Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  My questions about the history of my family and how my ancestors had come to settle along the international boundary with Mexico soon broadened into an obsession with the character of the southwestern borderlands, the nature of the peculiar ranching society that had sprung up there in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the whole history of human habitation in this hard country. But it wasn’t just the region’s past that came to preoccupy me. I felt that I was beginning to see, at least in outline, the whole arc of my particular American subculture’s life and death. There had always been something wild and dangerous about life along the border, but it seemed that a darker violence had overtaken us. Or perhaps an older darkness had returned.

  THE MAIL ROUTE FROM SAN ANTONIO TO EL PASO, 1850S

  I remember hearing talk in Del Rio about the bloody head that was found in a dumpster one day, and other body parts were rumored to have shown up across town. A drug-smuggling cult in Matamoros had carried out human sacrifices and made jewelry from its victims’ bones. Rising violence in Mexico, fueled by the perverse cycles of drug prohibition and insatiable market demand, had destroyed the local economies on both sides of the river. Piles of bodies, usually mutilated, often with messages carved in them, were routinely dumped in Mexican border towns. Hundreds of women had been murdered in Juárez, across from El Paso, where my mother lived for decades after she left my father. On the American side, an enormous law-enforcement presence had descended upon the region. All outbound traffic from Del Rio on Highway 90, heading both east and west, was stopped at Border Patrol inspection stations. People were routinely questioned about their destinations and private business. Helicopters and drones buzzed overhead. Sinister sedans with darkened windows raced along the highways. The border country was being transformed into an armed camp, and this militarization and the anxieties it heralded seemed to echo and recapitulate the history of the region in curious and unexpected ways. Down on the border, we were playing cowboys and Indians, cavalry and Comanches all over again.

  Borderland narratives, like the water that falls so infrequently in the great Chihuahuan Desert or the mine tailings that leach into the local groundwater, all eventually flow toward the Rio Grande. That drift can lull the observer into an easy complacency, metaphorical or not. I’ve done my best to resist those complacencies, to think through the seeming inevitabilities of technological and economic determinism. Hundreds of years passed before the border solidified along the meandering and shifting course of the Rio Grande; for generations the borderlands began a few miles southwest of Independence, Missouri. Migrants, traders, mountain men, outlaws, scalpers, buffalo hunters, speculators, and prairie tourists quickly entered the Indian territories and made their overland crossings at the sufferance of the Osage, Pawnee, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche nations.

  The Spanish discovered the Rio Grande again and again, eventually finding that the Río de Nuestra Señora and the Guadalquivir and the Río Turbio and the Río del Norte and the Río Bravo were all one great river that flowed southward from the mountains of Tiguex and through the deserts and wastelands of the north to the lush valley and into the sea at Boca Chica with its palms and savage river people. Three Englishmen who came upon the river in 1568 called it the River of May and, once they had walked all the way to New Brunswick, reported the wonders they had witnessed in that land of “Furicanos” and “Turnados” and “great windes in the maner of Whirlewindes.”

  Likewise, I have sought to rediscover the border and its rivers of water, people, data, and capital from different thematic and geophysical angles, sometimes journeying upriver, like the Spanish castaway and explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and sometimes downriver, but always moving aslant, both physically and metaphorically, cutting against the currents of institutional, governmental, and industrial momentum with side trips and excursions, historical and literary and personal interludes, as well as digressions and dalliances with a broad cast of characters. Their interpretation will serve to place our contemporary strivings in a broader context of history, landscape, and memory. I can offer no definitive answers to the most existential of my questions, but my hope is that a significant pattern will rise to the surface as I sift the remnants of the vanished world that nurtured my family from the time my great-great-great-grandfather led his family into the canyon lands north of the Rio Grande.

