Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  James G. Bell, twenty-two years old, like Perry born in Tennessee in the vicinity of Knoxville, traveled the lower road with a cattle drive in 1854. Another eyewitness of sights that would have been familiar to my ancestors, he followed the trails. Bell’s family came to Texas down the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers, by ship from New Orleans to Indianola. The father, Samuel Bell, was a jeweler, possibly the first in the state of Texas. Bell, one of 150 men working for John James, among them an old Comanche Indian, together with the cattle, left San Antonio on June 3 and made it as far as Castroville. Ten or fifteen miles a day wasn’t bad at all. That evening, some of the cowboys swam in the beautiful clear waters of the Hondo; Bell predicted to his diary that they’d often look back wistfully on that happy afternoon. A few days later Bell bought a rattlesnake skin from a Mexican and stretched it over his saddle, believing it would protect his posterior from saddle sores. He swam in Las Moras, a fine cold spring, then camped in mud along creeks.

  Three days later they were on the Devils River. The water there runs fast but not deep, coursing over limestone bedrock, eroding channels through which great fish thrash and spawn. At First Crossing, he climbed the slick stone banks of the river up to Painted Cave, describing the paintings within, which reminded him of decorations on a buffalo robe. “Probably,” he noted, “this was a place of revelry.” Over the next ten days they will cross the Devils River fourteen times, stepping over piles of stones under which lie the bones of men. Indian alarums will be frequent and almost always false. Grapes, plums, and pecans will be there to be eaten. Bell calls them walnuts. Then, as now, the Devils River runs fitfully. Some of the crossings were dry. Come rain and the river will rise; after a big rain, the river will roar, a mile wide, stretching across canyons and valleys. Greens will be picked, fair to eat, gelatinous like okra, but he knows not what to call them.

  (In the spring of 1853, Julius Froebel, passing with a caravan up the old Chihuahua trail, came to what he called the “notorious Devil’s River.” He described this long, sinuous canyon as the most interesting locality he had seen so far in America, describing with a scientist’s precision the structure of the geology, insofar as he could see it, and the character of the country. Heaped-up masses of stone were signs of the terrible power of the floodwaters that created this long defile in the Edwards Plateau. “I saw driftwood remaining high up the trees between forked branches, showing to what an incredible height the valley was sometimes filled with water.” The course was dry where he entered it, but soon the riverbed was filled with a powerful clear stream varying with broad still lakes. He saw camping places of the Indians and piles of stones memorializing the murders of travelers. At one such place he saw “the half decomposed body thrown out, the head set up on a pole.” Wagon boards, a makeshift coffin, were mysteriously arranged on the trail in some obscure insult. He observed the thousands of flowering spikes of sotol, though he used its Latin name. The area around Painted Cave he thought gloomy and painful, a dismal valley descending through a narrow cleft between grotesque rocks among peaks and pinnacles. Farther down the valley, Froebel hears a tale of desperation and cannibalism, escaped slaves, the remains of a human being roasted.)

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  A cattle drive carries its food on the hoof. A beef slaughtered, butchered, and roasted on spits for steaks, the remainder dried in strips for jerky, the old Comanche who traveled with them eager for the blood. Time moves along, like the river, in streams interrupted: The number of days will be lost. Debates break out. Was it Sunday or Monday? Upon reaching a post at Beaver Lake, they find it Monday. A pair of buffalo fish, bought from soldiers at the military camp, uncommonly fat, fifteen-pounders, twenty-five cents each.

  Lingering at Beaver Lake for two days, Bell and company prepared for a forty-mile stretch with no water, resting their cattle and other livestock. They set out, crossing what a few decades later would be my family’s land, and made twelve miles before a dry camp, no water to be found. At a prairie dog town they found ten barrels’ worth of water, scattered in pockets and depressions, remnants of the recent rain. Lucky they were, and the cattle got a mouth wash. After twenty hours atop a mule, Bell made it with half the train to Howards Well, a spring that in later years will be found at the bottom of a hole, dug by hand, twelve feet deep, stone steps leading down, with a bucket.

