FOLLOWING THE GRASS
FOLLOWING THE GRASS
HARRY SINCLAIR DRAGO
M. EVANS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by M. Evans
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Copyright © The Macaulay Company 1924
First paperback edition 2014
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940370
ISBN: 978-1-59077-428-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-59077-429-8 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MY OWN THREE
WINNIE, BARBARA AND TOM
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE I THE COMING OF THE BASQUE
II FOLLOWING THE GRASS
CHAPTER
I THE STORM
II THE STAMPEDE
III FLIGHT
IV ON BUCKSKIN
V THE FAR HORIZON
VI THE UNKNOWN PRESENCE
VII OUT OF THE PAST
VIII EVEN TO THE LOWEST
IX TIMOTEO SPEAKS
X THE SYMBOL OF HELPLESSNESS
XI THE SEED IS PLANTED
XII NECIA
XIII “VENGEANCE IS MINE”
XIV THE BULLY
XV “WE ARE FRIENDS”
XVI “I AM NOT AFRAID”
XVII “MY PLACE IS WITH YOU”
XVIII TWIN FIRES
XIX NIGHT FALLS
XX FATHER AND SON
XXI REVELATION
XXII THE LEAN KINE
XXIII “LEAD THE WAY”
XXIV MY HOUSE SHALL BE YOUR HOUSE
XXV “I SHALL GO”
XXVI A SHEPHERD SHALL LEAD THEM
FOLLOWING THE GRASS
FOLLOWING THE GRASS
PROLOGUE.
I. THE COMING OF THE BASQUE.
HIGH up among the Cantabrian foothills there is a paramera—a sealed valley. One enters and leaves it by a rocky trail that winds its way to the rim of the surrounding country by means of many tortuous grades. To the north, opposite the spot where the trail emerges from the valley, tower the grim, treeless, snow-capped Pyre-nees—the great Basque barrier which armies and adventuring princes have assailed in vain.
It is a goodly country. There, for nine centuries or more, men have tilled the soil and herded their flocks; no one among them rich, and no one poor; bending the knee never to king or potentate. Seldom, indeed, have they even made a promise of allegiance to any ruler, and then only with such reservations as left them free men and the makers of their own laws and the keepers of their souls.
This day a man toiled up the trail which led to the outside world. He paused at the rim and let his pack sink to the ground. He was a mere boy, for all that his body was man-grown. His name was Angel Irosabal.
He was the eldest of ten sons, and yet, until to-day, he had never been out of the valley. This was equally true of his brothers. That Angel fared forth into strange lands to-day was only because he was turning his back forever on the valley of his fathers.
Since childhood he had worn the sleeveless sheepskin jerkin and leather breeches of the herder. He was in holiday garb to-day—rough homespun woven from the fleece of the sheep he himself had guarded, and fashioned to his figure by his mother’s skilled hands.
Angel knew that as he proceeded through the valleys to come his attire alone would proclaim that some momentous event impended. And with good reason. Yet, surely, neither Angel nor his fellows could foresee that the business he was about was to change the course of history. Still, no less a thing was to come from it.
Take your map and place your finger upon the Bay of Biscay. You will see where the rocky coast of Biscay Province—old Vizcaya—turns back the surging tides. Nestling beside it is Alava, and beyond, to the north, hard-pressed by the Pyrenees and the Cantabrians, you will find Guipúscoa. It is a far-distant country, remote from the affairs of the world (or it was, then, in I860), but during the previous year word of the new world had filtered into its up-land valleys.
The New World—California! There was magic in its very name. Gold was hidden in its hillsides and streams; its wide valleys were rich, fertile beyond anything Guipúscoa knew. Rumor had it that those valleys only awaited the coming of man to be made to bloom as had the lowland gardens of Valencia.
It was a land where one rancho was larger than all of Guipúscoa—larger than all three of the Basque provinces put together! And men were their own masters there. They made their own laws!
Gray-haired Bonafacio, Angel’s father, had whispered that tale to his sons. They had asked him many questions, for they knew that the soil of the paramera was almost exhausted. They had need of a new land; but the father had allowed a full year to pass before announcing his decision.
The time had come. One of them must go forth in search of a new country. When he had found it—be it California or South America—the rest would follow—all but the head and the youngest son of each family. This, so that their seed should not be lost to their native land.
They had heard him in silence, knowing that Angel, as the eldest, would be the one to go. Sober-faced, the boy had accepted his responsibility. A day of feasting had followed—several whole sheep had been roasted upon the spits; tankards had been filled with smoldering chacoli.
That was yesterday. This morning, Angel had taken up his pack and kissed his mother good-by. With his brothers to bear him company he had set off across the valley to where the trail began. There, in the gray dawn, a dry-eyed girl had met them. His brothers had turned back then, and Angel, left alone with the girl, had taken her in his arms and kissed her.
