Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The rails cannot be blamed for bringing the people to the arid West; they would have come in any case. If they promoted thousands of individual and collective tragedies, the people were eager to be promoted. The problem was twofold: the optimism of the Anglo-American that he could conquer any country, and the fact that there was almost a conspiracy to conceal the fact that in the West there was little water and rain. Texas papers rarely commented on the dryness anywhere. Official pressure even caused regions where rainfall was fifteen inches annually to be described as "less humid" in reports and geography books. The term "arid" was angrily avoided. This is understandable psychologically, when it is realized that climatically speaking, the arid, semiarid, and subhumid regions of Texas comprise exactly one-half the entire state. These were conditions with which the Anglo-American had no experience. The cattle culture, borrowing heavily from Indians and Mexico, had adapted to the dry Plains. The swarm of later immigrants did not intend to adapt to the country but to adapt the country to their use.
They considered themselves the harbingers of civilization; they thought that all former occupants had put the land to small, and thus, immoral, use. They came filled with moral and personal courage, but with no money, to do battle with the "cattle barons" and the not-really-believed eternal drouth.
Water was and still remains in the West the last unconquered frontier. It was so little understood because in those years it was not yet an American problem; the entire East had so much water it was contemptuous of it, and was busily polluting and ruining a plenteous supply. But west of the 98th meridian there was never enough rainfall for farming. Irrigation, so-called scientific dry farming, and the use of well water were no real solutions. Subsurface water did not exist everywhere; and before the development of powerful pumps it could not be extracted anywhere in adequate supply.
Then, it tended to be exhausted rapidly. There was not sufficient stream water anywhere for widespread use. Storage was impractical because of a horrific evaporation rate; in any event, the distances were too great for impounded waters to be used except in limited areas.
Between the 98th and 100th meridian some places, some years, had rain. Here there existed another phenomenon not experienced by Anglo water and woodlanders: the Pleistocene-like, cyclical climate. This actually extended far to the east beyond the 98th meridian; rainfall was not even, but came in irregular cycles. There might be seven good years, but inevitably, despite protests and prayers, good years were followed by the dry and lean. People pushed into these expanses of rolling plateaus and high plains; they found them covered with buffalo grass, or saw them beautiful with red and yellow wildflowers in the ephemeral spring. They did not realize that the grass was a cover of eons, or understand the full horror of the brassy sun of summer, sucking moisture from plowed earth, or the wild winds that warred from north to south and soon began to carry aloft tons of dirt.
These were boom psychology years. All Texas history is connected in some fashion to a land rush, and the psychology of development and profits ran deep. What was later called "boosterism" was already fully born, and in Texas, despite a massive battering, this feeling never really died. This was a basic American affliction, not invented in Texas, but nowhere was it to emerge stronger. Just as local papers ignored the evidence of the fever coast, they avoided mention of storms, drouths, hard water, or the lack of any water at all. The grim "water jokes" of this frontier gave more real information than all the propaganda and comfortable reports of bounteous crops.
"I seen snow once," a sixteen-year-old told an immigrant in one joke. "Yeah," his ten-year-old brother chimed in: "And it rained once, too." Only later, much later, did Texans universally see humor, and take a grim sardonic pride, in such jokes.
The early 1880s began a series of wet years, with greater than average rainfall. "The country is becoming more seasonable," sensible men reported, believing what they wanted to believe. They had not been on the 98th meridian long enough to know that the weather cycles were often long. The records of old ranches, such as the McAllen ranch in deep south Texas, and the information available from government geographers was deliberately ignored. The government in fact gave warnings, to no avail. Government never stopped Anglo-Americans from doing what they wanted to do. A stream of immigrant settlers went west, spreading across the "less humid" lands until they reached the edge of the High Plains.
Here began a war, between Nature and man. As Webb, other historians, and countless novelists have tried to explain, it was fought with grim determination against cattlemen and Nature. The cattlemen were largely brought to heel, but in the end Nature won.