  Another thirty miles without water, passing a large prairie dog town, four miles in circumference. Some were shot, roasted, and eaten like rabbits. They made camp at Live Oak Creek on the Pecos River. The water was cool and clear, tumbling down a six-foot fall into the brackish, muddy, treacherous Pecos. There Bell found a pile of stones, oblong, and on its head the inscription “Amanda Lewis, 1852.” Another young man cried out in disbelief, for he had known her in Mississippi as the mother of a large family. “How desolate must have been the husband and children when they performed the last sad rights over their loved mother,—when with mournful feelings thay turned away knowing that then, thay beheld the last of her whom thay had ever looked up to with love and veneration.”

  Devils River

  Night was coming on, and the men were compelled to go about the business of camp, posting guard, keeping watch through the long dark against molestations of Indians. Bell stared out into the bleak dusk, but he did not feel afraid. There, by that uncommon and fruitful spring, he felt strangely consoled “in this vast expanse of hill and plane when by mere chance I came upon this grave—a feeling of desolation and insignificance came over me, and I felt content in my ignorance of the wondrous creation of earth—the spot where this woman is burried, pobably could not be found in one year’s search, for in 1852 this portion of Texas was outside of all civilization.” The weather, he thought, had been unusually fine that day, and nature had smiled “in all her beautous colors.”

  Upon rising they find the air clear and cool, and the sun feels fine on their skin for a brief moment before it begins to burn. Two miles along the high banks, too high for cattle to cross, too high for wagons, the stream turbulent, rapid, pink with mud and minerals, alkaline and briny, searching for the crossing. Wild plums, ripe and sweet, green ones preserved. Some cattle, as always, do not survive the Pecos.

  Lancaster Crossing, Pontoon Crossing, Spanish Dam Crossing, Horsehead Crossing, Emigrant Crossing, Pope’s Crossing—none were easy, all were dangerous. Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, and sheep crazed with thirst, diving off steep crumbling bluffs into the swift brackish water or, where the banks were lower, drinking until they were dead, or trampled to death. Indian ambushes, especially at Horsehead, directly in the path of the great Comanche war trail, were a danger. On the long waterless march to Horsehead, failing men were known to shoot down dying cattle and drink the hot thick blood.

  Ten miles along the west bank before camp. Another beef slaughtered and devoured quickly along with several rabbits, for even cowboys grow tired of bacon. Nights spent guarding the ambulance, filled with supplies—mesquite for dinner, chewing on the pods, not the hard inedible bean. After a third night camping along the bank of the Pecos, no one is sorry to leave it behind. Ten miles to Escondido Springs; then on to Comanche Springs, where the bones of a man, a known horse thief, were recognized from his clothing. Although he’d been dead three years, there remained scraps of dried muscle, a kneecap, a foot mummified in the dry air.

  The bottomless water hole at Leone Springs, beautifully blue water, brackish, with surrounding mud “lightly frosted with salt.” Another spring, unnamed, preparing for a hundred miles without water. A trial. They sleep in the open air, saddle and horse blanket for a pillow, atop an Indian rubber coat, with a blanket over all. Usually with boots on, in case of alarm. “When it rains I roll up into a ball like a porcupine, and spread the gum coat over me.” Horseback, with a coat tied behind him, pants tucked in his boots, check shirt open at the neck, chest brown with sun, nose, ears, and neck scaling like a snake. A rope, canteen, tin cup, and iron spoon, a dead rabbit hanging by the neck for evening roasting or a slab of jerk
ed beef flapping against the mule.

  Fort Lancaster, near the Lancaster Crossing of the Pecos River

  A plain covered with pyrites of iron. A large dog town. A miniature forest of cholla cactus. Into the Guadalupe Mountains, which loom solid black over them as they ride along precipices. Another cattle drive up ahead fights off a band of Indians, kills six. Cooking mescal, or perhaps sotol or lechuguilla, they do not much like it. “An epicure might call it delicious.” They eat steaks that have been improved by salt and age.

