Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
What happened in the Texas, and American, West was a small but powerful process of natural selection. This was a harsh land, and its pressing realities were hot and cruel. There was little real fat, either material or psychological. Inner convictions, developed in more rarified civilizations, could not stand unless they were practical. Logic was only logic in the West if it visibly worked. The man who held to a preconceived attitude toward Indians, and could not learn the Comanche reality, often saw his family killed; or he himself died in his own homestead's ashes. A little-noted but obvious fact of the long Texas frontier was that some men lived and some families prospered on the edge of Comanchería, while many others failed and chance was not the major determining factor. Eternal vigilance, eternal hardness, was the price of success.
Observers wrote how old Rip Ford, weathered but not withered in his last years, squinted carefully down both sides of a San Antonio street—the famous, careful Southwestern stare, evaluating the men, the weather, the lay of the land—before he emerged into the sun. A Charles Goodnight could move early onto the far edge of nowhere, and hold his new range against all comers. Some men could not.
The successful cowman did not pray for rain so much as study the ways of the land, and learn when and in what cycles the rain would fall. Such men survived. Others, in whom wishful thinking was forever dominant, could not.
The Western selection was natural, but arbitrary, according to the needs of the land. No man who could not ride well fitted this country; he was a horseman, or he left. The society, atomistic as it was, could not tolerate physical cowardice; bravery was required. The coward not only died his personal thousand deaths, but he got better men killed as well. Again, the nature of the land worked strongly; timid men did not move into Indian country, nor did they ride mustangs and chouse longhorned cows. The syndrome of physical courage was a natural result. The Westerner could "ride the river" with some men; with others he could not. He saw no reason to tolerate the failures. Nature, and this land, did not tolerate its own. It was intellectually impossible for the Westerner to adopt a sense of the sacredness of life, because the evidence of his senses and his reason proved there was no such thing. On the Pleistocene Plains, nothing, neither man nor beast, had any inherent right to life. Some died, some survived.
The Indians were pests, and were removed, like cougars and range wolves. The buffalo was useless and stupid, in cowmen's eyes, and they welcomed their demise. Thus a definite Western psychology evolved, sometimes miscalled rugged individualism. The Westerner was brave and generous among peers, immensely adaptive to new ways and artifacts, anything that would help him live on the harsh frontier, but contemptuous to the edge of cruelty of ineptitude, and suspicious to hostility and beyond of unproved or undemonstrable ideas. The Westerner was as atomistic and self-reliant as the Indian, but in many ways almost as tribal, which was not understood. The same land called both breeds forth, and the land itself was dominant over man. No man could make it rain, though many tried, and no man, emulating Canute, could halt a blizzard howling across the wild frontier.
Nor could any man withdraw into his own empire of the mind. Such structures require an intricate civilization, far removed from the immediate realities of the soil. Thus the best-adapted Westerner was keenly intelligent and observant but at the same time highly unintellectual. Table talk, as writer after American writer has recorded, was of crops and cattle, markets and weather, never some remote realm of ideas.
This culture emphasized manhood, and it showed true feudal strains. The owner-cowman, the range boss, did not direct from his office, in the formative years, but from horseback. No wall of class or caste separated the wealthy cowman from his riders; he was more often than not a man who rose from their own mass. He was tougher, smarter, more capable of thinking or handling cows and men. Because of this origin, and this prejudice, a spartan atmosphere surrounded, even the great and wealthy indigenous empires of the West. In Wyoming and other places, European and Eastern owners drank superb whiskey in local clubs, and enjoyed the amenities of wealthy, transplanted investors. In west Texas, and this was lasting, immensely respected and powerful cattle barons did not live any differently from the bunkhouse hands.
Their big houses were spare and without beauty; their sons learned to ride and shoot and curse like men, or were held in a certain, unspoken contempt. Just as a certain breed continually flowed to the frontier, the frontier continually threw its own detritus back. Some were men and women who could not live this life.