  What was it that brought my people to this particular place? Why would anyone attempt to settle in this unforgiving landscape? What were they searching for that was found here, in the devil’s own country, alongside his namesake river? My attempt to resolve these questions has resulted in many long journeys, in thousands of miles of travel all across my home state and beyond, and in untold hours of research, in archives both dusty and digital. I have followed the trails of my ancestors through six different states and at least fifteen Texas counties, tracing their habitations and professions and places of final rest. In tracking and describing my family’s migrations and peregrinations along the constantly shifting western borders of settlement in the Southwest, I have tried to create a portrait of the borderlands. Along the way I have marshaled the eloquence and insight of fellow travelers, those who followed similar paths and byways, as witnesses to my family’s passage. I have sought out the testimony of contemporary border dwellers, hoping to understand what has become of my native landscape under the watchful and unblinking stare of the border-industrial complex. Each of these journeys seeks to discover some kernel of the primordial fascination, the lure of the rough country, but also the impulse that drove people to forsake all that they had known and enjoyed and push off into the wilderness of a thousand sorrows, the Great American Desert.

  No reckoning with Texas history, however personal, can ignore the foundational experience of the journey, the expedition, la entrada, the filibuster, the crossing. As with many historical adventures, digression emerges as the dominant trope, with each turning from the definitive path leading us farther afield. Growing up in Texas, especially rural Texas, entails long drives to get anywhere at all, and the longest stretch of any transcontinental road trip is always the one that passes through Texas. Whether in the nineteenth century or the sixteenth or the twentieth, Texas was far away, no matter where you were going, and getting there was always hard. Even so, my nineteenth-century ancestors and their fellow travelers never stayed in one place for long. Their lives were but a motion of limbs.

  —

  My grandmother Anale Hodge, born in 1920, and I were sitting on the front porch of her house overlooking the Devils River. We were talking about my sons, while her son, my father, was shooting with them at a range he had set up in a small pasture near the house. They fired hundreds of rounds from his elegant bolt-action Sako .22 rifles. Leelee, as we call my grandmother, had come out earlier that day and shot with us as well. She refused to sit at my father’s portable shooting bench, as we did, preferring instead to fire standing up. She wore a kerchief, knotted below her chin, to protect her hair, carefully permed and set, from the relentless wind that whipped down the canyon across an old caliche airstrip, now grown up with prickly pear and mesquite. We shot toward a large earthen berm, at targets and little steel figures of rams, pigs, quail, and turkeys. It was mid-February and the weather was warm and mild, and we were enjoying the rare pleasures of being all together, at the ranch, as a family. My sons and I had been prowling around down by the lake looking for varmints, and now Leelee was curious to know whether there was any water in the riverbed, which is obscured from the house by enormous ancient live oaks. Only a few green puddles in the gravel, I told her, not quite stagnant, home to minnows and frogs. We saw all kinds of scat along the edges.

  Targets

  Leelee told me about fishing for bass in that lake when she was a girl, about riding her horse through its shallows and swimming there in the summers. She wasn’t allowed to go in the water by herself, of course, so when she was on her own, she’d creep right up to the edge and dig a little channel, line it with roc
ks, and let the water trickle in to wet her toes. When she caught fish, she’d take them to the cookhouse. “Mother didn’t like to cook them, and she sure wouldn’t clean them,” she said. “There was always a cook there. He cooked for the men. And he always had camp bread that he cooked on top of the old woodstove, and I loved it.” She grew up riding these ranches with the men who worked them. She’d go out gathering livestock in the mornings whenever she was allowed.

  Earl, her father, bought the Beaver Lake ranch when she was a girl of eight or ten. He was raised here in the Juno country but was born in Frio County, in South Texas, near the town of Moore. I asked her, not for the first time, how they came to settle out here. You never know when new details will emerge from a story, no matter how many times it’s been told.

  “Granny always said they were passing through. They stayed in a little rock house—it’s not there anymore, it was washed away years ago in a flood—down by the lake. Granddad was a great one to want to go look at some other area. He did that,” she paused, as if weighing her words, “too frequently.”

