Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The home of the ordinary Texas settler was called a "dog-run." It consisted of two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, but with an open corridor or "dog-run" left in between. This double cabin was usually built in segments, one room at a time. A porch was commonly extended in front of the dog-run house; this provided storage space for harness, tools, kegs, and saddles and a place for men and hounds to rest out of the hot sun. The cabin walls were roughly hewn logs, with dovetailed corners. The inevitably large chinks were daubed with mud. Chimneys were put together from mud-plastered sticks. The cabin roof was made of clapboard, anchored by weighted poles. The usual flooring was hard-packed mud.
To extend the dog-run, a lean-to shelter could be attached to the back side. This made extra storage space, or room for guests or a growing family. The older, more elaborate Texas farm cabins had outside kitchens and log smokehouses nearby. Cabins were located near a stream or spring; otherwise, a well was dug in the vicinity.
The common dog-run house was the result of social and economic necessity. In these years there were few settlements in Texas that could supply such things as lumber. The majority of pioneers who settled near the frontier could not afford the prices of imported materials or goods, and there were no carpenters or skilled craftsmen in the backwoods for hire, even if money could be found. Exactly like their forefathers along the Appalachian frontier, the early Texans made almost everything they needed or used, except salt, weapons, and metal tools. The Texas freeholder could erect a dog-run with his axe and saw, and almost without the use of a single nail. Even nails, like other artifacts, had to be floated down rivers from the industrial North, an incredible distance away. The pioneer was self-sufficient not through choice but through bitter necessity.
The families who went far up the Brazos, the Trinity, or the Colorado, left 19th-century civilization far behind. That they were, and had to be, self-reliant needs no elaboration. Just as the advance from Appalachia had no historic parallel, this march into the deep interior of Texas by thousands of individual families, supported by no government or other agency, against tremendous hazard, was almost without precedent. These people went west, each farmer yearning for his own small kingdom, willing to suffer hardship beyond counting while he carved it out with his own hands.
But if the dog-run house became the Texan's castle, it could hardly be called his pride. The frontier ethos of the Anglo-Celt rarely saw beauty in nature; it even more seldom created beauty out of man's domination of Nature. The usual cabin sat in a fire-blackened clearing; sometimes it was years before all the nearby stumps were removed.
Houses were surrounded by litter: farm implements, tools, beaten earth—there were no gardens or improved yards—and hungry hounds. The porches were stacked high with an accumulation of various junk; everything had its use, but no set place, on the frontier. The dog-run acquired its name from its most popular use, and the corridor was hardly the most sanitary of spots. Travelers who stayed overnight in the Texas countryside complained of holes in the cabin walls that let in moonlight and cold wind. Rutherford Hayes, passing through Texas, wrote that he slept in one dog-run through whose sides a cat could be hurled "at random." Sanitary facilities consisted of two kinds: crude outhouses or the nearest woods.
The people who inhabited these dog-runs were farmers of one kind or another, whether they were Tennesseeans or Missourians living partly by their rifles, or Alabamans planting corn and yams in the post-oak belt. The small farmers did grow cotton when they could, for cash, but the ubiquitous crop was corn. All farmers, and even large planters, grew some corn. Corn, not wheat, was the Texas staff of life. It fed the pigs; it was sold or traded; and it made the daily bread. The average farmer harvested between forty and eighty bushels of corn per acre, although some, in richer lands, grew as much as one hundred. The next most common crop was sweet potatoes or yams, on which the Alabamans doted.
