Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The West had a common national tale to tell, just at the time when transportation and means of communication were being developed to carry its story across the entire nation. Both Chicago and Austin newspapers, almost the same day, carried stories like
All Hell Breaks Loose in Texas—Miles of Fences Cut
, when this frontier made its last stand once again, against the, subtle but inevitable encroachments of the East. The last frontier was nationally advertised in the very days it ceased being a frontier; the impression was made.
Only a few Americans of many succumbed to Western psychology and Western mores, but they created a legend, with the aid of Eastern writers, which will never die.
As quick as its phenomenal expansion was the cattle culture's decline. The development flowered for a decade, then was extinguished on the Plains. The cow kingdom, the series of small empires, was always tributary and never sovereign, and it lasted for less than thirty years. It was moribund by 1885, dead by 1890. The Industrial Revolution, and the great mass of people to the East, subjected it as surely as they had destroyed the Indians, though they used different means.
Two inventions, the windmill and the barb-wire fence, destroyed the seas of grass. By themselves, each invention was imperfect; together, they made the cutting up of the Plains possible, and stock-ranching, rather than the cattle kingdom, profitable. The industrial society was endlessly inventive, endlessly destructive. With the air-driven, cheap, transportable windmill, wells could be planted on the semiarid prairies and stock tanks filled. Limited irrigation of pastures could be carried out. Each rancher could now stay in place, and cultivate his own parochial acres of land, to which he now must secure title. The wise cowmen had secured titles in Texas long before.
With the explosion of fence wire in the early 1880s, open range was done. Without cheap, transportable fencing materials, the Plains could not be sequestered; nor could the hardy but low-grade Texas stock be improved. The toughest and rangiest bulls, by natural selection, bred out the improved, weaker, fat stock. Behind barb-wire fences, the stockman could breed his expensive bulls and keep the range stock out. This was immense economic progress, but marked by certain failures. It was predictable that the ranchmen would overstock, and that the cattle, which cropped closer than bison, would eventually destroy the rich grass.
Meanwhile, there were no more trail drives or great roundups; wire enclosed the prairies and the rails pushed everywhere in the West.
Later Americans would never understand or sense the incredible vistas that inspired the first viewers to call the Great Plains an ocean. They were scarred first by stark lines of brutal metal wire, and iron windmill sentinels standing guard. Then the Plains disappeared in swirling dust storms, for which both the overoptimistic farmers who moved far west in wet years and the more economic-minded stockmen were jointly responsible. More people could live on the land, developing and destroying it, and that was the North American dream. The sun still shone, the winds still blew free, and only a handful of Americans heard a lament.
Now fully tributary to the economic cycles of the Industrial Revolution, the cattle culture withered; its bases were gone, engulfed in the continuing wave that devoured the First People. The boom and bust of the price cycles, the careful breeding of improved strains, the eventual development of vast farming operations, wheat and cotton, on some parts of the Plains, formed no part of history, except in books on economic development. The older, wiser, more good-humored stockmen sold off parts of their lands, helped develop towns, and usually served as directors of the first new banks. In one lifetime they had seen an abortive culture rise and fall. The lawyers were not far behind the Indians' demise; the men of the East insisted on making law and carrying it out for the men of the West.
The old-timers told old men's tales, of Indians, of fence wars, of good men and true, and bad men "mean as hell," as Dee Harkey wrote. Their descendants heard these tales, and were fascinated by them, but would never entirely understand.
They had not conquered the land nor bent it entirely to their will; they had cut it down to size.
The last stand of some, not all, of the cowmen was against the fences. The men who loved free range—free, if only a handful could enjoy or profit from it—saw the cruel wire come with horror. In Texas it was the large ranchers, above all the great cattle corporations, who fenced first. These people understood progress and stayed ahead of it. They fenced their huge acreages, which they bought cheaply from the state, and imported iron windmills along with the British cattle breeds. They crowded the small, reactionary, recalcitrant cowmen out. Some fought, some cut wires and tore down fences until it was made a felony at law. Behind these vast new preserves, and the small ones, ranchers raised cattle, rode horses, and wore boots, though they soon put their pistols aside. But the fenced pastures no longer resembled empires, nor were these men kings.
The land survived, immense, brooding, endless, its horizons lost in distant mountains, immensely old, yet somehow still young. There were places where men, and even the towns they built, were still specks of occasional ugliness upon it. New people came in and diluted old blood with new. Yet, something of the outlook, the psychology, and pragmatic directness of the Westerner remained along with the fading folk songs.
This land changed men, even Anglo-Americans, more than they ever changed it, and more, perhaps, than they would ever admit.
Chapter 32
THE DARK OF THE MOON
I find that the killing of those parties has developed a most alarming state of things on this frontier. The Mexicans on the other side of the river are very much infuriated and threaten to kill ten Americans for each of their Bravos. And then on this side the Mexican residents of Brownsville (that is, the majority, the canaille or lower class) are public in their denunciation . . .
CAPTAIN L. H. MCNELLY TO THE ADJUTANT GENERAL FROM BROWNSVILLE, JUNE 1875
What we want is about three good Rangers.
JOHN NANCE GARNER, JUDGE OF UVALDE COUNTY, TO ADJUTANT GENERAL MABRY
VAST changes—more vast and more turbulent than the various explosions of the next century—took place in 19th-century Texas. Only in retrospect did the older times seem stable; and this was a false view. From the first arrival of Anglo settlers in the 1820s through the closing of the final far-west frontier in 1881, life was volatile and dangerous; there was very little security of life or property; the state was always living under some fear or threat.