Both knew it was good-by; but there had been no tears. Angel would have held himself shamed had tears dimmed his eyes. Tears were for Catalans and Andalusians and other soft peoples of the plains. He was a Basque.
The girl was like him in this; not within the memory of man had a foreign taint crept into her blood. And so, although her heart was breaking, she had smiled bravely. It is the Basque way.
Even now, as Angel gazed down at the whitewashed caserio of the Irosabals, his face was unmarred by emotion. He was an heroic figure as he stood there, tall, gaunt, with his hand shielding his eyes as he stared across the valley, his wind-tanned, copper-colored cheeks reflecting the rays of the westering sun.
Patiently his eyes swept the paramera until he located the landmarks of his boyhood. Old memories rushed to him and the minutes dragged by before he lowered his hand. From his pocket he took a blue magpie feather. When he had it firmly secured to a small rock he hurled it out into space, knowing that it would fall not far from where the trail began. It was the signal they had agreed on which should tell the girl that he had reached the top.
Picking up his pack, he turned his face toward Bilboa and the west. Spain was to know him no more. Later, for a brief two weeks, he loitered in Vera Cruz and Parral.
In Mexico his Basque tongue was unknown, and so, by force of circumstance, he had recourse to Spanish, a “second” language, which he spoke with greater elegance than Mexicans had been wont to hear.
Angel took no pride in this accomplishment. Spanish had long been the language of business in the Basque Provinces, where, strangely, it had attained a degree of purity unknown outside of Seville. Hence, the boy’s use of it was natural. In itself, it was a trivial matter. And yet, it was materially to affect his future life and the lives of those who were to follow in his footsteps.
El Camino Real—the king’s highway—was still the great thoroughfare to California. In Parral Angel purchased a horse and joined a wagon-train bound for Los Angeles and Monterey. He went armed, as did his fellows, for even as late as I86I the road led through a wild country.
America’s attention was far from the Southwest. The great battles of the Civil War were being fought, and although the war touched the lives of those along the border, and volunteers for both sides were not wanting, it was with the problems which the war brought, rather than with the war itself, that the frontier was concerned. Their old enemies, the Apaches and the Teguas, had sensed the relaxing of the restraining hand to which they had submitted. If history does not record those turbulent days in the Southwest it is only because they were concurrent with events of far greater importance east of the Mississippi.
Angel was essentially a fighting-man. The days that followed were to his liking. As the wagon-train moved north tales of the great battles came with increasing frequency. Had the boy been free to do as he pleased he surely would have turned his back on California. But the war was not for him.
Soon after the train turned west its troubles began. More than once Angel’s nostrils dilated to the acrid smell of gunpowder. A month later, tired and saddle-worn, he crossed into California. There, the war divided attention with the Com-stock and Yuba River. Gold was on everyone’s tongue. California was not only the greatest country in the world: it was the richest. Just wait until the war was won!
Now the boy’s way led ever northward; through the San Joaquin valley, past the Merced, the Tuolumne, the Sacramento. He was in a sheepman’s paradise. Even the Pyrenees could not match the Sierra Nevada.
The basin narrowed as he left Sacramento behind him. He took to the hills and explored upland valleys that dwarfed the paramera of his childhood. No longer did great flocks of short-wooled merinos greet his eye. Here was only talk of gold, of the fortunes being taken out of the Feather and the Yuba.
Angel knew he had found the place he sought. The soil was light, sandy—the very finest in the world for sheep. Bunch-grass, wild clover and a variety of salt bush were abundant. Timber was to hand, also. Nothing was wanting. Land was cheap.
The very bigness of the country was in its favor. In three days’ journey he had not seen a fence. Best of all, this land was not unlike his homeland. Therefore, from old Nevada City he dispatched word to Guipúscoa.
The residents of Nevada City were not of a discerning mind. To them, Angel was just another Mexican. His features, hair, the color of his skin and his stature should have marked a difference in their eyes, but they failed of it; and largely because Irosabal had a Spanish ring to it, and because the boy spoke Spanish. Later, when out of loneliness and the desire for speech, he consorted with Mexicans, the term “greaser” was applied to him without question.
At the time, the term of contempt meant nothing to Angel. He had not a dozen words of English at his command. Later, though, it was to make a difference. And the tragedy of it! Had he come to California knowing not a word of Spanish, he would have been received as was his due—the first of a distinct, proud, industrious and thrifty race. Instead of which he dowered himself and his brothers with the contempt reserved by Americans for the shiftless, lazy, gambling Mexican peon.
But no matter. Winter was at hand. It proved to he a mild one. Angel went back to the hills and built a cabin. Very little snow fell in the mountains that year. No one appeared to notice the fact, least of all the boy busy with his plans for the coming of his people. Spring came early. In April, he went to Sacramento to meet his brothers.
