Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Warm, moist breezes blew out of the Gulf; they moved inland over leagues of endless, bending grass until they turned hot and searing. Arctic winds at times howled off the roof of the world, roared across the High Plains and whistled over the decaying limestone formations of the central plateaus, plunging into the dry savannahs beyond. In spring, warm and cold winds met and warred, with brilliant electricity, ice rains, and dark funnels that dipped and tore the ground. Nature was always hard, and frequently at war with itself.

  Over the whole land the sun burned, not the distant, friendly orb that filtered light through European forests, but a violent, brassy engine that browned the earth and made the hillsides shimmer with heat. The moon hung low and silver-cold beyond the ephemeral night clouds against a back-blaze of stars. On each successively higher prairie or plateau the land stretched out, fairly level, further than any living eye could see. There were few boundaries anywhere, and then sharp ones: where the trees ended and the land became an ocean of soughing grass; where the high mesa turned to blue-mountained, dusty desert; where the rolling, grassy, mesquite-studded savannah etched up into the flinty Balcones Scarp. The regions were wider than modern European nations; the subregions larger than Atlantic seaboard states. Over it all the wind blew, now south, now north. Endless land, and eternal wind—it made all animal life restless, long-visioned, volatile, and free.

  The Amerinds who entered this harsh, changeable country may have seen no beauty in it, nor learned to love it, until a generation had been born there. The tribes who scattered through it in the Amerind Archaic Age were not notably successful. They were tough and hardy, but they were on foot. They were in open country, armed with flint knives, stone axes, and flint spears; for some thousands of years they did not have the bow and arrow. Bison dotted the plains, but even this modern buffalo, a fraction of the size of the ancient, Pleistocene bison, was a formidable beast to attack on foot, at arm's length. More important, it was impossible for the tribes to follow the buffalo on their great migrations north and south over the arid plains. The hill country, where the ancient limestone formations frayed out above the Balcones Escarpment in spectacular scenery, supported deer and bear and smaller game. But there was not enough of this, nor sufficient easily killed animal flesh upon the grassy savannahs to the south, for Texas tribes to live off the fat of the land. There was, simply, very little fat, and the campsites of the early Amerinds have revealed mortars and pestles, seeds, and the remnants of roots among their small bones, as well as cracked human femurs. Broken and sucked human marrow bones have been discovered preserved in the ancient muck of the coastal prairies in great quantity—proof that where the Old Americans had been able to live well on mastodon and elephant meat, the aborigines who displaced them came to depend on other foods. In modern times all Texas tribes except one—the late-coming Comanches—practiced at least some form of ritual cannibalism, a grisly, ceremonial residue of a harsh past.

  The land was too big, too harsh, too restless in climate for man to dominate, or even carve a stable niche for himself, with the tools the archaic Indians possessed.

  This era, which paleontologists call Archaic, lasted for some thousands of years across all America. The invention of the bow, about the time of Christ, did not make life much easier, except that now birds, and more small game, were added to the Amerind diet. The great change, which ushered in the Neo-American Age, was the Agricultural Revolution. In America, as everywhere on earth, this was the greatest social and economic revolution mankind ever experienced, beside which the Industrial Revolution was a mere change of phase.

  Several thousand years before Christ lived—certainly long before 2500 b.c., for radiocarbon-dated seeds have been discovered in New Mexico as of that date—the Amerinds of Middle or South America discovered how to domesticate maize, or Indian corn. Just as all mammalian life is dependent, in the final analysis, upon water and grass, all human civilization is based on the controlled growth of some cereal grain, whether rice, or wheat, or corn. No civilization could exist without cities—the words are synonymous—and no stable populations could live without a dependable food supply. When the Amerinds of Middle America learned how to grow corn, and along with this development to domesticate a few animals, the basis for a genuine American civilization was firmly laid.