These threats—Mexicans, Yankees, Indians—were primarily external. But the turbulence of the frontier wars created an almost equal turbulence immediately behind the lines. No observer, seeing the violence that flared continually on Texas's long frontier, can fail to understand the ensuing problems of law and order that beset the state. By 1835, Anglo-Texas was drawing men who sought violence like strong drink; if they could not find a war, they were disposed to make one. It is an ironic fact that Stephen Austin's colony was one of the most orderly, with less crime, than almost any community in the history of the American frontier; but ten years after Austin's death, Texas had achieved an enduring reputation for lawlessness and bloodshed.
Austin's problem-solving was simple and direct, as it pertained to crime. By agreement with the Mexican authorities, he tolerated no unemployed, unpropertied, or people with dubious reputations on his lands. Gamblers and horse thieves arrived, along with duellists and gunmen. Austin saw to it that all such were rounded up, flogged if a lesson seemed judicious, and ejected from his colony. Expulsion was no difficulty; the criminals could always return to the States, or go beyond the confines of Anglo-Texas into Mexico. In terms of results, this system was almost perfect; it worked. Austin's Texas had no organized crime.
But with the immigration explosion of 1836 and ensuing years, the opening of headrights and free lands to any sort, and the eternal border violence that ensued, these conditions could not be continued. GTT—Gone To Texas—became a favorite entry, closing a case, in hundreds of American sheriffs' books. Along with the proud, stubborn pioneers Texas received many people of less wholesome cast. In 1842, homicides were common even in East Texas. The
Houston Telegraph
reported shootings and hangings, and observed that the frequency of both would "foster opprobrium upon the national [Texan] character."
The duel was not invented in Texas, but here it probably reached its widest use. At first these affairs were merely continuations of Southern custom; gentlemen shot each other for almost every conceivable affront. The Texas army was wracked by affairs of honor; officers put each other to the ultimate test almost with abandon. The end of the Republic, and the writing of an antidueling provision into the state constitution of 1845, halted most official frays. The old
code duello
brought across the Sabine fell into disuse, but the newer code of the West took its place. The informal, but no less bloody, duel in which the participants gave notice, drew, and shot it out—sometimes in a mass melee—was not recognized by the law as duelling, but as self-defense. It had the stamp of public approval; if a man went armed, he was expected to be able to defend himself.
But true crime also increased. The laws of the Republic were harsh: branding or flogging for theft, death for forgery, horse stealing, or equally opprobrious crimes. The state had no penitentiary until 1849, and these other methods were economical and direct. But already the laxity of law enforcement had become common, and this was to continue as a Texas trait. Local sheriffs tried to keep reasonable order, but not to stamp out crime. Texas juries were rough and ready, venomous when the public ire was aroused, but otherwise more disposed to set free than convict. Texans did not much like formal law or regulation, or the enforcement of codes that enjoyed no immediate popular support, and every state official knew this.
This condition, ironically, regularly created a real need for citizen action in defense of life or property. This again was an old American custom, the committees of vigilance, or vigilantes. The vigilantes normally only arose when the regularly constituted authorities refused, or failed, to achieve relief. When conditions became intolerable in certain areas, the citizenry did not want reasons, but results. However much vigilante action offended the concept of rule of law, it was more often than not effective. In 1852, after road deliveries and stock theft reached alarming proportions around San Antonio, the citizens hanged all suspected persons, some twelve or fifteen in all. Unquestionably some merely suspicious, not guilty parties, died, but crime in the vicinity temporarily ceased.
The majority of frontier communities organized vigilance committees at some point. A common practice was to give fair warning, usually through posted notices. If crime continued, the vigilantes rode. A high proportion of criminals, real or suspected, disappeared. Vigilantes were particularly active in Hill County, and further west. On one occasion, vigilantes shot one man in his jail cell. The fact that the court dockets were clogged, the jury system was venal—men biased in favor of the defense, or even relatives, were allowed by defense attorneys to serve—and sheriffs were somewhat inclined to live and let live where an arrest might start gunplay or a feud, all gave lynch law powerful impetus. The Texas frontier ethos, guileless and direct, demanded justice, not something the lawyers referred to as "justice under the law."
As often as not, justice was private and vengeance was personal.
The aftermath of the War Between the States created immense problems. Many of the thousands of deserters from the army in the last months of the war entered a twilight life of lawlessness and crime. Others were pushed over the line by the excesses of the occupation and carpetbagger administration. The line between a genuine criminal type, such as John Wesley Hardin or Sam
Bass, an iron-fisted rancher building up his range by might and main or a rebellious frontiersman who hated Yankees, Negro police, banks, railroads, and all their works, was very thin. Some men went over the line of the law and made it back successfully. Some did not. The immense distances and open spaces along the frontier, and the lack of statewide, cohesive law enforcement, made criminality possible and profitable. In 1876, Adjutant General Steele compiled a roster of 3,000 known fugitives on the fringes of Texas. In a message of 1879, Governor Oran Roberts, the "Old Alcalde," told the legislature bluntly that the "amount and character" of crime in Texas was "entirely unprecedented" in the United States.
One newspaper estimated that 100,000 horses were stolen by white thieves between 1875 and 1878. Almost 1,000 men were engaged in running horses, but hardly more than one in ten was brought to justice. Private organizations such as the Northwest Texas Stock Association (later, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers' Association) discussed the problem continually, hired detectives, and tried joint action. They met two immense problems: men of some wealth or influence were often engaged in or behind the organized rustling, and they had insuperable difficulties getting convictions when they caught some rustler in the act. Juries had the habit of ignoring evidence, of being venal or being stacked by the defense, or, in case the accused had a family, was a Confederate veteran, or promised to go straight, of letting him go.