In 1861, Texas seceded from the Union. Because Clay County was so small, and the danger of Indian attack was ever present, no election was held, or at least there is no record of one. The county’s records all burned in the 1870s. But it is safe to assume that Clay would have voted for the Union. In neighboring Cooke County, the vote was 221 against secession to 137 for. Jack County counted only 14 votes in favor of secession, 76 against. Montague cast 50 votes for secession compared with 86 for the Union. Statewide, sentiment was obviously quite different: 46,129 voted for secession versus 14,697 for union.
Most ranchers and farmers along the western border owned no slaves, and there were a number of free blacks living in these counties. Many of the settlers originally came from states that did not secede, and they probably calculated that the withdrawal of Union forces from Texas would leave them exposed to Indian attack. If so, they were correct. During the Civil War, the western frontier fell back almost one hundred miles, and Clay County was completely abandoned.
In tracking Perry’s movements through Texas, I came across a number of puzzling references to his service in the Civil War, so I went to the Texas archives in Austin. I found a brief and enigmatic scrap of information, two scraps, really: the muster records of both Perry and Levi Wilson. Subsequent research cleared things up a bit. They both served as rangers in the First Frontier District, of the Frontier Organization, which was created by the State of Texas to defend the western settlements along the Indian frontier, which stretched for five hundred miles from the Red River to the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. They were listed in Captain Sevier Shannon’s B Company, under the command of Major William Quayle. They both served one tour, twenty-two days, and drew two dollars a day in payment. Perry was thirty-six; Levi was thirty-four.
The Frontier Organization was created by the Texas legislature in 1862 to provide some relief to the western settlements, exposed as they were to constant raiding from the Comanches and the Kiowas. So many of the able-bodied young men were fighting and dying in the East. The men who remained had organized ad hoc companies of minutemen and rangers to protect the western counties. The idea of the Frontier Organization was to provide some discipline and structure to the citizen militia. The Confederacy objected, General Kirby Smith most of all, because the generals wanted all the cannon fodder they could get their hands on. And so Texas engaged in a three-year political fight with the Confederate States of America over a question of states’ rights. The historical ironies are endless. Texas refused to send its border rangers to fight the Union. They were needed at home, to fight Comanches.
Raids came in waves, and the rangers could do little to prevent them. Mostly they chased the Indians after the fact and tried to recover captives and take revenge. In December 1863, three hundred Comanches crossed the Red River into Montague County, where Perry and his family were living and where Perry, as an able-bodied man, was no doubt serving as a volunteer ranger. The Comanches attacked three settlements, killing a man, two women, and one child. Homes were burned, and the raiders rode back across the river. The next day the Indians attacked again. Ten homes were plundered and burned, twelve settlers were killed, a large number of livestock driven away. Citizen fighters confronted them and soldiers pursued, but the raiders easily outmaneuvered them.
In the Texas archives I read through dozens of reports, all written in a beautifully ornamental script, almost all of them detailed accounts of, and demands for, supplies. I much preferred the scouting reports, such as the diary of a certain William R. Peveler, who filed a long accounting of his patrols from March through December 1863. Amid the charming mundanities of entries such as:
June 4th Thursday started Early struck the divide between the Brasos & Big Wichita followed it on down until we came in site of the upper Round timber when we came to Bull creek & camped for dinner after Resting a Bout two hours packed up & traveled on down By the upper Round timber & on to the head of Buffalow Byou creek & camped for the Night having traveled 20 miles this day
and the dreary monotony of:
June 5th Friday traveled a Bout 15 miles & camped for the Night upon Browns creak
June 6th traveled a Bout 16 miles and arrived at Belknap
suddenly this:
Trying a tune to tell you that I am in love with you but heart has failed me in every attemt that I have made but I to come to the point and would like to know if you think
The text breaks off. On the next page, after a list of “Rifles in good repare” and shotguns likewise functional, another flight of broken poetry:
N Wood Remember the that I will wherever thou may be for I the Go ask the birds and flowers if they love sweat refreshing showers
In late September 1864, William R. Peveler and several of his men were unmounted, their horses tied, when they were surrounded by fifty Indians. One of the men was shot through the body. He ran and jumped on his horse but forgot to untie him. The horse ran to the end of the rope and broke its neck, sending the rider flying, to be killed by Indians. William was wounded in the arm but managed to get on his horse. He was cut off from his other men and started down a ravine when an Indian caught him by the neck; William, his brother Francis later wrote, “shot back over his shoulder, hit him in the neck and broke his neck.” When he made it to Flag Springs, “he had nineteen wounds and lived twenty-one days.”