  True city-based civilizations began to rise in Middle America, in the same latitudes and in no way inferior to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, and Ur of the Chaldees. Their centers were in Middle America and the slopes of the Andes, and in time they sent dim reflections to the ends of both American continents. There was no single Amerind civilization, but a series of connected cultures, which, in the hands of different peoples, rose, flourished, withered, and were restored. The Aztecs of the Valley of Mexico, and the Incas of Peru, were merely the conquerors and stabilizers of what was already a very ancient culture, and both took command within recent pre-Columbian times.

  In Mexico, many miles to the south of the Texas plains, a succession of Mayan, Toltec, and other cultures farmed the soil, grew large populations, and erected vast cities, comparable to ancient Memphis, and not much inferior to Imperial Rome. Immensely disciplined, hard-working, and imaginative, these Amerinds evolved a highly sophisticated social and political organization, with complete divisions of labor, classes, and castes. They built immense palaces and pyramids out of carved stone. They developed mathematics, writing, and astronomy—their calendar was superior to Cortés's—and pursued fine arts. They worked gold, silver, and copper with brilliant mastery. The fact that they did all these things without smelting metals only adds luster to the accomplishment—though this lack, when they were taken by unexpected disaster from across the Atlantic, probably more than anything else sealed their doom.

  Had Cortés and the conquistadores met metal-armed and armored men, the fate of Mexico might have been startlingly different.

  Where the civilization of this Nuclear America might have gone can only be conjectured. The Spaniards, on arrival, did not commit genocide, but something probably worse: culturicide. In almost a single night the Europeans, who sacrificed men and women to their God by burning them alive, justified the extinction of Amerind culture because of the Mexic addiction to ceremonial human sacrifice, the cutting out of living victims' hearts with stone knives. The dominant Amerind aristocracy was exterminated, their temples razed, and their palaces purified. The conquerors even erased the memory of their Mexican slaves. Ironically, the racial descendants of the Aztecs first learned authoritative facts about their vanished heritage from the excavations of North American and European archeologists in recent times, who stumbled upon abandoned Amerind cities the Spaniards never found. Even then, the memory was blighted, because no cultural bridge survived.

  Had the discovery of America been delayed a few centuries, the history of Middle America would have been much more like that of modern Asia. Europeans might have conquered, but they could not so easily have destroyed, and essential Amerind culture would have survived. When Columbus sailed, the Mexic civilization was on a par with 14th-century Europe, and certain other tribal groups of North America were culturally contemporary with the Germans of Tacitus' time. As it was, the Amerind contribution to the world was profound: three-fifths of the value of all the earth's agriculture in the 20th century came from crops the Americans planted first: maize, "Irish" potatoes, yams, tobacco, beans, squash, pumpkins, peanuts, tomatoes, chocolate, rubber, and long-staple cotton. Amerind discoveries were essential to modern American civilization.

  Though Amerinds tamed the llama, alpaca, turkey, duck, guinea pig, and dog, again in one crucial field—animal domestication—they fell behind. They had good reason; in the New World the horse, pig, cow, and sheep did not exist.

  Between 2500 b.c. and Columbian times, the use of corn spread northward. When the first white men came, the planting of maize had reached its geographic limits. But this great cultural revolution bypassed Texas, or rather, surrounded it on each side. The cau
se was geophysical, and obvious. For several hundred miles on either side of the Rio Grande the country was virtual desert—not "true" desert, like the Sahara or Kalahari, but Lower Sonoran plain, dry, dusty, almost waterless, with less than twenty inches of annual rainfall. When the tremendous Amerind invasion went north, it could have more easily marched through the southern part of Hell than crossed South Texas.

  But agriculture crept up the spine of Mexico and created a pallid reflection of Aztec splendor among the Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Rocky Mountain system. On the high plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado the Puebloan culture evolved, one of the two true barbaric civilizations of North America. The Puebloans—again, there was a series of tribes and peoples, at different times and over a wide area—farmed cotton and corn, beans, tobacco, and squash. They also ate sunflower seeds. They built spacious houses out of slabs of stone, which they chinked with adobe and covered with hides or thatch. They made beautiful ornaments and garments and pottery. They discovered social organization; both men and women worked in the fields. The practice and notion of war declined in their culture, and the peaceful farmer, rather than the savage warrior, became the nucleus of society. They organized colorful pageants and ceremonials; the Puebloans rose out of savagery to barbaric civilization.