There were various kinds of livestock on these rough-cleared farms. Swine were the most common, although cattle were found, too. The idea that Anglo-Texans did not bring cattle with them is erroneous; the Southern farmers took oxen as well as pigs and chickens west. All this stock was permitted, as it always had been, to run wild in the surrounding woods. A few improved breeds had been imported into Texas from England, but animal husbandry was not yet a business, let alone a science. There was no market on the frontier. Horses were immensely more valuable than any other kind of stock, particularly good breeds. The reason was that horses provided the only available transportation, and horse racing was by far the most popular sport and pastime in Texas. There is a record of one fine piece of horseflesh being valued at $6,000 in the 1850s—three times the price of the hardest-working Negro. A good horse could earn money for its owner, and there existed also a phenomenon that could only be compared to Americans' passion for automobiles in later times: some farmers had, or acquired, horses they really could not afford. This love of horseflesh probably arrived out of Kentucky, but in Texas it seemed to spread to all citizens, wherever they were from.
Certainly, cultural traditions kept most Texans from enjoying a better life, particularly in the matter of diet. Texas soil and climate could support an enormous variety of cereals, vegetables, and fruits. Bees made superb brush honey, and cattle were beginning to roam widely, in large numbers. But almost all Texas pioneers lived on miserably restricted fare: salt pork, usually fried, corn bread, normally served hot, sweet potatoes, and molasses. Fresh meats, except game, were rare, and so was wheat bread. Although the Germans in the hill country planted fruit trees and made cheese and sausage, the pioneer American kept no milch cows and churned no butter. Texans stubbornly clung to the ways of the 18th-century mountain frontier, on which they had been raised. Children sometimes got pellagra—later the mark of the class known as "white trash."
Foreigners entering the great frontier band of Texas often could not help considering all the pioneer stock in the "trash" classification. The dog-runs were crude; the scars on the soil and forest were still raw. Thousands of Texans had been born in log cabins farther east, and they had always eaten corn pone and some kind of sweet syrup; no backwoodsman ever kept a garden. Many Texans who eventually became rich in the west kept on eating corn bread and fatback until they died, and considered milk barely fit for babies. But although there were thousands of genuine "white trash" who lived on as hopelessly and shiftlessly as they had wherever they had come from before moving to Texas, evidences of thrift, hard work, and resourcefulness abounded. For every family that brought up its dirty children to urinate against the dog-run, or let the half-wild cattle or pigs uproot their straggling fields, thousands more instilled the old Protestant, later called the American, ethic: work as an absolute virtue, thrift as holiness, and visible success the outward evidence of both. Like almost all Americans, North or South, the Texans were puritans who were taught to equate cause with effect, and to look on life as a sort of battleground, in which the best man won and the weak were despicable failures. Since those who were weak failed conspicuously on the harsh frontier, this ethic was not without its logic.
Ironically, it was again not laziness but custom that made the Germans in the flinty escarpment northwest of San Antonio appear more diligent than the average Texan. The Europeans were brought up to intensive agriculture; they worked their small plots to perfection. But the American-born had never known, and could hardly conceive, of crowding, or an end to resources or land. They used land, then moved on. They thought in terms of leagues, while Germans treasured acres. In the 19th century, the native American concept was perhaps more valid than the rooted, European attitude toward intensive improvement of the land. The record is clear that the vast majority of great successes, and men who became large proprietors in Texas, were Anglo-American. The
Einwanderer
made decent, endurable small communities, but became trapped in them. Few Germans succeeded hugely—but then few of the European communities from Fredericksburg to Castroville suffered from the terrible residue of human detritus that littered the Anglo-American frontier. The tremendous strength of the American frontier was that many men thought big. Its seamy underside was that not every man had the strength, tenacity, or energy to fulfill his dreams, and the land broke him and his.
The family head who worked hard in these years, and who suffered no ill health or ill luck, showed steady, visible improvement. He put up fences of rails or stone with backbreaking labor; he spent twelve- to fourteen-hour days in the fields. He replaced his log dog-run with a house of neater frame. He began to be able to afford a few luxuries. He acquired a few Negroes, or to the south, some Mexicans for the dirtiest work. The first marks of affluence, which were still few in 1860, were the appearance of factory clothing or other "made goods" on the farm line frontier. But for many decades shoes, soap, candles, wheels, harness, shirts, and even coffins, were painstakingly homemade. The frontier man and woman had to be jacks and jennies of many trades, while gradually the fields began to take on the look of older, longer-settled areas, and rocks and stumps disappeared.