  Through Wild Rose Pass, said to be the most dangerous along the route, thorny with wild rosebushes, blessed with good water and grass; watching the moon rise as the sun sets, clear skies over the prairie, a barren waste appearing deceptively smooth and verdant from on high, listening to the yips of prairie dogs by the thousands below, popping out from their underground houses and singing to their neighbors, the young James Bell feels music in his soul and wishes he were a painter or poet so that he might possess the power to copy what he sees.

  And then from Eagle Springs or Van Horn Wells, the long march without water. Water found on the first night, at the head of a canyon, mere puddles and tedious to water the stock, but water is water. Onward through long days under a relentless sun, waterless camping, then driving the cattle through the night, though they are almost perishing. “Thay are compelled to go forward or die.” Seventy-five head of cattle lost.

  Finally, they come to the Rio Grande del Norte, eighty miles from El Paso, running fast, fifty yards across, with collapsing banks. Exhausted cattle stumble to the river, some die with water in their bellies. A government station, goods for sale. Here they can eat corn bread and drink coffee or even good brandy. The drovers recover themselves, sleep without worry, take turns riding for lost cattle. Then up the Rio Grande. Mexicans, wearing loose cotton trousers and long tunics, cross the river to sell onions, eggs, mescal. Apples grow on trees in San Elizario, pears and good green corn in the fields. Thence to Franklin, the American settlement across the river from El Paso, now known as Juárez. The cattle graze in the open valley; a splendid rain falls. A week passes quickly, and then emigrants and cattle drives must move on again, past Camp Fillmore, past Las Cruces, Doña Ana, harassed by mosquitoes, herding cattle under a bright, clear full moon, up the east bank of the Rio Grande to the crossing at Mesilla. Fields of watermelons, onions, corn—too tempting for those who have been in the desert for months.

  On then, all emigrants and cattle drives and mail stages and mule trains, across a desert of forking paths, past the City of Rocks, strange outcroppings surrounded now by barrenness, to the copper mines of Santa Rita. Travelers described this prairie in the 1850s as the most beautiful they had seen, especially in comparison with what they had passed through on the way to El Paso, thick ripe mesquite grass resembling oats ready for the harvest, so calm, so quiet, but water was too far along to stop and let livestock graze.

  How different is this landscape now.

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  Emigrant trains, often six or eight wagons—four or five families, four women and fifteen men, fifteen children might be a typical grouping. The unmarried men travel as hired hands or work for passage and protection. Men are needed as drovers, herders, shooters. The women cook and care for children and worry about the men. The children sit in the wagons, walking through mud or over the steep hills when the wagons must be lighter—when ropes must be used to navigate sheer bluffs, or boulder fields, or quicksand-laden streams. See their wide wondering eyes, pale drawn faces, their confusion about what they are experiencing and why. Reading the diaries of the womenfolk is always different from the chronicles of the men. Here we find a record of suffering that is almost unbearable.

  Graves line the roads west. The graves begin early, for Texans, often before they have left their home counties. These are the strangers. Later will come the companions, the husbands and wives and friends and children, graves receding in the distance, along a horizon stained with dust.

  In the women’s diaries we read the details of provisions, the daily accountings of cooking, washing, tending to the sick. A husband buys six hundred pounds of flour, and we learn how much it costs, four dollars for the hundred. Every ferry charges a different fee, ranging from fifty cents to cross some minor swollen creek to forty-two dollars to cross the Colorado below Fort Yuma. Oxen and horses sicken and die. At night the cattle stray, and in the morning the men must go in search of them, over and over again. Sometimes they lose days of travel while the menfolk search for the livestock. Women grade camps according to grass and water, yes, but also was there wood for cooking? Did the wind make starting the cook fires difficult? Sometimes they had nothing to cook with but weeds and dried grass. During off days the women would cook bread and boil hams and mend garments.

