby said. ‘It’s always best to have things in writing.’

  In early 1885, Rusk and all forward-looking people in Fort Garner were electrified by the news: ‘The Fort Worth & Denver City Railroad is planning to resume!’ And men began to dream: ‘Now maybe we can get a spur to drop down into our town!’

  In 1881 men of great ambition in Fort Worth and Denver had tried to link their two cities by rail and had started bravely to build west from Fort Worth, but had run out of money during the tight times of 1883. Their line had reached only as far as Wichita Falls, north of Fort Garner, where it came to a painful halt. But now, with more prosperous times looming, workmen were being rehired and iron rails ordered.

  When the good news was confirmed, Rusk became a cyclone of energy, his tall, awkward figure moving ceaselessly about the town and to ranches outside to learn whether they might join in offering the nascent railway special cash inducements if its engineers agreed to drop a spur to the south.

  In this enterprise he was prescient, because the histories of Texas written a century later would be filled with doleful entries recording the death of similar communities:

  Pitkin, founded in 1866, flourished for a few decades in the later years of the Nineteenth Century as a center for collecting rural products, but during the railroad boom of the Eighties the town fathers refused to grant the railroads any concessions. The tracks bypassed Pitkin and before the turn of the century the town had died, the last resident leaving in 1909.

  Rusk, with his keen sense of how the West was developing, realized that the continued existence of the town depended upon attracting some railroad that would speed its growth. Originally he had dreamed of inducing the main line of the F.W. & D.C. to swing slightly south through Fort Garner, but that plum had been lost to Wichita Falls. However, he could now logically aspire to a spur, and he was determined to get one.

  To that end he hectored local citizens to contribute funds with which he could approach the railroad barons in Fort Worth in an effort to convince them that a spur south was in their interests. Grocer Simpson contributed enthusiastically to the fund with which Earnshaw would approach the railroad men, and the flourishing proprietor of the Barracks Saloon also chipped in, as did Editor Fordson. Ranchers east of town were shown the advantage of having a railroad for their cattle, and ordinary citizens who wanted to be united to the larger world were invited to join the crusade, but Rusk was astounded at the man who volunteered to do the major work.

  The campaign had been under way only a few days when Banker Weatherby came voluntarily to the Rusk home, asked to be invited in, and spoke with a warm sincerity which belied the fact that recently he had tried to steal the Rusk lands: ‘I am hurt, Earnshaw, that you did not come to me first with your plan to bring a railroad into our town. It’s vital that we get one to come our way.’ Having said this, he contributed a thousand dollars to the invitation kitty and then proposed that he and Rusk leave immediately for Fort Worth, where decisions concerning the route were being made.

  Rusk had wanted to cry: ‘Look here, Weatherby, not long ago thee tried to steal my land. Now thee invites me to travel as thy friend. Why?’ But he remained silent because vaguely he understood that Weatherby was merely playing the game of building Texas. In July, Banker A does his best to steal Rancher B’s land, but in August, A and B unite to hornswoggle Rancher C. ‘Texas poker,’ someone called it, because sooner or later, B and C would be certain to gang up on Banker A.

  As they rode, Weatherby coached Rusk as to how they must approach the railroad men and how to make them an offer of cash rewards if they could swing the roadway south.
By the time they reached the hotel where the F.W. & D.C. directors were meeting, these two rural connivers were prepared to talk sophisticated details with the big-city bankers and engineers.

  Alas, they were one of nineteen such delegations, and by the time they reached the decision makers the route was set. ‘Gentlemen,’ the directors apologized, ‘we’re grateful for your coming to see us, and we appreciate the offer you’re making, for we know that such sums cannot be collected lightly, but we must allot all our funds to the main line to Denver. There can be no spurs.’

  Rusk was crushed, and like a child he showed it, but Clyde Weatherby, an adroit negotiator, masked his disappointment, wished the Colorado and Texas financiers well, and concluded: ‘Later on, when you do have enough money to run a spur south, and sooner or later you’ll have to, because we’re going to amass great riches down our way, I want you to remember us. Fort Garner, Garden City of the New West.’ They obviously liked this jovial man and assured him that they would remember, but on the return trip, Weatherby told Rusk in the harshest terms: ‘Earnshaw, I like you. But we’ve got to work in an entirely different way. The future of our town is at stake, and we either get a railroad to come in or we perish.’