Even before the immigrants arrived in large numbers, the cowmen had already begun to fence. Glidden's barbed wire was perfected in Illinois in 1873, and a few years later it was already enclosing the frontier. This wire was perhaps the single most important factor in the final development of west Texas. With the concurrent arrival of the iron windmill and the rails, which transported both easily and cheaply into the West, it spelled the death of open range. Formerly, neither cowman nor farmer could fence lands in the West, because there was no suitable material, and hedges failed to grow. To import rock or wooden rails cost more than the cost of the land. In fact, until the continuing Industrial Revolution gave an answer, fencing had become a major American agrarian problem. Farm fences cost more than all the stock in the United States, and more than the rails themselves. The annual amount spent on fence repair came to more than all the taxes collected in Texas. The long, flat, Glidden's patent wire, and its dozens of imitators, performed a technological revolution. The wire was foolproof; stock could not cross it or tear it down. In fact, wire killed much stock, by screw-worm-infected scratches, until cattle and horses acquired an ancestral, instinctive awareness to avoid it. A rampaging bull could butt down a rail, but no bull could cross barbed wire. The farmers' fields were made safe as they could not have been in cattle country; and the cowmen themselves, aided by windmills tooling up water, could create pastures and begin painfully to improve their runty range stock. An expensive English or French bull was not a folly, but an investment, when cows were protected by the cruel wire from the combative and usually victorious native stock.
The cowmen themselves turned the open range of the High Plains into the big pasture country. Wire cost from $150 to $200 per mile of fence, and the largest outfits generally commenced enclosing first. By 1883 most of the huge latifundia in south Texas were fenced and patrolled. In the northwest, the movement began along the farm line—farmers protecting their fields—but rapidly spread among the larger cow outfits on the High Panhandle Plains; above all, among those ranches owned or financed by Eastern or British interests. These Easterners saw the future more clearly; they had never been exposed to the abortive culture of the Plains. They were managing businesses, not acting out manhood roles between sun and sky, awed by the immensity of the earth. The water and best lands were fenced off first. The big interests also generally had title to their lands, which the average cowman did not.
In 1876, Texas still held 61,258,461 acres of unappropriated public domain, mostly in the west. It had another 20,000,000 acres in the state school lands. The state was eager to dispose of both. Although the state continually favored farmers over cattlemen in its sales policies, for years writing homestead codes that made no sense in the grass country, it also sold off much land in huge chunks.
The largest, and most famous, deal was the sale of 3,050,000 acres on the High Plains, which became the XIT Ranch, to finance the erection of a new state capitol at Austin in 1879. The new granite building was imposing; so was the enormous ranch. Other cattle syndicates, drawn west by the cattle boom of the 1870s and early 1880s, had multimillion-dollar investments: the Matador Land and Cattle Company, the Hansford Company, the Espuela, or Spur, and others. These companies had the capital to fence, and they did so. Quickly, they transformed cattle raising from a wild and woolly career into a stable business. The terrible blizzard of 1886, and the drouths of 1886–87, which killed thousands of cattle and forced other thousands on the market, also destroyed many hip-pocket cowmen.
Early fencing was done with arrogance; rivers were fenced off that other men's cows had used for years; the Eastern lawyers never heard of range rights. No such thing existed under the law. Public trails and roads were also fenced. The small cowman, who had never bothered to ride to Austin and secure his lands, was fenced out. He fought, as did cowboys forced out of work and rustlers whose work was now made more difficult. By 1883, fence cutting was an epidemic in west Texas; it was worst along the farm line, but essentially it was a war between large cattlemen and small. This destruction of private property had much sentimental support throughout the state, not to preserve the romance of open range, but because sale of public lands and fencing was "creating principalities, pashalics, and baronates among a few capitalists and arousing a spirit of agrarianism among the poorer classes," as one newspaper printed. In a few counties things became so bad that something like civil war ensued, and the Rangers were called in. In 1884, fence cutting was made a felony at law, even the concealment of cutters in saddlebags was a crime. But at the same time the law required gates to be opened at every three miles along a fence, and made fencing land not owned or leased illegal also. The fence wars gradually sputtered out, and in the end, virtually all west Texas was fenced.