  About a.d. 1000 the Pueblo (the word comes from the Spanish for "village") culture seemed to expand. Versions of it spread into the High Plains of Texas, and a Puebloan tribe built fine stone dwellings along the Canadian in the Panhandle. Other feelers of civilization inched down the Rio Grande into the Trans-Pecos region. Here, on the ruins of other semiagricultural tribes, such as the cave-living Basket Makers, the Jumanos put together a definite, though struggling, Amerind nation. But here, as on the edge of the Great Plains far to the north, the agricultural advance stopped. The Puebloan remained a civilization of the upper Rio Grande.

  Meantime, far to the east, certain events still clouded in mystery were taking place. The archeology of the American Southeast is much less advanced than that of the Southwest; the wet climate and the inundation of the white man destroyed sites and ancient evidence still preserved in the thinly settled, arid High Plains. But around the year 500 of the Christian Era, a vital new Amerind culture was spreading up from the Mississippi basin. It began on the Gulf of Mexico, reached the Great Lakes, and followed the curve of the sea so far as the forests ran. Thus, it spilled over into Texas, crossing the Sabine with the western edge of the great Southern pine forest. This barbaric civilization has been called the Mound Builder, from the eroding remnants of the immense earthen pyramids they left behind.

  The Mount Builders showed strong Mexican cultural influences. Otherwise, they were a Circum-Caribbean Amerind culture, building pole houses not unlike those found on the islands or the coasts of Venezuela. It seems likely they entered the present United States by water, though archeologists dispute this. No evidence of their passage across Texas has yet been found. The Mount Builders raised dirt pyramids fifty feet high, faced them with log stairs, and erected temples—presumably to a sun-god—at the top. The similarity to the Mexic culture is unmistakable; the Mound Builders used mud and logs because they lived in a country with little stone. The Amerinds also wore feathered robes, and they were divided sharply by class; their chieftains were borne about on litters, like Aztec or Mayan lords. The smell of the Middle

  American civilization lies all across this Mississippi pattern, as archeologists have described it.

  Although this new culture spread widely along the Gulf and up the Mississippi, something happened to it long before the Europeans came. This reinforces the idea of invasion; the Mound Builder culture was foreign, and it did not quite take root in a vastly different land. But in modern times it left behind a barbarian civilization within the borders of historic Texas, the Caddo Confederacies of the Piney Woods, once the most numerous and powerful Indians within the state.

  A haunting feeling of having descended from something greater still pervaded the Caddo nation when the first Europeans arrived. It was not truly indigenous to Texas; it faced East rather than West, and it halted abruptly where the pine woods ended, far short of the central plains. The Caddoan language, even, was linguistically bound not to the prairies, but to the lower Yazoo. Caddos resembled Choctaws, Cherokees, and Creeks; they unquestionably had a common cultural ancestor.

  The Caddoan peoples—there were two great confederacies, the Hasinai and the Kadohadacho, and more than two dozen tribes—still maintained the forms not of a blood kinship but of a former political ascendancy. There was a genuine bureaucracy: minor officials, subchiefs, tribal chiefs, who reported to each other, and finally, to the great chief of all the tribes, the Grand Caddi. They had a priesthood, which outranked the secular officialdom in standing.

  The high priest, or Xinesi, was responsible for the eternal flame in the central Caddo temple. All the various tribal temple fires had to be lit from this central, holy flame, a pontifical organization with recognizable manifestations.

  The Caddoans lived in a country of abundant rain, with rich soils. They enjoyed complete economic self-sufficiency; they hunted game much as the Anglo-Saxon settlers did, more as a supplement than a staple. They grew two varieties of corn and a whole assortment of vegetables, including pole beans. They lived in small villages, made up of large timbered houses, domed and thatched. These houses were airy and comfortable, furnished with colored rugs, baskets, and pottery. The villages were organized on a communal-kinship basis; both men and women worked the soil, and house-raisings were public affairs.