The life was peculiarly destructive of women, eternally the conservators of civilization. Few countries where men are men can be happy abodes for women. Good women, however, were partners and enjoyed immense respect, and not only because they were so few. But because they were rare, all women had a status beyond that in the East. No man respected a prostitute or dance hall girl, despite much romantic and anachronistic fictional maundering in later years, but a capable whore was a much more valuable commodity here than in the crowded, industrial, slum-town world, and thus enjoyed greater consideration.
Two things were remarkable historically in this ephemeral West. One was the evident early feudality. The cattle "baron" was a baron in the original sense of the European word: a man, not an aristocrat, who got things done, not from on high, but among men and at their head. With a water hole in danger, or free grass encroached upon by some farmer or "range hog," or if someone disparaged the totem of the brand, cowhands were known to ride at the cowman's back. American history will never be entirely expunged of the cow outfit: owner, men, and boys, clattering into town, or assembling on some disputed range. The tribe of sheepmen inspired horror beyond the destruction of cattle graze. Men who could not work from horseback, farmer or merchant, were regarded by the cowman with expansive contempt. The cow tribe came from many disparate parts and points, but it quickly fused into a tribe. Cowboys, from the Canadian to Canada, were one clan.
The other factor was how quickly this culture developed its own psychology and codes, not yet codified into laws, and how these lasted beyond the reality of their time. The imprint was immense in Texas, although the scattered cowmen never materially affected the lives of the vast majority of people in the state. It was a society of the young, because old men did not go West; and the young were more changeable and adaptive, while at the same time more tribal, and more inclined to be philosophical conservatives about fundamental things. Children's society, with its directness and its cruelties, was untrammeled, and so was the society of the West. The cowboy, as one observer wrote, was ready to sing, to ride, or shoot, at the slightest provocation.
Love was subordinated, though sexual gratification was not, a characteristic of young society. The horse and pistol were admired; "they filled the eye and purpose." They were a symbology of direct, uncomplicated action to satisfy the soul. The horse elevated men and increased their sphere of action; the pistol, a weapon, toy, and tool, increased men's democracy and individual sense of power and worth. "God made some men big and some men small, but Sam Colt made them all equal," the significant Texas proverb ran. The armed society was not necessarily democratic or free, except among the peer group, but it was imbued with the sense of being both.
It was a special social complex, in which men gave or took no orders except from the recognized leader. It was largely lawless, because in the explosive turbulence of the rapid advance across the Plains, law and the instruments of law could not keep pace. When 100 men lived in an area of 1,000 square miles, formal structures disappeared. But the West, in the great years, was not criminal, and this was to be a fact much misunderstood. Much of the so-called lawlessness of west Texas was a result of Eastern laws that made no sense in the milieu beyond the 98th and 100th meridians. Men had to make their own codes, because there was no authority otherwise to make them; and many of the codes of the crowded, organized counties to the East were in the West absurd. Police did not exist; and what courts there were frequently dispensed what few Westerners regarded as justice.
Theodore Roosevelt, who spent much time in the West, called the code of the West "a square deal," in other words, fair play. This was innate in the Anglo-Celtic nature; fair play was an Anglo-Saxon concept. Under fair play no man could bushwhack another, shoot an unarmed man, or shoot an enemy in the back. He could call a play, thus giving all a fair chance in ensuing duels or war. Some men were better shots, or faster, than others, but the code of the West did not call for equality, only for equal opportunity. All men had the right to defend themselves. His survival, as Webb said, imposed upon the Westerner certain obligations: courage, skill, and the ability to kill in self-defense. If he was too inept or bloodless to develop these, that was, in Texan eyes, his own tough luck.
Breaking of the code brought punishment, but not at law. The man who shot Robert Neighbors was not brought to formal justice, because formal justice could not, in Texas hearts, have given him what he deserved. The man who might shoot an Indian or a Mexican, even on dubious grounds, was not a criminal, because these were not social crimes. Nor could any man who did not live the reality of the bloody trail properly call them so; crime involves psychology as well as moral codes. The West evolved a different, but a very real, code of murder. Killing in an unpremeditated quarrel, or in a called fair fight, was not murder but an incident. It did not strike at the roots of society, and was tolerable. A hundred years later, the criminal codes of the state of Texas regarded casual killing as a relatively minor crime, drawing two to twenty years. The usual punishment set the killer in a fair fight free in two years or less. The penalties for burglary or robbery were more severe.
Crimes against property involved two kinds: horse theft and cattle rustling. There was almost no other kind of property in the West to steal, and petty thievery violated all social codes. In a horse-symbol society, and one in which the horse frequently meant the difference for survival, horse theft logically had to be punished by death. Cattle-stealing was less important, especially during the years when the price of beef on the hoof in Texas was low. In fact, some of the viciousness that centered on cattle-rustling in later years came because of the mildness of the law and public attitudes. Cattlemen who were being robbed blind and who saw juries deal leniently with cow-thieves, much as later juries dealt with drunk-driving and for the same reasons, were powerfully stimulated to take the law into their own hands, through cattlemen's associations, range detectives, or otherwise.
One distinction often misunderstood was between a branded cow and its unbranded maverick, or calf. An unbranded calf for many years was regarded as public property in Texas; most cattlemen gathered in any they came across and rarely considered themselves thieves for doing so.
The real wars between Americans in the West were over land and water, primarily water. Here the English laws were useless to promote justice, quick to foster range wars. Noticeably, when the sea of grass was still a sea, and cowmen moved on it, unwritten customs with the force of law emerged. Cowmen recognized each other's range and water rights, which were staked as miners in the West staked out gold and silver claims. The law did not understand certain realities in the West, almost certainly because the lawmakers and enforcers, all men of the regions farther east, did not understand them. These men thought in terms of purely private property, in which each owner fenced his own parochial plot, and water was available in some fashion to all. When the law allowed certain ranchers or farmers to fence off rivers, thus destroying everyone in vast valleys who owned no riparian lands, the law produced bloodshed. To the law, no one held range or water rights unless he owned the property itself. The Homestead Act of 1862, which was an immense but rarely admitted failure west of the 100th meridian, did not affect Texas, because in Texas there were no federal public lands. Other legislation, particularly on water, did. The only law that the various legislative bodies failed to pass to regulate land and water in the West, as one historian said, was a law requiring more rain. In the end, Texas, painfully, had to modify the English common law on waters, while most other Western states abrogated it entirely. But this was not easily or bloodlessly done. Texas was fortunate in having had experience with Mexican law, and the original Mexican-Spanish code of reasonable and prior use, and the code that available water belonged to a region, not just a single owner, eventually were used in much of Texas.
There was no solution to the basic problem, then or later, because west of the meridian there never was, and probably never would be, sufficient water for development on the usual American scale. All solutions were compromises and modifications.
This brief West was spectacular in its scenery and ways of life, lawless and hardy in its reputation; unfortunately, it was also romantic to many outside eyes. It was not the most important American frontier. It was a footnote compared to the advance across the Appalachians, and the strategic turn of the wheel at San Jacinto. Yet no part of American history, probably, received so much attention.
The reasons were probably several. The Civil War had ended, but left gaping wounds. The West was fresh and free, not only for settlement, but to catch men's minds. It was neither North nor South, but American, though a prejudice lingered against the Texas West in fact and fiction. The United States, as a nation, was strong now, but not yet caught up in its 20th-century role of imperial expansion. The nation looked inward, to its own receding frontier, and the immense success of that conquest "loomed high on the egocentric national horizon." There was a sense of closing the national destiny, and an awareness that, just as once the northern and southern streams of Anglo-Celtic migration met in the Allegheny-Appalachian foothills, the two mainstreams of American 19th-century movement met and fused on the Plains. The Texans who crossed the Sabine were still Southerners. The men who moved across the 100th meridian, and from there to Wyoming, were Western Americans.