Adelsverein
Page 55
One of my lucky finds at a San Antonio Library book sale was a paperback edition of a collection assembled by J. Martin Hunter. The Trail Drivers of Texas is a vast collection of first-person accounts put together in the 1920s. It proved to be a goldmine; who knew that cattle herds had been taken from Texas to Gold Rush-era California? Many of the adventures experienced by Hansi’s and Dolph’s drovers were drawn from that book. There was a long history of trailing cattle out of Texas to profitable markets elsewhere in the west. Texas longhorns were brought north beginning in the 1840s, along what was called the Shawnee Trail, between Brownsville and variously, Kansas City, Sedalia, and St. Louis. Another trail, the Goodnight-Loving trail, went from west Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming, following the Pecos River through New Mexico. The most heavily trafficked trail was the many-branched Chisholm Trail. Its tributaries gathered cattle from all across Texas into one mighty trunk route which began at Red River Station, on the river which marked the demarcation between Texas and the Indian Territories of present-day Oklahoma. The Chisholm Trail crossed rivers which, thanks to storms in the distant mountains, could go from six inches to twenty-five feet deep in a single day, and farther east skirted established farmlands whose owners usually did not care for large herds of cattle trampling their crops and exposing their own stock to strange varieties of disease.
Once into Kansas the trail split again, coming to an end variously at places like Dodge City, Newton, Ellsworth, and Abilene—depending on the year, how far the railway had advanced, and the exasperation of local citizens with the behavior of young men on a spree after three months of brutally hard work, dust and boredom. The cattle were loaded into railcars, the drovers paid off, and next year they did it again. The tracks can still be seen from the air, all across North Texas and Oklahoma. In the twenty years after the Civil War about 10 million cows walked north; most to the Kansas railheads, but a smaller portion went farther north, into Wyoming and Canada, to be used as brood stock for ranches that eager but late-coming entrepreneurs were falling all over themselves to establish.
The classical free-range cattle ranching and long-trail-drive era ended in the mid-1880s when bad weather and a glutted market brought prices for beef crashing down. The cattle towns depicted in western movies and television shows actually were limited to a very small time and space. They were also not nearly as lawless as presented then, or now. Many of the towns were in economic competition with each other, and each having a fairly freewheeling press and enthusiastic economic backers, any ruckus in one town was quickly magnified by detractors in another. Two cowboys indulging in a bit of relatively harmless gunplay outside a saloon in Newton could be magnified into small war, riot, and murder by a rival town’s newspaper. Murderous gunplay in cow-towns generally involved members of the professional gambling fraternity or local law enforcement professionals. Often, they were the same body of personnel. These were small towns any other time than the cattle trailing season, and people doubled up when it came to jobs.
The young lady with the pet prairie dog described in Chapter 13 was an enterprising dance hall girl and lady of the evening who later went by the name of Squirrel-Tooth Alice. Her real name was Mary Elizabeth Haley. She died of almost respectable old age, in a Los Angeles nursing home, in 1953. She had also, as a child of nine or ten, been a captive of the Comanche, until ransomed by her family.
Other curious things noted as regards the golden age of western cattle ranching: The average age of a cowhand/drover was about twenty-four. About one in six or seven was black and one in six or seven Mexican. The work was seasonal and most did it for only about seven years before moving on to something that paid a little more, or setting up as ranchers themselves. They usually did not own their horse, just their saddle. Horses were provided as a necessary tool by the cowhand’s employer, to be swapped out when necessary. At the end of a long trail drive, the horses were usually sold and sometimes the cook wagon too, as I have made note of in this volume. The cowhands returned to their starting point by rail, a ticket home being provided along with their wages.
One would think that to write about cowboys and the cattle trails is to venture upon extraordinarily well-trod territory, but there still are stories to be told. In this one I have tried to emphasize that it was a business, and sometimes a chancy one, especially for those who came late to the party. Men like Hansi Richter and Dolph Becker got into it because it looked like it would turn a profit, in taking a commodity of which they possessed a lot to a place where they could get a better price for it. I have modeled the R-B Ranch and Hansi’s and Magda’s various businesses after Charles Schreiner’s Y.O. Ranch near Kerrville. Charles Shreiner also ran a bank and a general store and experimented with other herd animals than cattle. The general store became a department store, which closed in 2007 after 138 years of business in Kerrville.
Finally, the birth and death of the city of Indianola: the Queen City of the Gulf coast, which flourished for merely a half century. It rivaled Galveston as a port and a mercantile center for that time, before being destroyed by a hurricane. Although the city fathers tried very hard to rebuild and revive their town, another hurricane ten years later made the end inevitable. There is nothing left of it now but a scattering of holiday homes on very tall stilts and a monument. Indianola’s nearest rival, Galveston in turn was nearly destroyed by another hurricane at the turn of the century. At least 8,000 residents were killed. Among the institutions destroyed was a Catholic orphanage, where the sisters tied the younger children to themselves with clotheslines and led them in singing a hymn to Mary, Queen of the Waves, as the building fell apart around them.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream!
Wm. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 5, Scene 1
Celia Hayes
San Antonio, 2011
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If you enjoyed this epic adventure of frontier Texas, be sure to check out my other historical novels, which are available in print editions from most online vendors, and in e-book editions from Smashwords. Further information about current titles is available at my website, www.celiahayes.com, at my book blog, and on Facebook.
To live without a sense of history, is to live in a kind of cultural sensory-deprivation tank. I write books as a way of exploring the past, and encouraging an interest in it, on the part of readers.
And besides – I hardly have to make anything up at all.