Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (20 page)

(That story trails on: Theodore Roosevelt gave Quanah land in perpetuity in Oklahoma, pretty land along Cache
Creek, and just last year—perpetuity, as is its wont with Indians, having expired—his children and grandchildren and the last of his wives came protestingly into the news again when the Field Artillery had the place condemned and grabbed it.)

Maybe the redheaded Comanche had been another one like Cynthia Ann, or maybe like Quanah the half-white son of another woman captured long before. The bag of fragmentary, jumbled, contradictory tales left over from the frontier is lumpy with mysteries like that, and no one will ever solve them now. The reason Cynthia Ann’s story is famous, besides her relation to Quanah, is that it came to the surface again, and had an end, whereas most of the others didn’t. Captive children, renegades white and black, Mexicans by the hundreds—The People weren’t exclusive in terms of race. They’d been winners for too long to be a pure blood, anyhow; women go to winners. They were a spirit, another on the roster of the world’s proud savages who had to win totally or lose totally, like Zulus and Araucanians and Moros and Pathans and Fuzzy-Wuzzies. All colonial and imperial histories are smoky with their fighting. There’s more pathos in the defeat of gentle and reasonable peoples, but the fall of pride strikes more sparks.

If the river has meaning for you, you can see all of that from the sandstone bluffs where the mountains drop away. You don’t have to strain to impose the tales on the landscape; they’re there.… Margaret Barton at Brannon’s Crossing with an arrow next to her heart which they were afraid to pull out, throbbing in the air with her blood beat, all night long … Bill Youngblood, whose cohorts gave chase and killed the Indian who had his scalp, and galloped to the graveyard just in time to put it back on his head—
their literal, Calvinistic application of the doctrine of corporeal resurrection agreeing with the Comanches that it was bad to go to your earthly resting place in more than one piece, or for that matter less … Dignified Mr. Couts, later the big man at Weatherford, who ranched in the early days opposite Palo Pinto mouth and refused to take guff from the four hairiest white bully-boys in the neighborhood; they waited for him with shotguns between the spring and the church door at Soda Springs one Sunday morning, and, knowing them there, he walked on into them with a bucket of cool water in his hand and a Colt’s Navy in his waistband. When they opened fire, he got the first one through the heart, the second one through the trigger hand and then the shoulder, and the third in the hip. (“The reason I didn’t kill him as he went in at the door,” he told Mr. Holland analytically later, “was that he jumped up about two feet getting in and I hit him that much below where I aimed.”) The fourth, comprehensibly spooked, piled his horse into a ditch and smashed up his face and shoulder. Mr. Couts counted the bullet holes in his hat and his black silk vest, and the neighborhood was reasonably lawful for a time after that.… In ’66 he drove 1,000 longhorns to California, rode back alone across the plains and down the Platte to the Missouri with $50,000 in gold in his saddlebags, caught a boat south, and opened a bank.

Most of those stories are recorded, though only a few are recorded well. In what scholars call “primary sources”—pioneers’ memoirs and little county histories with a genealogical slant—they’re likely to be a bit prejudiced and fragmentary, with the choicest details left out either from delicacy or because cowards and scoundrels have descendants. In the Texas brag-books and their ilk, a teeming speties,
they’re most often contorted beyond recognition. Only in the work of a few people who for the past score or so of years have been trying, literately and otherwise, to see shape in the too turbulent century behind us, do they come out straight—or fairly straight, since the old folks those historians talked to had written nothing down when things were popping, and only spoke of them later when memory was playing its dirty tricks.

There is consequently a mistiness.… Take Andrew Berry. The People caught him down the river a way from the Point with a wagonload of pumpkins, and after killing him scalped him and broke the pumpkins over his bloody skull. But one version of the story has him killed just below Lazy Bend, and another far down by Spring Creek, and a third, more dramatic but just as likely to be true, has two little redheaded sons along with him who were scalped and crowned with pumpkins, too.

The fact is, the stories have been retreating into fog for a long time, as maybe they should. Boosters in compulsory beards stage centennials in the little towns and resurrect the old bloodshed in pamphlets and festivals, and have high times dunking one another in reconstructed horse troughs. Some towns maintain annual pageants, and museums. But the significances are transmuted there, more often than not, by what Hollywood and television and the
Post
and who-not have said the general West was like, and by the Texas paranoia (petroleum and carved belts and bourbon and country clubs and nickeled six-guns and aircraft factories and the excessive regional glee of the newly arrived: mingle them with the old leathery thing if you can), so that the rough-edged realities of the past have faded dimmer each year.

