Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
There were two pools of water in the camp. One was so filled with blood the Rangers could not use it; they made their morning coffee from the other pool.
Captain Baylor's report to Major Jones concludes:
We all took breakfast on the ground occupied by the Indians which all enjoyed as we had eaten nothing since dinner the day before. Some of the men found horsemeat pretty good whilst others found venison and roasted mescal good enough. We had an almost boundless view from our breakfast table; towards the north the grand old Cathedral Peak of the Guadalupe Mountains; further west the San Antonio Mountains, the Cornudas, Las Almas, Sierra Alta; at the Hueco Tanks, only twenty-four miles from our headquarters, the Eagle Mountains. The beauty of the scenery [was] only marred . . . by . . . the ghostly forms of the Indians lying around.
The last settler had been killed by Indians in Texas. In the chill rare air and stark shadows of the Rockies at this daybreak, Texas Rangers had shot down their last Indian. The vast Pecos drainage was secure; this same year the last free range disappeared, and rails had almost reached El Paso.
In 1881 Jones died, and the principal captains of the Frontier Battalion resigned. The Battalion lived on for many years, but it was a living anachronism.
The frontier was closed. Texans at last stood the masters on their chosen soil.
Part VI
THE AMERICANS: NEW DREAMS FOR OLD
Chapter 33 – The Stubborn Soil
THE STUBBORN SOIL
The fertile lands, delightful climate, and wonderful resources of Texas, all combine to attract within her borders the intelligent and enterprising of every State, and indeed of almost every land.
THE
Vicksburg Times
, 1870
Shall we gather at the river,
The beautiful, beautiful river;
Shall we gather at the river,
That flows by the throne of God.
TEXAS SETTLER HYMN
THE parameters of Texan life were set by the outcome of the Civil War; no restoration of 1874 could alter certain basic facts. Texas was subject to the revolutionized theory of government that destroyed all state sovereignty over politics, money, and social organization. The Industrial Revolution triumphed, turned the United States into a common market, and established economic development as the primary goal in American life. The cotton kingdom was aborted with much pain and blood; the cattle kingdom vanished because it never embraced enough people even to make a fight. Americans, like most peoples, accepted the inevitable as good. It would have been healthier for the nation, however, to have looked upon the contest for what it was, and to have recognized that while the greater and better organized population of the industrializing North could subordinate the South and Southwest, it did not effect for many years any solutions for the social and economic problems that made those regions different. Cotton and cattle were made tributary to the industrialized society, on its terms. The emergence of a new mercantile elite in the South, the building of rails, and the domination of Eastern finance did not industrialize Texas. These gave the state some new problems in exchange for old.
The wholly agrarian society in Texas was to suffer from severe problems and tensions in the last quarter of the 19th century. The greater nation dragged it along certain courses it did not want to go, and forced it to abide by laws and rules few Texans saw as working for their own best interests. There were continual prejudices and bitternesses on each side. Social and geographical factors slowed industrialization in Texas compared with the U.S. as a whole; meanwhile, the economy, oriented as much or more to Europe as to the North, suffered from enforced national tariffs and hard-money policies. Texans saw these impositions as a part of the pattern of conquest; Yankees looked on Texan protests as rebellion.
The agrarian problem—and most, if not the most powerful Americans, were agrarians in the 1870s—was consistently misunderstood or ignored by dominant government after the Civil War. Industrialism was an ideology, even if not well articulated. Once the United States adopted the Texan solution to the Indian problem consciously, and agreed to the reordering of the Negro tacitly, economics were to dominate Texas politics and federal–state relations. In these fields Texans were not to have their way.
For about two decades after the restoration of nominal state sovereignty, however, the agrarian society of Texas was successful. In these years the state developed enormously. The development, however, was like the previous Southern advance, along static lines. The two reasons for the great increase in over-all wealth and state revenues during the 1870s and early 1880s were, first, a heavy immigration, mostly from the South, and second, a cycle of wet or rainy years throughout even the central and western areas of the state.
Life in the 1870s was very little different for the average Texas farm family than it had been in 1860. The planters were gone, and the new landowners who took their place tended to live in towns, but the thousands of small farms throughout eastern and central Texas still raised cotton and corn, and were surrounded by a few cows, sheep, hogs, and noisy flocks of domestic fowl. The more industrious families had gardens now and a few fruit trees for home use. Corn was eaten or fed to the stock; cotton was sold for cash, needed for taxes and always desperately scarce. Much trading, even at the local settlement stores, was still by barter: bacon for denim, smoked hams for flour. Each fall hogs and beeves were killed, hides sold, and the meat cured. Game was still abundant in most regions of Texas, and venison, duck, squirrel, turkey, and quail supplemented every farmer family's diet.
Land was still plowed with oxen, seeds planted by hand. Husbands still made implements and furniture, wives clothing, soap, candles, and bedding. Spring or well water supplied each farm; logrollings, house-raisings, and quilting parties continued as they had for a hundred years. The school system, after the destruction of the Radical innovations, was the old, largely private, little red house system of old.
The countryside was overwhelmingly rural. Washington County, with the largest population of any county in Texas, had no important towns at all. But county seats and settlements were important centers; the farms radiated around them. The Texas farmer was still in no sense a peasant, affixed to his soil. He moved frequently, always seeking better land, and while the towns, in an era of limited transportation, were inhabited solely by business or professional classes, the farmers went in and out of them. They provided centers for communication, and such business as the farmer did.