  Before they reached Fort Garner he had a plan: ‘Let me have all the money. I’ll spread it around where it’ll do the most good. You put up thirty or forty of your acres and I’ll do the same with mine.’

  ‘What will thee do with them?’

  ‘Give them to people who will determine where that first spur to the south goes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To buy their support. To be sure of their votes when we need them.’

  ‘But isn’t that bribery?’

  ‘It is, and so help me God, it’s going to buy us a railroad.’

  If Rusk had been tireless in his initial work, Clyde Weatherby was remorseless in his follow-up, yet at the end of six hectic weeks he had to inform Earnshaw: ‘I’ve handed out all the money and accomplished nothing. There’s no hope of a spur south.’

  ‘Are we doomed?’ Rusk asked, for already he could see in other aspiring towns the dreadful effect of having been by-passed by the railroad.

  ‘We are not,’ Weatherby snarled, as if he were furiously mad at some unseen force. ‘The people we gave money and land to will remember us. But now I’m asking for one last contribution. From everyone. We’ll see if the folks in Abilene have vision,’ and off he went to the new Texas town that carried the same name as the famous old railhead in Kansas. Before he left he told Rusk and Simpson: ‘If they won’t come south to meet us, by God, we’ll go north to meet them.’ But when he came home, with no money left and no promise of anything, he told his co-conspirators: ‘Nothing now, but in this business you plant seeds and pray that something good will spring out of the ground. I have seeds planted everywhere and I give you my word on the Bible, something is going to start growing before another five years pass.’ So the men of Fort Garner watched hopefully as the years passed and the railroads inched out to other places but not to theirs.

  Three weeks after Franziska Macnab had buried her husband in the family cemetery overlooking the Pedernales, she received word from the capitol in Austin that her younger brother, Ernst, had died at his desk in the Senate chamber. It had happened at nine in the evening, when the Senate was not in session; he had been working late.

  So within a month she had to conduct two funerals, and this reminded her of how very much alone she now was. Her mother had died some years ago; her beloved father and her youngest brother, Emil, had been killed in the horrid affair at the Nueces River, and now Ernst and Otto were dead. The sense of passing time, of closing episodes, was oppressive.

  Her three children, with her encouragement, were preoccupied with their own responsibilities, but this left her in sad loneliness. She experienced a strong desire to reestablish contact with her only surviving brother, Theo, who had gained statewide attention in 1875 by his heroic work in rebuilding the town of Indianola after the destructive hurricane of that year. More than forty places of business had been wiped out by the raging waters of Matagorda Bay, more than three hundred lives lost, and when scores of older men announced that they were abandoning the site, Theo had stated to the Galveston and Victoria newspapers: ‘I’m going to rebuild my ships’ chandlery bigger than before.’

  And he had done so. Encouraging other businessmen, he had been responsible for the rejuvenation of the destroyed town and watched with pride as it returned to prosperity. His own store, which serviced the many ships that sailed into Indianola, doubled in size, and his agency for the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway Company established him as In-dianola’s leading merchant. He conducted his affairs from an office which stood at the land end of the pier that reached far into the bay; here he greeted captains of the Morgan Line steamers as they docked with cargoes from New Orleans.

  Despite the obliteration of so many businesses in that hurricane, Theo continued to envision Indianola, where he had first set foot on Texas soil, as the state’s gateway to the West, and his letters to Fredericksburg displayed this optimism:

  If you walked with me down our main streets you would think you were in Neu Braunfels, because two names out of three would be German: Seeligson, Eichlitz, Dahme, Remschel, Thielepape, Willemin. This is a real German port, with hundreds like me who saw it first from the deck of their immigrant ship and liked it so much they never left.

