Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The codes and actions of the Texans showed that all men seek moral and temporal order, but not necessarily the same kind. If Charles Goodnight, Jack Hays, and L. H. McNelly had waited for someone to make law for them or hand down precedent-justice, the intolerable conditions of the frontier would have lasted longer. Hays and McNelly, judged against their own times, were not murderers but warriors; the charge fails to stick in their white hats. The taking of life could not and did not develop the stigma in Texas it already had in the more sedate regions of America, because the Texans were at war. Hays, who shot down many a squaw outside her tepee, was no more a killer than the bombardier who dropped his armament on crowded tenements in World War II. Both consciously worked to defend his own people by breaking the enemy's will.
In the same milieu, the shoot-out was an incident rather than murder, if it was carried out according to the rules. On the frontier, the burden of self-defense lay on the individual; it was a burden that could not be denied. If it was one he could not bear, this was his tough luck. No one forced anyone else to come to the Texas frontier.
Many of the emulators of L. H. McNelly and Jack Hays were killers. Codes tend to live on in debased form, often long after the necessity that called them forth is dead. McNelly shot a dozen Mexican bandits and left them where they lay. But the Cameron County of 1875 was not the county of 1915, when other Rangers left other hapless Mexicans littered through the brush. Like the gentleman's sword in Europe and Ireland, the pistol lingered very long after it had ceased to be a necessary tool. Men wore pistols on the border until the middle of the 20th century, and no few of them got in trouble for it. In the 1960s, all Texas had a high shoot-out, now called murder, rate. The laws dealt with unpremeditated killing more leniently than those of any other American state.
The lawlessness of Texas was generally misunderstood. At least half of it came because of continual attempts to impose law that did not fit the place or times. No intelligent people obey laws that contradict their society or otherwise make no sense. The Texan was not so much lawless as lawmaking, bending his own concept of law to fit conditions few Easterners, even east Texans, could comprehend. The notion that the border must live by the same legal codes as bound the streets of New York seemed logical to some. But to the Texan, an Indian policy written by Easterners that permitted Kiowas to flaunt blond hair or an army policy that made commanders adhere to instructions on how to catch Mexican cattle thieves coming by Washington telegraph, was incredible. The policies and instructions were often ignorant, because they came from men ignorant of local conditions or affairs.
The cattlemen, fence-busting, and nester wars do not fit simply into patterns of aggression or greed. The West was able to handle the range hog, until the Eastern law interfered. Land laws were broken because the Homestead Acts made no sense, except to farmer legislatures who could not even envision what the country beyond the 98th meridian was like. Congress never agreed to make the homestead base 2,650 acres in the West, although this was intelligently proposed. This amount of land was the basic minimum a stockman needed to survive, but in the face of all such evidence the small-farm-heritage Easterners refused to pass such laws. Like Indian policy, Eastern law often broke down in the West, because it absurdly failed to take local conditions into account.
Lawyers failed to recognize such on-the-spot solutions as range and water rights. They gave those with legal title to the ground the right to fence it off, even if this fencing barred other men's cattle from grass or water. Millions of dollars in damage was done, and many lives lost, before certain compromises were made. The cattleman gained his ground by hook or crook, often falsifying before the law, but he gained it. The law recognized that public roads could not be fenced and that openings had to be left each three miles. The English common law was amended to recognize that all the people living in a watershed, in arid country, had rights to flowing water, not just those who owned the river banks. None of these things were easily done, because men think in preset ways. In the course of such troubles, Texans understandably came to hold many reservations about the infallibility of laws.
One important Texan discovery and usage was local option. Texas had wide divergences in climate, topography, and the way men earned their livings; it soon occurred to legislators that some statewide laws could not apply. Texans allowed counties to opt on pistol-wearing, open range, and later, on school segregation and the sale of alcohol. It was firmly established in the Texan mind that men make laws to their need and satisfaction, as Webb said, and for no other reason. To impress a Texan with the notion of a "higher moral law" outside of use and wont was like impressing a Comanche with the wisdom of the Great White Father in Washington. Both Indian and Texan bent, because they had to, before superior force. But men convinced against their will remained of the same opinion still.
Texans had few self-doubts. No conquering race could, and proceed to conquer. Here was an enormous strength in action, a strength most Americans exhibited through the 19th century on their way west. The Texans were purposeful, almost to a man. They came to Texas because they wanted land. Men like Rip Ford, who, unlike some of the men he showed up in the field, never was able to acquire land, keenly felt the bite of failure in their old age. This terrible, psychological sense of failure could not easily be understood in more stable societies, where men were not expected to acquire property come hell or high water. Honors meant very little in Texas. The successful Ranger captains, who left few if any legends, were Armstrongs and Tobins who did have the pragmatic sense to acquire ranches while they could. This tradition did not end. Land acquired a prestige value in Texas not unlike the landed estate in 18th-century England. Almost universally, successful politicians bought ranches, which had a symbolic value far beyond any possible income that might be derived from them. Senator Lyndon Johnson and Governor John Connally, both of whom began poor, instinctively sought large tracts of land. Their offices did not mean as much to their Texan souls as the ownership of thousands of acres. When they possessed miles of ranch lands, they had arrived.
It was very noticeable that the most prestigious people, in the Texan mind, were the owners of visible property. The corporation executive, who might make far more actual money, lagged far behind. Old-line Texans put their capital in real estate as well; even wealthy men from old families kept a certain distrust of Yankee stocks and bonds. Noticeably, customers' men or stock salesmen in Texas, though they developed a large market in the metropoli, usually originated somewhere else. Texans thought in property, not financial terms; they preferred land to paper values.