  Such understatement! Somebody told T. A. Wilson to go look at the Devils River country, and then, a few years later, in about 1891 as far as I’ve been able to determine, he packed up the family in a wagon or two and came west. My father remembers approaching our south fence through a neighbor’s ranch, along a dirt road in the 1960s, driving his father and grandfather, ascending a steep switchback, when Earl remarked that he remembered climbing that exact switchback in a wagon, when he and his family first moved out to the Juno country.

  “Daddy never said this,” Leelee continued, “but Mother said that anytime a good friend or somebody that Granddad particularly liked would come to him and ask him to co-sign a note, he would do it, and then he’d end up paying for it. That happened several times.” Again, that pause. “And it broke him several times.

  “He lost the Murrah ranch that way. Somebody named Murrah bought it, and Daddy bought it back.”

  But they lived out at the Murrah Place for years before her grandfather—T.A.—lost it, and the children went to school at High Lonesome, another ranch just to the east of the Murrah Place that her daddy later bought as well. There were eight of them, five girls and three boys: Earl was the oldest, then Amy, Beula, Homer, Callie, Beatrice, and Edna; Ernest was the youngest, born in 1900, when Granny moved to town. “She told Mother she was tired of having babies.” T.A. never moved to town. After he lost the Murrah Place, they moved to another ranch, closer to Juno, the Cully Place. But in those early years, in the last decade of the great century of the American continental empire, the Wilson children had to travel for school. They camped for weeks at High Lonesome, where children from other nearby ranches also came and stayed with the teacher. High Lonesome is up on the divide between portions of the Devils River watershed, an uneroded remnant of the great Edwards Plateau. It isn’t flat exactly; the terrain is rolling grassland savanna, dotted with invasive cedar, bounded to the north, south, and west by the meanders of the Devils River, with steep canyons dropping off on all sides. It was, and remains, fantastically inaccessible.

  While they were camping at High Lonesome, Earl watched out for the younger children. Once, when they were sitting around a fire, a little fox darted into the light from the outer dark and bit Homer. Well, that was a true emergency, for surely a fox that would invade a fire circle was rabid. Of course there was no rabies vaccine in those days, or any vaccines for that matter, but there was frontier medicine, folk medicine, and people made do with that. Back then everyone on the frontier lived in terror of rabies, which was common, and they kept mad stones as a remedy. A mad stone is an enterolith, a calcium deposit formed in the stomach of cattle and deer and other animals, that resembles a stone but is really more like a pearl that forms around a hair ball or some other indigestible object. The most desirable mad stones came from the stomach of a white deer, and a white mad stone was best of all. Usage was strict; mad stones could not be bought or sold; rather, they had to be found or received as a gift. The wounded person had to be brought to the mad stone, which was boiled in milk and then applied to the wound, which must be open and bleeding, where it would adhere and draw out the poison. When the stone was released from the wound and dropped off, its work was done, and the stone was again boiled in milk, which was supposed to turn green as the poison was released. Mad stones were also used for snakebites. The Wilsons had one back at the house, so Earl took Homer home on horseback, riding long through the dark night, to apply the remedy. Fortunately, the chances of contracting rabies from a single bite are far from certain. Homer lived.

  Anale shooting

  I got this story not from my grandmother but from her cousin Patricia. Leelee might have heard the story, but she isn’t one to dwell on the colorful details of frontier life. She is the most sensible person I have ever known. She is not sentimental. She does not dwell on the past. She is tough and practical, and she gets on with life when tragedy befalls her. And yet she is full of laughter and joy. In fact, she is probably the most consistently joyful person I have ever known. Her husband, Roger, for whom I am named, died in 1972, when I was five years old. Everyone called him Wally. Anale and Wally were married in 1940; she has been a widow for a decade longer than she was a wife. For those forty-four years she has remained the matriarch of our family and our family ranching business.