  We have our own ice machine now and are no longer dependent upon the refrigerated ice ships that used to bring us river ice from New England. We have a new courthouse, several hotels, at least six good restaurants, shops with the latest styles from New York and London, our own newspaper and all the appurtenances of a city. You would like it here, and any of you who tire of farming in the hills ought to move here quickly, for this is a glimpse of Old Germany installed in New Texas.

  Franziska, welcoming such letters, wondered whether she should move permanently to Indianola to be with her brother for the remaining years of their lives, but after several months of cautious consideration she decided against leaving Fredericksburg, for too many of her cherished memories were rooted there. And Otto had loved the Pedernales, the wild turkeys strutting through the oak groves, the deer coming to the garden, the hurried quail in autumn, the javelinas grubbing for acorns.

  However, in the spring of 1886, Theo did send a sensible letter: ‘With Otto and Ernst gone, you and I are all that’s left. Come spend the summer with me, for I am lately a widower. Besides, it’s much cooler here with the sea breezes each afternoon.’

  Turning the care of the farm over to Emil’s children, all of them married now, she took the stage to San Antonio, where she boarded the new train connecting that city with Houston, and at Victoria she dismounted to catch the famous old train that chugged its way out to Indianola. It left Victoria at nine in the morning and steamed in to Indianola at half past one in the afternoon.

  She joined her brother on Friday, 13 August 1886, and shared with him some of the best weeks of her life, for Theo spoke both of his burgeoning hopes for the future, which excited her, and of his memories of the Margravate, which reminded her of how happy she had been as a child. They were old people now, he sixty-four, she fifty-seven, and the bitter memories receded as the good ones prevailed.

  ‘Does your tenor voice … can you still sing so beautifully?’ she asked, and he tried a few notes.

  ‘We have a singing society here, you know,’ he told her, ‘but I yield the lead tenor to others.’

  On Sunday, when they both attended the German church at his suggestion, he apologized: ‘Father wouldn’t approve of our going to church, but times are different now.’ He then took her for a delightful buggy ride in one of his own carriages. They rode out to the great bayous east of town, where he stopped to explain the winds of a hurricane: ‘They come in three parts. A fierce storm blows from west to east. Tremendous noise and rain but not much damage. Then a lull like a summer day as the eye passes
over. Then a much wilder storm from east to west, and it’s the one that blows everything down.’

  ‘Why does one kill and not the other?’

  ‘Neither kills. Oh, a tree falling or some other freak accident.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘This does,’ and he pointed to the flat, empty lands basking in the sun, so quiet and peaceful that they could not be imagined as threatening anyone. ‘You see, Franza, tidal waves throw immense quantities of water onto these flat places, so much you wouldn’t believe it. And as the storm abates, it has to go somewhere, and with a great rush it finds its way back to sea.’

  He dropped his head, recalling that tremendous surge of trapped water that had destroyed so much of Indianola: ‘It took thirty hours to build up … high tides, rain, hurricane winds. It ran back in two, an irresistible torrent.’

  ‘How did you survive?’ They were speaking in German, and he replied: ‘Ein wahres Wunder. And prudence. I guessed that the retreating waters would be dangerous, so I took our family to the upper floor of the strongest building in town, not my own, and tied us all to heavy beds, not lying down, of course, just to the heavy iron pieces.’

  ‘And it worked?’

  ‘When the water swirled past, clutching at everything, we could see it sucking people to their deaths. It tried with us, right through that second floor, but we were tied fast.’ He chuckled: ‘It tore away my wife’s clothes, all of them, and she screamed for the rescue party not to save us.’ He laughed again: ‘Water can do the strangest things.’

  ‘Will it come again?’

  ‘Records show that once a hurricane hits, it never hits that spot again. That’s how I’ve been able to hold the town together. We know we’re safe. Only the cowards fled.’

  Indianola, under his driving leadership, had restored itself as the premier port in South Texas and many predicted that it must soon outdistance Galveston. It was clear to Franziska, from the respect in which the citizens held her brother, that this revitalization was due primarily to his optimism, and she saw that he was much like his father: ‘Remember, Theo, how during the worst days of our Atlantic crossing, he kept spirits high? You’re like him.’