A few weeks later, on October 13, came the Elm Creek raid, in Young County, one of the largest and most destructive Indian attacks since the early days of the Texas Republic. Captain J. T. Rowland and his men saw the smoke rising miles before they came upon the mangled bodies. Eleven settlements were burned; eleven settlers and five soldiers were killed, and seven women and children were captured. At the Fitzpatrick ranch, a young woman was scalped alive while an Indian forced her mother to watch; a seven-year-old boy was shot down; later, a thirteen-year-old captive was burned alive. Again, the mother, the same mother, was forced to watch. Witnesses put the size of the raiding party between three hundred and one thousand. The wife and children of a free black man known as Negro Britt Johnson were taken. Over the next three years, an estimated 163 settlers were killed by Indian raiders; another 43 were abducted.
Johnson spent years trying to get his family back. On his third or fourth trip into the Indian Territory, depending on the source, Johnson succeeded in recovering his wife and two children, as well as other captives. In 1871, Britt Johnson was killed in another raid on Young County.
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In 1867, Perry and his family moved south, keeping close to the Balcones fault line, to Hondo Canyon, near Bandera. Three years later the Wilsons were among the founders of Tehuacana, down near the Frio River. By 1880, the Wilsons were listed by the U.S. Census among the residents of Frio County.
In 1938, an old cowboy named Sam Houston Blalock told Mrs. Florence Angermiller, who was working for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, that in 1876 he was working in Frio County for a man named Sam Hutchison, when some Indians came through and took a black man who was working with them. They found him dead, swelled up as large as a horse. “He had two bullet holes in him and his left hand was pinned to his breast with an arrow.” These same Indians, he said, went down and stole all of Old Man Perry Wilson’s horses. “He had a horse pasture fenced entirely with brush—every bit of it.” One of the horses was a big gray, and they killed and ate him. “They left a great big chunk of that horse meat sticking on a stick where they had broiled it.”
In 1879, Blalock moved back to Frio County to work for Old Man Perry Wilson. Blalock soon married one of Perry’s daughters, Alice. She was a good ranch hand, though she was small, about 105 pounds. Sam said she was dark, with dark eyes. Perry moved his cattle to the Devils River in 1886. Sam and Alice went along and stayed three years. They all lived in tents. When they were driving the cattle to the Devils, there was an awful stampede. There were about twelve hundred head. “We lost them all. We were two days gathering them. We got nearly all of them—mayb
e twelve head short.” Sam was on herd when the stampede started, and he never did figure out what scared them. “It was a moonshine night and bright as it could be. And we never could stop them cattle—just had to let ’em go. They run right through camp and this fellow, Swindler, was in bed. A little old yearling run right over him. That tickled me worse than anything that happened. Golly, he sure squalled.”
The Devils River had some of the biggest catfish Sam had ever seen. “One boy caught one that weighed 140 pounds,” Sam said. “Once, Tom Wilson caught a catfish out of there that weighed sixty-five pounds. He had a sheep camp on the river there and caught this fish and he had it tied to the horn of his saddle and the tail drug the ground.”
After three years, Perry and Blalock sold their cattle. Sam and Alice went back to the old Wilson ranch in Frio County. Old Man Perry went west, no doubt for his health. The man was always looking for fresh air, a better climate, so he packed up his family, including his eight unmarried children, drove a herd of horses and mules, along with several wagons, a piano, and a schoolteacher, and took the lower road once again. Brother Levi and son Thomas Austin stayed behind with their families.