This life was hard, dirty, terribly monotonous, lonely, and damagingly narrow during the brutal years. Few of the Americans who later eulogized it would care to relive it. But it was also possible to despise the frontier farm, and the people who lived on it, too much. Tocqueville was one cultured man who saw or sensed that the American was living an ephemeral frontier phase. For every man, woman, and child trapped in a stultifying existence, thousands more were building the roots of an economic civilization, if not a new culture, on the land. As Tocqueville marveled, every frontiersman seemed to live with both an axe and a local newspaper in hand, and when there were a dozen pioneers within a few square miles, they pooled their small resources and began a school. These people lived worse than many European peasants, but they did not think as peasants. Their ethic did not permit it.
The great and lasting impression of this ephemeral time was the independence of the Texan in the west. The man who took his family out to the fringe of 19th-century civilization was beholden to no man. His land, in Texas, came free, or almost free, not in labor but in original money price. If he had no bank, or agency to assist him with cash or seed, he had no instrumentality to put him in debt. He had no landlord to sap his ambition or his fruits. The American pioneer, historically, was almost unique, because he did not have to go west, and though he went to improve his lot, he from the first intended to stay. If he suffered terrible failures, he made greater successes, because the country grew.
The enormous strength of this breed lay in their complete rejection of the organism of human society. The Texan, like all Westerners, was not antisocial, but asocial. He congregated or cooperated only for education, or defense, and then with some reluctance. No other breed, probably, could have lived contentedly for years on a far-flung frontier, where the distances between houses or farms was measured in miles. No Hispanic race, psychologically, could have endured it; the very notion chilled most Latin peoples to the core. They were gregarious; the Anglo-American, comparatively, was not.
Despite his terrible responsibility and the never-ending work, this was a tremendously exhilarating time for a strong man. Texas was open country. Although the Anglo settler could not much admire Nature, regarding it as an obstacle rather than a force to which he should attune, Nature provided a sense of freedom and exuberance. There were thickets to explore and prairies to ride. Here, where there were still deer, bear, big cats, and other game in every county, man's natural instinct as a hunter had full play. Almost every Texan hunted and killed game.
Beyond the pine woods, where Texans hardly changed much from the Southern stock from which they came, a man could see far and smell winds that coursed down from Canada across a thousand miles of plains. There was an apparently endless, rolling vista north and west and south. The small woodchopper, with an axe and a couple of brawny sons, could catch a scent of landed empire or dream of possibilities to come. Less than half a million Texans scattered across a land as large as Britain, and the land itself had to remain dominant. The new Texans tore down trees, built cabins, threw up fences, and scratched furrows in widely separated small fields, but there was too much raw land for the countryside to take on a settled, civilized look. And the tremendous vagaries of weather in this part of the world—the Texas landmass was subject to blazing droughts, followed by torrential rains, the mild winters were stabbed by sudden, chilling, arctic cold fronts, called "northers"—made all settlers uneasily aware of forces beyond human control. The average Texan was still just a speck on a vast land; he could not forget that land.
A feature of this frontier was that only a few men could create empires, or even riches, in the new west. Most families were unable to clear and plant even the generous initial grants of the Republic and state. The pioneer farmer had only his own, or his sons', labor, and sons left home early. The average family scratched out a limited living from their subsistence farm. But the dream of personal empire, which had somehow become permanently attached to the name of Texas, never died. Big country, even terrible country as Texas could be in the western counties, fed big dreams, and even the outright failures never quite lost them. Almost every man in Texas, walking over his broad acres, seeing the far horizons, fell in love with his dreams and the land. The changeable weather, the distances, the soil, and the loneliness were merely hardships or obstacles to be overcome. But if men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it. Women had different values and different dreams. In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad.