Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Some of the preachers were cultivated men. The great majority were men of God called from the people, well-meaning but unlettered, who understood their people and the essential evils to which all flesh was heir. This was a cruel, hard, atomistic place, where great wrongs were done and received. The preachers tried to battle the world and the devil; they thundered against sins of every kind. They did not regularly prevail; nor was it possible for any clergy, in this or any other time or place, to alter the facts of human nature or be substantially different from their own people in thought and deed. The preachers were sometimes harsh, stubborn, intemperate, intolerant, like their flocks; but they made the pulpit the center of their world, and they probably left the world a bit better than they found it.
The frontiersmen were Old Testament–oriented. The land they lived in had many parallels with the land of Canaan, and they themselves with the children of Israel. They were beset with dangerous heathen enemies. The land was scourged by ravaging insects and burning drouth; the imagery of the Israelite deserts struck home in the Texan heart. The farmer endured plagues of grasshoppers; he lost sheep and cows to cats and wolves; he saw green crops die and wells run dry. The Old Testament had a relevance it would have for no later American generations.
The lives of the farmers hung on acts of God, who made rain fall from the heavens and the rivers swell. Their best-loved hymns, with which they made the arbors shake, sang of cool and beautiful rivers they would someday cross, and of glorious showers of blessing upon the land. These people, especially near the 98th meridian, were locked in gigantic battle against Nature's God and their own weaknesses; like Israelites, they chose this soil; like Israelites they had to fight for it, with faith. They developed an Israelite chauvinism and intolerance, which sometimes gave them callous cruelty, but with it, a Hebrew strength.
Fresh immigration swelled the tribes; families filling up the land tended to be absorbed quickly. The scattered, lonely life, with its barren society centered on the meetings, permitted few enclaves, integrating all.
The true cities were still small. Galveston, enjoying a flush of seacoast prosperity, had temporarily become the largest settlement in the state. It had about 14,000 inhabitants in 1870, and 22,000 ten years later. It was briefly beautiful, with six public squares, two parks, two miles of esplanade, street railways drawn by horses, thirteen hotels, three concert halls, and an opera house. Half of the cotton grown in Texas was exported; it went through Galveston, and the profits erected splendid mansions and financed insurance companies and banks. Galveston, unique in Texas, had 23 stock companies, with capital exceeding $12,000,000. It was a seacoast, Southern city, with gaslights and theaters; on its island it was remote from the earthy heartland.
San Antonio, like Galveston outside the body of rural Anglo-Texas, was only slightly smaller, with 12,000 persons in 1870. The Spanish-Mexicans were outnumbered by the Germans, though the Spanish had given a certain character to the town. San Antonio had become an important military center, headquarters for all Army troops in Texas, and this function it was never to lose. The military, the Europeans, and the Spanish all brought a peculiar cosmopolitanism, which in the 1870s began to be submerged. The rails first reached the city then, and they brought in an influx of Anglo-Americans for the first time. In these years, also, San Antonio became a headquarters for prominent ranchers from the south and southwest, who fled the arid
brasada
as the Spaniards had. It became a mecca and retiring place for prominent Texans from all parts of the state. Here Rip Ford, other Ranger captains, Confederate generals, past governors, and big cattlemen from the Rio Grande met at the Menger or on the plaza and made talk.
Houston, with nine thousand people, was third in size. It was not yet a port; it lay fifty miles inland up Buffalo Bayou. But it was an important rail and steamboat terminus, and already had begun to make such things as steam engines, rail cars, wagons, cigars, and soap. It had twelve sawmills, for the vast timberlands of east Texas, with seemingly endless stands of pine and cypress, were coming into their own. Out of this ravaging, Houston steamed and prospered.
Austin, the capital finally confirmed to it in 1872, now had its rail line, and reached five thousand. It was an attractive town, overlooking the wide channel of the Colorado, set in rolling hills. It lived primarily off the government; it was orderly and clean.
The next largest center in Texas was an ephemeral boomtown, Jefferson. In the far north, on Cypress Bayou, Jefferson counted four thousand souls. It had sixty brick stores, built in a single year, an ice plant, a brewery, gaslights, and all-night trade. But the rails pushed on through east Texas, and in the 1870s Jefferson began to fade.
In these years Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso were all small frontier towns. Waco, on the Brazos, was larger. But the people of the state were now rapidly pushing west. The last great tide of immigration into Texas had arrived.
In bringing this immigration a number of factors converged. The first was the dilemma of the planters, and their successors in the ownership of the land, in finding labor. The landed groups in the older parts of Texas all tried to find new people to replace the newly freed, and temporarily euphoric, slaves.
One landowner, in an unsigned piece in the Texas Almanac of 1870 wrote prophetically: "Competition will dissipate many of the freedmen's conceited notions and lower their growing pretensiousness." Having learned nothing from the Negro problem in the South, this same writer urged the importation of Chinese. Although a few Chinese were brought in, they proved too clever to work on the farms. Some worked for railroads, others as cow-camp cooks. As soon as they could, most became small merchants in the cities. Much more successful were the efforts to get ruined whites from the older South to move to Texas.
Committees met in various places, agreed to transmit favorable information about the state, above all, concerning the healthful climate, the richness of the soils, and the availability of unused lands. Southern newspapers agreeably printed such intelligence as landowners in Texas supplied.
The state government also widely encouraged immigration, which was felt essential to strengthen the Indian-riddled western frontier. The state had two ends: to settle white labor, as tenants, on the idle cotton plantations in the east; and to encourage homesteading on the far frontier. A homestead act, similar to the federal law of 1862, was passed, and also a law exempting 200 acres of homestead land from foreclosure for debt. These state laws were unusual, and since approximately half the state was still unsettled by whites, seemed to offer enormous opportunities. Besides open lands in the west, there was an abundance of slave-deserted plantation acres, and very cheap acreage all through the farm-line counties on the edge of the Great Plains. Articles were printed all over the South that a family head needed "no money to secure him a good farm in almost any part of Texas"; all a man needed was "good character, industrious habits, and one or two boys. . ."
All through the blasted South people were ready to hear this call. Old memories stirred. Every family knew someone who had gone to Texas and made it rich—either in truth or legend. Everyone knew the rails were pushing west, and that the Indians had been exterminated or driven off. Thousands upon thousands of Southern poor whites, seeing the hopeless landscape around them, determined to move to Texas.
This was to be the last major immigration into the Texas heartland. Significantly, almost all of it came from old American stock, primarily from Georgia and Tennessee. However, every Southern state sent people, and sizable numbers arrived from Kentucky, Iowa, and even Illinois. European immigration renewed, but this was small, and also, unlike in the North, it was rural. The groups who arrived from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Austrian Empire took up farms instead of flocking to the towns.
More than 10,000 persons, bound for Texas, passed through Memphis in 1870–71. Some 100,000 newcomers arrived in 1872, and because of the depression the next year, more came in 1873. The cost of living in Texas was less; land terms were better; and many families abandoned old debts.
The immediate effect of this influx was a flush of prosperity in Texas, reflected in public revenues. Large areas of the state that had been very thinly settled were filled up. From 818,175 inhabitants in 1870, of which some 51 percent were native-born and of which some 250,000 were black, the population almost doubled in ten years, and climbed to 2,235,527 by 1890. The Negro proportion rapidly fell, since the new arrivals brought no slaves. Cotton production jumped from about a half million bales in 1874 to 1,514,000 in 1886. Railroad mileage in the same period more than tripled. Property on the tax rolls increased enormously. All this, although the vast majority of Texans were very poor, gave the state a new impetus and activity different from the ruined economic and social scene of the rest of the old Confederacy.
The immigration generally separated into two broad streams. One filled up the vacant or unused lands in east Texas, replacing the old plantations with hordes of tenant farmers. Now, the freedmen had competition indeed, as they were forced back on the land. Many of the newcomers were forced to take up sharecropping, since they lacked all capital; virtually free lands were available in many areas of the state, but families needed seed money and something to get them through the winter. The other stream spread into the western counties, filling up the sections along and around the old frontier of 1850, and pushing even further west, eventually to the 100th meridian. These families were freeholders, but they also needed money, and almost all of them were forced in some manner to go in debt. Some borrowed money; more took advantage of credit at the general store.
