Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  That was evidently true, Olmsted observes rather mordantly. The cattleman lived in a rude one-room cabin, seven by seven feet, with his family. There were three doors and no window. A bed filled a large part of the room. Some wooden boxes served as storage. Everyone sat and ate with winter clothes on, hat and coat on. The wind blew right through the walls. “As I sat in the chimney-corner I could put both my hands out, one laid on the other, between the stones of the fire-place and the logs of the wall.”

  Common topics of conversation among Texans were the ridiculous doings of Senator Sam Houston and complaints “about niggers.”

  Austin was a pleasant town, if somewhat exposed on the thinly settled western frontier, “at a point the speculative, rather than the actual, centre of the state.” Olmsted was surprised to see how many drinking and gambling shops there were, “but not one book-store.” As usual, the cuisine consisted of the “eternal fry, pone and coffee.” Wheat flour was rare, “too much trouble,” and the butter usually rancid, though Austin did have a German baker.

  As Olmsted moves westward, the character of the prairies changes as well: “Live oaks, standing alone or in picturesque groups near and far upon the clean sward which rolled in long waves that took, on their various slopes, bright light or half shadows from the afternoon sun, contributed mainly to an effect which was very new and striking, though still natural, like a happy new melody.” So pleased were they that they stopped and sketched the vista, unaware that the scene would repeat itself a thousand times, for they had entered a vast terrain that covers what Olmsted naturally called West Texas, it being the westernmost settled area, but that we would term Central Texas. Here, too, the plantations and ranches he encountered began to change. They were well-ordered and neat. At one, the house stood near a spring, “tastefully grottoed with heavy limestone rocks,” now covered in moss under the impetuous stream that gushed forth into a delightful gurgling current. He felt as if he were in Virginia, or Italy. Other travelers were staying at this plantation, and over a meal that included wheat bread the conversation turned to the Germans, whom the Texans called “Dutch.” They were suspicious about the Germans, and accusations of “agrarianism” were cast. An odd aspersion, Olmsted thought, in an overwhelmingly agrarian state, which could only mean the Germans were abolitionists and free laborites.

  Meeting German merchants in the towns was to be expected, but Olmsted had not thought he would find such a large number of German settlers along the western frontier. In Bastrop he found a copy of the San Antonio–Zeitung, which he thought far better than any other Texas newspaper. Olmsted was delighted; he loved the Germans. They were free-minded and “thought it better that all men should be free.” They sang arias from Don Giovanni to one another in the evenings. There were seven wagon factories in the German settlement of Neu-Braunfels. There he stayed at a delightful inn that could easily have been found on the Rhine. Everyone was cultivated, educated; they read books! Cheerful little troops of children carrying knapsacks of books marched off to school in the morning. People made butter and delicious wheat bread. Here, at last, he had found civilization in Texas.

  Many of the German immigrants were poor, but their condition was rising. Every year they improved their holdings. Some were refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, liberals who lost everything when the reaction set in. Near Sisterdale, set in a lovely valley adjacent to the Guadalupe River, he met a judge who had been an intimate of Humboldt’s, an acquaintance of Bettina von Arnim’s and Goethe’s. Sisterdale, also known as the Latin Settlement, had been founded as a kind of communist utopia, more intellectual and spiritual than revolutionary, and Marx’s brother-in-law Edgar von Westphalen was an early immigrant. One evening, after a dinner party, the gathered neighbors danced and sang, accompanied by a piano. “I think, if one or two of the German tyrants I could mention, could look in upon us now, they would display some chagrin at our enjoyment,” one of the immigrants confided to Olmsted, “for there is hardly a gentleman in this company whom they have not condemned to death, or to imprisonment for life.”

  A spring, Central Texas

  Delighted by the picturesque jumble of buildings, races, languages, and costumes of San Antonio, Olmsted could only compare it to New Orleans. He admired the ease and freedom of the city’s Mexican culture, as well as the evident comfort of the young women with their bodies, whose loose dresses “seemed lazily reluctant to cover their plump persons,” with necklines extending “as low as possible, sometimes even lower.” Unsurprisingly, he learns that Texans tended to treat the Tejanos with contempt, as if they were not fellow citizens but a conquered people, without civil rights, their land and property seized unjustly, their participation in the revolution conveniently forgotten. Lynchings were not uncommon, and whole Mexican communities were driven out of Austin in 1853 and Seguin in 1854. “Even at San Antonio, there had been talk of such a razzia,” and the sheriff attempted to organize a posse to drive all the Mexicans out of the neighborhood, but the Germans refused to participate, and so the mob failed to coalesce.