Everyone, large or small, had to fence in self-protection. The range baron turned into a peaceful stockman, whether he owned hundreds of acres, or millions. A long era of ranch consolidation began with fencing. Cattlemen bought up land from the state, the railroads, school lands, generally at from twenty-five cents to one dollar per acre. Ranchers were limited in their purchase of school lands, since the state officials favored farmers. This policy brought "nesters" into cow country in the 1880s, and also forced cattlemen to buy through agents and in other illegal or extralegal ways. It took many years for the big ranches to consolidate and prove title. Despite Land Commissioner Terrell's famous statement, that ". . . a few good homes are worth more than many ranches, one good home for one child is worth more to a country than many ranches with a thousand cows upon every hill and in every valley; the cry of one child is more "civilizing" than the bleat of ten thousand calves. . . ." in Texas, west of the 100th line, the ranchers won. They could not beat the law, but the lawmakers could not legislate the climate. The wholesale misrepresentation, fraud, and perjury resorted to by cattlemen, as well as occasional force, are almost universally excused by Texan historians on the grounds that the government was dominated by men who tried to impose upon the West a social pattern unsuited to its needs. The farmer prejudice lingered, however, in song and story, long after the passing of the wars.
Cultural life and death was still being enacted on the prairies, with profound effects on the Texas mind and soul. The triumph of wire, which destroyed the longhorn and made it as extinct as the bison, also enormously enhanced the concept of private property in Texas. When every man wired and patrolled his land, fighting off encroachments, the big pasture country became a country of endless enclaves. The ranches were still empires of a sort, but remote and secluded imperial domains. In Texas, men crossed somebody's fence at peril.
The feeling for property right, and against trespass, grew more deeply and emerged more ferociously than in almost any other state.
The fences gave the last blow, in a largely unseen way, to the status of the cowboy, the underpinning of the cattle culture. Thousands were turned loose from jobs; without roundups on open range, and without long trail drives, fewer hands were required. A series of cowboy strikes against the large Eastern cattle combines in the 1880s failed, because of a surplus of such labor. Loading pens and loading chutes, with fences, forced the buckaroo to become a cowhand. Now, he had to do laborious work on foot—"wade in cowshit," as one rider contemptuously snarled—to hold his job. He drove fence posts, strung wire, wrestled cattle up chutes; he no longer did almost all his labor from the saddle. His proletarianization was far advanced. On the trail, he had been a
charro
hero; he was now only a poorly paid ranch hand.
Even while cowman was opposed to cowman over fences, the intrusion of the hoemen went on. Thousands of immigrants followed the wet years of the early 1880s, buying farms from public domain, the railroads, or homesteading on unappropriated land under the laws of the state. Experimental colonies again came in vogue. Carhart founded his Christian colony near Clarendon in 1879; 400 Germans settled in Baylor County (Texas in 1876 "organized" fifty-four counties in the west even before the necessary 150 people lived in them), and there were groups of Quakers from Ohio in Lubbock county before 1880. What happened to these colonies makes tragic reading. Totally ignorant of the country and its demands, these people failed miserably. They collapsed under drouth and swarms of grasshoppers and disappeared. But by about 1890, almost all the territory between the 98th and 100th meridian, especially along the trail tracks, had been plowed.
Here millions of dollars were lost and thousands of lives blasted. Men sweated themselves to death, anguished as their plants withered; their sun-blackened women grew gaunt and died. The old joke told a grim tale: the tracks west, littered by tin cans; the tracks east, marked only by lark feathers and jackrabbit bones. Thousands of families retreated finally back to other regions, broken and bitter in spirit, radicals in embryo. A human detritus was scattered across the whole Texas frontier. This had happened before; but on this arid frontier, even the strong failed in the face of hostile nature.