Probably a man from that bump of the country who has
soaked the tales in runs a danger of overappraising their worth. In kind, they don’t differ sharply from the lore most regions west of the Mississippi can muster. In weight—in, say, the number of people killed or the human glory or shame manifested in their slaughter—they’re dustmote-sized when you compare them to the violences two wars in two generations have wrought among our race. I once saw 4,000 Japanese stacked like cordwood, the harvest of two days’ fighting, on one single islet of one single atoll awaiting bulldozer burial, more dead than the Brazos country could show for its whole two or three decades of travail, and just as brave. Almost daily for years, Belsen or Dachau could have matched the flavor of Mrs. Sherman’s agony.…

What it amounts to is that a short segment of the American frontier, distinctive in its way but not as distinctive as a local might be tempted to think, paused in the Brazos country, crackled and smoked for a few years like fire in underbrush while the Indians were being fought out of existence and the cattle were being harried north, and then moved on, carrying most of the vigorous frontiersmen with it.

Nothing that happened in this segment, then or later, made any notable dent in human history. From one very possible point of view, the stories tell of a partly unnecessary, drawn-out squabble between savages and half-illiterate louts constituting the fringes of a culture which, two and a half centuries before, had spawned Shakespeare, and which even then was reading Dickens and Trollope and Thoreau and considering the thoughts of Charles Darwin. They tell too—the stories—of the subsequent squabbles among the louts themselves: of cattle thievery, corn whisky, Reconstruction, blood feuds, lynchings, splinter sectarianism, and further illiteracy.

Can they then have any bearing on mankind’s adventure?

Maybe, a little. They don’t all tell of louts. There was something of a showing-through; meanings floated near the surface which have relevance to the murkier thing Americans have become. It didn’t happen just on the Brazos, certainly, but all along the line of that moving brush fire. There’s nothing new in the idea that the frontier had continuing impact on our character, or that one slice of that frontier, examined, may to some degree explain the whole.…

But in truth such gravities were not what salted the tales I could read, looking off over the low country from the point atop the bluffs. Mankind is one thing; a man’s self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts.

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one’s will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man?) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I’d as soon be forty other kinds of men I’ve known. I’ve lived much away from that region, and have liked most of the places I’ve lived in. I used to know who the good bullfighters were and why they were good. I’m familiar with the washed silent streets of Manhattan at five o’clock in the morning, and what Los Angeles promises in the evening when you’re young with money on your hip, and once almost saw the rats change sewers swarmingly in Paris, and did see dawn wash the top of the old wall at Avila.… I’ve waked in the green freshness of mountain mornings in tropical lands, and have heard the strange birds cry, and the street venders, and maybe music somewhere, and have felt
the hit of it like a fist in my stomach, going sleepy-eyed out onto a balcony under the green mountains and above flame-flower trees to thank God for life and for being there. And I’m glad I have.

If a man couldn’t escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.… It’s not necessary to like being a Texan, or a Midwesterner, or a Jew, or an Andalusian, or a Negro, or a hybrid child of the international rich. It is, I think, necessary to know in that crystal chamber of the mind where one speaks straight to oneself that one is or was that thing, and for any understanding of the human condition it’s probably necessary to know a little about what the thing consists of.

And Mrs. Sherman and Bigfoot Wallace and Charlie Goodnight and Old Lady Rippy and the rest of them, haunting the country they’d known below the Point, were a part of my thing. They weren’t all of it, but they were a part. In mere fact, they were. Much of the good and bad and beside-the-point of what they’d been was stuck in me as certainly as the canyon wren’s song, as surely as were the memories, looking down toward Brazos town, of the times we’d misread the wild zigzagging channel in those sandy stretches and had ended on bars and had had to get out to tug the loaded boat over, up to our knees in shaking, sucking quicksand. That it all meant much was doubtful,
and that I’d ever understand a half of what it did mean was more doubtful still, but the effort seemed worth while.

Such, as Port Smythe,
M. D
., might have written if he hadn’t been too tired for climbing when he got there, were the Conflicting Sentiments with which my Bosom was inspired as I gazed out from that Noble Eminence.

I inched and skidded back down the bluff, tossed my gear and my dog into the aged Old Town, and took off paddling down the river toward the T. & P. bridge.…