  “June 19: We started early and it being cool and pleasant we got along fine. We pass the grave of a lady, Mrs. Rachel Drain, who died May 19, age forty years. It makes me feel so sad to see a lone grave here in this doleful looking country and kneel at the head to read the name. I can’t keep from crying, thinking how I would hate to be left on this road.”

  So wrote Ruth Shackelford in 1865. She made the trip across the plains not once but twice. First on the northern route, the Oregon Trail, where she lost children and friends. Those who followed the Oregon trails suffered greatly from fevers, though settlements were more common and the desolation was perhaps not so great. The mountain passes, of course, presented special challenges, as the Donner Party learned. Three years in California was enough. Back they went, through the desert this time, the southern route, passing train after train of Texans headed to California, “going to the land of gold, they think.” The desert was doleful, she wrote. Again and again, she writes that this country is the worst she has ever seen, the most ghastly and gloomy and dreary and forsaken. The wind blows so hard she can barely stand.

  Thirteen-inch hail, missiles thrown by some malevolent genie, knock men onto the ground and wound horses. The trains pass burned-out settlements, abandoned ranches, unmarked graves, slaughtered and half-eaten horses surrounded by moccasin tracks. At the end of the day, after long hours of bouncing over roads that can be identified only by the scrapings of wagons on enormous stones, long hours comforting the crying children, the first thing Ruth Shackelford does is milk the cow.

  The men go hunting, and the women cook bacon, beans, and rolls or maybe a big molasses cake. More graves. Days spent in difficult rocky climbs and descents, trudging through sand hills, wading rivers, mending broken axles and broken wagon tongues; a child follows her pet crow under the oxen and receives a kick in the head and a two-inch gash. Another falls from the wagon and cuts his leg to the bone. The roads are bad, the water is bad, sulfurous or alkaline or muddy from the hooves of oxen or rank with death.

  At Horsehead Crossing, the whole countryside is burned up with alkali. Dead cattle lie thick on the banks. The children cry because the sun burns them and they cannot get away from it while the adults make preparations for the crossing. Some of the men take horses miles to find grass. A herd of cattle, two thousand strong, mills about on the other side of the river, waiting to cross. Mosquitoes swarm at night as the emigrants huddle around the fire, hoping smoke will keep them away, keep the insects from eating out their eyes; horses, covered in sores, have no escape. Finally, they cross as men swim back and forth with wagons used as ferries, barrels lashed to the sides, children and women huddled together, quaking with fear. “We reloaded our wagons and filled our water barrels with nasty, dirty water. We can see dead cattle floating down while we are dipping up the water and see them lying on the banks all over. This is all we will have to drink for eighty-seven miles. There is a man in now telling us there were three thousand dead cattle in the canyon we have to go through this evening.”

  Husbands, wives, and children die of fever on the road. Men die of hunting accidents. A young man, almost a boy, shoots himself in the chest, twirling his Colt pistol like a fool. Another grave. Women scal
d their feet when pots overturn on a campfire; dresses catch fire, skin blisters. A little girl, sick, finally gets up out of the wagon, catches a chill, and dies that night. “She suffered very much for two hours after her chill. She had but little fever and in about an hour before she died she rested easy but never spoke so they could understand her, only she called my name three times like she was going to sleep.” Another little girl: “cold and clear. Little Annie died this morning just before daylight. She died very hard. She was teething and had diarrhea.” Along the road, in the howling waste, there was no medicine for that baby. Another grave.

  “They say this is a God-forsaken country. We are camped tonight in a nasty, dusty place and the dust is four inches deep. The wind blew the dust in our faces all evening and it is half soda. When we wash our hands they feel like we are washing them in soda water. They have to dip water out of the spring with buckets to water two hundred and forty head of cattle and it is three miles to grass.”