  Discovering that a mule train to El Paso and Chihuahua was about to leave San Antonio, Olmsted considered joining the excursion. He rode to where the train was camped, just outside the town, and was pleased to discover it was under the command of Julius Froebel, the great Swiss republican leader, a scientist and former member of the Frankfurt Parliament who narrowly escaped a death sentence in Vienna. Froebel traveled all over North and South America, frequented Sisterdale, and wrote for the New-York Tribune. Froebel advised against joining the train (which consisted of twenty-six wagons, 260 mules, and professional hunters and drivers), discouraging his fellow journalist with stories of the tedium of such travel. Likewise, George Wilkins Kendall, founder of the Picayune newspaper, celebrated war correspondent, author of the best-selling Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, and progressive sheep rancher, advised against travel in Mexico, telling Olmsted that “the scenery was composed of desert plains and cactus, and once a day, perhaps, of a stone wall, in addition. We should wear out about one horse a week, and would be robbed each day of something we had, until we should reach Mexico without a sou in our pockets, and without one rag with which we started.”

  Olmsted chose to disregard Kendall’s advice. Although there was some danger of encountering Comanches, Olmsted and his company rode out west of San Antonio, bound for Fort Duncan on the Rio Grande, by way of the most extreme settlements. As they rode, they passed trains for California. One was a cattle train, with four hundred head of oxen and twenty-five men to drive them. Some of these men were seasoned drovers, who knew the road and the waterings and had experience dealing with the Indians. Others were young men, emigrants, who signed on for passage, working without wages, hoping to find their fortunes in the promised land beyond the deserts and the mountains. They all rode mules and carried a short rifle and a Colt revolver. Two wagons followed as well as a cart all loaded with supplies, ammunition, cooking utensils. A family of French immigrants had joined up to travel under the protection of the train. Then out they went, beyond Castroville, a settlement of Alsatians, French-speaking Germans, to D’Hanis, Eagle Pass, and beyond.

  D’Hanis was a village that puzzled me, growing up, because of its odd name. I had never bothered to look up its story. Olmsted was puzzled by it as well, but for different reasons: It struck him as singularly odd to see what appeared in all respects to be a tiny little European peasant hamlet—with twenty-odd hovels, made of poles and logs placed together vertically, chinked with clay, windowless, thatched, with beaten earth floors—out here on the border, at the mercy of Comanches. Populated by rigid Catholics, its children educated by a priest, D’Hanis was pleasant enough, if terribly poor.

  Passing beyond a scattering of homesteads along the Frio River, Olmsted marvels at the landscape, the great chaparral desert before him stretching to the Rio Grande valley, live oaks giving way to mesquite, and at the kind of person willing to live out here, unprotected, exposed to the de
predations of Indians, who were always showing up when least expected. He stops to inquire at one of these homes and has a conversation with a young black boy, about ten years old, who could only say that no one else was home. He hadn’t been with these people long, and he didn’t know his father. He was sold long, long ago. “As I left the house the child ran after me and called out, ‘Massa, does you know how long it be to Kis’mas?’—‘Oh, a long time yet. What do you want to know for?’—‘Coss I’se on’y hired to Kis’mas; I’ll get away den, go back whar I belong.’ ”

  Onward then, beyond the Cañon de Uvalde, misnamed for a Spanish commander named Ugalde, down which Indians were known to come raiding off the high plains and where Victor Considérant had tried to establish a colony after the failure of La Réunion. The Rio Grande was several days’ ride west, but Olmsted was in no great hurry. Stopping for a time at Fort Inge, at present-day Uvalde, Olmsted visited a nearby Indian camp, populated with Tonkawa, Mescaleros, and Lipans. He found nothing there but “the most miserable squalor, foul obscenity, and disgusting brutishness, if there be excepted the occasional evidence of a sly and impish keenness. We could not find even one man of dignity; the universal expression towards us was either a silly leer or a stupid indifference.”