  When I was a child, I spent countless afternoons playing in Leelee’s big yard on Losoya Street in Del Rio. My grandmother’s yard was a private world, enclosed with high tan brick walls, scarred and pocked by fig ivy removed when I was very small. Within those walls stood tall, majestic pecan trees and a building we called the party house, which contained a precious pool table. Bird feeders always hung from a pecan branch outside her big kitchen window so she could watch the little songbirds as they darted in and out, squabbling and fussing at one another as hummingbirds buzzed and hovered like huge bees. Behind the party house and my grandmother’s plastic greenhouse were corners and shadows and hiding places. Her yard seemed so vast, the walls that bounded it so high. I had my ways of scaling them, and I patrolled that perimeter endlessly, usually with some kind of makeshift weapon, a plastic rifle, a sword, or an improvised stick pistol. When I came to a wooden gate, I would leap down and scramble up again on the other side. Standing on a gate was a terrible sin, for it would ruin the hinges and earn me some grievous punishment from my father, who was likely to come striding suddenly into the yard, shattering my private world, if Leelee spotted me misbehaving and gave him a call.

  Next door was my great-grandmother’s house, slightly scary, unwalled, with big white columns out front and what seemed to my young mind to be an enormous grove of magnolia trees. The magnolias were mysterious, and they could be climbed, though I was not permitted to do so. Yet climb I did, because I was a reckless child who never failed to find ways to injure himself. I never fell from those particular trees, though I climbed so high that the slender branches swayed and bent and threatened to break. The terror of falling made my body tingle. The pleasure was intensely sensual. The thrill of that fear was something I never mentioned to anyone. I could not explain it; I had no vocabulary for such feelings. When I threw rocks at hornets’ nests until the angry yellow and black demons attacked me—their stings, to which I was allergic, causing my arm to double in size with the swelling, or my cheek to balloon and sag as if I were chewing a gigantic wad of tobacco, or my eyes to swell shut like a matching pair of hairless puffy alien vaginas—or when I came running with cuts, gashes, scratches, punctures, and other bloody wounds acquired from falling off walls, falling into irrigation ditches, or stepping on rusty nails, my cautious, careful, reserved father would just stare at me and shake his head. He could not fathom such behavior. My recklessness was always a mystery to him. He was convinced early on that I possessed a death wish.

  But we were not talking about my errant childhood. I was trying to coax my grandmother into reminiscence, which was never easy. I
asked her when the big rock house at Beaver Lake had been built. Although I had plied her with questions about the past before, this was something that I had never asked. She had to think. Well, the house in town, by which she meant her mother’s house with its white columns and magnolia trees, was finished in 1940. She and Wally were married on November 30, and by Christmas, when they came back from their honeymoon, that house was finished. “Mother was furious with me, because we wouldn’t wait,” she said, slightly mysteriously, and did not elaborate. “There were no carpets in the house.” The house at the lake was not finished when my father was born, in 1942, but it was by 1945, when his sister Luralee came along. Leelee was eight or ten years old when my great-grandfather bought the Lake ranch, so it was probably 1930. That date brought me up short, because for me the Beaver Lake ranch had always seemed like the center of my world, but it was a relatively late addition to Earl Wilson’s country.

  “Daddy started out at the Juno ranch,” Leelee said, “buying acreage a little bit at a time.” His parents’ ranch was nearby, but he went out on his own. This would have been just after he returned from Galveston, where he had enrolled at a business college. He was in Galveston during the great hurricane of 1900. Everyone thought he had died, Leelee told me once. Of course, communication was slow, and it wasn’t easy to get word about who had survived and who had perished. Eight thousand people died in that storm, which is still the deadliest in American history, and Galveston, then a major port and the largest city in Texas, was leveled. Earl just showed up one day a few weeks later, to everyone’s surprise and delight. He leased his country at first, running sheep and goats, and slowly started buying rangeland near Juno. Eventually, he was able to buy the Murrah Place, the ranch where he had been raised, and he bought the High Lonesome ranch, where he had gone to school, and the Beaver Lake ranch, a historic and beautiful site where soldiers and Texas Rangers and stagecoach passengers had sojourned in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1930s, he was running the largest operation in the county, with more than thirty thousand sheep and more than one hundred hired men, who worked livestock, built fences, fought the brush, and farmed the fields in the fertile Devils River valley.