Here, in this hopeful immigration, the seeds of much human tragedy were laid.
Both the cattle and the farming frontiers had been static for a generation until 1876. In five years the cattle kingdom exploded to the very limits of the Texas line; it filled the Panhandle in the high northwest, pushed past the Pecos and preempted the vast Big Bend country. Now, hundreds of miles separated the cattle and farming frontiers, but the hoemen were not far behind. The farm line punched out westward. Generally, it followed the rails into the west.
In this settlement, the rails played a new and controversial role. As in the eastern United States, the first rail lines merely connected already settled points. They served an obvious purpose and enormously increased commerce and industry. But west of about the 98th meridian, the tracks were moving into virtual desert, and deserted lands. The cattle kingdom would not support them; for many years the cattlemen consciously avoided the nearest railheads, because a trail drive was far cheaper than shipping cattle as freight. Texas cattle still went to Abilene and Dodge; also, it had been discovered that cattle pastured on the northern range put on weight.
The tracklaying in the west was more an exercise of ideology than a commercial enterprise. In retrospect, the arid regions of Texas, and other parts of the American West, did not possess sufficient economic potential at the time to justify the expense of railroad building. It was clearly seen at the time the rail companies required subsidies. They got these, from both the federal and Texas governments. In the great, gaudy era of corruption and rail expansion in Texas, the state alone gave assorted railroad companies 32,150,000 acres of public lands. This was a total acreage equivalent to the state of Alabama. Historians have shown that the total cost of rail-laying in the West amounted to a tax of $28 on every American citizen between 1865 and 1873. Even then, most railroad companies were undercapitalized, their lands were sold for a few cents per acre, and most ended up in receivership. It is fully understandable that C. P. Huntington, Jay Gould, and General Grenville Dodge, who built rails across Texas, pushed the tracks with a conviction amounting to élan. What is not so understandable is that they pulled legislatures and the general population along behind, not by corruption alone, but by that magic Anglo-American word, progress.
Rails connecting cities made sense. The rails reached San Antonio in the 1870s, and pushed on to Laredo by 1881. El Paso was reached by 1883. At Laredo, the rails connected with the commerce of Mexico, and both El Paso and Laredo, then tiny hamlets, began a rapid growth. Significantly, Brownsville, which had been the queen city of the Rio Grande, was now bypassed. Harassed also by a yellow fever epidemic and the silting of the pass at Brazos de Santiago in 1882, Brownsville stagnated. Its Northern capitalists went elsewhere; the lower river valley retreated into a stunted cattle culture that did not end until the rails came at last in the next century.
But while rails joined El Paso and San Antonio, Fort Worth and Denver, and El Paso and Fort Worth, this laying of track across the dry Plains was disastrous. There was nothing for the rail lines to feed on in between. They ran into money troubles. The failure of Cooke's Northern Pacific in 1873 is credited with causing the national financial panic of that year. Built at enormous cost, these rails did not really serve their purpose; as studies at the University of Chicago later revealed, they increased the gross national product by only 4 percent.
The rails held great power in the West, because they could focalize settlement or commerce, what little there was, along their routes. But they lacked one necessary power to develop the country: beyond the 98th meridian they could not make it rain.
So strong was the philosophy that increased population meant progress—and rapidly increasing population was necessary to a credit economy, which Texas always was—that Rupert Richardson, noting the anguish and controversy caused in Texas by the railroad subsidies, wrote that the question was moot. He insisted "the railroads promoted rapid settlement and development of the country, the goal of every Anglo-American commonwealth." The railroads were indeed forced to promote settlement once they had laid track into the desert; they did their best to induce farmers to go where no 19th-century farmer should have gone. Not the rails but development of widespread irrigation techniques in the 20th century allowed cultivation west of the 100th meridian. By this time, new methods of transport had developed; and the automotive engine eventually caused a great retraction in Texas railroad mileage.