A typical Texas town contained a courthouse, several general stores, at least one drugstore, and inevitably, a number of saloons. The general stores sold a limited number of goods: a few groceries, such as cured meats, sugar, syrup, cheese, coffee, crackers, dried fish and fruits. Canned goods could normally be found only in larger towns. Dry goods could always be bought, such as denim cloth, calico, gingham, and hats. Furniture or hardware was rarely sold; men made their own. Guns and ammunition always filled one counter; though the farm families almost always owned an old percussion rifle or shotgun—old "Tin and Tack"—handed down, and for which they manufactured their own shot.
Luxuries in this ragged South were few: peppermint stick candy at Christmas time, to make children's eyes grow wide; lemon crackers, and not much else.
The drugstore was as important, perhaps more so, than the general goods store. Patent medicines were plentiful, and guaranteed for almost any ill.
Despite glowing statements, and vehement denials, health conditions in much of eastern Texas, particularly near the Gulf, were not good. The actual incidence of the dread diseases, cholera, typhus, and yellow fever, is hard to determine, because Texas newspapers vigorously suppressed such news. However, in the early years of the Republic, cholera epidemics were frequent, at Goliad, Nacogdoches, Indianola, Brazoria, and San Antonio. Typhus, certainly brought in from Central Europe, ravaged the German settlements at New Braunfels and Fredericksburg in their formative years.
Cholera was combatted among the Spanish-Mexican population by the wearing of copper amulets, and by lime, laudanum, and boiled peyote water taken internally. Anglo-American cures such as large doses of brandy, cayenne pepper, and mustard were probably equally effective and euphoric. Almost all educated people, however, connected Asiatic cholera and filth, and by the 1870s actual epidemics were rare; a few outbreaks were still caused by polluted wells.
Yellow fever, with endemic malaria, caused havoc along the coasts. U.S. Army records are more informative than Texas newspapers, which printed little that might inhibit immigration. Some two thousand soldiers died of yellow jack at Fort Brown, with the worst outbreak coming in 1882. This hazard was not removed from the Gulf coast until these fevers were finally associated with mosquitoes.
For most assorted chills and fevers Texans took large amounts of quinine. Doctors prescribed quinine and calomel for most ills and advised against milk.
The numerous doctors in the state were generally poorly trained and educated, and their practice was hardly brilliant. No Texas doctor ascribed to the theory of germs in the 1870s, nor could any perform abdominal surgery or remove an inflamed appendix. Many frontier doctors served also as dentists; a medico who could set broken limbs while someone held the patient down could also pull teeth by the same method. One brilliant exception to the rule was Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig von Herff, who practiced distinguished medicine at San Antonio. Herff brought German medicine to Texas, used chloroform as early as 1854, and founded a medical dynasty that kept in touch with Vienna.
The hotels in Texas, except in the larger towns like Galveston and San Antonio, hardly changed; they served up rough fare, well water, and common, vermin-infested beds. The saloon, however, had grown into a genuine Texas institution. It was a social and political center for a considerable part of the population. Heavy drinking seems to have been common, and in an armed society, particularly in the frontier regions, politics, strong drink, and strong opinions produced frequent gunfights. The saloons were already producing a certain reaction, however. The American temperance movement entered Texas in the 1840s, and it made considerable headway among the puritanical farmers. By the 1850s the question of alcohol had entered politics; under a local option law later found unconstitutional, thirty-five counties restricted the sale of liquor. Agitation to close the saloons was growing, but this was not yet a dominant force.
One great change in postwar Texas was the emergence of the churches. All historians seem to agree that they were the single most important cultural and social force behind the Texas frontier. The more institutionalized churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic, were among the first to build edifices, but these were mostly confined to the towns. They were influential, particularly the Presbyterian, but they did not have the effect on politics or life that the Methodists and rapidly growing Baptists did. Methodists and Baptists carried over the old Anglo-Celtic puritan ethic almost intact. Baptists recognized only the authority of the local congregation in matters of religion; they supported no other; and they could organize a church without authority or ordination. They were slow to erect church buildings, but by 1860 they already had 500 congregations in Texas. The Methodists were still a majority in 1870, but losing ground fast. These, and other evangelical bodies, enjoyed a rapid growth in Texas. By 1870, there were 843 churches, with some 200,000 members.
These fundamentalist congregations were evolved by the frontier; they met its conditions most perfectly; and they were saturated with the American frontier ethos. All were puritanical, sectarian, and enormously democratic; they were brotherhoods rather than institutionalized organizations. They bore very little resemblance to the urban Presbyterian, Anglican, or other churches. They filled a much larger void in rural life. The evangelical assemblies provided the frontier with its social cohesion; they were the only cultural and socializing agencies Anglo-Texas had.
Their puritanism, also, was not quite the same as that of the urban middle class. Frontierspeople never quite adopted the Victorian urban furor over sex. Texans were much too close to the soil. Conversely, they chose alcohol as a more violent battleground. But the puritan ethic had the same root, and therefore the same basic effect. It made both Texan farmer and Northern businessman utterly functional, and severely limited the cultural vision of each. Both saw work as the greatest virtue; both expected material success.
Church meetings were as much social as ideological. They were held in open groves or brush arbors. Here families came from miles around, dressed in Sunday best. They included suppers, bazaars, and basket parties; they lasted all day, with religious services in the morning and at night. There were two-hour sermons, delivered by circuit riders or local laymen; men and women listened from separate benches. Here women and girls, starved for companionship of their own kind, could grasp at news and gossip, and men discussed crops, common problems, and politics. This meeting was the only place large numbers of people ever assembled regularly on the harsh frontier. The enormous, socializing, tribal effect on thought and custom is easily understood. What was discussed, and thundered from the crude pulpits, set the moral standards and much of the thinking of farming Texans across the whole frontier.