In 1891, after little Tommy, their baby boy, died in an accident, T.A. and Bettie Wilson loaded up their family and went back to the ranchman’s paradise on the Devils River. He was thinking about sheep and goats. I found little Tommy’s grave in the old Tehuacana Cemetery. The town is long gone now; the smallpox came, and those who survived moved away. No one cares much about Tehuacana’s dead nowadays or even remembers the town at all. Everyone down there has been too busy making money on the big oil and gas play. Fracking trucks speed up and down the highways thereabouts, hauling water to the oil and gas wells, drilling in the Eagle Ford shale. Weeds had grown up in the cemetery, and I had a hard time finding the grave. But I knew what to look for: a little marble Rambouillet lamb, curled up, and the inscription OUR DARLING BOY, GONE SO SOON.
The grave of little Tommy Wilson
Sam Houston Blalock told his WPA interviewer that Old Man Perry went to lower California. In fact, he was headed for some land he acquired in northern Mexico, near Yuma. He never made it that far. Perry’s son Walter remembered traveling west by wagon and being stuck for three weeks on the banks of the flooding Pecos River. Perry and his boys turned one of their wagons into a ferry and set up business, carrying emigrants and their livestock across the river, before traveling on.
By 1888, Old Man Perry Wilson was one of the leading citizens of Phoenix, Arizona. He gave up the cattle business and started farming. Seems he specialized in strawberries. By the time he died, in 1899, he was known as Strawberry Wilson.
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The summer of rains was followed the next year by drought and fire, as if in retribution for the rare and unreasonable gift of moisture. Fueled by unusual quantities of vegetation (tall grass, abundant weeds, thriving brush), wildfires burned all across the state, even threatening towns like Marfa, filled with Donald Judd’s primordial geometry, and Fort Davis, with its astronomical observatory. One such fire started on the Massie West place, just northwest of our country, and burned 190,000 acres, including half the Juno ranch. The Deaton Cole fire, as it was called, burned for a month and drew firefighters from across the United States. The fire turned sixty-year-old fence posts, across which my father had stretched wire when he was a child, into charcoal in a matter of minutes and destroyed many miles of water lines, the black PVC pipe strung from one end of the ranch to the other, moving water according to the imperatives of topography and gravity from windmills and their reservoirs to water troughs many miles away. Both livestock and wildlife depend upon such human ingenuity.
In the early 1980s another fire came down from the northwest off the Mayfield ranch, where one of Jake Mayfield’s men for some reason decided to burn a dead sheep and walked off and left the blaze unattended. That wildfire was comparatively small but still burned thousands of acres. Jake was a grand old man—half outlaw, people used to say.
When I was young, I spent many evening hours sitting in front of Jake’s late-life folly, the Mayfield Country Store, which he opened in the late 1970s, listening to his stories. Unlike my grandmother, when we owned the old Juno store, Jake had no problem with the idea of selling liquor to grown men and women at his Devils River Liquor Store, yet even with a liquor license the business wasn’t viable in the end. The country thereabouts was steadily losing its inhabitants, and there just weren’t enough travelers meandering through the back roads between Ozona, Sonora, and Comstock. Before long, oilmen from Houston and environmentalists would begin buying up ranches for their own obscure purposes, including the Mayfield place, now owned by the Nature Conservancy.
The absence of livestock on our neighbors’ ranches meant there was plenty of fuel that spring, and the fire traveled quickly up and down canyons, creating its own weather; winds swirled and changed direction without warning. At one point, as the front line of the fire was advancing into the wind, it seemed we might lose the whole ranch. The fire had jumped the firebreaks and crossed Highway 163. There seemed no way to prevent it from taking everything.
Then the weather turned, and a light mist settled in. The moisture was hardly even measurable, far less than an inch, but it was enough to permit the firefighters to contain the blaze. In the end, no one died, and none of our buildings were destroyed. We managed to drive our livestock out of the fire’s path using helicopters.
Three months later I drove through charred pastures with my father, my stepmother, and my nine-year-old son, who had spent the last week hunting varmints and, more ambitiously, trying to shoot a big axis buck, one of the exotic species of deer that now roam the Texas countryside. We drove through thousands of acres of countryside, my father pointing out landmarks to his grandson, a special canyon that his father had always loved to hunt, places where he’d called up a fox, a spot where his grandfather had first shot a particular rifle. We saw no living creatures. Even the turkey vultures had forsaken the land.
