by Unknown
And so, indeed, it was. A few miles up the road from Cross Plains, during the early years that Robert Howard lived there, lay the town of Pioneer. Here, for example, a jail break was accomplished in a most unusual way. When a bunch of Jack Tindall's mule skinners whooped it up in Pioneer, the constable threw the more obstreperous members of the group into the small local jail, planning to keep them there until the effects of the liquor wore off. Their comrades, scarcely more sober than the prisoners, demanded that the constable free the jailbirds. He refused. Thereupon the teamsters loaded the jail, inmates and all, onto their wagon and headed for home.
The sheriff—more angry than alarmed—placed a long-distance call to Jack Tindall, demanding the return of his jail and his prisoners.
"Let them go," advised Tindall. "Tell me how much their fines are, and I'll take the amount out of their pay." On the strength of this promise, the men were released; and once freed they gallantly returned the jailhouse to its rightful owner.3
The history of Callahan County was both colorful and violent, and the past left an indelible stamp on the people who lived there in the twentieth century. Callahan County, an area of some twenty-eight miles on a side, was named for James A. Callahan, a Georgian who came to Texas in the 1830s to fight for Texan independence. Callahan was taken prisoner when Colonel James W. Fannin lost the battle of Coleto to the Mexican army. The Mexican general Santa Anna, who had captured the Alamo and ordered all the male defenders killed, sent orders for the massacre of Fannin's men.
Although General Jose Urrea, who had promised the captives mercy, protested this order in vain, a heroic Mexican lady, Panchita Alvarez, with the connivance of her husband's fellow officers, smuggled several of the prisoners away in time to save their lives. Callahan was one of the survivors, either because of the efforts of Senora Alvarez or because his skill as a wainwright made him more valuable alive than dead.
Still, Santa Anna's cruelties inspired a ferocious hatred in Anglo-Texans that has ever since reinforced interethnic hostility between Anglo-Texans and Hispano-Texans. In his letters Robert Howard revealed his share of rancorous contempt for persons of Mexican descent. When telling Lovecraft how a rancher killed a Mexican and sewed the corpse in a cowhide, only to have a detective come searching for the body, Robert wrote: . . just why so much trouble was taken about a Mexican I cannot understand." In another letter he stated: "The main thing I dislike about Mexicans is their refusal to speak English. . . . You know he's lying, but there's nothing you can do about it. You restrain your impulse to strangle him."4
Fear and hatred of Indians, likewise, persisted in Callahan County in Robert Howard's time. The unsettled land that later became Callahan County had belonged to a peaceable and sedentary tribe of Indians, the Tonkawas, who had been farmers until they got horses and learned to hunt buffalo. Later, reduced by smallpox and wars to a few hundred survivors, they reverted to an agricultural life. They were mainly friendly to the whites, although this tolerance did them little good. In 1859 they were driven into Oklahoma with other Texan Indians and were massacred there by fellow Indians when they refused to join in an uprising against the whites who had driven them forth.
The warlike Comanche raided the county, especially during the
Civil War; and the settlers' hatred, inspired by Comanche brutalities, carried over for generations to all Indians, no matter how peaceable.
Howard reflected this common attitude. He told with relish of a quirt made from the skin of the last Indian killed in Callahan County before his corpse was fed to the hogs. Robert's mother likewise viewed Indians with loathing. When Robert sat near a window at night, he reported: "I notice my mother by force of habit pull down the curtain. It is an involuntary relic of the old days when it was not wise for any man to give his enemies a clear shot of him."5
Harassment of blacks was so integral a part of the culture of West Texas that Robert seemed unaware of it. He wrote that Texans had never persecuted any class or race because of accident of birth; yet he also noted that no Negro was allowed to remain overnight in Callahan County.6 When in the 1920s an oil magnate came through in his limousine, his black chauffeur was allowed into the county only on condition that he stay in the car the whole time.7
The years after the First World War saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which professed such ideals as "the preservation of law and order, protection of virtuous womanhood and orthodox Protestant moral standards, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, pre-marital chastity, marital fidelity, respect for parental authority, and maintenance of white supremacy."8 These ideals were enforced by terrorism aimed at Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and persons against whom individual Klansmen harbored grudges.