The newspapers of that day make bare mention of their coming; and yet, there were more than forty in the party—men, women, children. Most of them were related to Angel. The girl to whom he had tossed the blue magpie feather was among them.
Her coming was a surprise arranged by Angel’s father. They were married the following day. By the end of the week the party had been provisioned and properly outfitted. Lambing-time was nearly over; the season for buying and selling breeders would follow immediately. Before it began, Angel’s party had to be housed. Therefore, he led the way to the valley south of Nevada City without further delay.
There began then such a job of pioneering as America has seldom witnessed. The year was to be long remembered in California. What snow there was in the mountains went off rapidly. The streams rose over night. Sacramento was devastated.
Close on the heels of the flood began the severest drouth in California’s history. By midsummer, cattle and sheep were starving. Horses were slaughtered in great numbers in order to save range for the cattle.
Conditions grew steadily worse. Not once during the long hot months did rain fall in the Sacramento Basin. To the north and east, where the foot-hills were timbered, the bunch-grass and dwarf sage survived.
Angel’s people profited by this. They were able to buy sheep at their own price. No wonder, then, that before winter came again they were cordially hated by the less fortunate sheepmen of the Basin. And now, for the second year in succession, were the mountains free of snow. The fact was noted this time. It was an ominous sign Spring but proved it—the drouth was unbroken; even in the hills, the sage, hardiest of plants, withered and died.
II. FOLLOWING THE GRASS.
THERE was nothing for Angel and his people to do but move. But to where? No one came forward to offer them range or help them in their extremity. They were a people apart.
But they knew how to meet misfortune with a brave face. The houses which they had built, the corrals, the crops which they had planted—these and all of the fruits of a year of hard, unremitting, back-breaking toil were lost to them if they moved. Undaunted, they chose to drive their flocks to some new country where they could begin again, to follow the grass as sheepmen ever have done.
Their courage brought them one reward—a new and distinct term of contempt. They were no longer “greasers”; they were “boscos”—a strange corruption of the Spanish Basque. “Greasers” quit; these “boscos” were fighters, and accordingly, they were to be watched. There were too many foreigners in California, anyhow!
The Central Pacific was being built. Already the railhead was beyond the Sierra Nevada. Along this route, then, did Angel and his followers go. Those who had horses rode, the others walked, driving their herds before them. In the rear thundered their wagons. California was glad to be rid of them. But it was California’s loss.
For nearly a century the way of the pioneer had led westward. Here, then, was the first trek eastward. It made history, for it brought to Nevada its greatest factional fight— the war of the cowboy and the herder. The big cattle-outfits were well established in the valleys north of the Humboldt.
Range was free, but there was no room for sheep. There had been trouble enough already over sheep. Arizona had had a taste of it. Sheep were a Mexican business anyhow.
Nevada was a new state and things were lax, but even if the politicians down in the old Washoe country had no concern with anything that did not affect mining and Virginia City, folks north of the Humboldt could look after themselves. So along the river, from Dufrayne’s mill to Fort Halleck, the warning went up—“Sheepmen Stay Out!”
The cowmen did not lack arguments for the stand they took. Sheep huddle closely while grazing. They have an upper and lower set of teeth: so they virtually crop grass and herbage to the very roots, and what they do not eat their
knife-like hoofs destroy.
With free-range, it was not to be supposed that herders would keep their flocks moving. At that time, no one gave a thought to the future. The universal intention was to rip out a fortune in a hurry.
If cattle did not destroy the range it was because of the habits with which nature had endowed them, not because of the care or foresight of the men who owned them. Equal carelessness with sheep meant the ruining of the range; for if they grazed time and again over the same land, nothing could survive on it, not even the sheep themselves.
And this was the country to which Angel, as a last resort, led his people I So far, they had followed the railroad, but the construction gangs had only reached the Truckee; so at the river they took the trail to Fort McDermitt. In a general way, their objective was the Owyhee Basin, or, denied that, the valleys of the Tuscarora Range to the south of the Basin.
Before them stretched an arid, semi-desert country. There were no towns. White men were few. In a sense, it was Indian country, for although the Piute was, to all intent, peaceful, he had not forgotten what he and his brothers had done to the white man at Pyramid Lake.
Observe this immigration, then, for what it was—a journey of privation, danger and hardship beneath a scorching sun, and undertaken without previous knowledge of the country through which they were to pass. At the river-crossings, quicksands awaited them; when they left the river their children were to cry and their own tongues grow thick for want of water.
They knew nothing of the desert. They were even less fitted, by experience, for their task than the men and women who had followed Brigham Young across the plains. And at their journey’s end, if they won through, was what? Organized hostility, hatred and contempt!
The picture is well-nigh hopeless. Add to it that they were to stop not less than three times to bury their dead beside the trail; that four of their women were to know the anguish and travail of childbirth. Is there aught of misery that was not theirs?
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