Fire is a primordial element of this landscape, and we know that it once helped regulate periods of growth and regeneration. Lightning was often the spark that set the high plains and their eroded foothills ablaze, and the Indians were known to do so as well, often in pursuit of the buffalo, hoping to drive them off a cliff. Although we suffered a great loss of infrastructure to Deaton Cole, we did at least entertain the consolation that the wildfire might kill the mesquite and cedar that have come to choke our pastures. Grass would grow again in time. Yet in the months since the fire was contained, there had been no rain, and so in hours of driving we saw not one blade of grass growing in the thousands of acres that burned; just charred clumps surrounded by hard black soil, swept clean and smooth by the burning winds.
Mesquite trees, evil and thorny, bare of leaves, thrust their black trunks and branches upward. The cedar like the grass appeared quite dead, but mesquite possesses a deep root system that penetrates the broken limestone and shale to find the abundant groundwater down below. The only signs of green life in that vast burnscape were the delicate pale green shoots at the base of black mesquite silhouettes. Mesquite would thrive even in hell.
As the day settled into evening, we drove up an unpaved county road from Juno toward Pandale to see some of the West ranch where the fire had originated. We’d heard a rumor that the Deaton Cole fire was ignited by a burning automobile along a high-voltage power line that a company called EC was building through that country. A man-made fire, then, perhaps a result of negligence, but there was no hard evidence. EC was building something big, preparing the way for a new, capital-intensive westward energy play: necessary modern infrastructure for wind farmers.
In fading daylight we passed the headquarters of the old Mayfield ranch, surrounded by bulldozed firebreaks that succeeded in saving the old Mayfield house. The place had deteriorated badly since the Nature Conservancy took it over, and water gaps in the fences, designed to break free during floods, were still down along t
he highway from last year’s rains. My father noticed that the grand old pecan trees in Jake’s yard appeared to be dying from the drought. At least they survived the fire. Not spared was the Mayfield cemetery, which I had not seen in more than twenty years. Now cleansed by fire of the underbrush that seems to have infested it since this strange monument to an old outlaw was constructed in 1984, the cemetery and its gravestones appeared almost to glow in the dusky golden light. I was moved by its weird majesty. At the center of the graveyard was a small, flat-topped pyramid, constructed in Jake’s honor, of large gravel stones turned round and smooth over the centuries by the undependable waters of the Devils River. Steps ascended the burial mound, and the name MAYFIELD was carved upon a slab of granite. I walked through the cemetery and paid my respects, trying and failing to recall some of old Jake’s tales of his misspent youth along the Rio Grande.
Mesquite, Juno ranch
Wrought-iron crosses, already going to rust, adorned the fence and the gate, which was swinging open. As I walked back to the pickup, I pulled it shut, closed the latch. In the world in which such men lived, there was something sinful about an open gate.
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At the end of the last Ice Age, when the high glacial cliffs began to shrink back across a scarified continent, woodlands more typical of northern latitudes covered parts of what we now call Texas. Tall-grass prairies flourished, with pine and aspen growing along streams and rivers. On the Llano Estacado, where today giant windmills sprout from endless cotton fields, there might have been substantial forests, or short-grass prairie, or desert, or perhaps an open forest steppe, a grassy parkland with clumps of deciduous trees. Large Pleistocene mammals, such as mastodons, mammoths, giant bison, camels, and horses, grazed and wandered through seas of grass, among oak savanna, avoiding wildfires, hunted by dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. Then they died out about thirteen thousand years ago, victims of climate change or perhaps hunted into extinction. The coast, hundreds of feet lower and miles beyond the present shoreline, would have been much drier, perhaps with wide dune structures, sand laid down by cold glacial winds blowing over a bare midwestern tundra. The Trans-Pecos, now part of the vast Chihuahuan Desert, was temperate, with tall grasses and extensive open woodlands composed of piñon pine, juniper, and oak. As the glaciers withdrew and the oceans rose, the climate remained cool for a long time but grew progressively wetter, until it flipped and turned hot and dry, a trend that has continued, with some brief moist intervals, and dramatically colder episodes, for the last ten thousand years.
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