Violence in Texas did not abate during Robert Howard's youth. In 1924, after "Farmer Jim" Ferguson had been impeached for stealing public funds, he ran his wife Miriam for the governorship, telling the voters that they could have "two governors for the price of one." "Ma" Ferguson won the Democratic primary, tantamount to election in the Texas of the time, and served her term as governor.
The Scopes evolution trial—the famous "Monkey Trial"—was held in Dayton, Tennessee, the following year, while the Fundamentalist anti-evolutionary movement was in full cry. "Ma" Ferguson ordered that all references to evolution be snipped out of textbooks, declaring: "I'm a good Christian mother . . . and I am not going to let that kind of rot go into Texas schoolbooks."9
But the tug-of-war of ideas did not merely result in mayhem on books. In Fort Worth, the Reverend J. Frank Norris, a leading anti-evolutionist, furiously attacked the Catholic Church in his paper The Searchlight. When an official of the Knights of Columbus, D. E. Cripps, went unarmed to Norris's office to protest, he was shot dead. Norris was tried but, with the support of the Grand Dragon of the local Klan, was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. He returned to his pulpit to the cheers of the congregation.
The Fergusons had worked out a system of graft safer than the one that had earlier gotten James Ferguson into trouble. Persons whose dear ones languished in Texas jails hired Mr. Ferguson as their lawyer to secure the prisoners' release, and Mrs. Ferguson routinely acceded to her husband's recommendations. Hence Texas went through a period of easy pardons for any crime, provided that the petitioners could pay the legal fees of the governor's husband.
Still, true to her campaign promises, "Ma" Ferguson pushed through such strong legislation against the Ku Klux Klan that it slowly withered away. Young Robert Howard, who believed in evolution and opposed the Klan, supported the Fergusons. While aware of their faults, he considered them champions of the common folk of Texas against "the interests."
Cross Plains, where Robert Howard lived during his last seventeen years, lies in the southeast corner of Callahan County, about forty-three miles southeast of Abilene and thirty-two miles north-northwest of Brownwood, the community in which Howard studied for two years. This cluster of towns comes close to marking the geographical center of Texas.
Cross Plains stands on the ridge of the Callahan Divide at an altitude of 1,715 feet. Like most of Texas, the land is flat with a slight roll. In winter, when the leaves are off the trees, the level horizon to westward is broken only by the larger of the two Caddo Peaks, named for the Caddo Indians. Beyond the northeastern horizon marches a range of low hills called the Baker Mountains.
Lying in a north-south strip of land, called the Cross Timbers, the county has no permanent rivers—only such intermittent streams as Turkey Creek, which wanders past Cross Plains to the west; the Pecan Bayou, whose several branches drain most of the area; and in the southwest corner the Jim Ned Creek, named for a noted scout of the Tonkawa Indians.
Rainfall in Cross Plains averages about twenty-five inches a year, but it may drop to a low of only thirteen inches in dry years and rise to a high of forty-one in wet. Despite the claim of the Texas Guidebook that "Texas as a whole has the best all year climate in the nation,"10 this land is given to sudden changes and disturbing extremes. The rainfall is irr
egular, alternating between cloudbursts and drouths. The wettest month is usually September; the driest, February.
Although the average temperature in Cross Plains is 50°F, in summer it may rise to 96° or even to 110° and in winter fall to 32° and, on occasion, to 10°. Texas is a notoriously windy state. The Panhandle— the northernmost part—has the highest mean yearly wind velocity of any place in the nation.
The area around Cross Plains is suited to certain kinds of agriculture, the main crops being wheat, oats, and other small grains; "Spanish" peanuts; and pecans. Some cotton is raised, although much less than in Howard's time, when this was the major crop. More of the acreage is suitable for grazing; and cattle of the Hereford, Angus, and Charolais— as well as the American Santa Gertrudis—breeds roam the pasture lands.
In the 1870s several German families clustered at Cross Plains, in log cabins at the start, then in small frame houses. They named their settlement Schleicher, after Gustav Schleiche , who came to Texas in 1847 in the stream of German immigrants of the 1830s and 1840s. A huge man, Schleicher became a highly successful businessman, land promoter, organizer of German settlements, and politician. In 1874 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, despite being a reconstructed Southerner with a German accent, he gained popularity by urging the installation of an elevator in the Capitol, using his own 300-pound bulk as a telling argument. He was still serving there when in 1879 he died.11
By 1880 the town of Schleicher had a population of twenty-five. The next wave of migrants came mainly from the Deep South. Successive groups of new arrivals changed the name of the town: first to Turkey Creek, then to Greenbriar, and finally to Cross Plains, the name that the U.S. Post Office made official.
In 1911 the town boasted about six hundred residents. The year before, the Texas Central Railroad (later part of the Missouri—Kansas—
Texas system) extended a line from Waco to Cross Plains via De Leon, Sipe Springs, Rising Star, and Pioneer. The coming of the railroad touched off a minor boom, causing the town to move itself half a mile to the east, from the banks of Turkey Creek to the vicinity of the railroad station.
As the town took shape in its new location, the railroad entered it from the southeast, cut diagonally northwest, crossing Main Street to reach the station half a block west of Main, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. The track continued on for several blocks to dead-end in a Y, used for a turnaround. In Howard's time a single mixed way freight with a day coach attached arrived from De Leon every afternoon or evening, spent the night, and returned to De Leon the following morning. With the coming of the automobile, fewer and fewer passengers rode the train.
As a youth and young adult, Robert Howard got around by whatever means were available—hitchhiking, bus, mail truck, or train. After visiting his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in Brownwood in the summer of 1923, Howard returned home by taking the train from Brownwood to May, a village in northern Brown County. There he picked up a "mail hack" (a car or truck used by a rural postman to haul mail) headed for Rising Star. Thence he rode another mail hack to Cross Plains. Thus, says Smith, he was forced to make "what is now a short trip by modern means into the greater part of a day's journey."12
By the time Robert Howard and his family moved to Cross Plains, the town had grown to some 1,500 souls. Although it expanded remarkably in the boom days of the 1920s, it now harbors only about 1,150. This is why some people say that Cross Plains is a town that time forgot.
Cross Plains was a pleasant-looking little town when the Howards chose it for their permanent home, and it has not changed much in the intervening decades. Neat modern bungalows surrounded by clipped lawns and colorful plantings line the residential streets. Streets that were dirt-surfaced in 1920 are now paved—Main Street was paved in 1928—and several service stations have risen at major intersections. And the lawns are greener now; for in Howard's day water was not abundant enough to maintain them well in this land of devastating drouths.
Although several of the business buildings on Main Street rise two stories high, most of them were, as they are today, single-storied. In the 1920s Cross Plains had two banks, the Farmers National and the First State Bank. Sauntering southward along Main Street, the shopper would come upon two drugstores, Smith's and the City Drug Store owned by Barney Lindley, each with a magazine rack and a soda fountain, which of an evening provided curb service to young couples affluent enough to order ice-cream sodas served to them in their cars.
Across the street stood the impressive tan brick building that housed the Higginbotham Department Store, a landmark in the town for nearly fifty years. A block or two away, on a side street, one could see the broad-glassed windows of the local newspaper office and print shop, wherein Jack Scott sold advertising space and took orders for handbills when he was not busy writing or editing copy for the next edition of The Cross Plains Review, owned by his father.
There were four churches in town: the Methodist, the Baptist, the Presbyterian, and the Church of Christ, the last an offshoot of Alexander Campbell's Disciples of Christ. Mrs. Howard joined the Methodist Church and remained a steadfast member, although never a regular churchgoer. Dr. Howard joined the Baptists but did not strictly adhere to their creed. Although a deeply religious man, the doctor's inquiring and restless mind led him to seek out and follow a number of different religious beliefs.
Cross Plains in the 1920s boasted two motion-picture theaters, the Ideal and Dad Childs's Movie Theater. The latter, seating about seventy-five viewers, was the more colorful. Henry Childs, the proprietor, at show time stood on the sidewalk loudly proclaiming the virtues of the current attraction while his daughter sold tickets. His grandson, of course, did not have to pay to get in; but other children, at least in theory, did. So the friends of little Joe Child would cluster around him at the entrance, looking longingly at the inviting door, until Dad Childs, losing patience, would roar: "Get out of here!" and shoo them all in without tickets. Inside, an elderly Indian was hired to sit near the player piano and look picturesque. Sometimes local boxing matches were held on the stage.13
After the Great Depression claimed these movie houses, the Liberty Theater took their place. Robert Howard became an avid motion picture fan, devoted to William S. Hart's silent Westerns. Many of the settings of oriental palaces and other exotic scenes that appear in Howard's stories are essentially descriptions of the lush movie sets of the twenties and early thirties. The 1923 version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of
Main Street, Cross Plains, Texas, 1977
Notre Dame, with Lon Chaney, Sr., grotesquely made up as Quasimodo, impressed Howard enormously. The cinematic version of the thieves' quarter in medieval Paris may have inspired Howard's creation of the Maul in his Conan story, "The Tower of the Elephant." But we are running ahead of our story.
For America, for West Texas, for the Howards, and for young Robert, 1918 was a pivotal year. Change was everywhere. In Europe the tides of battle had turned. Along the Western Front the Germans were forced back until by November 11, 1918, they signed an armistice. The world was once more considered safe for democracy.
The jubilation of American soldiers returning from their European victory was dampened by an epidemic of "Spanish influenza," which swept the country in 1918 and wiped out almost as many lives as had the fighting in the unspeakable trenches along the Western Front. About 200,000 Texans had served in the armed forces during the First World war; but of the five-thousand-odd men who lost their lives, only one-third perished by enemy action. Another third died of flu.
Dr. Howard, back in Burkett, had his share of flu victims. He was either more skillful or more fortunate than many of his colleagues, for he was able to pull most of his patients through. Dr. Howard believed that he was so successful because he "treated the heart." The minute he knew that a patient had "war flu," he began to treat the heart. He so confided to a patient whose flu had "settled in her ear" and who was cured by Dr. Howard's ministrations.14
In the How
ards' West Texas, overshadowing both victory and the specter of disease was the discovery of oil. In Eastland County near the town of Ranger, in Jake McCleskey's pasture, on the afternoon of October 21, 1917, the first oil well—later called the McCleskey—blew in. The boom was on.
During the six months that followed the drilling of the first well, the population of Ranger leapt from 1,000 to an estimated 80,000 people. The Ranger field produced 10,000 barrels of oil a day at a time when oil was selling at $3.50 to $4.50 a barrel. This strike coincided with a research report published by the Smithsonian Institution, which concluded that the nation's oil reserve had reached such a low point that there were only seventy barrels of oil available in the United States for each man, woman, and child.
Those were exciting times. Everybody was affected by the oil boom. Local labor shortages, postwar unemployment in the north, a demobilizing population already on the move—all stimulated a migration toward the Oil Belt that surpassed even the California gold rush of 1849. Oil activity focused the attention of people within a radius of fifty miles of the McCleskey well. Drilling spread from this center to the periphery of a widening circle that first reached Pioneer in Eastland County and later the town site of Cross Plains itself.
The Texas pools of "black gold" were shallow and scattered. Some wells came in at about 1,500 feet; others went as deep as 3,000 feet. The wells came in dramatically. There would be a tremendous rumble just before the oil spurted out of the hole to rise higher and higher, sometimes over the top of the derrick, before fountaining out on the ground in a stream of 2,000 to 6,000 barrels a day.
Now all this is gone. The forest of derricks that rimmed the horizon, stretching above the mesquite and oak, have disappeared. The few remaining wells are serviced by pumps, which stand like gigantic praying mantises, rhythmically nodding up and down in the cotton fields or pastures.