  Olmsted’s guide in these western districts was an old hand with the Indians named John Woodland, who understood their languages. “Why do people who write books,” he inquired of Olmsted, “always make Indians talking that highfalutin way they do? Indians don’t talk so, and when folks talk that way to them they don’t understand it. They don’t like it neither. I went up with Lieutenant ——, when he tried to make a treaty with the Northern Apaches. He had been talking up in the clouds, all nonsense, for half an hour, and I was trying to translate it just as foolish as he said it. An old Indian jumped up and stopped me— ‘What does your chief talk to us in this way for? We ain’t babies, we are fighting men; if he has got anything to tell us we will hear it, but we didn’t come here to be amused, we came to be made drunk, and to get some blankets and tobacco.’ ”

  Olmsted’s attitude toward the Indians was by no means simplistic. “Nothing can be more lamentable than the condition of the wandering tribes,” he writes. “They are permanently on the verge of starvation. Having been forced back step-by-step from the hunting grounds in the fertile soil of Lower Texas to the bare and arid plains, it is no wonder they are driven to violence and angry depredations.” Of course, this was not true of either the Comanches or the Apaches, tribes whose whole economy depended on raiding and always had. “The borderers’ idea, which looks upon them as blood-thirsty vermin, to be exterminated without choice of means, was imperatively uppermost in our minds while in their presence. A look into their treacherous eyes was enough to set the teeth grinding and rouse the self-preservative tiger herd of the animal man, latent since we ran naked like the rest in the jungles. If my wife were in a frontier settlement, I can conceive how I should hunt an Indian and shoot him down with all the eagerness and ten times the malice with which I should follow the panther. Yet the power of even a little education on these chaotic, malicious idiots and lunatics can hardly be overestimated.”

  Riding back to the fort, which was really more a camp where miserable soldiers huddled together in rude shanties and did their best to prevent Indians from stealing their horses, mules, and supplies, Olmsted found himself in the company of some “red brothers.” The leader of the group turned out to be a Lipan Apache chief named Castro who was on his way to San Antonio. Castro rode a mule and wore a buckskin shirt covered in beadwork, a wreath of oak leaves upon his bare head, heavy brass rings hung from his ears, and a vermilion streak of pigment blazed across his face, including the eyelids. His eyelashes and eyebrows had been plucked. The Indians eyed their animals and their saddles, and Olmsted struck up a conversation with Castro in which they discussed “the various merits of whiskey, corn, horses, and Germans.” Castro said he was on his way to San Antonio to meet with the Indian agent. He planned to propose that the Lipans make a series of raids into Mexico to steal horses and mules that they would then sell to the Americans.

  That night, Olmsted later learned, a group of Indians killed a Mexican shepherd boy and captured a second, the third getting away. An Anglo settler named Forrester was shot in the back as he went inside his cabin to fetch food for his demanding guests. His wife ran out the back door and looking over her shoulder saw two of her children murdered, with hatchets. In San Antonio, when Castro heard the news, he offered to help track the villains, who he said must have been Comanches, but all signs ended up pointing toward his Lipans.

  Shortly afterward, war broke out between the Lipans and the Texans. “Frontier murders became the order of the day, and for more than two years, hardly a week elapsed without a visit to some exposed settlement from a gang of Indians, who left their arrows sticking in cows and sheep, drove off cattle and horses, shot down whoever appeared least likely to resist, and carried sleepless excitement and terror before them.”

  Riding out toward Eagle Pass and Fort Duncan, Olmsted observed many deer, rabbits, jackrabbits (which he calls mule-rabbits), quail, a herd of antelope, and a wolf, which was probably a coyote. He marveled at a bird that he describes as about the size of a robin with a forked tail, “like a pair of paper shears half opened,” that was often running along the side of the road. His guide called it a bird of paradise—we’d call it a roadrunner—and Olmsted thought that was amusing and ironic because he had never seen such a dreary country. The landscape was rolling like a prairie but with poor soil—arid, rocky, sterile—and blanketed with a “dwarf forest of prickly shrubs.” All in all, a perfect description of South Texas.