  The Caddoans made bows of a superior wood, Osage orange or bois d'arc, which was greatly in demand on the plains and in the far west. They must have carried on an extensive commerce with the west, because Puebloan cottons and pottery, as well as Plains buffalo hides, were often found in their houses. In this commerce the Jumanos of the Trans-Pecos acted as middlemen. Caddos occasionally hunted the bison, but they had no great enthusiasm for moving out on the plains. War had declined among the confederacies, and society no longer revolved about the cult of the warrior, as it had in the Archaic Age. The village official, the priest, or the peaceful husband had become the social ideal. These had developed into hereditary classes.

  These peaceful Amerinds had developed other traits, or had degenerated them, showing civilized origin. Though they no longer built temples or pyramids to the sun-god—or even knew why these once were built—they practiced a ritual torture unknown to North American tribes. Captives were stretched on racks to face the morning and evening sun; the ritual, and torture, was carried on for days, before the prisoners were killed and eaten, not for food, but ceremonially. The Caddos had torments far more exquisite, and lengthy, than the fiendish, savage, but relatively quick executions of the Plains Indians.

  Unlike other Amerinds, the Caddoans shed tears easily. They wept and wailed on almost every occasion, especially meeting or parting. White enemies were often warned of an impending massacre, in historic times, by the fact that the Caddos went into sobs and fits of weeping. Uniquely, the Caddos mourned their victims while they prepared to kill them.

  The cult of courage, at the base of most Amerind culture, was not important to the Caddos. A warrior who triumphed, or gained loot by treachery or stealth, or who fled the scene of battle with some gain, was still a hero. The Caddoan practice of war, however, was not really sophisticated: it was replete with moves, actions, delays, and ceremonials that no longer made sense even to the participants; they were fixed by custom. All war preparations, for example, required eight days, and ended with a ceremonial burning of a house. In all this can be sensed the dead hand of a former military tradition—much as the love of close-order drill has persisted in European armies in the Atomic Age.

  Because they were agricultural and war was no longer a central part of their culture, the Caddoan tribes were remarkably amiable to white men in the first years of contact, with disastrous results to themselves. It was not accidental, though ironic, tha
t the first French and Spanish who encountered Caddos appreciated them more, found their culture more related to theirs than that of any other Texas Amerind, and also destroyed them most easily.

  Between the Puebloan civilization of the upper Rio Grande and the decadent barbaric grandeur of the Sabine Hasinai Confederacy, the vast reaches of Texas remained what anthropologists call with some justice a cultural sink. Mexic and Circum-Caribbean influences reached Texas, but only on the fringes. On the hot, dry, harsh sweeps of the high mesas, the limestone plateaus, and the rolling coastal savannah, the numerous tribes never culturally left the Amerind Archaic Age.

  Racially all Texas Indians were quite similar, except for minor differences of height and skin shade. In their tribal customs, habits, and economies, however, they were as differentiated as Frenchmen and Chinese. Nor were the land and peoples stable.

  It is impossible to reconstruct the history of these peoples with any accuracy, and since a majority of the Texas tribes died out or had decayed to impotency by early historic times, their history had little importance to what came after. Its pattern merely suggests a continuing, endless rhythm of periodic aggression from the north, with sporadic internecine warfare at all times.

  South of the Caddo Confederacies, along the Gulf Coast, lived a number of small Atakapan tribes. These were a wretched reflection of the Caddos in some respects; their name was a Choctaw word for "man-eater."

  Further south along the coast, from Galveston to Corpus Christi bays, the Karankawa tribes had a more formidable reputation as cannibals—though their man-eating seems to have been as much of a ritual nature as for dietary benefit. This people early acquired a name for peculiar savagery, as well as bestiality. An early Spanish traveler wrote: "They are cruel, inhuman, and ferocious. When one nation makes war with another, the one that conquers puts all the old men and old women to the knife and carries off the little children for food to eat on the way; the other children are sold . . . "