Much of the old cheap-money philosophy survived, in a way incomprehensible to the substantial people of the East, who could not understand the separation of private property and paper money in the Texas mind. Money, to the substantial Texan, was a commodity used to buy property; of itself it had no mystic value.
The Texan ethic and Texan society, both inherited, rewarded enterprise. The Southern American outlook was generally as puritan and enterprising as that of New England, although its outlets took different forms. The frontier made Texan society far more atomistic than that of the East or North, however, and this, while it allowed individual men to break patterns and do great things, was an inherent social weakness. The strongest Texans, remarkably, could think and act for themselves. But there was an enormous tendency to what Texans called "jackleggism," too.
Texans were independent. No man put his nose in his neighbor's business, unless asked. They could act in concert, but not for long. Few Texans could subordinate their dreams and desires for any length of time to the group. The frontier did not draw that kind of men, and the kind it drew had less sense of community than the people in the North and East. Significantly, the Ranger companies coalesced, then disappeared. It was difficult for Texans to sustain a campaign; each man had better things to do. Collective action, or group discipline, grated on the Texan frontier soul. In retrospect, the Texan defense of its frontier was poorly done. It was mounted as thousands of individual efforts, while a few years of sustained, collective struggle would have solved the problem quickly.
The refusal to act in concert slowed the frontier. Jackleggism also affected Texas and Texans in later times. It was a strong bar to unionization of labor; the native Anglo-American, even where he could see unions might help him, maintained his distrust of collectivization. Farmer unions, though they were tried again and again, usually foundered. Noticeably, cooperatives in Texas were never so strong or so successful as in other states. Thousands of Texas farmers, large and small, suffered from price discrimination and other practices that their counterparts in California or Wisconsin alleviated by concerted action. The Texas frontiersman, stubbornly, even bitterly independent, refused to cooperate. This was a weakness as society grew more crowded and organized. But it was a source of strength in the early days, because no organic-thinking people could possibly have scattered across the wide and wild frontier, fighting a thousand separate, successful battles, winning a million separate plots of soil.
The Mexicans were lacking in both independence and entrepreneurism, and until the stubborn Anglos had tamed the country, their colonization failed.
As conditions changed, and Texas was drawn more tightly to the larger nation, the very Texan empiricism of mind also became a weakness. The average Texan could not quite grasp the meaning and the reality of the industrial society, where men worked and lived in relation to other men, not to Nature and the land. Thinking in straight material, not social, terms, Texas continued to produce men who were prepared to exploit and process the resources of the earth, while it produced few people prepared to offer the services society more and more required. By the middle of the 20th century, Texas was importing the vast majority of its technicians, in management, medicine, and such new industries as television, from outside. Texas metropolitan society was rapidly taking on a Yankee patina in public communications, sales management, business and finance. Northern minds and Northern techniques even conceived and exploited the urban development, and found the gold in Texas history. Immigrants smelled profit in the Spanish heritage while the practical Texan mind yet failed to see any glories in it. There were more foreigners, inevitably, directing and shaping San Antonio's world's fair in 1968 than natives.
Texans were not in the vanguard on the newer industrial frontier. They were still entirely purposeful, but their internal society and its education were not fitting them to exploit fully many newer avenues of American life. In fact, the messy meritocracy that seemed to be evolving on both American coasts had little appeal for Texans. It was not attached either to private property or the soil, and its very intellectualism to minds as hard and dry and practical as Texans' was inherently suspect. Texans could conceive of a society based on cotton, cattle, citrus, and oil, but not of a structure resting on techniques and ideas, in which intellectual capacity merited as much attention and respect as a ten-thousand-acre pasture or title to a city block.
Northern businessmen and students flocking into Dallas sometimes referred contemptuously to turn-of-the-century attitudes among the natives, and in the calmer, sun-splashed San Antonio, despairingly sensed a lingering of the 18th century. In all this there was a certain truth. The old American ethic was not eroded in Texas. Nothing had occurred to cause such erosion.
Ethics were more tenacious than ideologies or ideas, which changed to meet changing conditions. An ethic comprised an unconscious outlook or motivation; it was so fundamental it was rarely consciously thought of or discussed. The Texan still believed subconsciously that work was the real virtue, and acquisition of property its reward; that ceaseless, aggressive action was the proper sphere for man, and God had given him the world for his arena; that social classification was wrong but status all-important; and that the only logical, or moral, basis for status was acquired wealth. It was a cultural tradition that was literally civilized; it tore down forests and plowed millions of acres of virgin soil; it extracted billions of tons of petroleum and spread great cities over the land; it erected massive dams and paved countless highways to connect the whole. It was a cultural ethos that had no room for culture. Texans were not responsible for it; their ancestors brought it from the British Isles.
The American frontier was superbly fitted to the puritan ethic, which was only minimally devoted to certain attitudes towards alcohol and sex. The puritan ethic drew a straight line between cause and effect. On a frontier embattled with aboriginal natives and hostile Nature, cause and effect reigned, and had to reign, supreme. Ideas did not overpower the earth; unless man was in ceaseless action the earth overpowered him. The vast sweep of land and sky, the great plateaus, the savage drouth and frequent, howling storms, stripped man of intellectually conceived notions. Men succeeded, or lived and died, not because of what they believed but how they applied themselves. The Texan was predominantly a fundamentalist Protestant Christian, but his religion was fundamentally different from that of the earliest Christian centuries.
Texans had a hard time visualizing the Christian martyrs. They had to dismiss the hagiocracy of saints, because the first Christian saints did not live in the real world, but created their own. Texans could understand the rejection of the values of the Roman Empire, but not men who dismissed the Empire and proceeded to dwell in their own minds. A few such men arrived on the Texas frontier, but blizzards or Indians usually got them.