  Over the course of sixty miles they encountered only two men. “Seen any niggers?” the men asked. “Nigger-hunting,” they said, “poor business.” The proximity of the border was apparently a strong source of temptation for Texas slaves and frustration for slaveholders. Fort Duncan was a small collection of thatched sheds, cabins, and military storehouses. The village of Eagle Pass comprised about six “tottering shanties,” mere confused piles of poles with hides hung over irregular openings to serve as doors. Piles of rubbish lay everywhere, broken wagon parts, wheels, scraps of leather; chickens roosted willy-nilly among the loose thatch. Hogs rooted about in holes in the shade. A single, dusty “woman’s garment” fluttered on a clothesline.

  The town appeared to be deserted, but after some loud hollers a friendly man appeared. All the rest of the town had gone to bury a man who had died the previous night. “What killed him?—Whiskey.—Well, I reckon that was it.”

  “See any niggers?” the man asked. He said two had crossed into Mexico the previous night. He offered his bed to the travelers, saying he preferred to sleep out here on the ground. “I don’t like the bed, ’count of the fleas.”

  Twenty-five white folks lived in Eagle Pass. Nobody bothered to count the Mexicans. There were nine groceries and five gambling saloons. They all lived off the soldiers’ station there at Fort Duncan, and the Mexicans from Piedras Negras, just across the river.

  After a dinner of roast kid goat and eggs and vegetables, cooked by a mulatto from Louisiana, Olmsted crossed the river into Mexico, ferried across the swift Rio Grande by a Mexican with a skiff. A Mexican corporal wearing a sombrero reclined in stereotypical fashion in the shade on a blanket smoking a cigarrito, keeping watch.

  While in Mexico, Olmsted met a runaway slave, born in Virginia and brought south to Texas. He had escaped four or five years before. He was fluent in Spanish and made a good living as a mechanic. He had worked as a servant and as a muleteer and had traveled all over Mexico. He said that slaves were constantly arriving here and that the Mexican women quite fancied them. It was easy to make a living over here in Mexico, and colored folks could make money faster than the Mexicans themselves, he said, “because they had more sense.” The government here was very just, he thought, and colored people had full civil rights. Many former slaves had becom
e wealthy, marrying into old Spanish families. They were set up as well as the best white people in Virginia. A colored man could do better than a white man over here, he said, because the Mexicans like them better. “These Texas folks were too rough to suit them.”

  —

  Westward then, Perry and Welmett, with babies Thomas and Bud, out past Castroville and D’Hanis into that forbidding land, camping along the Medina and the Hondo Rivers, on the Frio and the Nueces, past Fort Inge to Las Moras Springs and Fort Clark. Perhaps, like other westbound migrants and cowboys, they bought vegetables there—cucumbers, beets, parsnips, lettuce, parsley—and haggled with the begging Lipans over trinkets. There was no settlement at Del Rio as yet, but they might have camped at Mud Creek, Sycamore Creek, San Felipe Springs, or along the banks of the Rio Grande. Onward then to First Crossing on the Devils River. Perhaps they admired the rock art in the Painted Cave and wondered about the people who left those markings.

  Phocion R. Way, riding the Jackass Mail in 1858, inscribed his name and the date of his visit in Painted Cave. The Devils River, he wrote, was a “favorite resort of the Indians, and some bloody scenes have been enacted there, but we passed through unmolested.” An engraver from Cincinnati, Way was employed by the Santa Rita Mining Company and was on his way to Arizona. En route to Fort Clark, he observed that “everyone that leaves San Antonio for the West goes well armed, and they do not conceal their arms but carry them in open view.” His fellow passengers had large Colt revolvers on their belts, and rifles at their sides. The driver was well armed, and so were the escorts, astride mules. He was a greenhorn and enthusiastic. “All this was new to me and looked a little strange—it looked like we were indeed going through a country of savages and ruffians. However, to be in the fashion, I buckled on my armor also. I have a Colt’s large Navy revolver, a very large Bowie knife, and a Colt’s six-shooting rifle. I feel like I would almost as leave have a little fight as not, just to try my hand.”